Sand Without the Sea

I grew up on the beach and have a lifetime's worth of memories that involve shaking out my shoes or feeling the burn in my calves after a run that wasn't even very long. Walking barefoot along the shore has always grounded me just enough but never completely as each footprint arrives in tandem with a slightly unpredictable shift in space and momentum. My life may have allowed me to know the beach, but I now realize I only ever understood sand as it relates to water. 

Never have I been so awe struck by the morpheus entity that is sand than in the Sahara Desert. The humbling magnitude of an unfathomable amount of tiny grains mounded together not to meet but rather to form an ocean. Sand for me has always been a safe place, a boundary, a border between civilization and the sea, but not in the Sahara. Walking out over the dunes at sunset and sunrise carried a sense of endless mystery I could easily get lost in. The relationship between the elements is so clear here. The dryness of the air, the temperature, the direction of the breeze all clearly palpable. Each individual minuscule piece of sand entirely forgettable on its own here stands as a proud member of a fortress shaped by wind and shifted by time in a way that carves out the the ridgelines and slopes of an unforeseeable future lacking a distinct endpoint. This unbounded terrain demands respect and makes me reflect on how much I don't know. I found myself thinking about how far I was from my comfort zone. How dependent I was on those around me to introduce me to this place that I would have no idea how master on my own. 

 The world is gorgeous. People live in such different ways. I believe that everywhere people are being shaped by their environments and simultaneously contributing to the conditions of these spaces. It's a dance. It thrills me how the human body adapts to demands put upon it and takes the shape of the way in which it is used and what it is exposed to. Natural environments are exactly the same. Change is a constant gradual occurrence and in the Sahara, the sand is so powerful it shows the riddles of life to anyone willing to make the journey to take a look.