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.