We are all left with the necessary risk to starve the ego—that in us which believes it can control the world—so that the unseeable music of being may rise and carry us.
—Mark Nepo, Book of Awakening
In the sand
my daughter digs
a hole. I help her,
absently pawing
at the ground.
Our hole deepens.
There are no thoughts
that stick, except
perhaps that the softness
of sand under
my fingertips
is pleasant.
I realize she’s changed
the game to
fill the hole.
It is a moment
before I join her.
I am still in the routine
of scraping out.
How soon
a habit forms.
So we fill. And pile.
And soon it is time
for digging again.
It goes on this way, and on,
only I no longer resist
the transitions from digging
to filling, from doming
to digging. I scrape sand roads
from one mound
or ditch to another.
A whole day could blisslfully pass
this way. But it doesn’t.
After an hour, I tell
her it’s time to go,
some hole I’ve dug
for myself, this filling
in slots of time with
things to do. But
the sand follows
us home and empties
onto the closet floor,
streaming from
the small pink hourglass
of her shoe.
“After an hour, I tell
her it’s time to go,
some hole I’ve dug
for myself, this filling
in slots of time with
things to do.
Here’s where you make that bridge across from the story of playing in the sand to the larger castles we build. I might play with compacting what’s above this a bit, but the sense of the habitual does arise from the back and forth of digging and doming.
It’s a lovely image at the end, the “pink hourglass of her shoe” that spills sand onto the floor.