My recent time away on the Welsh coast reacquainted me with the perfection of the universe’s cycles and patterns. I unexpectedly witnessed the miracle of birth and new life in the plethora of seal pups hidden in quiet coves along the coastline. My heart was instantly tenderised by the breathtaking beauty of vigilant parents patrolling the waters and a seal Mum answering the strangely human call to feed her pup, dragging herself determinedly over sharp rocks and stones. At the same time I was very present to the fact that this joyful burst of creation and new life is always accompanied by the savage blow of destruction and release; for every birth there is a corresponding death.

So it was that I gazed out serenely on a millpond-calm sea from the solemn remains of a church that had been almost completely destroyed in a storm centuries before, a tempest that wracked and wrecked 114 ships in one night. While seal-spotting I mourned the inert body of a pup being rocked in its last sleep on undulating waves, was shocked by the broken shape of a sheep that had plunged from a clifftop to its gravelly grave, broke my heart over a wounded bird that nestled so placidly on the shoreline during its final moments, and gasped in sympathy with a lemon shark stranded too far from the life-giving depths.

While I allowed myself to feel all this grief and pain and sadness, I found I could dive into these dips as fully as I could celebrate the swells. The partnership and the necessity of both felt so natural and obvious in this wild landscape, simply progressions through the same perfect process of change.

As so often happens, my life reflected this knowing back to me at once in a practical way. Making our way North along the coast for our last couple of days, the gearbox on our van jammed as we sat watching seals in a tiny, secluded bay. The AA couldn’t free it up again, and so we had to be low-loaded back home.

Before we left our runaround car’s clutch had started sticking and so it had been taken to the garage for fixing, where it had been for the last three weeks and was still sitting – rather to our annoyance at the delay. Now here we were with a dog and a van-load of stuff, being towed straight to that garage where we could quickly and easily transfer everything into our car to drive the 15 minutes back home. If there had not been a problem with the car, if the repair work had not taken longer than we were happy about, if the garage hadn’t maddeningly called minutes after we’d already set off for the coast to say it was ready for pick-up, then we would have had the added stress of working out how to get ourselves, Finn the dog and the van contents (including a full fridge!) home from the rurally-situated garage. Not to mention that the change for the worse in the weather meant we’d chosen to head North towards the nearest town that day, which conveniently brought our garage within the range of allowable towing distance!

So no matter how bleak, inconvenient or tragic an event or happening may seem at the time, I know to view it through a wider lens that can encompass the full picture, the edges of which my eyesight cannot even reach. A loss must always eventually flow into a gain, before ebbing again into loss and then turning back over and over upon itself like the tide. The waning and then dark moon under which we had begun our journey had only the night before sliced its crescent presence into the dark sky. At this time of visible crisis and chaos in the world, I found comfort and strength in embracing the fullness of the life/death/life cycle in such a palpable way.