Sea Glass Synchronicty?
I’ve described my falling in love with sea glass and hunting as a spiritual explosion, a practice and something which has been teaching me. Well, now I’m reaching the less than blissful lessons. I’m not even going to get into the most difficult aspects. I’ve been called to teach. Over and over and over. When I stand in front of groups I worry that I will drool, that my lips quiver so much no one will understand what I say or that my face will get so red and blotchy people will call a paramedic.
I’ve led a department of ten. I’ve given talks at churches. I’ve rallied and protested and written and shared my opinions. But talking to a small group, eye to eye, and trying to explain how to do a task. Trusting that I will be clear when I will speak, that nerves won’t cause me to chatter rather than allow silence or that I will even be able to get out of my way to hear a question asked. These are my issues. Still, seven year-olds I adore say, “Can you show me how to make a necklace,” strangers ask if I can lead a brownie group through a session and despite how badly I think I’ve done as an artist-in-residence I may have a chance to teach pendant wrapping again. And there’s public classes too.
I keep telling myself I need work and money and love sea glass. I also LOVE sharing making jewelry with others because people feel such pride in finding their own sea glass and in wrapping them and making a craft. So, is this all part of the lesson too? Maybe I am supposed to be pushed outside of my comfort zone and am supposed to teach as much as I am to sell and to create? Listen to this.
At the end of a family fun day at the Y we belong to a woman comes up to me and said, “That’s sea glass.” She had on tumbled sea glass piece which was beautiful but made by humans. I have always been known as someone who wears big earrings, necklaces and bracelets but I’ve never had a brand-name anything. I don’t usually break a twenty on earrings or a necklace because I’m clumsy and I break things – A LOT. So, I love attractive and funky jewelry that is affordable.
Anyhow, this woman says her daughter just found a piece of sea glass. And people are very proud of their finds and curious about what to do with them. I tell her wrapping is not difficult, she can make a necklace and she can goodle, “how to make a sea glass wrap” and find some kid’s crafts or check out my blog where I once found some sea glass crafts and listed them.
Anyhow, she says, she thinks the Y will have a sea glass wrap class. I say, “And I think I’ll be the teacher.” She says, “Maybe the brownies would want a class” and I say, “Sure, I could show them.”
I give her my business card and not only does she know where I live, the town, but the street, my neighbors and was going to buy the exact house we live in from her friends, the people we bought the house from. “No way,” she kept saying about our chance meeting. “No way,” about the street I live on and the house and the people we both know. “No way,” since we were both meeting and standing 30 miles away from my house.
Here’s the added wild part – it’s at and in this very home where I have learned to seek sea glass, solitude and to walk the beach. It is here where I live near a rocky beach where sea glass can be collected.
Sea glass synchronicity. Learning and lessons and stretching and growing far beyond what I ever imagined.
One of my friends told me how much I’ve changed since I started collecting sea glass, how much lighter I am, how something shifted in me. “It’s true,” I said but can’t attribute it all to sea glass. i said, “it’s the quiet, the ocean sound, the ions near the water, the being still and notcing the torrent of thoughts rushing around my brain” and that poor ocean absorbs my obsessions and takes them in like a toilet and flushes them away, tumbles them back into something less cutting and sharp, more mature and weathered so that eventually I have thoughts in my head and feelings in my heart that aren’t so mortifying and immature that I can strain to confess them.
I love the ocean and the hunt. I love how the water recedes daily, but always returns. I have learned to trust that receeeding is not leaving. I am starting to trust that returns can be depended upon.
My brother hokes how he was ready to “blow off everything I really needed to do todayto hunt sea glass.”
“You’ll be hard-pressed to make it til next week,” I warn.
Some get a taste for sea glass and others are bitten and want to swim as mermaids except in the sand and rocks on the shore. I have wanted to claim this joy as mine alone, a “so who I am lately” thing and I can’t help myself. It’s not mine, like a cake, to cut up and divide and give out. Over and over and over, I tell anyone who listens, “Taste this, it’s great,” and so how can I get mad if they want another serving?
I must learn to let the ego recede, let go and see what develops. Who knows why I ended up near this sea? We hadn’t even intended cottage-style or ocean living. We too, were brought in on a current, a wave and I can’t say who else gets to have boats on the same sea and what their destination. I’m still figuring out my own.
Catch of the day: Learn to treasure the present.
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SEA GLASS ARTS with Sea Glass Girl 
