All the World in a Grain of Sand

In February of 2001 I went on a trip to Guatemala to spend ten days traveling with Deborah Chandler and four other women. I had met Deb at a WARP retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico the previous year and learned that she was now living in Guatemala and was going to start taking small groups around the country to experience the weaving and visit various sites.

We stayed in Deb’s two apartments, one in Guatemala City and one in Quetzaltenango, also known as Xela. She was limited to having five people come on her tours because each apartment had three bedrooms and there would be two of us sharing each room. We would also be driving around the country in Deb’s minivan, which comfortably held six people. We all cooked dinner most evenings and hung out sharing stories, so we became a rather tightly knit group.

I was coupled up to share a room with a lovely woman named Sidney who lives in Mesilla, a small town in southern New Mexico. She was a delightfully charming character who was a bit older than the rest of us. She always dressed in brightly colored clothes and accessories, and she was delighted by the colorful handwoven textiles we came across everywhere we went. She carried colorful metallic star stickers with her, and everywhere that we encountered children she stuck stickers on their faces, much to their delight.

During the course of our ten days in Guatemala we had all kinds of wonderful weaving experiences and other adventures. On the last full day there we drove from Panajachel back to Guatemala City so that we could fly home the next day. Along the way we stopped at a site called Iximche, where there were spectacular Mayan ruins in a beautiful pastoral setting. When Sidney saw all the sand in the area she pulled a ziploc bag out her shoulder bag and exclaimed that she had to collect some of the sand. And then she shared the story of how she began collecting sand from all over the world.

Since Sidney lives just a four-hour drive from my house I have had a number of opportunities to visit her over the past twenty years, and during that time we have developed a very close and special friendship. Last month when I felt ready to get out and take a little road trip one of the first things that I wanted to do was drive to Mesilla and spend a couple days with Sidney.

She lives in a 700 square foot apartment that is quite pristine, and that at first glance appears fairly minimal, with bright splashes of color here and there, particularly in her signature turquoise.

But around the perimeter of her apartment are a number of deceptively plain white cupboards that hold an amazing wealth of wonderful things.

I spent two days and nights with Sidney, catching up on what has gone on in life for both of us, but also photographing the insides of her cupboards and boxes and drawers and filming Sidney telling me story after story about all these wonderful things that are tucked away. I could easily have spent a week with her doing this, but at least got a good start on it.

There are easily two or three or more blog posts to write, and I would love to see a whole documentary film about Sidney and her collections someday. But for now I want to focus on Sidney’s sand collection and how that all came to be. If you look at the photo above with the two recliner chairs and look way back to the back wall, you will see a stool piled with three pillows, and just to the right of that a stack of plastic craft tool boxes.

You would never know it, but inside that small space is the entire world. Sidney has not been able to travel much in recent decades, though she has collected sand herself from Guatemala and Peru. And one time a few years back she drove up to visit me in Santa Fe for a few days. I took her up to Abiquiu and the Ghost Ranch area and she went crazy collecting all the different colored sand from the various places we stopped.

But mostly Sidney asks anyone she knows who is going anywhere in the world to bring back just a couple spoonfuls of sand in a plastic bag from a special place. And not just sand, but special stones or sticks, or anything else that has particular significance, as long as it is small. The sand is placed in little bottles and vials that she has found and they are all labelled with the place the sand is from and who sent it to her. And they all have a story behind them.

I’d like to share this video in which Sidney tells the story about how it came about that she started collecting sand. I hope you’ll watch it so that you will get a sense of Sidney’s spirit and the delight she takes in all these small wonders in the world.

Many of the objects in Sidney’s collections are things that she has picked up while taking walks right in her own neighborhood, along the ditch bank that eons ago was part of an ocean. When I spend time with her I realize that there are wonders all around us that most of us don’t even notice. It inspires me to take the time and be more observant of all the little miracles that are right under our feet and noses if we just pay attention.