Bluffs

These are the limestone bluffs that you see in the distance from the beach at Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point—the same area you’d climb into to see the lighthouse itself. If you’ve been on this beach, you know some version of this view.

This version of the word “bluff” comes from an old Dutch word, blaf or bluff, meaning flat, broad, or blunt. Dutch sailors and traders used it to describe rounded coastal faces and land that rose steeply but not sharply, and then English speakers in North America adopted the term in the 1700s, especially along the Mississippi, where you get those wide, rounded bluffs over the river. Blunt land with a bold face shaped by time and tides.

All of this got me to thinking about other meanings of the word bluff, meanings that came later and instead referred to presenting a bold front to the world, and, later still, just plain feigning confidence—whether in a game of poker or just in life. 

A bluff landscape is a bold, blunt face of land, and a bluffing person has a bold, blunt face of confidence. One is geology, the other is psychology. But in a way they’re the same. Bluffing has a negative sort of connotation, but sometimes we just have to fake it until we make it. Sometimes that confident front is the only way to get past the imposter syndrome that we secretly feel when big opportunities present themselves and we need to take them on while, inwardly, we don’t feel worthy.

Michelangelo said he wasn’t carving stone, just revealing what was already inside. Maybe these limestone formations work the same way — shaped by pressure, repetition, and time until something solid emerges.

Maybe we do too.

Taken at 75mm, 1/800 second to cut the light and freeze the water, f/9.0 to pull everything into focus, ISO 100.