sand is a substance
beautiful mysterious
each grain on a beach

… the materials of the beach are themselves steeped in antiquity. Sand is a substance that is beautiful, mysterious, and infinitely variable; each grain on a beach is the result of processes that go back into the shadowy beginnings of life, or of the earth itself.

The bulk of seashore sand is derived from the weathering and decay of rocks, transported from their place of origin to the sea by the rains and the rivers. In the unhurried processes of erosion, in the freighting seaward, in the interruptions and resumptions of that journey, the minerals have suffered various fates—some have been dropped, some have worn out and vanished. In the mountains the slow decay and disintegration of the rocks proceed, and the stream of sediments grows—suddenly and dramatically by rockslides—slowly, inexorably, by the wearing of rock by water. All begin their passage toward the sea. Some disappear through the solvent action of water or by grinding attrition in the rapids of a river’s bed. Some are dropped on the riverbank by flood waters, there to lie for a hundred, a thousand years, to become locked in the sediments of the plain and wait another million years or so, during which, perhaps, the sea comes in and then returns to its basin. Then at last they are released by the persistent work of erosion’s tools—wind, rain, and frost—to resume the journey to the sea. Once brought to salt water, a fresh rearranging, sorting, and transport begin. Light minerals, like flakes of mica, are carried away almost at once; heavy ones like the black sands of ilmenite and rutile are picked up by the violence of storm waves and thrown on the upper beach.

No individual sand grain remains long in any one place. The smaller it is, the more it is subject to long transport—the larger grains by water, the smaller by wind. An average grain of sand is only two and one half times the weight of an equal volume of water, but more than two thousand times as heavy as air, so only the smaller grains are available for transport by wind. But despite the constant working over of the sands by wind and water, a beach shows little visible change from day to day, for as one grain is carried away, another is usually brought to take its place

From The Rim of Sand in the book, The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1955).

Ms. Carson may be better known for the book, Silent Spring, but I like the Edge of the Sea better.

Maybe because that it is where I work.

I can leave my office at lunch time and in 5 minutes stand with my feet in the water and Mr. Thoreau said of Cape Code, “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.“

sensed deep in his bones
natural state of universe
was endless summer

Though he had never lived in a truly warm climate he always sensed deep in his bones that the natural state of the universe was endless summer, though he had only heard rumors of its existence.

He had heard of places where the grass was eternally green, where snow was spoken of with nostalgia by people who had not endured it for years.

But Miami, and Florida, that tropical green finger with the angelic aura of white sand, was so perfect, so magical, the possibilities of baseball so endless, that its mere existence almost caused Sandor to acknowledge the possibility of a God.

From Butterfly Winter by WP Kinsella, 2011, Winnipeg, Enfield & Wizenty

tide goes, tide goes out
once more the empty day goes
down the empty shore

Adapted from:

Ebb

The tide goes out, the tide goes out; once more
The empty day goes down the empty shore.

The tide goes out; the wharves deserted lie
Under the empty solitude of sky.

The tide goes out; the dwindling channels ache
With the old hunger, with the old heartbreak.

The tide goes out; the lonely wastes of sand
Implore the benediction of thy hand.

The tide goes out, goes out; the stranded ships
Desire the sea, — and I desire thy lips.

As it appears in: Poems by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts, 1907