Cosmic Perspectives on Sandcastle Construction
Or: toward why we keep digging
Author’s note: This is a small draft scene that I hope will eventually become part of a longer piece about space dust, the stuff that blocks starlight, but also allows them to form.
A few weeks ago we visited my sister-in-law and nephews at a campground on Lake Michigan. The crashing waves sparkling like diamonds were glorious in the warm sun, which bathed our shoulders in its white shimmering rays. The blue sky overhead was cloudless, and a light breeze kept the bugs away. A perfect day, hindered only by the haze in the distance, a reminder of wildfires in distant Canada – a burning world far away. But that was there. Here the haze closed us off on our own little planet, a haven of sun, sand, light.
On the beach we built a sandcastle. As in: I piled up walls and formed castle shapes and 7-year-old Willem dug holes down to water level, his pools filling from the bottom. Five-year-old Hendrick moved around duplicating what I did: creating drop towers of wet mud like I taught him, a forest of trees built from rich droplets of golden sand.
We worked hard at that sandcastle, Willem digging away, carving deeper holes until the wall would cave in from the eroding power of the water he’d unleashed, a spring of its own destruction. We’d dig out the collapsed area, expanding the cavern or trying to reconstruct a collapsed wall. But wet mud dries, and soon turns to fast running white sand, perched like an unstable glacier, an avalanche at the fist touch of wind or hand. Still, we made good work for a while: bridges, stairs, drip lined turrets and spires like Russian cathedrals, with wells to withstand the strongest siege. That is, of course, until Hendrik got bored and decided to play Godzilla, laughing as he stamped on walls, sliding as he rode their collapse like roller coasters down their initial decent.
To avoid Willem’s protests we moved on to new projects, a lake protected by cannons (pieces of driftwood we found on the beach) with space for pretend swimming or viewing by our imaginary minuscule citizens. And I’d occasionally try to reform a wall as Hendrick moved on, or dig out a collapsed well. But of course it wouldn’t last. Later, the next day when we returned to the beach, just the outline of our work remained. A slight reshaping of the sand. In a week our presence and efforts might be unnoticeable, even to the practiced eye, and yet, we built and laughed and played in the sun, soaked in the wealth of the crashing waves.
And I wonder when God looks down at the sandcastles of our lives — the reputations we construct, the homes we form, the systems we repair — if he knows how they dry and blow in the wind, but loves us, and sends the sun and waves and laughter nonetheless.