earning texture

I don’t have eyes for shark teeth or four leaf clovers. Never found one of either in nearly 40 years. My 8-year old son can take four steps on the beach and find a shark’s tooth or a few steps in our front yard and find a four leaf clover. He has eyes for that sort of thing. We call him eagle eye Jack. My eyes seem more drawn to texture—to uneven shapes. To imperfection.

I passed a woman on the beach this morning—she showed me all the shark’s teeth she had found. Besides teeth, her hand was filled with shells she had discovered along the beach—all perfect in shape. No knicks or holes—and the colors were clean and bright—belying their true nature. I mean, shells, after all, are the discarded encasements of sea creatures. Inhabited and discarded again and again before tumbling around the ocean floor for years and then vomited onto the beach. So, to find a perfect shell is indeed remarkable, and this woman chose to remark, “Doesn’t it just look fake? I mean like I bought it from a store?”

I thought this was interesting as I’d just been thinking that the ocean is like nature’s gift shop—offering up shells each morning on the beach for us all to choose from. And we all have such different tastes- perhaps we are drawn to shells that have lessons within them- or that are reflections of us.

While her hands were full of brightly colored purple and pink perfectly shaped delicate shells, my bucket was full of oddly shaped deeply embedded coral with many holes—washed and worn out but absolutely solid in nature. I’m drawn to shells that I suspect have a story to tell—a long history that involves them earning their texture.