I am a single grain of sand on a vast, perhaps an infinite beach that lies at the edges of all the world’s oceans.  I have structure, I am glittering if the light is right; I let light pass through, slightly, though it is altered and obscured by me.  The Tao is that beach.  Without me and 10,000 things, the ten thousand things, like me, there is no beach, no Way.  But from the perspective of the infinite Tao I barely exist, I barely mean anything.  Yet the Tao embraces and encompasses me; we are in a sense one.

Or say that the whole of human existence, the whole history of the hominids on Earth, is one such grain of sand on that same incomprehensibly long, bright beach.  Now I am not even a small atom within one grain of sand.  And the beach is now not only the whole existence and being of the planet Earth, with the rise and fall of all its species, as well as the end it will reach eventually, whether at human hands or when our sun finally exhausts itself.  It is also the being of all planets, and all galaxies, among the billions of galaxies we posit as the universe; and as science begins to tell us that there are other universes, so the beach encompasses those as well.

Meditation allows me to begin to understand my puniness in relation to a vastness so bright, so warm, so inviting, so calm, that my cares fall silent.  Meditation is a kind of standing on that beach, or perhaps walking on it, and gazing into the distance.  And perhaps enlightenment would be a life lived wholly in orientation to the beach of which one is not even a granule, a life without much concern for the infinitesimal geometry of one’s own being.

Humility.  One’s smallness.  One’s burdens’ pitiable slightness and transience.  The sunlight and shadow ahead on the sand.

25 July, 2024.