Shabbat and Sea Glass

A tiny bit of sea glass mixed in with shells and coral on Okuma Beach.

I spent a few days this past weekend on retreat with the Jewish community my wife belongs to.  On Saturday morning we walked the beach looking for sea glass.  It took me a while to slow down and appreciate the contemplative nature of searching for sea glass.

(I guess it's been a while since I've let myself slow down…)

In case you don't know what sea glass is, when broken glass bottles are tossed into the sea, the waves beat it against the bottom of the ocean, breaking the glass even more, and the coral, the sand, and the waves take broken jagged glass and offer up polished glass stones of a variety of colors: blue, green, white/clear, green, etc.

You have to be slow and observant when looking for sea glass.   Not every piece of glass is ready to be picked up.  Not every piece  of glass has been smoothed and polished by the crushing waves, sand and coral.  Some of it has still has jagged edges, and if you aren't careful will cut you as you try to pick it up.  Others are smooth and polished.

I have no idea how long it takes for sea glass to become smooth, or how much time must pass between the "not-yet" and the "ready."  I don't know if it depends on the glass, or on the environment, maybe it's a mixture of both.  

What I did notice is that the smooth and polished sea glass, isn't shiny glass any more, the sand and the coral and the waves have made the glass more opaque, a little hazy.  What makes it polished is that you can run your fingers around the edges and not get hurt.  You can handle "ready" sea glass and it does no harm to you.  

I couldn't help but think about humans as I looked for sea glass.  We all get broken from time to time and some of us, sometimes, take longer to heal than others.  It's a process.  We go from jagged to a little less jagged to polished and smooth. 

I don't know how much time it takes.  Maybe, like the glass, we each need the right environment to take the edges off.  But my hope is that we're each on the way to becoming something beautiful.  

And maybe, just maybe, if we take the time to slow down and look, we'll see that in each other.