A Delicate System
Yesterday the shore was quiet, water rolling
in over shells and sand, beige, grey, white, an occasional red of a crab claw
or blue of a mussel shell, and then pulling away softly as the sky started to
go from blue blue to porcelain pink and then red, over a half hour or longer as
the earth turned. The west lit up, the
water blanketed and then receded from the shelly sand. This motion was timeless, repeating over and
over again, forever bringing thin shells onto land, and leaving them there
until waves again rise to the higher point on the beach.
The shells in front of me had been
homes to sea creatures; I’d forgotten there were so many: scallops, oysters,
clams and mussels. I did not see many snail
shells, but gulls lined the rock jetties and were eating something. One lone herring gull came to us when we
returned to the car for food. He was
alone until we threw pieces of sandwich out the window, then he called others
to come and see what was up.
The delicate nature of little yellow
and orange shells holds for me the bigger mysteries of the planet; here are
these fragile thin pieces of transparent shell lying on the edge of the shore
having been placed there by the power of waves.
Peace in the midst of complexity, in
the midst of a minute detailed system, intricate.
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