"I am forever walking upon these shores,
betwixt the sand and the foam.
The high tide will erase my foot-prints,
And the wind will blow away the foam.
But the sea and the shore will remain
Forever." Kahlil Gibran
I was thinking of this poem while sitting in the sand at the beach yesterday. With 80 degree weather it was like summer. I thought "between the sand and the foam." I looked. There was nothing between the sand and the foam. The sand and the foam is where the ocean meets the land.
What does it mean to be somewhere that can only be two dimensional, not three? What did Gibran want to convey by saying he was walking between the sand and the foam? As I watched the dance I began to see that the foam was always moving and the sand was at rest. Ah, the play of being and doing once again.
Was the poet's life lived in that non-space between doing and being? Was he trying to say that his place was a delicate balance between doing and being? I think he was. The best of lives are lived with a wise blend of activity and stillness, work and play, wakefulness and sleep.
And as for our doing and being, the tide of life will wash away what we do and the winds of change will blow away even our spiritual achievements. But...the sea and the shore, love, God, the universal intelligence that guides the stars, remains.
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1 comment:
Thank you for sharing this insight. At the heart of the sufi teaching is the analogy of a drop of water entering an ocean. The drop looses it's seperateness, but in the process it becomes one with the ocean which is its source. In this analogy the ego exists only so that we may feel separation from our source for a period of time so that when we return to it we know something about its nature, and our relationship to it, that we didn't know before.
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