I know better than to romanticize beach glass. I know most began as beer bottles, with a random bottle of SKYY vodka contributing a little blue among the white and green and brown. But I also know that how things begin isn't always how they end, and I wonder where and how that one piece of purple started.
As I wander among the rocks and the wet sand, picking and collecting bits of color, I can feel how the waters and the grit blunt sharp edges. What started out as pointed and cutting has become smooth, rounded, safe. The bright, brilliant colors have become softer, more mellowed.
Sometimes, though, I wish the tempering process didn't diminish the boldness of those colors. I wish that, in order to gain one property, another didn't have to be sacrificed.
I am surprised at how many times the pieces have broken into a triangular shape, a shape that brings three equal things into relationship, union, dance ... the water, the beach, and me? Yesterday, today, tomorrow? Father, Son, Holy Spirit?
I find bits of words, and while I know they began as CANADA and DEPOSIT and DISTILLED, they now encourage me, that I can sit and be still. I squint at the fragment that might have been a bottle of LISTERINE, but it tells me not to look, but to LISTE(N).
A Buddhist teaching is that the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and a Christian author once wrote that the purpose of religion is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. When I bring home my cottage cheese container filled with assorted beach glass pieces, I ponder these two possibilities.
The beer and wine and mouthwash bottles are everyday items, bottled by the millions every day. They move from factories to shelves and coolers, carried to the beach for a quiet think or a raucous party, then tossed onto the rocks with a satisfying smash. And out of the destruction, a new thing is created. Out of an ordinary bottle comes pieces of extraordinary beauty. Out of familiar words comes a new, strange poetry.
I know better than to romanticize beach glass. But it does make me think.
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The Sentinel welcomes submissions from religious and faith leaders for the monthly Reflections column. Submissions should be no more than 500 words and on topics of interest to the general public. Send submissions to Larry at wrgsent@gmail.com.
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