Sandcastles
The First Part
Last spring was a challenge for me. One of my new seminars didn’t fill as expected and I had to cancel it, which negatively impacted my income. A dear friend suffered a brain aneurism, and while he survived, his situation was precarious. It disturbed me even more because I lost my mother to a brain aneurism years ago. Then there were several large, unexpected house-related expenses that were manageable until they became unmanageable. I found myself in a season in which I could not handle life; life was too big. It was scary. I could not be with the pain, and I was not prepared for the unexpected problems. I was burnt out, and not producing the results I needed. I made myself wrong for not having done “it” differently. That last complaint is a particularly nefarious one: “it” never reveals to me exactly what “it” is that could have been done differently. “It” occurs more like a fog in the back of my mind, a swirl of different possible tactics and strategies that are in fact useless. I was in a familiar racket of being “on my own” or “alone” in life, and I found myself in a state of despair that I couldn’t shake because the circumstances seemed unacceptable and were overwhelming.
In this place of intersecting breakdowns—past wounds of abandonment fully triggered, disconnected from Spirit—I did manage to have a meltdown differently. There I was, lying on my kitchen floor, having cleaned up a flood of water from a massive leak under my sink. (Prior owners failed to put in valves under the sink. WTF?) I was also in the company of my 10-year-old son who was at the kitchen table dying Easter eggs, as was our original plan. Calvin would come over to me from time to time to check on me, and I would just say I needed to cry for a while, or say nothing at all and kept crying, and then he would go back to his Easter eggs. Sometimes he would sit with me with his hand on my shoulder. Once in a while, I would get up, still weirdly weeping and admire his eggs or even dye one for myself before going back onto the floor to cry some more. We did this for about 20 minutes. Afterwards, he told me he was proud of himself for not leaving. He wanted to leave, but he chose to stay with me anyway to keep me company. I told him I was proud of him too, and that his presence was comforting to me and made a difference. I told him I was glad he still made the Easter eggs. I told him I was also proud of myself because I wasn’t only in my meltdown, I was able to be with him, admire his eggs and even make one of my own while still being upset. It was a victory for the level of integration we practice in our household, where big emotions are included and normalized, but do not tyrannize or dominate everyone’s experience, or even necessarily one’s own experience.
One day during a seminar, I shared that I felt like a captain of a sailboat who prides herself on being an excellent sailor. I even welcome challenges so I can prove to myself that I am up for it; I like a healthy challenge to test my skills and resilience. But this time, the number of breakdowns was like an overpowering storm that chastened my confidence in my own adulting. To be clear: I can map out my life as a timeline of hard, scary, or tragic events, but this set of circumstances broke something. It broke some fundamental belief that after I get through this, it could be fine. Or that if I could get my shit together, I would be protected from being impacted by ____ (fill in the blank) in the future. It wasn’t the circumstances in the present that were getting to me, it was the finality of the understanding that I am only a good sailor because the weather cooperates with me. At any moment, Life can overwhelm me and capsize my boat. On the one hand…. I already knew this. We all know this. No one thinks that we have any real control over life. But we pretend we do, and we convince ourselves that we do. And we work so, so, so hard to keep that illusion alive. We spend our lives working to control that we have no control over Life. Lying on my kitchen floor, I got the lesson not only intellectually; I got it personally, viscerally.
I had the opportunity to participate in a breathwork session not long after the kitchen floor incident. In my heightened state of oxygenation, I encountered Life. I told Life to fuck off, though not unkindly. Life was compassionate with me about it. Like, “I know babe, I know.”
I brought the insight of my “capsized boat all but for the Grace of God,” to my coach, Dr. Martin Kettelhut. We talked about powerlessness and surrender, acceptance and temporality. He said, “We have the gall to create on foundations of sand.” I love that: Gall. Truly, what gall to create, and how transient the surface of life that we create on! Reflecting on that over the following week, I was delighted to recognize that I, personally, have an abundance of gall. Honestly, it was the first embodied experience of abundance that I have ever had: I have no lack of gall to create. I have plenty of gall to create anything, basically with anything, at any time. I’ve had people acknowledge the unapologetic attitude I bring to life…. it’s because of my gall! I have the gall to be unapologetic! That I create on a foundation of sand makes no difference to my abundance of gall to create, none whatsoever. I am compelled to create, I take joy in it, and I crush it—because I have the gall to.
With this coaching, I set out with a new mindset towards the nature of what I can create and to what end, playing with both my gall to create and the wisdom that whatever I create is already in the process of its own dissolution. Life entered a season of fully felt humility, desire, tenderness, insecurity, power, possibility, and loss.
The Second Part
Metaphorically speaking, what we create is not only built on a foundation of sand: our creations are themselves sandcastles. We have an idea that if we create something, it will be done, or stable, or lasting, but everything created is impacted by time until it no longer exists. That which is created is limited by its own duration.
