Before the Fire Shaped You

Tiny grains of sand. Weightless, untamed, move with the will of the wind. Scattered, shifting, belonging everywhere and nowhere. This is the raw state of being— uncaptured, undefined, impossible to hold.

But when earth meets fire, alchemy begins. Not destruction, transmutation.

The sand is summoned into the heat, where it softens, glows, and fuses. What was once countless and free becomes a molten dance. Alive in a different way. Fire doesn’t ask permission; it reveals what’s hidden beneath resistance. It demands that potential rise to the surface.

And then comes the hand. The worker of the rod, guiding this luminous, malleable substance into shape.
What was wild becomes willed. What was fluid becomes formed.

The particles of earth, once free to slip through cracks and ride the breath of air, are now locked in a single vision. A vessel. An ornament. A fragile kind of beauty, admired precisely because it can break.

This is the paradox of transformation:Fire awakens, but it also defines. It can liberate, but it can also confine.

How often are we pulled through our own alchemical fires? Not just by life’s challenges, but by the pressure to become something visible. To be shaped into versions of ourselves that are easier to understand, easier to display, easier to consume. We’re taught that the raw, shifting self isn’t enough until it’s polished, hardened, and held up as art.

But the sand was already whole before the fire. It didn’t need to be molded to have worth.

There’s a quiet power in staying ungraspable.In knowing that you are both the element and the flame. Capable of transformation without losing your essence. And if you’ve been shaped, cooled, and called beautiful—
know this: glass remembers how to be sand.

Breaking isn’t failure. It’s a return to what’s infinite.

Because not everything wild was meant to survive the fire as art.Some of us were meant to be the fire.
To hold the alchemy within— shifting, uncontained, and impossible to shatter.

Pretty isn’t polished.It’s raw, untamed, and too alive to hold.