Tide pool worlds

If you walk northward along the western shore from our house you soon come to Indian Point. It's a remote place where the harbour seals enjoy the sun, where we once found two rams in a state of regal retirement, and where on another early foray we came upon a fawn, curled up, looking at us, not moving a muscle.  

Indian Point has fantastic tide pools. A tide pool is always in process. Each one is a small isolated world of its own, and then the high tide washes over it, and it loses its separateness and becomes at one with oceanic vastness.  This week tiny fish lurked in the tide pools, like shadows. They darted into mud banks and crevices when they sensed my presence.  I wonder if these little fish cling to their own pool when the high tide comes in, thinking it safe, or whether they swim bravely away into the wide sea.  

Algae drifted beneath the tide pool surfaces, spring green and diaphanous. They look innocent, but they may be quietly planning their ultimate takeover of the world -- the big world, not this little one.  Or they could be as graceful and lovely as they appear, giving safe harbour and food for small creatures.  Or both, maybe, since they belong to this ambiguous world, where something's always washing in or washing out, being born and dying, bearing its own identity and becoming part of everything else.