(Early morning pilgrim on Praia da Falésia)
When I wasn’t watching the waves down at the beach I was watching where I walked for interesting treasure. The sea provides plenty of gifts if you keep your eyes open for them.
(Sanded piece of shell)
I love broken shells not the sharp edged ones, I like the one that have been in the sea awhile. The ones that have been sanded… by the sand. There are plenty here. Their rough edges are smooth and each one is a different shape.
(Can you see the sea glass?)
There are also little pieces of sea glass on this beach. They are harder to spot in the beginning but soon they are very hard to miss. It’s like anything you are interested in. If you like a particular make of car you will see it wherever you go. We notice every motorhome or camper van on the road. I see storks and now I notice sea glass.
(Close up)
I wonder could I use this for contentment? We humans have a tendency to notice what is going badly for us, what we’re not good at, what we should be doing. This is not contentment. Even if we can see the good in others we find it difficult to see the good in ourselves. We tend to notice what we didn’t do on our to do list or if we get 80% in a test we are disappointed about the 20%. Or we wonder why only 6 people liked our photo, instead of being amazed that 6 people took the trouble to tell us they liked our photo. This behaviour does not produce contentment.
(Footprints of contentment)
How about if we looked for only the good in ourselves? Like looking for sea glass. My sea glass looks like an hour of photography or a thousand words of writing or or a nap when I’m tired or time in nature or a tidy kitchen or a 6am start. When I look at my day with eyes only for my sea glass I don’t notice the things I didn’t do. What if contentment was more than enough?
What does your sea glass look like? Mairead.