Standing Against Water

Late in the day on the Olympic coast, the weather closed in. Sea, sky, and stone shared the same deep palette, and the light lay low and heavy. Offshore, a lone tower of rock stood in the moving water.
It was the same workshop that took me to the Dungeness River, but a different day and an altogether different mood. On the coasts I know in Australia, evening is so often generous with colour. This darkness was new to me, and it held my attention completely.
They call them sea stacks on this coast. This one has stood longer than memory, the last of a headland the ocean took back. Tides pull at it, currents work around it, weather arrives off the open water, and it remains. Trees have even taken root on its crown, life finding a hold where there seems so little to hold.
What stays with me is not the darkness but what stood inside it. The scene has not asked to be admired for beauty in the usual sense; it asks for something closer to respect.
The image gives the sea its full width, and the stack its place within it. Everything in the frame is moving, or waiting to move, except the one thing that has outlasted every wave.