The Offing
The Offing examines the fluidity of time and the places where we find solace.
February 2021 presented a perfect block of time, four seven-day weeks stacked atop each other.
In the dystopia of 2020, predictable patterns of temporal life were conflated into the trinity of yesterday, today, and tomorrow and further still to past and present, made more profound by our mother's rapidly declining health. The New Year promised renewed hope and a return to the freedoms lost during a year of quarantine. The ritual of taking a morning photograph seaside was intended as a reset in a perfect February. But there is no such thing as a perfect block of time.
If there was no order to time, if time was an abstraction, it followed that other things I held as absolute were as well.
The horizon's equanimity has been a part of my life for over twenty years, assuringly stringing my days together. Standing seaside each morning, I held the paradox of time and timelessness as I navigated my mother's finite days in the Offing and the vast and infinite ocean. The daily ritual informed new thinking about the elasticity of time, memory, loss, and the things we hold constant – our small, fragile place within the natural world.
