WHERE DID I
WHERE DID I
COME FROM?
COME FROM?
A Philosophical Conversation Between Two Little Creatures Improvised by the Beach and Imagination.
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They stood between two immensities.
Behind them, the dark cave.
Beside them, the great rock facing the sea.
Both shaped by centuries of wind and salt.
Though separated in appearance, they stood only a few metres apart.
And so the two little stone creatures began to wonder:
— Did we come from the cave… or from the rock?
The one on the left was a timid being, almost ghostlike to human eyes. The white mark immediately formed two expressive eyes, as if it were surprised or observing something. It looked at its own body, formed of thin lines drawn in the sand like temporary roots.
The one on the right was completely different. Rounder, more earthy, almost comical. The white protrusion on top resembled a single enormous eye.
Cave or rock.
At first, the question seemed simple. Origins usually do. Creatures like to believe they begin in one clear place… a birthplace, a crack in the earth, a womb, a country, a name. Something solid enough to point toward.
But the longer they looked, the stranger the question became.
The cave was not separate from the rock. The rock was not separate from the sea. The sea itself had carved the cave, grain by grain, tide by tide, through endless, unimaginable patience.
The little creatures looked at each other.
Neither had made itself. That was the unsettling beauty of it. They were merely tiny fragments shaped by forces too vast and too slow to fully understand. Pressure and fracture. Movement and time. Waves and collisions. Minerals gathering silently long before any creature existed to give them names.
And yet, here they were, standing in the sand, asking questions.
Maybe consciousness itself begins like this: a small stone wondering where it came from while the entire coastline seems to answer:
— From everything!
Not only from the cave.
Not only from the rock.
From everything.
The cave and the cliff themselves were processes, ongoing transformations.
The creatures suddenly realised something even stranger.
If the cave came from rock, and the rock came from older earth, and the earth itself from fire and dust drifting through darkness…
The one-eyed stone creature was silent for a moment.
— Then perhaps nothing in existence truly has a single origin.
— Perhaps every being is merely a temporary shape taken by an ancient conversation — replied the wide-eyed creature.
The sea knew this. That is why it never stopped returning. That is why it kept erasing footprints and other marks around them, saying:
— Origin does not matter as much as you think. You are shaped differently, named differently, worn differently by time… but made of the same world. And so is everything else. And so is everything… and so…
The waves continued arriving. The sea kept repeating it. Again. And again.
As if the earth itself had been trying to say this for millions of years. Millions of years.
Photos and Story by
Ana Isabel Pais
May 2026
Rock collected in Furnas Beach
Photographed in Vila Nova de Mil Fontes, Alentejo
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