Rocks & Sand: What We Fill Our Days With
For this blog post, we’re going to do something a little different. I have one container with some rocks and another with some sand. Watch the video to see what happens.
The rocks are practices like chanting, meditation, sitting in stillness, moving through a yoga practice, or sharing a meal or conversation with someone whose life reflects the teachings we're trying to live by. The sand is everything else — the doomscrolling that eats up an hour without us noticing, the show we didn't really want to finish but did anyway, the fifteenth panda video on Instagram. None of that is bad. But if we let it go first, it fills every open space in our day, and there's no room left for the things that actually steady us.
The Pure Land sutras spend a lot of time describing a place built entirely of what's precious — jeweled trees, lotus ponds, birds whose song is itself a teaching. It's tempting to read that as just a nice picture of where we’re reborn after this life, but it's also telling us something about attention. A description like that is asking: what would it look like if your surroundings reflected what actually mattered? What would your day look like, built the same way?
Here's the part I want to be careful about. None of this — the meditating, the chanting, the discipline of showing up for practice — is what causes anyone's birth in the Pure Land. That's not something we earn through effort, and no amount of rock-stacking secures it. If it were, this would just be another transaction, another performance we have to get right. It isn't. Our birth there was never in question and never up to us to arrange.
So why bother with the rocks at all?
This is where I think Shin Buddhist practice is easy to misread. It's tempting to conclude that nothing we do matters because our birth in the Pure Land is assured. What it really means is our days are free to matter for their own sake, without the pressure of having to secure our future. We chant, we sit, we show up for each other, not because it's owed, but because it's how this particular life gets to be lived with some clarity instead of on autopilot. That's an invitation, not a requirement.
And I want to be clear — I'm not asking anyone to throw out the sand entirely. That's not the goal, and it's not realistic. Watching something silly or funny on your phone isn't a failure of practice. The problem was never the sand itself, it's what happens when sand goes in first and there's no room left for anything else.
Where do we go from here?
Do what Everyday Buddhists do: Notice where your hours actually go. Not to judge it — just to see it clearly. Then try putting one or two rocks into your day before the sand: a few minutes of chanting before you check your phone in the morning, a short sit before the show you already planned to watch. You don't have to give up the panda videos. Just make sure they aren’t going into your day first.
