made out of sand.

I don’t forget that it’s all sand here, or rather all granite. The concrete debris is from mountains in another life, just like the pure sand and the misplaced headstones and the concrete highway above. It’s all granite.

Everything I see is mountain dust and takes me back to the jubilant Sierra headwaters.

The built city is geological. The towers are sandy. The roads are mountains made flat. What will the ancient/future aliens think of us? How will they dissect our weird geologies?

A walk on the beach is vast galaxies of granitic decomposition. Stars of feldspar, quartz, micalinked to star stuff, as are our own bodies. All of it skin, or skin as simply a protective soil. I am dirt as much as I am a star and that’s all just facts. Sand is an ecosystem, a living system not a blank fantasy place. It’s as storied as the concrete sidewalk which I now know is assembled by geological materials millions of years in the making.

Each grain of sand is a planetthe whole beach a cosmos.

On each grain of sand lives up to 100,000 microorganisms from thousands of differing species: bacterias, tardigrades, plants, small worm and shrimp-like animals. Many of these organisms act as a filter, collecting and processing carbon and nitrogen from seawater so the levels are maintained and excessive oceanic algae blooms can be avoided - a filter-skin that again makes our very breathing possible. This and other necessary work is done again by whole universes getting on with daily life. These lives are completely invisible to me - which makes it so easy to ignore them.

Scientifically, these organisms are called interstitial animals because they live full lives in minuscule gaps between grains of sand. The gaps are worlds. Rocks are alive. Margins are lively zones and probably the bacteria and micro-critters the most resilient of us all.

As far as Ocean Beach goes, there is a new plan to stop with all the “winning,” to back off and to let the beach do what it likes to with the Great Highway. The Ocean Beach Master plan developed by SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association) in San Francisco, will eventually turn a piece of the road that is too close to the cliff’s edge into a temporary park & native plant habitat for people and creatures. All traffic is to be rerouted further east. Through this move, the Great Highway will eventually give way and yield to natural beach breathing, changing sea levels, erosion, and sand loss.

A sand garden.

A shapeshifting skin for geomimics.

Geomimicry in everyday living could be a practical step towards neighborly survival. The first step I suppose is to even realize where all your neighbors are.

Invisible to my clumsy eye like the lichen eroding granite and the thinning river in the valley and the dust in the lung and sand tumbling forth across hundreds of miles and the tardigrade spinning worlds on the grain of sand now stuck to the bottom of my boot.