A Thousand Passing Winds
On age, what shapes us, and what we become
Time is nothing, it’s everything.
Age is the wind, its only dust.
And I — I am a mountain of sand,
standing between land and sky,
carved by a thousand passing winds.
Some days the wind is strong and cruel.
It carves through me, it takes pieces of me,
scatters them across the land —
building new dunes elsewhere.
But it will never change who I truly am.
Oh wind, I have followed you and obeyed you.
I have lost pieces of myself to you.
And I have learned.
For I am but a mountain of sand.
The wind does not ask permission.
It lifts millions of us — grain by grain —
and carries us out toward the water.
We do not know we are moving.
We only know we are lighter than before.
Some of us reach the sea before we understand why.
I stop. I look at my hands.
The years have left their marks —
ridges pressed into skin like ripples on sand,
the same curved lines the wind draws on the dunes at dusk.
We wear our age the way the dunes wear their rain —
hardened on the surface, still sand at the core.
And our hair catches the light differently now,
not dark like night, but silver,
the color the sun turns everything it loves long enough.
I used to think the wind was mine alone to bear.
That my shape was singular, unrepeatable.
But I looked across the dunes and saw the others —
carved the same, drifting the same,
all of us moving without knowing.
And eventually we turn to waves, all of us,
next to each other,
carrying what remains of us forward.
Just waves.
Simple waves.
Drawn to the shore that was always close.
Then, slowly, quietly,
we dunes drift toward the water,
where the sun turns the sea gold at its edges
and silver at its heart.
Grain by grain, the wind delivers us home.
We do not fight the sea.
We become it.
These words began as three separate pieces written across different seasons of my life. The dunes back home eventually merge into the sea. I have always thought there was something worth saying about that. This is my attempt.