Years ago, I walked on beaches searching for shells and sea glass with my children.
As years passed and they began to search beyond my reach, I all but forgot the art of collecting relics sculpted by sand and water.
But this morning I walked where temporal sands meet the eternal sky in the ocean’s embrace.
I found myself searching for sea glass and shells as I delighted in the promise of a grandchild who would join our family in the fall. On this gray morning as I walked along the Santa Monica Beach, I noticed distant cliffs fading into mist. My hair tangled in the whirling dervish wind. It was an easy place to dream of finding treasure among kelp and pebbles before my morning meeting.
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I had been planning on paper how I could construct my sweet granddaughter a giant sand box with a castle rising up right in the middle. I knew sea glass and seashells could become buried treasure in the soft sand.
My aspiration is to create a place where she can use her childhood magic to transport herself in time and space to places where she can dwell in dreamy bliss. I found two luminous pieces of banded sea glass and three unbroken shells that she could uncover while digging in the sandy sanctuary of her backyard Camelot.
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My granddaughter has already given me the gift of delighting in the beach, not just counting steps or accessing the environmental impact damaging shores.
Picking up another perfect shell brings me a new wild joy. I am a collector once again, with seashells in my back pocket that were washed ashore by the pull of the moon.
I continued my walk and came upon a piece of green glass that looked like it may have been part of the neck of a beer bottle. The edges were rough enough that I deemed it unsafe.
I picked it up and tossed it as far as I could out into the ocean.
My hope was that it would land deep enough for the motion of the waves to continue to smooth its edges over time so that maybe fifty or sixty years from now it can land once again, smooth and beautiful on the shore.
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I laughed to myself as I let it go thinking about how we are formed like that piece of glass.
We are broken and jagged and need time to be smoothed by the churning tides of time until we become like old treasure on a sandy carpet. I think of the years it has taken me to heal the rough edges created by the brokenness of the world. It is rough in every sense of the word. It takes time forming in the salty waters of oceans, sweat and tears.
This is not just the truth of my life or, for that matter, even the truth of the world. The need to smooth our rough edges from the world’s brokenness will also be the truth of my sweet granddaughter.
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She will play in the magical sandbox of dreams until she goes out in search of bigger ideas. She will endure rough waters where she will be tossed and tumbled by life.
As I watch the next wave bring new treasure onto the shore, I have a vision of my grandchild decades and decades from now as a grandmother herself.
She will walk along a beach just like this and perhaps bend down to find a smooth piece of green glass from a hundred-year-old bottle. I hope when she does, she recognizes that it is a sacramental sign of how love endures past heartbreaks. Maybe she will recognize in that smooth pale sea green how love smoothed her rough edges and in her old age offered her a peace that transported her back to childlike wonder.
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New life is a fleeting joy.
Together they herald the truth that in this rough world love smooths, refines, and polishes us. Love is in the dance of the moon and water over time. It is the dance that brings us onto the temporal beaches and eventually carries us to the other shore.
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-- Becca Stevens