1
0
Beaches are surreal places; where the ocean meets the land. There’s something timeless about a beach, eternal almost. At your left hand, you have the orderliness of the land, at your right you have the teeming, frothing and chaotic ocean. The great mother, the genesis of us all.
The ancients once said that the whole world orders itself from chaos, meanwhile the immortal sun remains where it’s always been, high in the sky and glaring down at us, benevolent and at the same time dangerous. It’s the same Sun that once warmed the dinosaurs in their swamps before watching over their extinction some one hundred and fifty million years later. It’s the same sun that watched our primitive ancestry, as well as the heroes and villains that populate our history books.
The sun is a benevolent god, but is also a pernicious one, too much time spent in its presence will cause you to suffer. Sunburn and thirst are both lessons in humility.
The sand beneath your feet, shifts and crunches endlessly with every step, your feet etching a permanent record of your adventures into the very surface of the beach, yet tomorrow it will have no memory of you. Entropy will have reset the clock, wiped the chalkboard, or simply cleaned up after you.
Most beaches look the same today as they did a hundred years ago, or even a thousand years ago. The beach is always changing, but it never changes into anything else. A beach is the epitome of change and at the same time changelessness.
There’s something mystical about the beach, it’s a place where you can meet God, but in order to do so, it needs to be empty, if you meet so much as another human being, you’ll just meet a mere aspect of God, a single facet of an unlimited jewel. The gulls that soar above you are also God as is every grain of sand, each of which stands at the centre of its own cosmos, fully participating in the nature of being.
You see it’s like this, your deepest consciousness doesn’t age or alter. It’s always the same, you may learn more throughout life and when old possess a weight of knowledge, but intelligence and education, life experience and more are merely mental possessions attached to your identity. Your thoughts are not you, your feelings are not you, they are merely things that you experience, they are mental events, nothing more.
Your timeless spark sits at the centre of your awareness watching time pass, marking every moment. It stays the same while everything else around it ages. Your mind is immortal, always changing, yet never changing into anything else, just like the beach, just like God.
