Sea Glass

Broken shards scattered on the beach twenty miles long, brown and bottle-green sticking out of the endless sand, half-buried and half-forgotten, half-exposed and half-painful where the sun glints off their edges, steely-eyed and stinging in the light.

From a bird's-eye view, they're sparkles, bright flares of blue and green and brown amidst the smaller diamonds of silicon particles. When eyes are scanning, they catch: There is a broken piece.

But over time, the waves roll in and out, sometimes a battering wall and other times a gentle pulse, moving over the sand and the pieces so that they break down or round out. To the bird's eye, over time, the shards (if they can still be called that) glint less, their colors instead like the stained-glass windows of a church: still eye-catching, but also a seamless piece of the building's whole tapestry, and never the focal point amidst true communal worship of the waves.

To the shore walker, the mulled-over pieces are gentle to the eye even when they catch, half-obscured in the beach, the muted color now only striking because it's unique. Gentle to the eye and smooth to the touch when unearthed and looked over and pocketed. Once a malady, now a memory. Once a sharp reminder of pain, now a soft reminder of patience...and the faithfulness of the waves whose ebb and flow and crashing and receding never dislodged the piece from the sand but used the fullness of the sand to smooth the sharpness of the piece, integrating it, softening it, somehow making it part of the whole and yet unignorably beautiful—worthy to be picked up and held and cherished, all without getting poked.

The waves knew all along what the bird's eye found only over time and what the shore walker saw only at its fruition: Brokenness is only the beginning.

Photo by Jodie Irwin, from Pinterest.