Poetry, Photography, Travel
The Illusion of Solidity
Reflections from a moment on Bandon Beach
The slick of water sheening over a silvered beach, the vapored breath of evening air, and the chill of the moment when the sun gasps its last breath of the day,
these moments brim over into a certain stillness of the soul, but also infuse me with eternal motion.
Beneath my feet, the sand shifts and I sink a little deeper with every frigid wave tugging at my ankles. How far would you descend into the granular depths, which give the illusion of solidity, if you simply stopped moving?
And yet, the beach holds firm. Twined with the passage of those who have trodden this ever-changing scape of breathy exhales of the sea and the inhales of time, the illusory boundary between the placental waters and the first primordial gasp of air is constantly in flux.
Is it like the spinning, whirling world of atoms, filled with more space than matter?
I wonder about these things, as the waves lap at my flesh, and I ponder the uncertainty of being.
For aren’t we also made of water and atoms and air?
Which part of us is truly solid and which bits are like the vacuous, ephemeral, snaking bubbles exploding from the sinking sands into the burst of sun-dusted air at the end of the day?
Contained between the lick of one wave and the suck of the next, the stillness and the eternal motion lulls me into the certainty held within uncertainty.
I may not comprehend what, if anything, of me lasts longer than the pulse of a tide or the foamy grasp of fingers on the shore which claw their way back to the mother sea.
But yet, here I stand, sinking into a granular eternity, perfectly content.
Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem, or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).
Thank you for reading. I hope that you enjoyed my musings and photos.
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Photos and poem ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.