To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

In Blake’s imagination or with a powerful microscope it might be possible, but with the naked eye you need more than a single grain of sand to see a whole world. Nevertheless, the tiniest fragments of the world around us can be visually inexhaustible worlds in themselves. Sometimes I think that the closer I get and the smaller my field of view, the more interesting everything becomes.

Down at ground level, a sandy beach is not just metre after metre of the same old boring thing, it is as varied a landscape as any other that you can imagine, and teeming with life. You can’t always see what is actually living in or around the sand, but you can see the beautiful evidence that it was there.