Two of my favourite pastimes – walking on the beach and writing Haiku. The two came together a few years ago after I picked up several shells. I'm not sure what it is that so fascinates about beach walking, but there's a combination of curiosity and unpredictability that often compels me to walk with head down.
Stones shaped by the motion of millions of waves; shells which used to be home for creatures now long gone; wood seasoned and smoothed by the actions of sand and water; fragments of pottery and glass worn and polished and now discarded for the pleasure of the finder. Such are the gifts of the sea.
That parable about the farmer ploughing a field and hitting a box that has treasure inside. Now and again I've felt a similar lurch of excitement on finding just this object, here, now. My mother often said to me when I was a child, "You're easy pleased." I guess I was, and am, because I've always valued and taken pleasure in things that weren't expensive, some of them items which have little value, if by that is meant commercial worth or sale-ability.
Take these three shells. I don't have them now. They were picked up years ago and disappeared some time after. At the time, they made me stop and pay attention. These shells were handled, examined, enjoyed for the small if transient masterpieces that nature scatters everywhere.
The Haiku are neither exhaustive description nor clever semantic game playing. They are statements of admiration, and gratitude for the brief pleasure of contemplative seeing, which is like a low key but patient kind of wondering at the ubiquitous beauty at our feet. As a Christian, such ubiquitous beauty nudges mind and imagination to the thought of God's creative purposes and overflowing love for all that God makes. And that is theology in a seashell.
More recently I collected another handful of shells, which for now sit on my window ledge. Again I wrote a Haiku to distil my response to these lovely but discarded creations.
Calcified dwellings;
sadness, of homeless creatures,
and creatureless homes.
What prompted the sadness of those lines? I had been thinking of the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, such as the ebb and flow of life, the come and go of the seasons, the dependence of growth and new life on seeds sown in soil made fertile by the death of the very plants which produced the seeds.
So not unqualified sadness, more a poignant reminder of the fragility and transience that is the life we live. And therefore a reminder too, of the call to gratitude as one of the default dispositions of the heart and the mind. Life is more precious than we realise. Is it a new kind of besetting sin to be part of a culture so preoccupied with living, so relentlessly fixated on the cost of living, so often helpless to control the pace of living, that life itself slips through our fingers, like sand?
Ages ago, so it seems, T S Eliot asked the question more pointedly in The Rock, one of The Four Quartets. "Where is the life we have lost in living?" Walking along the beach can be for me, a time of inner recalibration of mind and heart. Those small discarded objects, with their strange allure and serendipitous appearance at my feet, dare me to slow down, and think, and wonder, and find time for thankfulness and to relearn the importance of patient wonder.
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