Addendum.

Upon reflection, my last post seems a little off. It reminded me of a
piece I read a while back about how a woman's totally untrained, unruly
dog taught her about Buddhism by destroying her life and property. I
spent the entirety of the essay wondering "Instead of deciding that
your dog is teaching you the principle of non-attachment by
ingesting your high heels, how about you try some DOG TRAINING?" It
made no sense to me how little agency this woman felt she had in her
own life, how low her expectations were for her dog.

I did not make it clear in the last post that I am not just letting Z run wild. But I do struggle with finding ways to guide her: to watch bugs instead of squish them, to put things back where she found them, to play with things the way they were designed to be played with.

She has this "gumball" machine that spits out hard plastic balls when you press a lever. For the first sixth months of owning it, she would only play with it by tipping it over and dumping the balls out the top. I DID press the lever, show her how it was "supposed" to work. But I also stood back and watched and described and let her do her thing. She has a long time to learn how things are "supposed" to be done, right? Besides, she soon enough learned to press the lever and get them to
tumble out. Right after that, she totally lost interest in the thing.

I try to balance showing her how things work with letting her explore the world, playing with things in her own way, in her own time. The sandbox is a great toy precisely because it has so few rules for play. It can be anything you want it to be.

I still secretly want the sandbox to be clean and tidy with perfect little sand castles. And I work every day on letting go of that.