The Weight of the Tide

The sea does not keep what it discards. It offers up fragments, broken and bleached, to the edge of the land. We walk the shoreline, picking through the debris of a world we cannot see, searching for a symmetry that feels like an answer. There is a strange comfort in these hollow things. They are empty, yet they carry the shape of a life that once moved in the deep. We hold them to our ears, expecting a roar, but find only the silence of the sand. It is a quiet labor, this gathering. We look for patterns in the chaos, hoping that if we arrange enough of these small, calcified remnants, we might finally understand the rhythm of the water that pushed them here. But the tide returns. It erases the lines we draw in the wet earth. What remains when the water pulls back, and the sun begins to dry the salt from our skin?

Elizabeth Brown has taken this beautiful image titled Scallop Shells. She has found a stillness in the debris that I often overlook. Does the shell feel heavier now that it is dry?