[Y]ou have been walking through a wilderness of sand. The silence and the rhythm of the walking have sent you into a reverie in which you seem behind yourself, watching yourself watching reality. The wrinkling action of water on sand brings a thought to the surface which echoes the pattern itself. What is the force driving matter into ever more complicated, ever more improbable forms. Why does it do this and why are you here to observe it? What you see is so astonishing that you are grateful simply to have life, to have senses with which to witness the event, even though the seeing hearing smelling touching wondering must end in nothing-at-all. Then another thought washes up through that thought and you recognize the rightness of it, of yourself being one of an infinite series of forms coalescing out of matter, returning to it, so that before and after lose their meaning and their terror, and the soul is allowed, for the time it takes for a sparkle to flash on the sea, to feel connected to everything that ever was or ever will be. Something solid forms in you again and holds you strongly to life.