You can sit on a beach, at the threshold between the dry sand and the edge of waves crashing on the shore. If you sit down and grab a fist of dry sand, it will go down and fly with the wind. Just a small bump of dry sand will accumulate, but it will resist for only a moment.
Instead, if you grab wet sand, it will slide down through your fingers regardless of your efforts to keep it. You could then use your hand, full of wet sand, as a Sac à Poche, a cone through which the wet sand could go down in a narrow stream.
If you direct your sand-based painting brush, you will have a blank canvas to draw upon the flat and levigated semi-wet sandy surface.
The sand-based paint is thick. If you keep your brush-hand steady for more than a moment while the wet sand is percolating, the sand will pile-up.
Listen to the music playing in your thoughts. Find the rhythm with which having your hand dancing. You can have patterns to form on the sand.
One long note and one long sweeping of your arm would let a small wall to be built. A Pointy rhythm, maybe percussions, would drive your golden brush to create a series of columns. If you insist on individual piles, you will have pillars to emerge until having towers and bastions.
You have infinite sand. The water will never stop bringing fresh and wet sand to the reach of your arms.
Grab fists of wet sands and let them pile up. Try patterns formed by movements. Dance them, invent them, sing them, do them randomly.
See the patterns you drew on the sands. Recognize familiar forms.
Is that a house? A bridge? An archipelago? Isn’t that a human feature? A nose? What about trying with lips?
Then, learn the winds, the sun, the warm, and the cold—the rain.
If you become good, you could have the wet sand to dry in a safe harbor. Protected by the waves, dried by sunrays and the salty breezes, the sand could form a strong crust. You can turn the sand into cement.
And your creation would resist the volatile whimsical of a moment to become something lasting a few minutes more.
What do you have to do?
Go playing with sand.
One response to “Like sand piling up on the shore”
Related in an amazing way!
> “You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life