The Humble Shell

I love seashells, looking for them along the edge of the ocean and the sand, watching them come in and go out with the tide, finding the one with beautiful color or unique shape. Sometimes, as I am drifting off to sleep, I close my eyes and picture myself as a little boy searching for seashells as the sun rises up onto the horizon, feeling the ocean breeze across my body, smiling a happy smile.

Life is beautiful.

If you look closely at the shell on the left, it is spiraled in a shape that is common in nature and architecture. This shape is made by graphing the Fibonacci numbers - 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,22...(can you see the pattern?) Some say it is the structure Thelonius Monk and Claude Debussy used to write their music and that Vincent Van Gogh used to create his art, and I like to think that is true. Some say it is the structure God uses to build things, and I like to think that way, too. I try to use it to write poetry, and have had three poems published on the Fib Review, a journal for Fibonacci poems (http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/trevor_scott_barton1.html)

What a beautiful, wonderful, ingenious way to create and build.

Look at the smallest shell. Have you seen such a beautiful color? I have - in the sky sometimes at dawn and dusk. I always marvel at that color. Only God can make it, I think. And God used it in this smallest of my shells.

God seems to be like that.

Look at the shell on the right. Even though it is beautifully colored and wonderfully made, I almost didn’t pick it up and bring it back to my room because it is chipped.

As I looked at it, though, I thought of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken parts with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. Brokenness makes it beautiful.

This is true. Brokenness reminds us that we are all made from dust, but that we are all made. It reminds us that God created us, and is still creating us each and every day. It reminds us to be humble. It reminds us to care...for each other and for the world.

I love the humble shell.

- Trevor Scott Barton, essays for a brown-eyed girl, 2020