Sand.

The hourglass reminds us that time does not pass—it falls-it’s returning.

Hello dear readers,

Felt inspired to continue the series on archetypes—on seeing beyond the obvious, diving deeper into meaning, into the symbols beneath our feet.
Elusive, profound wisdom can be right in front of us, all around us.

Seeing through symbols and beyond appearances has always been one of my ways of going though life—a way of pointing the path forward.
A life of wonder, magic, of never settling for the surface, of letting life shape me. Allowing myself to be part of everything I call home.

To meet people where they are, like mountains rising, plants blooming, souls opening.

This post is about a word that is not just a word.
It’s a story, one of eternity, one that reveals itself only when we remain present with it.

Allow yourself to be carried, remember what lies beyond your own memories.
There is so much more to life than this moment, than just our lives here and now.

“I wonder, though, if memories eventually become a trap—sooner or later, we end up weary from constantly discovering that we are no longer who we once were.
In the desert, you probably don’t look back.
What is there to see?
The wind has already erased your footprints.
Your gaze persistently searches the horizon ahead, where on the burning sand shimmers a kind of daze that might just stir you to hope.
A desert is never false.”- Octavian Paler

Sand: sit, settle, sediment—that which settles.

Octavian Paler, one of my favorite authors, wrote a diary book called Desert Forever. I always return to it not to see who I was, but to remember.
As the years go by, I understand more of its truth—the kind of truth you only begin to see as you move forward in life.
This desert of his is not about sand, it's about remembering paradise, about death, mistakes, and failure.

“A desert is never false. It only lies to encourage you to keep going, which makes illusion something vital.”-Octavian Paler

Rocks eventually become sand, vital illusion.

I feel like sand, carried by the wind, shaping myself under the sun. Watching myself shine across the endless dunes, never-ending, curving dunes. And when night comes, flowers bloom deep in the desert.
Like us, the desert has a night life and a day life. The night is cold, and the day is the opposite.
At night, you feel the moisture coming from a faraway place, remembering Mother Ocean, heated daily by Father Sun.

All the elements blend into this vast memory we think we travel to discover.
But in that travel, we are only entertained, not connected, not remembering.
We see the sand, but not the story. Not ourselves. Not our golden dust. Not our past. Not our future.

We crave to go back to buildings, turning sand into a distraction instead of a return.
We go to mountains to conquer. We go to beaches to forget.
And maybe, we go to the desert to remember.

Fragments of remembrance.@katerinanedelcu

I came to the desert today to retrieve the picture of my deceased brother, caught between the pages of a book as I was searching for inspiration, and to remember him. He is back to sand, to ash, and will return to the mountains, and so will we, those of us still here, feeling immortal.

There is a certain truth in the feeling of being eternal, and that is:
sand is a promise of forever.

Death can also be a celebration, as nothing is ever wasted—only transformed.

Souls run deep into the desert, as if they’ve lived there forever, beneath the stars, under the constant pressure to become something new each day, while somehow remaining whole all along.

Inevitable beautiful, golden landscapes that turn us around.

Ancient Beings in Corfu @katerinanedelcu

In a psychological and metaphorical sense, mountains can represent our ego, the firm, stable, structured self—while sand, as a symbol of transformation, represents the soul surrendered to the elements.

”I never imagined that by describing the dry season in Asybaris, I would end up enduring it. I can't remember the last time a drop of rain fell. In fact, all I wish for is to see this summer one day turned into a memory.”- Octavian Paler

As Jung said, we spend the first part of our lives motivated by the outer world, and the second part returning inward.
Mountains represent the beginning of a cycle, rising upward, while sand is the mountain turning inward, moving into depth, beyond the mighty ego, becoming one with the landscape, no longer needing to achieve.
To simply become part of something greater.
These are cycles not measured in our time, but in the time of cosmic becoming, a time we cannot observe.
And that is a gift to us, we are not meant to carry the burden of time.

A single grain of sand holds a story billions of years old, and we still can't fully understand it, we don’t need to.
On the atomic level, it goes deep, a world within a world.
Sand doesn’t vanish, it becomes.
Just like souls, they can never be contained, the more you try to hold them, the more they disappear through your fingers.

Rivers know where they’re going. @katerinanedelcu

The idea of the desert is not about sand; it’s about what the sand holds, lives lived through.

A story that is always changing, rarely still, unconscious in nature, shifting constantly, pulling from the depths, urging us to remember the past, to face what we have forgotten.

We look at the sand, and we see time, layers of it, eroded, broken down, yet holding vitality, buried pain, the faces we rarely remember. It does not let us forget; it’s a map, a record of everything that came before.

