The tide draws back at dusk and leaves the whole shore shining.
Kelp lies along the strand line in dark wet ropes. Bladderwrack pops beneath your boot. A hundred small pools hold a hundred broken pieces of sky, and the light in them slides from copper to pewter to grey while you stand and watch it go.
Out past the last black rock, the water has already turned.
A sea witch is someone who has learned to feel that turn. Not to command it.
The sea has never once been commanded. Not by any of the countless people who have stood at its edge with their arms open and their asking ready.
A Name for a Kind of Attention
The label is loose, and it is meant to stay loose.
No initiation makes a sea witch. No lineage hands the title down. It describes where a practice happens to live — in salt, in weather, in the slow arithmetic of the moon dragging water up a beach and letting it slide back down again.
Some who take the name were raised within sound of the water. Others met the sea once, as adults, on a grey morning that would not leave them afterwards.
Both are the same craft. The shore does not ask for a certificate.
If the whole vocabulary of witch-types is still unfamiliar, the fuller map is kept in what kind of witch am I. This page assumes only that the sea has your attention and will not be giving it back.
The Tide Is the First Calendar
Most coasts are given two high waters and two low waters in a little more than a day, and each arrives later than the last, so that the hour of low tide walks slowly around the clock across a month.
Around the full moon and the new moon the range grows. The water climbs higher up the wall and falls further back across the flats, and the shore becomes briefly enormous. Near the quarter moons the difference narrows and the sea seems to breathe more shallowly.
This is why a sea witch keeps a tide table where another witch keeps a chart of moon phases. The two are one clock, read from different rooms.
Flood tide, for bringing and for beginning. Ebb tide, for release, and for letting a thing be carried off. Slack water — that strange hinged silence at the top and the bottom of the swing — for stillness, and for listening.
These are not laws. They are a vocabulary the shore offers, and most who work there find that it fits.
Salt
Salt is the sea’s first gift and its plainest.
It rides in on a westerly. It stiffens your hair, dulls a window, whitens the toes of your boots and leaves a fine grit on the table by the door.
In the craft it stands for cleansing, for boundary, for the line drawn that a thing does not step across.
Ordinary salt out of the kitchen jar is enough. There is no virtue hiding in an expensive one.
Two plain cautions travel with it. Salt kills what grows, so it does not go into soil, into a plant pot, or onto a lawn where you would like anything green next year.
And salt eats metal. A blade, a bell, a ring or an iron nail wiped with brine and set down wet will rust, pit or dull.
Dry the metal. Every time.
What the Shore Gives
Beachcombing is the oldest practice on this path and the least ceremonious.
You walk the strand line with your head down and your hood up, and you take what the water has finished with.
Driftwood, worn pale and soft as bone. Sea glass with its edges gone to frost. A holed stone — a hagstone — which coastal folklore has long held to be lucky and protective, hung on a cord at a door or a bedpost. Feathers, cuttlebone, the black leathery purse that once held a skate’s egg and has been empty since the spring.
Take little. The shore is not a shop.
Leave anything living, and remember that an empty-looking shell is very often a house — a hermit crab, a burrowing thing, some small patient creature waiting out the low water in the dark.
Some shorelines are protected, and the removal of sand, pebbles, wood or shell is not always permitted. Check what is allowed where you live before you fill a pocket.
Water Carried Home in a Jar
Sea water goes into a jar because it is the sea, and keeping a little of it feels like leaving a door propped open.
The wider subject of collected waters — rain, dew, storm, snowmelt, the moon caught in a bowl — belongs to moon water, and it is treated properly there. What follows is only the salt one.
Gather it from moving water, well away from a stagnant pool, a harbour wall or an outfall. Stopper it. Label it with what it is and where it came from.
It is not drunk. Not a sip, not a taste, not diluted, not in tea, not in anything cooked. Water that has stood in a jar grows things no eye can see, and sea water carries whatever the coast carries besides.
Keep it away from your eyes and off broken skin. Keep it out of reach of small children and animals. Keep it well clear of your tools.
When it is finished it goes back to the sea, or down a drain with the tap running after it. Never onto the garden.
Stones, Shells and the Salt That Eats Them
Sooner or later somebody suggests leaving a crystal in a rock pool overnight.
Do not, unless you know exactly what the stone is. Several popular minerals dissolve, flake, rust or shed something you would not want on your hands, and salt water is harsher than fresh.
The whole hazard list — what dissolves, what is soft, what carries metal, what must never be ground or soaked — is set out in stones that must not touch water. Read it before the sea gets its chance to teach you.
Shells, pebbles and sea glass are another matter entirely. They came out of salt water and are at home in it.
The Sea Is Not Kind and Does Not Pretend to Be
This section matters more than any table of correspondences.
