MonuMental

It’s hard to look closely and recognize everything that we have lost on the small scale. Usually we do keep ourselves focused on the here and now when we could instead benefit from gazing at the larger picture. But that’s not the case here. I’d like to look closely and focus on the minute details that, once isolated, are easy to excuse. To focus on these grains of sand is difficult though because they incessantly start to blur until you can only recognize the beach that they pile together to form.

The beach is just easier to see.

All the things we’ve lost are thrown carelessly into this oblivion. Each singular identity becomes lost into the greater appearance of the coast.

We all know people either like or don’t like the beach.

As the winds shift our lives around in the swirling fates of unpredictable destiny I can see the traces of the dead.

As the sea laps its gasping tongue against the shores of what is gone it creates a middle ground that is neither living nor dead. No soul has ever sustained their existence in this trench of the void for very long before having to commit to the sand or the sea. We saw my grandparents traipse this watery slope as they left their life of the ocean to the sedentary dunes of the beach. To the still land where rest is complete. We saw my uncle slide gradually from life to land and now the times of his life have left the tides to remain off shore where they dry and scatter in the winds that influence us all. Yet occasionally a soul will leave the mighty deep, where colors and textures drift freely amongst the varying temperatures and life, to cast itself upon the rinsing shelf of the surf, where the turbulence of change, and the pressure of the life left behind tries mercilessly to pull back its lost treasure into the bath of boundless possibilities.

Rarely has one washed up onto the middle ground between awake and asleep so early and remained for so long. The blank space between here and there is no place to take up residence.

That is a soul lost to nothing; not to death nor to complete loss, but a wanderer to nowhere – a place of waste. For a time that, itself, becomes waste. We’ve lost beautiful souls to death – the loss that unites us all. It’s on rare occurrence we lose a soul purely and purposely to the beach itself. That is not its place but that is where it remains.

When a ball tries to roll into the sea it rides the edge of the water as it laps back and forth on the sands until it is ultimately cast back to the land where it belongs. When a buoy attempts to float onto the beach from the rolling ocean the endlessly moving surface of the water gently pulls it back to the wide open sea where it too is meant to be.

When a body washes to the shore the natural cycles of the Earth attempt to pull it back to the drift of the waters, to return it to its natural place in time. Its timely progression will occur on schedule as it is meant to occur along the path of its natural rhythm. We’ll all be pulled back to sea until the time is right to be cast from its lively waters and deposited into the drying, decaying sands and soils of the land.

I don’t know what this one body is doing, disregarding its aqueous alignment and repudiating its remaining days burgeoning amongst its peers until it is delivered felicitously from the depths. A voluntary despiriting of desperation. A martyr for martyr-sake.

Don’t wish for the beach ahead of your own schedule. Don’t wish for the beach before it is your time. The beach just might accept you.