The rare gift of water in the sand is the awakening, the symbol of life.
It’s not a river flowing through, but an essence that rises from deep within, like the mist at night. It comes when the world is quiet, when the cool desert air wraps around us.

This water of Life connects us to everything that came before, what we drink to remember who we truly were: amniotic beings, deep in the ocean, swimming our way up, feeling the sand beneath us, ascending into the mountains.
In this way, it becomes the catalyst for breaking free from old patterns and forces that have shaped us unconsciously, revealing the deep truths hidden beneath the surface.

As the desert shifts, as the wind moves through the sand, we too are constantly changing, moving through cycles of birth and rebirth. Nothing is permanent.

And in that return, there’s a chance to rebuild, to recreate, to make our paradise once again.

The more we let go, the more we understand.

The temporary paths the sand makes represent the meeting of the unconscious and the conscious. Blending worlds, always melting into each other.

The dream world is the most direct space where the conscious and unconscious interact. Dreams are like sandstorms, capable of reshaping our understanding of reality and our waking life.

"No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked... Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles."
— Carl Jung

Tarot, astrology, playfulness, all are spaces of being in a flowing state, beyond the rational mind and ego.

Symbols and fragments surface, breaking like cracks in sand—parts of the self we were not fully aware of.

Our body is another space where these worlds meet—skin, where the inside meets the outside.
Tensions, scars, psychosomatic diseases, unprocessed memories, trauma, and sensations are unconscious forces moving beneath the surface.

We share art, and in doing so, we create a space where the unconscious is brought into the open.
Sharing our solitude forms a bridge, allowing others to join our world.
We connect.

In the silence of nature, our ego dissolves, and we become vast landscapes, moving through time.
Dawn and dusk, the symbols of opposites blending, offer moments of clarity.
These spaces, external and internal, are where we meet, in the in-between places, during different phases of life.

“Dawn is what I have come to know as faith. She loyally arrives in a consummation of colour. Every day. Faith just arrives. A knowing. Darkness releasing her light.
Day born of night. Remembering.” -Jamie Millard

We return to the sand and rise again as mountains, over and over, until the end of time.

And as the night gives way to the morning, the sand becomes the mountain again—whole, renewed, and ready for the next cycle.

Fragments of remembrance.@katerinanedelcu

Wind scattering golden sand against my skin, breathing in the golden memories of all the stones that were once whole, rounder, bigger, not yet scattered across this ocean of sand, the beautiful desert.
This is a poem for you, a shared, protected solitude.

Sand Was Once a Mountain

Sand was once a mountain—
towering, solid, still.
A body of unmoving bones,
hardened by time, shaped by Earth's own breath.

Then the weather happened,
whispering change.
Water, a quiet sculptor,
seeping, stripping, into the stone's silent thoughts,
freezing them, expanding them,
from the inside out, day after day.

Wind, breath against bone with its passion.
Heat and cold, two lovers apart
one warming by day,
the other cracking with frost by night.

The mountain began to crumble,
not all at once, but as time passed,
second by second.
Rock became pebble,
then grain, then sand,
a million fragments of memory,
each holding a story of what once was,
just like us.

Some sand is born as quartz,
crystal, clear, a survivor.
Some of us are corals,
bones of the ocean, broken by waves,
kissed by fish,
and carried by strong currents.

I am made of coral.
I like to be carried by strong waves
and transformed into shore,
meeting the sun and letting it shape me,
breaking me open, day by day,
trusting his wisdom.

Some are dark, magnetic volcanic glass,
shattered dreams of fire and earth.
They mix with shells that were once homes
on warm, white beaches.

All of them—sand,
carried by rivers from one home to another,
by rain, open mouths,
delivered back to the sea, to the desert,
where
stillness
becomes rest.

And there it lies now,
under your feet, between your fingers,
a billion years of breakdown,
somehow still, it feels like becoming.

Just like us.
We are fragments of what was once whole,
shaped by life,
remembering the mountain we used to be,
the breath of the earth again,

returning to the rock,
to recalling the strength we have forgotten,
before we become whole again,

As the winds scatter us anew in the whisper of time,
as sand cycles back into a mountain,
and I into a
pink coral,
ready to be
drifted away.

© Katerina Nedelcu

Rivers know where they’re going. @katerinanedelcu

“For me, death is just the boundary where 'tomorrow' no longer exists. Only up to that point can you love, dream, regret. Suddenly, everything you haven’t done will remain forever undone.”-Octavian Paler

Experiencing life is a true gift, the gift of remembering.
And if you can’t yet see the magic, allow yourself to be guided (by sand).

Thank you for being!
Don’t forget to lose yourself, only to be found again.

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Thank you—whoever you are.
Ripples always travel farther than we know… or sometimes, they bring things closer.
I'm here to write and share. You’re welcome to read with no expectations.