I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Mary Oliver

As a child, I collected shells and starfish from the beaches we visited. When I lived in Bellingham in my late twenties, a friend introduced me to combing for beach glass. To this day, I never miss a chance to walk a beach, feel the sand on my feet and the water in my toes, and pay attention.

Beach as school house. Beach as storybook. Beach as memory. That makes sense to me in way that I know the sound of hungry gulls, the rough shape of conch, and the shadowy ripple of a stingray. That makes sense to me in the way the tides are predictable, storms blow in and blow out, and that deep water is black and shallow water is blue.

That is the breakage. Each shell. Each piece of glass. Each tide. It tells 100 stories. Torn apart and then repaired. There is magic in the breakage. There is magic in the repair.