Some places don’t ask for a performance.
They don’t care about job titles, unfinished inboxes, or carefully rehearsed competence. They don’t even care about names. The desert looks the way the ocean looks, the way the night sky looks. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Simply.
And that simplicity feels like mercy.
In Mleiha, at that hour when the sun is tired and generous, the sand turns into a quiet instrument. Every step writes something that will not be preserved. Every footprint is a sentence the wind is already preparing to erase.
Netta is holding Ehan’s arm as they climb a dune that isn’t steep, exactly, but feels like it is because the sand refuses to stay put. It slides under small shoes and adult soles as if to remind me: nothing here is meant to be owned, not even balance.
From a distance they are silhouettes. A mother leaning forward. A child lifting his leg with the seriousness of a mission. The sky is wide enough to make even brave thoughts feel smaller. The clouds are soft, almost careless. And somewhere far behind them, thin metal towers hold their straight lines against all that natural curve, as if humanity is always trying to prove it can draw a ruler across a world that was never built for it.
That contrast feels like the story I keep living.
Certainty gets built. Schedules. Systems. Plans. Power gets strung through emptiness and is called progress. Life gets compressed into tasks and outcomes, as if being alive is a problem that can be solved.
But the sand doesn’t agree.
The sand makes honesty unavoidable.
In one of my earlier reflections, I wrote about the freedom of feeling like a grain of sand. That freedom isn’t the kind I usually chase. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t come with achievement. It doesn’t raise the heart rate in the way ambition does.
It is the freedom of being released from the burden of importance.
A grain of sand doesn’t have to be exceptional to be real. It doesn’t have to be noticed to be necessary. It belongs without performing. It is part of something vast without needing to be the reason for it. And when that is allowed to be felt—truly felt—something inside unclenches.
Because so much suffering comes from insisting on mattering in a specific, measurable way.
The desert offers a different kind of mattering.
It suggests: I matter because I am here. Because I feel. Because I can hold a small hand and walk forward.
Looking at them on that dune, nothing grand is being announced. No staged heroism. Just movement. Just care. Just a shared leaning into the next step.
And yet it feels like a universe-sized act.
Maybe because it is.
Parenthood is like that. It doesn’t always look monumental from the outside. It looks like adjusting a sleeve. Like holding an elbow. Like slowing down because the legs beside mine are shorter. Like allowing a child to lead, even when the route is known.
But inside that ordinary tenderness is something rare: the decision to become a living shelter.
Netta’s hand on Ehan’s arm isn’t just guidance. It is an unspoken promise:
He can walk into the world. I am here. The ground may shift. I won’t.
And Ehan, doing what children do so naturally, isn’t thinking about symbolism or philosophy. He is simply stepping into his own scale of adventure. A dune becomes a mountain when someone is small. A horizon becomes a question. A sunset becomes a quiet applause for effort.
Adults forget this. I forget how to let a moment be enough.
Everything keeps trying to become a conclusion.
But the desert doesn’t do conclusions. It does continuity. It does repetition with variation. Dune after dune after dune, shaped by the same wind that shaped the last one, yet never identical.
That feels like another kind of freedom: being shaped and still remaining whole.
Being changed by what has been lived, and still being oneself.
This truth gets resisted because smallness is often treated like a flaw. As if small means powerless, invisible, insignificant. As if the only escape from smallness is becoming louder, bigger, more “successful.”
But smallness isn’t a sentence.
Smallness is a doorway.
In the desert, smallness feels accurate. And accuracy can be comforting. It means control can stop being pretended. It means certainty doesn’t have to be engineered into existence. It means the universe doesn’t need to obey a calendar.
It becomes possible to admit: I am one person on one dune on one evening in a world that will outlast me.
And somehow, instead of despair, something tender rises.
Gratitude.
Because if I am that small, then I don’t have to carry the whole world on my shoulders. I only have to carry what is mine to carry: a hand, a moment, a love, a step.
There’s something else in the edges of the photo too.
The sun is setting. Which means the light is leaving. Which means this scene is already becoming memory even as it happens.
That’s the quiet heartbreak of being human: living inside things that won’t stay.
And still loving. Still walking. Still holding arms and hands, even with the knowledge that time is a wind that never takes a day off.
Maybe that’s the deepest courage.
Not conquest. Not domination. Not mastery.
But presence.
To stand on a dune with people I love and allow myself to feel how temporary it all is—and still choose to be fully there. Still choose warmth. Still choose care. Still choose the next step.
A grain of sand cannot stop the wind. It doesn’t protest the sky. It doesn’t argue with the sun about setting too soon.
It simply exists. It belongs. It participates.
And when enough grains gather, they become a landscape that can hold a mother and a child and a moment that makes an observer pause and feel something honest.
So maybe that’s what freedom looks like.
Not the freedom of being untouchable.
But the freedom of being small enough to be real.
Small enough to be part of something wide.
Small enough to stop fighting the vastness and start letting it heal.
On that dune in Mleiha, with the sky opening like a slow breath, Netta and Ehan aren’t trying to prove anything.
They are simply walking.
And the desert..patient, enormous, and quietly wise…lets them.
FANTASTIC!