Phyllis’s Reviews > The Place of Tides > Status Update

I should have gone to bed, but felt that I might never return to this place…The island was a deep, dark green now, the meadows rank with cocksfoot, reed grass, and billowing clouds of meadowsweet that turned silver as the wind passed across it. The island was waiting for us to leave, to become wild again. And, now, I was ready to go home. Like Anna, I had a place to care for, and it was time to go back and do that.

Perhaps islands are like farms, almost impossible to pass down the generations without someone getting hurt. We cannot be what we are and what we aspire to be at the same time, something in us has to die for something else to be born.

Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment. I began to understand the old Norwegian myths about the rocks and mountains coming alive, shapeshifting into creatures that were half human and half geology. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind, and tides. I was coming to see that those tales were about the people themselves.

We do not think of watching the world around us as work. Work is usually muscular and rushed at - but that was a misplaced way of thinking on the island. Even on the busiest days of the season that followed, there were always quiet hours when Anna simply watched. She drew no distinction between looking out the window and physically doing jobs - they were one and the same.

This slow day by the fire…was quite unlike my normal life. The clock on the wall had stopped and no one cared. We were now governed by the rain, the clouds passing over, whatever the seabirds were doing, and the endlessly changing light. But above all it was the tides that dominated our waking hours. The island breathed beneath us, giant sighing breaths: in, and the water fell away, out, and the water rushed back.

At high tide, there were only a few small acres that I could walk around, much of it fissured and cracked slabs of rock. I was learning that our dreams of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful - an island is defined by constraints and limits.

Ours is a dark and chaotic world. We are all in need of lights to follow. On that island I felt I had met someone who had made a life on her own terms. I was increasingly sure that I, on the other hand, had notmy father died…[&] several elders from our community…whom I had looked to for guidance when I was young. And, as the years passed, I began to feel unmoored, like a piece of timber drifting on the current.