Earth Pathways Showcase

Sea glass is born when ordinary glass falls into the water. Broken on the sea bed it tumbles with the rocks and pebbles until all the hard edges are worn into smooth curves. Until the glass is burnished into soft glowing, weird shapes that merely echo what was once part of something else, something discarded. Now utterly transformed into beauty.

And then the tide brings it back to the land.

As a child on our Mallorcan beach I loved it because when you took it home it was like taking a piece of the sea world with you: beautiful, strange, opaquely glowing. Like the sea when you first open your eyes underwater.

As I grew, other beaches came into my life, but you would still find me pacing, eyes searching, and my heart would leap at the glint of one of my jewels of the sea. Pregnant on Bryher in the Scilly Isles I found the most vivid blue piece that I keep in my purse to this day. On my Father’s D-day landing beach in Normandy, part of a perfume bottle stopper marked with rays like the moon.

A beach’s sea glass depends on the tides and who lives, or sails, beyond them. Any beach will do to start. You need keen eyes and a little patience and an appetite to be by the sea. But I think each piece sings to you if you are meant to find it.

My sea glass sings to me of the ebb and flow of the tide and how my wounds, my brokenness, given up to the transforming power of the sea, of life, of Goddess, return to me as treasure.

Sea-change © Katie Player