by
Odds Bodkin

You are walking on ten thousand mountains. Once this soft warm sand was cold solid rock, buried in the heart of the earth, dark and silent, hidden from the ancient fish and dinosaurs.

These tiny, light-filled grains that pour through your fingers have been here for many millions of lifetimes. Perhaps they were freed from the rock the day a Triceratops scraped his horn against a stone by the sea.

Perhaps a Pteranodon's wing blast scattered these very same grains on a day hotter than this one, buried deep in the memory of time, remembered only by the universe's oldest light.

Your blood is salt water, just like the sea. We are carried by our mothers in small, safe oceans as we grow before we are born. Though we walk on land and breathe air, we are all children of the ancient sea.

Feel that last surge of foam? It is the same water that has always been here. It never leaves our earth's protecting sky. This water hissed on the earliest volcanoes and rose in plumes through methane clouds. Up through this water bubbled the first atmospheric oxygen, the waste of early bacteria, but now what we cannot do without.

These very molecules of H2O slid past the wet rubbery skin of Plesiosaurs as they snapped up fish among the kelps. It is the water that Eohippus, the tiny Dawn Horse only a foot high, drank on grassy plains in the Age of Mammals.

This liquid has tumbled over waterfalls the world over and clung as hoarfrost to Himalayan mountain tops. It has fallen as rain, evaporated into the wind and circled the earth for eons. It has crept up the water tubes beneath the bark of countless trees, and lifted from tiny pores beneath their leaves into billions of warm skies.

Lastly, think of all the human hearts that have pumped it to arms, legs, fingers and brains, right through yours now, at this very moment. So that you can feel the hot sand on this beach, and the cool water between your toes.