You dig your fingers into the beige sand and feel the odd resistance of the grains. And you feel the coldness beneath the shallow layer of warm sand. You feel the moisture the sun can't touch. And you slowly bring your fingers together into a claw shape.
Lift the fingers out of the sand and watch the grains disappear, falling out, and some clinging stubbornly to your skin. You forget about it for a little bit, letting your body automatically put your hand somewhere you aren't paying attention to, while you can look into the distance. The seaside has a simplistic landscape. It's the blue sea, marked by some white foams here and there, as sporadic waves crash and re-emerge. And on your left and right is just beige sand, dunes that stretch into infinity. You need not turn around because it's mostly dunes too. You sit in this simplicity, almost an abstraction of what life should be. Just the complementary colors of blue and yellow. And you sit there as a singular contrast to this simplicity because you've made yourself too complicated.
Invisible to this simplicity is the wind. It is only visible in the slight complication it makes, in the wave, in the movement of sand particles around you that are visible enough. And every now and then a gust would be felt, especially when it carries sand particles with you. Tickling your skin. And when you look at your forearm that had just been touched by the sandy breeze, you realize the sand isn't so simple. Each grain has a particular shape, particular color, and for some you can actually identify if it had come from an eroded shell or an erode rock. Life, in all its complexities, had its association in the sand, each grain, as if an iota of soul remains marked in the shape and color of each grain.
You brush off the sand and sighs, not because you have something on your mind, but because you are inspired by the simplicity of your surroundings, as if you just heard the simplicity sighing by making a breeze. You sigh also because you like the sound you make. It sound harmonious with the sea, with the waves that come waxing and waning before you. You sigh, because, it makes you feel good. It is as if your lungs infuse some of your troubles, some of your complexities, into that breath and let it out. As if each sigh is a tiny step in detoxification, in de-complication. And your sigh melts gently, diffuses into, the breeze that moves the sand, ever so slightly, over the infinity of history.
There had been others in history who have sat here, perhaps even in this very spot, a random spot you picked. They have looked out the sea with different perspectives, different desires, and in different states of mind. But still, they heard and saw the same thing, and it is likely that for a little bit, at least, they have been inspired to do the same thing you are. Digging their fingers into the sand, brushing it off from their forearms, and sighing deep breaths.
The sky isn't always so perfectly clear. Most of the time there are some clouds, and sometimes it's not blue at all, and often, it even rains. But even with all this, with thunderclouds, lightening, it's all still very simple. You dig your heels a little deeper into the soft sand before you, feeling the resistance and it small but enough to tire you out of you try running against it for a even a few minutes. And the deeper you successfully dig, the more your fingers on both hands want to do the same, and in the end, you feel like you are sliding into the sand, becoming part of it, being absorbed by the earth, and transforming into the sand so that the wind can lift you up and take you all over this simplistic landscape.
The wind picks up. The landscape is slowly transforming. While you're too busy wondering about becoming part of the earth, distant clouds have formed. It will rain tomorrow. The landscape will change, but not in any way that adds complications to its soul. You still have your fingers inside the sand; you still feel the little sand particles between your toes, around your heels. The smell of the sea is the smell of the future storm, the storm that will find its resting place underneath the thin layer of dry sand at the end. Your fingers feel the storms of yesterdays, or the tides of yesterdays. Millennia of history surround you, the only complicated existence in this landscape swept by the wind and caressed by the sea. You lift your fingers out and make gentle caresses on the sand to cover the mark you have left behind with fan-like patterns that the wind can't make but will soon remove.
