Tide Pool Thinking

How Structure Makes Space for Imagination to Breathe

Somewhere between ocean and shore, a tide pool waits.

A hollow in the rock.

A small, still basin of water.

It doesn’t look like much at first. But stay long enough, and life reveals itself.

Swaying anemones. Darting fish. Minuscule crabs.

Fronds of kelp whispering against the rocks.

Each creature is wholly itself, moving freely.

And yet, this freedom exists only because of containment.

The tide pool is a cradle, not a cage.

It holds. It shelters. It shapes.

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The Wild

We are often taught to see creativity as wild and unbound.

A spark.

A rush. A tearing down of limits.

And there’s a truth in that.

But there’s also another truth: creativity thrives when it has somewhere to land. A place to gather. A shape to grow inside.

Structure is not the enemy of freedom.

The right kind of structure, like the curve of a rock holding sea water, can make life possible.

In activism, we often find ourselves resisting the structures of the world as it is.

And for good reason: many of those structures are harmful.

They stifle, extract, and exploit.

But in our resistance, we sometimes make the mistake of rejecting ALL structure.

We focus only on the world we wish existed, and struggle when the reality we’re in doesn’t bend to meet our idealism.

We drift. We rage. We burn out.

And this is where the tide pool offers us guidance.

To imagine a better world, we need both the vision of the open sea and the humility to work within the contours of the rocks at our feet.

We need to understand where we are.

To use what’s available.

To honor what is, even as we reach toward what could be.

The Free

Creativity, like activism, isn’t made of pure freedom.

It is made of a sacred tension between what we long for and what we have.

Too much freedom, and our ideas disperse like plankton on an outgoing tide.

Too much structure, and we choke the very life we meant to sustain.

But in the balance—in that held, living edge between form and flow— something thrives.

Something complex.

Something we might call art, or resistance, or simply life doing what life does best: responding.

A tide pool does not try to be the ocean.

It becomes a world of its own.

…

This is the practice:

To create pockets of beauty and truth within a larger, often-chaotic whole.

To let the edges we inherit shape us just enough without closing us in.

To build shelters for the waves of the future inside the rocks of the present.

…

What life will be possible because you choose to hold it in your care rather than your grasp?

This is a community of people thinking deeply and feeling a lot. You’re invited to be part of that, no pressure, just honesty. 🤍

Further reading -

Pollinators of Privilege

Nonviolent Communication for Activists

Anxiety is a Form of Futurism