beaches and idealism

a few nights ago i read with interest the following lines from a lecture by Hugh W. Nibley:

"Order and security are the exception in this world."

"There is a force that creates and a force that destroys; humans are in between."

"We stand in the middle position. This earth is the Old English middan-(g)eard, the middle-earth [...] the knot that ties heaven to earth, the knot that ties all horizontal distances together, and all up and down, the meeting point of the heavens and the earth. It is the middle point at which the worlds above and the worlds below join."

to be clear, it was a theological lecture given in full in 1975.

for a long time the beach has been a metaphor in my head, beckoning, warm, comfortable, escape. i suppose i'm playing into the hands of all those travel agents out there, but i know and you know that i've never been very serious about running away to live on a beach. i could never live on a beach. beaches are for visiting. for summer. life is too permanent and boring to take place on a beach.

but there is a connection. humans are in the middle, Nibley says. beaches are too. land meeting sea. waves meeting sand. this sounds so much more cliche in words than it does in my head. and i can't really map creation and destruction to land or sea-- either could do both. and a beach is just a name we give to a certain piece of geography. it's just another edge.

yet i've picked it for a symbol of escapism. a place free of work, free of annoyance, free of responsibility. in real life i know a beach is just a beach. not so different from here. i'd still have to eat and sleep and fight the pull of gravity every moment of the day. the wind and surf might annoy me to death. the sun might burn my freckly skin. peddlers might come up to me and try to sell me things. such is life.

so that symbol makes no sense unless we play into the hands of travel agents and take it that the beach is always sunny, clean, and beautiful. i guess ideals are like that. just pretty pictures. an irreality we can't get to except for in summertime, on lucky vacations.