It. Gentle creature. Jelly soft amongst the foamy fury. Silver Chinese lantern. Metallic and inorganic in an organic world. Translucent. Bioluminescent. Framed in crimson beading, edged in polished brassy blood. Caught in the mercy of surf and froth. Maelstrom and morass competing to push it further and further in. Nearer and nearer to its inevitable, inexorable sandy demise. An outlier on these shores. Brought south on the currents of climate change. Stranger in a strange sea. So very far from home. See now how it moves helplessly on and onward. Breaking up in breakers, wallowing in whitecapped waves, swept surgically to the shore. I hesitate. Stand still for a moment ignoring the wind and the rain. Momentarily, in one small second, I entertain the notion that somehow, I can save this one creature. Can launch it out to sea beyond the shoreline. Yonder where rollers turn and laugh as they curl and fling all before them. And as I reach down to scoop and hurl, as the icy water floods my ungloved hands with coils of numbness closing in, I suddenly comprehend that this beautiful creature is not alone. It’s part of a family. A whole shoal of silvern shiny lanterns and I feel so very privileged to be part of its journey. Part of their journey. I can’t turn back the sea. I can’t Canute it. I can only refute it and the human activity – that chain of events – that brought them here. We warm the oceans. They pay the price. Powerless to swim against the tide, they tumble into the shore. Some are lucky. Some few are tumbled back again. Chance collects and carries them rearward. Most are dashed in. Rinsed onto the beach to die in what we flushed. Detritus. Dying. The tide that brought them in receding, retreating. No turning back. Journey’s end ends them.