Encounter Coast + Mono no aware

The photo  below is of a salt pond that was made whilst on  an afternoon  poodle walk  along  the littoral zone at low tide during the summer of 2025. The location  was the rocks lust west of  Petrel Cove along the Encounter Coast on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.  

The pool of salt water between the rocks  is  ephemeral because  the  pool of seawater can only dry out  between the tides  with  the heat of the summer sun. The salt pond is then washed away with the next high  tide. 

It is Japanese aesthetics that enables us to  expand the western aesthetics beyond the recent return to beauty or the sublime so that we are able to  represent the ephemeral as the ephemeral. 

The Japanese word for ephemeral is hakanai 「儚い」  for fleeting, transient or short lived.  The Japanese aesthetic concept  for this moment is  Mono no aware (物の哀れ), literally  'the pathos of things'. It  refers to  the passage of time, to impermanence or  the changing nature  or the  flux of things,  as in the cherry blossom, the sound of wind or crickets, the colour of snow,   that incorporates  a sadness at their passing.