Ocean Beach, San Francisco, February 2011
Photo by Tim Giller
There is such beauty in these forms that approach perfection yet refuse it. A sand dollar, strange animal carapace, hard form with a slight bruise. Perhaps we’ve given this creature, valuable beyond money, such a name not merely for its shape and size. It is neither quite round nor of the uniform circumference necessary for coinage. Perhaps we see it this way because it comes as surprise. The beach combing urge fulfilled, of finding some treasure washed up in the sand at our feet as if directly gifted to you by powers just beyond reckoning.
Do you take it, keep it? Something you put on display as reminder of the setting sun glinting off of the surf, waves gliding up and breaking into your toes rinsing the sand from the crevices yet adding more. The foam draping across at a recessional pace upwards and back, repeating endlessly for as long as we can imagine. This important piece of a perpetual motion.
Perhaps we leave it to another fate, another wanderer who may later grasp it. If it ends up in some forgotten corner of this other person’s bedroom as their life echos forward, broken into uneven flakes by regretful hands too indelicate, caring yet clumsy. Weathered not by repetition of waves and scouring sand but by ennui. Neither process profane or sacred but an enwrapped dance of both.