Love is Endless, Don’t Try to Grasp It

Since embarking on this journey, I’ve been reading the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I read a line from it today that stood out to me. I wrote it down. “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.” His writing flows so effortlessly. I find it hard to describe. Reading it has been inspiring me to try and write. Writing has always been one of the hardest art forms for me. Its contradictory. The more effort I put into words the worse it seems to make them. You can feel it when adjectives don’t flow or ideas come out forced. A thought I had this morning keeps coming back in my head. I can’t seem to shake it loose. It was her. Of course I was on the beach when this happened. I’d been trying to capture the ocean for her. It was later in the afternoon. The tide was low and all the rocks and their crustaceans were exposed. I was looking for some seashells I could give her, something heartfelt but not overly forced. Maybe the seashells are forced I thought. I walked down the shore and kept looking. I thought about her a little more too. It wasn’t crowded but with my head down I saw someone else’s footsteps beneath my feet in the sand. It made me imagine all the steps that had been taken on this beach before me. I couldn’t grasp the thought. I looked up and followed the past footprints with my eyes and watched as they ran towards the ocean. I stopped for a second as one of the imprints got washed away by the waves. I wondered if this seashell idea was stupid again. I thought about writing her something on the ocean’s impermanence and how the endlessness of past trails in the sand had reminded me of her. It felt forced. One of the waves crashed onto the rocks and came up to my feet, some sound to disrupt my unending silence. I looked up from my search and saw that the water had washed my own steps away. I’m thinking too hard. I put the seashells I had collected in my pocket and decided to head back up to the pool.