“Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.  If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”

Wu-Men

What is perfection?

I have sitting on my desk at home a postcard I picked up somewhere along the way that reads:

“Avid shell seekers know that some days they’ll come away with nothing but a lesson in patience and perseverance.  Other days, their faith will be rewarded with more than they’d hoped for.”

~Jodee Stevens~

I don’t actually remember when I first started to walk a beach gathering shells but I do remember how much my perspective changed about those walks and about what I looked for and found.

It used to be the shells I sought were perfect and unblemished by their rough and tumble journey to the shores, perhaps much like how I envisioned the ‘perfect life’ to be- free from scars, free from broken-ness, fully intact and no parts missing.  But as I got older (and hopefully wiser) and the realities of life came my way, I wore more courageously my own scars and scabs ( some of which were picked open again and again) and saw  light shine more clearly through the jagged pieces of my heart, soul, and mind something interesting happened.

These shells and bits of sea glass and driftwood challenged my idea of perfection and these bits of marine life invited me to pay closer attention to what those cracks and holes really mean for them and for me.  As a reward for having survived the voyage sharp edges were often replaced by smooth and rounded textures.  Those very things I thought had no value because they were broken really were symbolic of strength and transformation and that because of and  not in spite of them we are all those glorious creatures who made it to the shore, sometimes over and over again.

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery~

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about journeys and symbols we use to mark our places along the way, to say perhaps, “I was here” or to mark the path for travelers and pilgrims behind us.  Building a cairn is at once a meditation and an exercise in patience and trust.

Gathering the rocks we’ve collected along the way-getting in touch with their very nature as we work gently to stack them in a way that both honors their shape and how that shape is meant to support the rock on top and beneath.  Playing with them, stacking and taking apart until the balance is just right.  Sort of how we take the components of our own lives- the bits and pieces  of emotions and energies, joys and sorrows that don’t always seem to fit together  but somehow we emerge standing stronger than it would seem possible.

I have a little cairn just outside my front door.  They are rocks I collected from a favorite beach on Cape Cod.  They stand just so through the seasons and only come apart when my grandsons visit and take it apart but I don’t mind.  Sometimes Matthew especially will play with them awhile and put them back together in a different way.  Sometimes I sit on the steps after they have gone home and hold them in my hand for awhile and offer a prayer of gratitude for a place, a person, a memory that took me one little step further in my journey to wisdom, wholeness and healing.  They never go back together in exactly the same way but somehow they stand together as a reminder to me that there is always another way to be.