Wet sand squished between my toes as chilly water bubbled over them. I stared out into the cerulean horizon where it met the white foam arch of the ocean’s wave rolling toward its inevitable fate at my feet. Surfers, balanced elegantly on their boards challenging Poseidon’s might, caught and held my fascination. Even as they fell one by one into the gray waters, disappearing calmly under the surface as if simply returning to their true habitat, I couldn’t look away; they all did reemerge into the sunlight and climbed back onto the boards. I felt a certain kinship with the sun-bronzed, sinewy men gracefully riding the barrels; I, too, felt at home here where the land ends and the world truly begins.
I inhaled the gentle breezes of saline summers and Nicholas Sparks movies…after all, this was his domain. I glanced down at my feet as the tide rushed out. Lying on the smooth surface of the glistening sand was a small piece of seashell about twice the size of my thumbnail. A beautiful shade of tangerine, striped like a Bengal tiger if a tiger’s stripes were white and lavender, the shell was silky under my fingers, whispering of longevity and perhaps quite the trek to find itself at my feet. As I stooped low to pick up the little piece of history, a soft voiced murmured in my head demanding to be recognized, We are our stories. It played again and again. This voice so familiar – the Spirit.
I stood silently gazing out across the endless sea, tiny bit of the briny deep’s yesteryear clasped in my hand. We are our stories. This lovely, glossy piece of calcium carbonate that landed at my feet would tell me of other shores and other lands, of other surfers and other children playing in the sand if it could speak. This little piece of sea-polished shell had stories. We are our stories.
This is not a novel idea, but sometimes it is one I eschew. Sometimes, I don’t like my stories. Sometimes, I wish I were not my stories, but Dear Heavens, do I have stories. You know some of my stories, and I don’t mind telling them to you as they come up naturally. But that doesn’t mean that there are some stories that I wish I could erase, rewrite, drown in tar, watch sink in quicksand, maybe even douse in gasoline and light on fire. (No, I’m not at all unreasonable about this.) However, if we are our stories, that makes our stories – all of them – important.
Then, what to say about the stories that leave us gasping for breath and writhing in despair or pain when they merely flicker as suggestions in our heads? Can we reframe them and believe they were instrumental in our growth? Can we be mature enough to glance at the past and say, “You can’t hurt me anymore; I accept you for what you are, for what you have done, for what you are capable of being now.”? I don’t know that I am that strong yet. I would that I were. I have faith and trust that someday I will be. We are our stories.
The lustrous fragment of shell now lies next to the empty ink well under the stained glass lamp on my writing desk. When I pull back my chair, the little memento of sun and sand calls to me. I cherish this scrap of sea for its constant reminder, and as I run the tips of my fingers over the sleek surface I hear, We are our stories.
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written, The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them. –Psalm 139:16
The Unexpected Life 