What You're Really Standing on When You Go to the Beach
It’s nearing that time of year: the official season of standing on the shoreline while the waves nibble away the sand from between your bare toes. But while you’re there, kneel down – because sand is beautiful.
What you’re looking at is the same dull beige grains you see at the beach, in your car and clinging to your towel, in that order. From where you stand up there, sand grains blend together into the colour of….well, sand. But lay your hands on a 3D microscope as Gary Greenberg has, and sand becomes a series of richly coloured microcosms. It’s a jumbled record of thousands of years of our sedimentary and volcanic environment (look at the amazing photos here, over at Discover). Greenberg has assembled all his work into A Grain Of Sand: Nature’s Secret Wonder (Amazon listing here).
But we humans have our ways too. Take the Buddhist tradition of making sand mandalas.
The Tibetan monks in the above picture are using the traditional metal funnel known as the chak-pur. It’s filled with colored sand, and when a metal rod is scraped along one ridged side, the vibration makes the sand run out like a tiny stream of water…
The results can be astonishing.
Sand grains image: Gary Greenberg
Image of monks building mandala: GirlReporter
Image of sand mandala: shutter.chick
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4 Comments
May 13th, 2008 at 11:24 am
What beautiful photos from the link above! Thanks Mike for reminding us to look to the very tiny treasures of nature… stunning in beauty, even at diminutive size.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I knew that grains of sand were as unique as snowflakes, but I’d never seen just how beautiful they are. The colors and shapes are stunning. Thanks, Mike.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Wow. . I’d say thats more than three-dimensional. . .
My husband and I sometimes have contests when we’re relaxing at the beach–who can find the most beautiful grain of sand. This entertains us for hours!
May 20th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
So cool. Sometimes we forget how beautiful the world is… thanks.
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