WHEN SEASHELLS TALK
(Reprinted with permission from LOST & FOUND ON LANA’I: The Trials & Transformation of One New Yorker Living in Paradise, 1995, by Marcia Zina Mager)
The other day a sea shell spoke to me. It was a moon white cone shell with dabs of amber gold. I was walking along Frasier Avenue, minding my own business by frantically worrying about a personal problem. All of a sudden this shell leaped out at me. (Well, maybe it didn't actually leap but it made its presence known!) So I bent down to scoop it up and it began seriously philosophizing.
"Life is more than pain and misery," the shell said. "Feel the perfect smoothness of my body. This is the miracle of life."
Knowing full well how important it is to listen carefully when a shell or a tree or a flower decides to speak, I took a deep breath and did as I was told. Wrapping my fingers more firmly around the shell, I felt the cool smooth surface. Oddly enough, it immediately calmed me down.
"This is the miracle of life," the shell repeated, "Nature and God have conspired, over eons and eons of time, to create this perfect shell. Thousands of years in the ocean, touched by infinite waves and creatures, washed up on endless shores, played with by countless numbers of smiling children. And then, by even more miracles, it found its way to this dusty dirt road, sixteen hundred feet above sea level, to be picked up by your hand. This," the shell said for the third time, "is the miracle of life."
I thought about what it was saying and started to look around at what I was passing by. Sleepy plantation houses with well-trimmed bougainvillea bushes in every color and stunning bird of paradise displays. I began to notice the soothing chatter of the mynah birds, a sound I would not have paid attention to because of all the miserable chatter in my worried mind.
"Lift your head up and out of the rushing river of human pain," the shell piped in, "and feel what's surrounding you."
As I strolled along Frasier, holding this shell and listening to its amazing discourse, I continued to look around at Lana‘i’s beauty: lush banana trees leaning into the shadow of towering pines; mist-covered mountains, endless fields of green and gold. The problem I had been fretting about was quickly melting into the wondrous wisdom of this shell.
I know all this sounds pretty wild. An ex-New Yorker turned “haole,” living on a small rural island in the middle of the Pacific, listening awestruck to the soundless words of a small white cone shell.
But then many things on this island are pretty amazing, don't you think? The wild spinner dolphins who come to rest and play in our bay, the rare gigantic whale shark who gently gives a diver the ride of a lifetime, the amazing cowry and auger shells that look better than any buried treasure you can find. And the miracles don't stop there: Tiny white gecko eggs, smaller than a thumbnail, that hatch inside palm trees; spectacularly painted parrot fish that look like God had a field day with His/Her easel; all those amazing creatures, large and small, that live beneath the sea and upon the land, innocently unaware of their own magnificence.
The truth is ... magic happens. Every day. Reality, I've come to realize, is much, much larger and grander and more fantastic that we can even imagine. But don't take my word for it. The next time you stumble across an ordinary sea shell, pick it up. And listen. It just might have something extraordinary to say.
