Belonging at the Estuary
Estuaries are sympoietic spaces —strands of co-becoming and co-evolving. In estuaries, the river imagines what it’s like to dance with the moon as she surrenders to tidal forces.
The sea is calm and the air is soft. Quiet clouds cover the sky. No wind, nor waves. Occasionally, a ripple breaks outwards. A soft breeze hits the tinfoil water surface, while a seagull hungry for fish penetrates through it. Perfect stillness, broken only by murmuring streams and the rattling sound of a fishing boat’s engine far away.
As we walk over the desolate white sand beach among washed-up shells and driftwood, I am reminded of my friend Aaron, a beachcomber, who taught me that a shore is a cemetery and an invitation to contemplate death and decay. Yet where I am today, at the outer edge of the estuary, is not merely a lifeless place, it is a very hotbed of life.
The estuary is sympoiesis. The place where two bodies of water, fresh and salt, concurrently self and other, meet, mingle, and experience themselves afresh. Two bodies that fuse and give birth to new lifeworlds, as they endlessly recreate themselves in unimagined variations and expressions. Estuaries are sympoietic spaces —strands of co-becoming and co-evolving. In estuaries, the river imagines what it’s like to dance with the moon as she surrenders to tidal forces. The ocean comes to know itself as the river, fluid and in flux, purifying and life-sustaining. In the estuary, the ocean receives life’s flow and does not resist it.
Estuaries are constantly negotiating their identity. Who they are, now and in the future, is always revealing at every meeting, at every push and pull, at every swirl and merging with the other. Like an estuary, we are not separate selves with fixed identities and clearly defined material boundaries: We are continuums in co-becoming, ecosystems of human and non-human bodies submerged in an ever-deepening sea of ancestry.
As we approach a white house at the bank of the river, I ask myself what it means to make one’s home at the estuary? What does it mean to live and create from this place?
Perhaps sympoiesis is that edge place where we are invited to contemplate questions of being and becoming; of relationship and transformation. To live from a place of abundance and wake up to unseen possibilities. Every morning walk is a sensuous encounter with death and renewal on the shore of life, where the past flows in and out of the future in an endless cycle.
Sympoiesis is the experience of self-with-place — and the relationships that make it, caring for us the way I care for it.
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