I walked the beach this morning, collecting. I picked up an array of shells of varying textures, shapes and sizes that reminded me from where we humans draw our inspiration: a piece of scallop shell that looks just like corrugated roof; a snail shell with cathedral ceilings; a spiral staircase, the only remains of a conch. I found one smooth, grey wing feather. I ran my fingers across them one at a time as I walked. They got me thinking.Everything is so intentional. The long, tapered wing feather is prepared perfectly for flight. The short, downy chest feathers are different; they have a pile effect to give warmth and create a buffer from the wind.
I bent down and snapped off a length of a large tree branch that had washed up from the ocean onto the beach at the shoreline. I walked on, touching the moss-like growth covering the smooth wood. I wondered how old it could be, if it had lain rooted down there for hundreds of years, perhaps once stood in the same piece of earth, but above water, or had been broken away from some other place and swallowed under for a time.
In any case, it had been down there and stayed put for an amount of time enough to have grown a furry forest of sea brush, become a landscape unto itself. From seed, to tree, to aimless log grown ecosystem turned epiphany, this stick has served its purpose.
Beginnings and endings happen simultaneously, not chronologically. There is no moment of pause to determine which causes the other. They occur at exactly the same moment, cannot be split apart.
Watch the ocean spilling and receding. There is no first movement, only movement. Look well at the shells along her foam moustache. Step on one firmly; it crumbles: sand. The life it had contained inside it has become food for the little scurrying pipers or the gluttonous gulls. Life feeding life feeding life feeding lifeedinglife.
The dead stuff, cast off, breaks down and becomes foundation for new growth.
Photo by Andrew Schwartz
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