In June I took a one-week retreat to a little cottage called The Sea Urchin. It’s nestled on the coast of remote Maine where I first encountered the tides in any significant way. I’ve made my peace with the tides by now, but the first summer that I spent a week at the Sea Urchin, I noticed that I watched the tides flow in and out with some anxiety. I wanted to see the tide at high tide and at low tide. It was hard for me to accept the process of the tides, to realize that most of the time they were in transition.

This seemed a wonderful lesson for me! What a metaphor for life. I made it a conscious self-reflective practice to open myself to the large arc of continual movement of the tides. They were no less wonderful when at mid-tide than when they were at high or low tide.

In life I need to accept this flow as well. Life is not about getting to high tide, or getting to low tide. It is about being the ocean, which moves, and changes.

How great it was to step outside the striving pattern of my daily life, to simply be with the changing tides for one full week. I felt that I breathed more oxygen in the first 24 hours of my retreat than I breathed in the last year.

You can see a set of pictures from my retreat here, in my flickr account.