From monoliths to fine grains of sand, from the granodiorites of Isla Catalina to the dunes of Magdalena Bay, the circle of journeys draws to a close.

Tiny tenacious particles of sand worn from the rocks by the actions of waves or scouring winds, fractured by rootlets or freeze versus thaw, set free to travel alone. But collective movement, driven by wind, melds them loosely into steep-faced dunes contoured by the evening light. Time, heat and pressure and they're rock once again. A cycle completed or set to begin.

Circles and cycles surround us. A sand dollar lodged in the sand reflects the orb of the sun. Rounded shapes in nature abound: a full moon, a yellow morning glory flower, a turbulence-tumbled rock, the eye of a whale, a barnacle scar, or a fiddler crab hole on the beach. Changes occur step by step but always return to the start: rock cycles, metabolic cycles, cycles of tides, the repetition of night and day, metamorphosis and more.

We arrived six days ago in La Paz, alone or in a family. Tomorrow our circle will be complete. Back to La Paz we return. But for a week we moved together like these shifting sands, free to be ourselves yet as united as a colony. Joined by memories of surreal landscapes where water and sky blended as one and clouds above were mirrored in water below. Joined as closely as the sea and the shore for it was here on the desert shores of Baja California that we touched the water and through it connected each with each other and each with every other living being that was in or on the oceans, bays and rivers of the planet. One journey together ends but a new one begins.