Microcosms: Eons, Tides and Dreams
‘I go to the rockpool at the slack of the tide
to mind me what my poetry’s for.’
– Jen Hadfield (from the poem, Daed-traa*)
‘The parent materials were gathered together as volcanoes poured them out in fiery streams, as waters running over the bare rocks of the continents wore away even the hardest granite, and as the chisels of frost and ice split and shattered the rocks. Then living things began to work their creative magic and little by little these inert materials became soil. Lichens, the rocks’ first covering, aided the process of disintegration by their acid secretions and made a lodging place for other life. Mosses took hold in the little pockets of simple soil – soil formed by crumbling bits of lichen, by the husks of minute insect life, by the debris of a fauna beginning its emergence from the sea.’
– Rachel Carson (from the book, Silent Spring)
‘…I feel more at home in miniature worlds, which, for me are dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves that generate world-consciousness emanating from my dreaming self.’
– Gaston Bachelard (from the book, The Poetics of Space)
* Daed-traa – Shetland dialect for ‘the slack of the tide’
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