Its beguiling simplicity and rich complexity cannot be fully grasped or named. What is on the surface washes away. What lies beneath remains dark, unformed, many-layered. New things are always happening to observe, note, remember. Each time you look nothing is the same. Even as your senses awaken to its myriad wonders, it unsettles you, makes you aware of its transience. Flowers, clouds, birds, appear and disappear, as in dreams.

In its earth a history lies buried. Remnants of past human shaping and patterns are occasionally revealed. Each story and presence are like accumulated moments in the flow of the island before it returns to itself. Nothing stays still or is fixed: the path traced over its surface on one day cannot be repeated on the next. What was there before is now hidden, what was absent, now present. Mudflats rise from the water, flowers erupt on hedgerows, blossom explodes and drifts away in white clouds. Paths sink into the long grass and maze-like channels open in the receding tide, and the mosaic of glistening beach life is submerged once more.

On a wild day, the sea tears at the island's margins, carrying earth away and returning it elsewhere as mud ready to be colonized. The elements, calm and clear on an August day, will dissolve in a cold winter mist into one another until land, water and sky give up any visible edge. On wet January mornings the saturated ground is so soft it appears to slip bodily beneath the water.