Every Grain of Sand

The sea and sky are softly grey today. The seaweed strewn beach could be a pocket of space picked up from its usual home and placed somewhere different entirely. The feeling of dislocation is welcome; the chain of events is broken and we float free.

I sit with castles forming at my feet and watch the waves which I have been waiting all week to see. They rise and fall as naturally as I breathe in and out. A curving line of pelicans hovers overhead and a springy Doberman bounds past, intent upon the endless quest of fetch.

I could stay here forever, or so I like to think. Nothing much is moving and everything is exactly the way that it seems. I gaze up, up, up at the clouds and wonder. If I stretch my arm up high enough could I paint them with my finger tip? Cold water from the castle moat splashes my foot. My thinking time fractures and the clouds will have to paint themselves.

I turn over and find myself gazing up close at the sand right under my nose. So many grains, so many colours. I open my mind to the vast perspective that we constantly flee from into the safety of our tiny boxes. Every grain of sand could be a life we have lived in this beginningless cycle of samsara, or a parent who gave us life and love. In much the same way, the waves often remind me of the River of Lethe and the endless vanishing of every single memory we have ever believed ourselves to have been in possession of.

Walking down to the water’s edge, the tide is pulling out. There’s a clean line of sight right down the beach across the mirror of sand left wet and glistening by the retreating wave. If I look far enough through the horizon will I see the highlands or are they just too far away?

Chilled eventually by the ocean’s touch I retreat and sit back upon the sand, momentarily dislocated from the present but surrounded by signifiers of its preciousness.