Over two years and three monsoons, Yuvan Aves pays scrupulous attention to the living world of his coastal city. The result is a diary of deep observation of coast and wetland, climate and self. Set in beaches and marshes, and the wild places of the mind, Intertidal comprises daily accounts of being in a multispecies milieu.
In language that is jewel-like and precise, we hear frog calls through the night, spot butterflies miles into the ocean, find blue buttons washed ashore, see the churning of longshore currents and meditate on the composting abilities of worms. We also witness communities stand together to preserve the homes and livelihoods of the human and non-human inhabitants of the coast and the marsh.
Intertidal asks us to reimagine values to live by in the here and now, heeding the living world and attending to the climate's calling, moving away from the old political, religious and cultural values that have proved to be ecologically disastrous. Yuvan Aves invites us to see beyond the binaries of sea and coast, mindscape and landscape, human and not human, self and other, and live in deep animism amid all of life.