A sandcastle needs constant maintenance. Walls fall and need repacking. Sandcastles are often revised. We add structures and then break them down to do it differently. Sandcastles need constant reinforcement. We need water to wet the sand, upgrading structures with wetter, stronger sand. Sandcastles require flexibility and discernment. We lift the pail up to find half of the sand is still in the pail. Do we try again or is this sufficient? And how many times do we try to get that perfect shape? Twice? Twenty? When is it good enough? Our ideas for our sandcastles change if more people are involved. We must accommodate another person’s idea, adapt, and accept that sometimes what is created is completely different than our original impulse. Our sandcastles are only as good as our skillsets, tools, and materials. That is why some are rudimentary, and others are works of art. There is plenty of sand to build limitless sandcastles. We are only limited by ourselves: our vision, our abilities, and the time we are willing to put into making them. And of course, sandcastles get destroyed. Sometimes we accidentally knock down parts of our own sandcastle—the classic “oops.” Other people carelessly run through our sandcastles. Or their dogs do. Sometimes people smash them in anger, or even just to take pleasure in their ruin. A storm comes in and rain destroys our sandcastle. We unwittingly build it too close to the tide, and when we come back the next day, discover that it has dissolved back into the ocean.
After sharing this with the seminar cohort, participants started to change their relationship to their goals, and in particular the ones were related to as a final form of something. “Once I get this done, I’ll be DONE,” became: “Once I get this done, I’ll be done for now.” This created great freedom, as objectives lost significance in the acknowledgment that they were not permanent. There were no fixed concepts or final plans. They were initiatives for now, current experiments and explorations, things that seemed useful to be/do/have next. What we are working on are the sandcastles we are working on now. We are maintaining the sandcastles we built recently that we are still committed to for as long as they and/or our commitment lasts. We do not expect them to last forever—they were never the solution to anything—they are only what we have the gall to create now, and we can be OK with that.
The Third Part
The process of creation is not, ultimately, finite, until it is. Its ending is not in its fulfillment, but in its dissolution. In our imagination, there may be a specific conclusion or end goal, but the actual creation of the thing, and the thing itself, is an ongoing experience that we then live with. Ask anyone who has written a book. Once the book is written (i.e. out of our heads), there is a whole new set of consequences to afford the experience of that book on the planet, and those consequences go on indefinitely. Until we move on to another book, or goal, or sandcastle….
Consider getting a new car. Getting a new car may be a goal, living in concept until its fulfillment, but once we get that new car, we have the lived experience of driving it. As that experience loses its newness, another one emerges: the experience of maintaining the car. As more time passes, the experience of our car begins to shift again to the experience of no longer wanting that car. We have reasons to no longer want that car. The cost to maintain it may become more than it is worth, or complaints start to show up, or new technologies come out, or we just become bored with it. At some point, we stop investing in the current car—in time, money, energy, or intention—and begin the creative process of getting a new car.
This example is useful because it illustrates our own agency in destroying that which we once created. When we are thinking about the new car, our attention shifts away from the one we have, because we are already letting go of it. Some people experience light grief when they give up a car, as it was such an integrated part of their lived experience for a period of time. In the end, the new car is a promise of a new experience which affords the letting go of the old car, and we do so with intention and agency. The sandcastle “car” is smashed by our own hand…the foundation of sand smoothed out, and a new sandcastle, “new car,” is conceived of and built in its place.
From a metaphysical perspective, we have direct responsibility in the destruction of the metaphorical sandcastles that no longer work for us, whether we are aware of it or not. We imagine that life surprises us, that we find ourselves in new circumstances that we did not create, or would not have created if we “had the choice.” While some dissolutions are out of our control, some are a direct result of who we are being, the destruction of which is a powerful expression of authenticity.
The Shiva asserts its destructive power to make the necessary evolution of the Being possible. We cannot become, or evolve, without destroying some of our most treasured creations. What we destroy for our own evolution is often what we are most attached to, our identities most invested in, and therefore the process of dissolution is one of suffering. We cannot imagine life without it and at the same time, some part of us is clearing it out. Our left hand does not know what our right hand is doing. We spend months getting coached on how to maintain a thing that is ontologically, or spiritually, non-sustainable for us and our evolution. Eventually, we find a reason to step away. We may go back and forth about it. We might create a drama to kill it off. We could sabotage it. Or avoid creating the next thing that is calling us forward. All of this process is because of our attachments to our creations—which are in fact the very content of our lives— and our existential attachment to life itself. Each sandcastle that the Shiva dances on makes way for a new creation, and ironically, today’s authentic creation will become tomorrow’s limitation, as each creation is just a temporary sliver of a representation of the authentic Self. Our authentic nature may be expressed in the material but is not material.
The inner Shiva, then, joyfully stomps out whatever sandcastles no longer serve us. It ruthlessly clears the way for the next iteration of the Self, as our material world gradually loses its relevance to our Being. Amen.
© 2024 by Marita Bollici. All Rights Reserved.
