(*Note: Something I wrote several months ago when I visited the seaside)

I’ve been searching for shells since we got here. I’d imagined that I’d find beautiful shells, lovely smoothed pebbles and silky grey driftwood just like the ones I usually find at other beaches, but instead there have been very few in sight. All I’ve found has been broken bits of seashells, tiny and smoothed.

At first I was disappointed. Then this evening I wondered…What if this is what the grand wise ocean wants me to receive right now? What if these tiny bits of seashell are a mirror of the broken bits of wildness that the great mother is returning to me – fragments of a shattered whole that needs to be put back together?

We search for beauty in wholeness, but there is beauty in broken fragments too, and the treasure in these pieces is the journey we walk when we slowly glue them back together. Maybe what we piece back together doesn’t become a perfect picture of what the original once was. But then again, maybe the point isn’t to recreate that and instead it is to find new ways to put together something new – a mosaic of wild shell pieces that represent a new way of being.

Brokenness brings growth and evolution, so when we patch ourselves back together, then it is important to allow the skins of our souls to take new form and become what it is now, not what it was once was. Not who we are told she should be.

This is how we heal. This is how we grow.