One day we went to the beach and Jazzy had a brand new pair of goggles that she was excited to try out to check out the fish and other sea creatures and mermaids and what have you. I was excited about the free earplugs that came with the goggles. I love floating on my back and watching the clouds, it’s so relaxing, but the water always gets into my ears and after a while it hurts. So anyways, we’re sitting in the shallows and we pop open the box and guess what happens?
One of the earplugs falls into the water, and of course it’s translucent and so we can’t find it. So I quickly put the goggles on and go under water searching for it… After looking frantically for a while I got frustrated and just gave up, and took a deep breath in and stopped moving and just floated, looking down at the glittering sands… The tide carried me forward a bit towards the shore and then the backwash pulled me with exhilarating speed backwards and sideways towards the ocean…
It was a bit unsettling but I just surrendered to it… what a rush… moments later, after a blurry sliding shimmer, I was motionless again… the ocean had deposited me somewhere else and guess what I found dangling right in front of my eyes? I reached out and grabbed the little translucent earplug and at the same time grasped an important lesson or principle or process: breathe in… let go… trust in life… and go with the flow…
Another time, I went to the beach on my own. Jazzy couldn’t come that day and so she asked me to bring her back something. I had some soul searching to do cos I had a difficult decision to make and I needed to be by the ocean. When I got to the beach I walked on past our favorite spot and I saw this unusual looking shell on the ground, in the sand. I picked it up to get a better look… It was rounded and rough but when I turned it over I saw something quite magical…
I had never seen anything like it before in my life. It was so beautiful and smooth and it had this nautilus spiral pattern in delicate purplish orange tones… Sometime later I discovered that it came from a little sea snail called Turbo Sarmaticus. When Turbo feels threatened he pulls his soft body into his shell and uses this operculum like a door to seal the entrance once he’s safely inside. The infinity shape comes from the way the shell twirls as it grows.
It was mind-blowing in its own right as a gorgeous piece of organic engineering but also as an analogy for my own state of mind and the question that was weighing heavily on my heart at the time that I found it; pulling away and hiding in my “shell”… it was a symbol of self-protection but also of that psychological barrier, that avoidant pattern of behavior that was my default ever since my early childhood.
