Looking for wisdom, I find myself in a steep-sided cove, sitting on pebbles. I take a handful and notice how they are uniform and how they are different. Shapes and sizes vary, but most are of the same pink-grey mottling, formed in the same furnace or the laying down…I don’t know if they are igneous or sedimentary. Among them are strays of different hues.
I wonder what wisdom is there to be found in pebbles. I let them fall from my hand.
I find a tiny whelk shell. Pure white and fragile. Intact. For all the tumult of the tides and being stranded high above the waterline, this fragment of perfection has survived. Whether the whelk died or swam away, I cannot say.
I wonder what wisdom is there to be found in shells. I set it down.
I sit listening to the waves. I am sure I have much to learn from listening. That would be one reason that I keep returning to sit on shores. What is it, though? What is the unending susurration trying to teach me?
Perhaps that repetition is strength. After all the land itself is shaped by the simple coming and going of the waves. Consistency. Continuity. Repetition.
Waves can overcome everything in their path. But what friends do they make in the process? Where is the gentleness?
I have been here before. In different years, in different weathers, in different selves. I don’t believe it has ever felt as gentle a listening as it does on this particular afternoon. There is wisdom in going back to a place, again and again. We cannot know a place, just as we cannot know a person, on first meeting. We must return to it, get to know its faces and its moods, show it ours, see how those interact: the mood of the place, the mood of the self.
Do we find the place beautiful when its mood coincides with our own internal weather – or more so, when it differs? Does it energise us out of lethargy, or soothe our agitation? Or both according to our need? A place is not just a place if we choose to befriend it.
Then it becomes a confidante, an advisor, a sanctuary, a teacher, a kick-up-the-booter, a chastiser, a reminder. Befriend a place and it becomes a friend and, if we listen, it will give us what we need.
Places are as wayward as people. They may whisper to us in the evenings the secrets they withhold at dawn. A soft September may have smoothed away the sulky Summer. There is wisdom in waiting.
I wait for the gulls to slowly circle above the beach. I wait for the ducks to settle on the river. I wait for the day trippers to leave, the regular swimmers to leave. I wait for solitude – myself and my place. This place, this day. Another maybe tomorrow, but equally mine and equally full of knowing what I want to draw in.
There is wisdom everywhere we look. We only lack the ability to seek it out, and to understand, then, what it is we have found.
The wisdom in the stones is that their beauty is enhanced, by their tumbling through the waters, smoothing down their edges. Their beauty is enhanced by the mixing of myriad shapes and colours and sizes and ages. Their beauty is enhanced by the holding of them, the feeling of their warmth or their coolness according to the season. Their beauty is enhanced by our taking the time to look.
The wisdom in the shells is that vulnerability and fragility are definitions only of potential, and that we can accept both and still survive. That however ‘fragile’ we may seem, however vulnerable we are to what the world throws at us, we may still wash up in a beautiful place where we can shine. The wisdom in shells is that maybe we are not as fragile or as vulnerable as we believe.
The wisdom in the waves is that we can only do the work; we cannot control the outcome. The tides have no thought as to what shape they will make of the land; they only know that they are to breathe in and out, to sift the sands, tumble the stones, carry the shells, do what they can to make each more beautiful. They cannot know if they will succeed.
The wisdom in the waves is that they know their gentle seasons, as well as their stormy ones. They know they make friends of the animals they carry in their depths and on their surfaces. They know that they carry within them the warm cleansing waters of forgiveness and acceptance, even as they carry the bracing waters of rebirth and regirding. They accept that they may destroy. They know that they also create. And recreate.
We cannot sing the wave song. It is too complex for our human hearing. We can feel it though. We can sit in a cove and watch and listen. If we think we do not understand, it is because we are trying to translate something into the words of our language which has no direct equivalent. To gather the wisdom of the waves, we must stop thinking, stop listening– only hear. We must stop looking – only see. We must take a deep breath of that salt-scattered air. We do not must - but if we are brave enough we could - walk in and meet the waves, skin to skin.
At the end of an afternoon, as the light dances on the water out beyond the shadows of the cliffs, as the scent of the sea starts to mingle with the pine scent of the woods behind me, as I notice my skin sun-tinted and salt-stained and sand-scraped, I also notice how I am smiling at nothing in particular.
Sometimes there is wisdom in just sitting down and doing nothing very much at all.
Of all the wishes I have at my command, if forced to choose just one, I would wish to be wise.
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