The tide comes in behind you. It fills the channel you crossed dry-shod an hour ago, and the sandbar underfoot becomes an island, and then stops being anything at all.
Know the tide time before you walk out, and know the way back before you need it.
Rip currents run out through the surf like cold rivers and do not care how well you swim. Wet rock is glass. Weeded rock is worse than glass. Cliffs undercut, and the ground at the top of one is not always ground.
Cold water takes the breath out of a body in seconds, before strength or courage are given any say in it.
So go at low water and leave at low water. Watch the sea rather than turning your back on it. Carry a light and dry clothes. Tell one person where you are going and when you will be home, and then be home. On a storm night, work from a window.
A witch who drowns has not been chosen. They have been caught out by an ordinary tide doing the ordinary thing it does twice a day.
The Shore You Do Not Have
Most people who love the sea do not live beside it.
An inland practice loses nothing that matters. A bowl of water with a spoonful of salt stirred through it is a small sea and behaves like one — it darkens, it reflects, it holds a candle flame upside down and shivers when you breathe.
A jar of sand on a shelf. A photograph of one particular bay in one particular weather. Surf played low while you work. A pebble kept in a coat pocket for a whole winter until its shape is as familiar as a tooth.
Distance is not disqualification. The element of water answers in a washing-up bowl as readily as in a bay, and a working built out of longing has never been the weaker for it.
The Names Spoken at the Edge
Every seafaring people has left names at the waterline, and those names are not interchangeable.
Irish medieval manuscript tradition gives Manannán mac Lir, a figure of sea and mist and crossings. The Norse material set down by Snorri Sturluson and preserved in the Eddic poems — all of it written in the Christian era, long after the beliefs it describes were living practice — names Njörðr of ships and harbours, and Rán, who is spoken of with a net and with the drowned. Greek poetry from Hesiod onward gives Aphrodite rising out of the foam.
Say plainly which shore a name comes from when you use it. That courtesy costs nothing.
Be careful here as well. Several of the best known ocean goddesses in the world today belong to living initiatory religions, including Yoruba and Afro-diasporic traditions, where a relationship is carried through community, teachers and initiation rather than through a book bought online. Those doors are not open ones, and the difference is set out in whose gods are these.
No god of the sea grants outcomes. A relationship is not a transaction, and no name spoken over water obliges the water to do anything whatsoever.
Offerings, and the Things That Must Never Go In
What to give, where to leave it and what happens to it afterwards belongs to offerings to the gods, and the full treatment is kept there.
The coastal part is short and not open to negotiation. Nothing goes into the sea that the sea cannot take back: no ribbon, no plastic, no wax, no foil, no floated candle, no balloon, no glitter, no coin dropped where a bird will swallow it.
Sung words. Poured fresh water. An hour spent carrying litter up off the sand. The sea has always accepted those, and the shore is measurably better for the last of them.
A Rite at the Turning of the Tide
This rite is used when you wish to set down a grief, a habit or an ending, and let the water carry it off the land.
You will need:
- a plain natural stone, small enough to close your hand around, unpainted and unmarked
- a tide table for that stretch of coast, checked the same day
- warm dry clothing, and a light if the hour is late
- a companion, or one person who knows where you are and when you will return
Then:
- Arrive at low water with time in hand, and choose a place where the way back up the beach is short and clear.
- Walk down to the strand line, where the last high tide left its ragged braid of weed and shell.
- Hold the stone in a closed hand until it takes the warmth of your palm.
- Say the thing you are setting down, out loud and plainly, in the fewest words it will fit into.
- Set the stone on the wet sand below the strand line, where the water will find it.
- Turn and walk up the beach without hurrying and without looking back.
- Do not wait for the tide, and do not return to check. The working is finished the moment you leave it.
Go home. Get warm. Eat something.
The Shore Log
Keep a record.
Date, tide, moon, wind, what the water was doing, what you found, what you did, and what you noticed three weeks afterward.
Across a year those entries stop being a diary and become an almanac of one particular beach — worth more than any published table, because it is true of your own coast and of nowhere else.
A book of shadows holds it as well as anything.
What the Sea Will Not Do
The sea does not fix a life.
It does not lift a grief, settle a debt, return a person, or take the weight out of a morning that has been heavy for months. If that weight has been sitting there a long while, if it has taken your sleep and your appetite and your interest in what you used to love, the shore is not the help required. A doctor is. Go and find one, and keep the beach for afterwards.
What the sea does is older and smaller than a cure.
It takes a thing out. It gives it back changed, or does not give it back at all, and it does this whether or not anyone is standing there watching, twice a day, without pause, forever.
Stand at the edge of that long enough and the size of your own trouble is quietly corrected.
That is not nothing.
On certain grey evenings, with the light going out of the pools and the water already turning past the last black rock, it is very nearly everything.