The sea floods and breaks rhythmically against the rocks, spilling into crevices, receding, flowing under and away and back into itself.

Hermit crabs and clams and barnacles—and whatever grows in the various collections of life along Maine’s fascinating coast—are washed and fed and sustained by the relentless, dispassionate ocean.

We watch it (what little of it we can see) and wonder sometimes how we fit with it all. We are not boss of the process. We do not measure out the water’s nutrients in order to feed the crabs and clams their right portions. We do not, though we may be artists, arrange the rocks and crevices for perfect designs of splash. We watch merely as a part of what happens. And if that was all we did, there would be no reason to worry about the oceans and the rest of the world.

But watching is not all we do. We, the most ingenious of creatures, devise techniques and improve methods and race into plans. So smart we are! And now, look what’s happening. We got so savvy about how to catch fish, we began to deplete whole species and disrupt eco-systems that are thousands of years old. We invented so many ways to dispose of our waste, maintain our roads, fertilize crops and build structures, that we began to affect the balance and purity of water. We began to poison life, of which we are inexorable extensions.

Because the sea does not need our direction, and is vast beyond knowing, we are naturally tempted to go and do our various human things, leaving nature to nature. But we cannot escape the connection of ourselves to the natural world, however mysterious and elusive that world may be.

We cannot take in the whole ocean, which is so much of all life, or know its secrets. But knowing that we don’t know must be a good place to start. Humility at the water’s edge surely must give us a rock to stand on.