Memory's Tide

It is a true saying that memory is like the seaweed when the tide is in — but the tide ebbs. Each frond, each thick spray, each fillicaun or pulpy globe, lives lightly in the wave; the green water is full of strange rumours of sea-magic and sea-music: the hither flow and the thither surge give continuity and connection to what is fluid and dissolute. But when the ebb is far gone, and the wrack and the week lie sickly in the light, there is only one confused, intertangled mass. For most of us, memory is this tide-pool strand: though for each there are pools, or shallows where even the ebb does not lick up in it thirsty way depthward — narrow overshadowed channels to which we have the intangible clues.

— Fiona MacLeod, “Morag of the Glen”
from “Dominion of Dreams”