Original collage by Helen Sword
When my children were young, we used to scour the beach together for sea glass, which we would take home and sort into jars and bowls: burnished browns, textured greens, clear glass etched to a misty white. Occasionally we might find a nugget of red, blue, even purple glass -- precious treasures to be rubbed between our fingers and held up to the light.
Those fragments of glass, I told my children, started out as something useful: a bottle or container, a part of a whole. Eventually those containers got emptied, smashed, discarded; the broken glass lay sharp and angry on the ground, a hazard for tender feet, reviled as trash. But some lucky pieces found their way into the sea to be tossed by the waves and scoured by the sand. Weeks or months or years later they washed back up onto the beach, their jagged edges now polished smooth.
Writing is like sea glass. Sometimes the words flow from us like running water or leave our hands in shapely sculptures. But more often our sentences need to be broken up and churned around by the ocean swells until, like the missing father of Shakespeare's Tempest, they undergo "a sea change / into something rich and strange."
Writers, too, are like sea glass. We start out as empty vessels, filled only with potential. We end up polished by time, textured by the waves, more precious and beautiful than before.
Tumble down to the tidal zone
and beach yourself here beside me
where vision and substance meet:
where the earth flattens and floods
and smashed beer bottles
wash up at our feet
disguised as amber jewels.
Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).
WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.