The Temple of Desolation

by Shane Steinkamp

I was thinking about the idea of sacredness yesterday while unwalking along the shores of Ship Island—a habit I’ve cultivated for decades. The ritual is simple: take the ferry across, then set out on foot, tracing the edge of the sea until I arrive at what I’ve come to call the Temple of Desolation. This is much further than most people go - past the snack bar and past the lifeguard station - east past the black sand.  There is no shade there. No comfort. Only the blinding salt glare off bone-white sand and the endless breath of wind. It’s a place of stillness and stripping away, where the soul sheds its noise.

If you go further, beyond that barren altar, there lies the Temple of Oblivion. But I didn’t make the pilgrimage that far yesterday. It’s enough to sit in Desolation, where there is nothing but the line of horizon stretching unbroken left and right; emptiness wide enough to feel yourself dissolve inside it. That’s where I sit, when I can, and consider the teachings of that place.

Down here, beneath the surface of our concerns, there are thriving colonies of Ghost Crabs; strange, translucent monks of the shore. My relationship with them has always felt oddly foreign, like communion with another order of being. Just before sunrise, they emerge in silent processions, rising from the sand and surf like pale echoes of the deep. They comb the beach for scraps - flotsam, castoffs, the refuse of the tide. They are Nature’s cleanup crew.

But then, as the horizon prepares to offer up the sun, something remarkable happens. They pause. Thousands of them, motionless. Facing east. Waiting. And when the first edge of the sun’s disk breaks the waterline - when Ra’s eye opens - they remain fixed, witnessing. It is a ritual older than memory. Only when the sun is fully risen do they resume their silent work. And then, as quickly as they came, they vanish. Back to their burrows. Back to the sea. Waiting to be summoned again by Light.

Whenever I camp along these shores, I wake in time to join them. I sit with them in sacred silence, watching the turning of the Earth. They have never rejected my presence. They make no demands. They simply allow me. Somehow, they have always accepted me as one of their own.

Yesterday, I found one of these small brethren who had died mid-ritual. His body was stilled in the act of scavenging, a bit of shell still clutched in one claw—like the last note of a song that could not finish. He had survived the gauntlet: predators, storms, hunger, the arbitrary cruelty of waves and weather. And in the end, he earned what few creatures ever do; death by old age.

I sat with him for a while. The decomposers had already begun their work. The eyes, apparently, are the first to go - perhaps the tastiest, perhaps the most symbolic. In that tiny corpse, I saw a truth too often ignored: the Circle of Life is equally a Circle of Death. And both circles are sacred. All of these little beings, these unnoticed pilgrims of the tide, are sacred. And so am I.

I, too, am an Earthling; flesh and dust, slowly winding down, facing my own gauntlet of God's dangers. My end is written on the same sand. And if I am lucky, I’ll reach it - not in fear or violence, but with the quiet dignity of old age.

So, from time to time, I come to this desolate temple, sit beneath the gaze of the sun, and remember: My whole life is the blink of an I. A single flash in the eye of Ra. And for a moment, I see, and I am seen.