Finding Shells
Author: Patti Cobian Issue: 2024-07-03
Finding Shells
by Patti Cobian
March of 2023
I arrived in Costa Rica the way a tumbleweed blows across the plains lining the Rocky Mountains: dry, prickly, cartwheeling along the wind until it slams into a fence, a car, or caught in a front yard. Momentum ceases abruptly, and there it stays until something else comes along to nudge it back into the wind.
My life had felt gritty and sparse for the last two years, and I had a vague suspicion of the cause: I had been running the combines of self-help and therapy through the soil of my mental landscape for five years now (with consistent, deep EMDR and Neurofeedback work for the latter two) in hopes that some of those dense, seemingly immovable patches of dirt and stubborn clumps of hardened ideas might loosen and break up a bit, allowing more air and moisture into the soil. But I could no longer deny it; I was having a hard time recognizing myself whenever I would survey the landscape of my life. Where had the artist gone? When had the play, the delight, the joy disappeared, and who was the thief?
Some instinct had lead me to cease the trauma therapy, though there had been no compelling judgement or discernment to support the decision. After all, the books, the podcasts, the blog posts told the stories of movement, of doing and digging...and this was where the empirical evidence really got to strut its stuff. Statistics like “70% improvement in eight sessions”, blowing more conventional treatment outcomes out of the water with their efficacy and tidy results. Trauma-informed modalities: the leading edge, the promise of a future that might be different from the past, the best hope for those whom little else had worked in the past. I had staked my hope, trust, hundreds of hours of time, training, and several thousand dollars on these claims.
And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that I had little to show for it.
Not long after this unceremonious departure from my EMDR and Neurofeedback sessions, I decided to take a chance: a pilgrimage to Costa Rica, a country that abhorred the very pressures and constraints that I had been laboring under for so long. At 31 years of age, it was my first time leaving the country, and I was choosing to travel alone. I wanted time, I wanted beauty and nature, space and answers. I didn’t know what I would find, but I had some vague sense that something awaited me there, somewhere amid the twenty-nine days that I would be wandering around Los Pargos.
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On a cold February evening, lost in a maze of “what-next’s” and “shoulds”, I decided to take a chance, a pilgrimage to country that abhorred the very pressures and constraints that I had been laboring under for so long. I wanted time, I wanted beauty and nature, space and answers. I didn’t know what I would find, but I had a vague sense that something awaited me there, somewhere amid the twenty-nine days that I would be wandering around Los Pargos.
In my effort to honor this month alone of rest and space, I had booked only one call on the entire trip that could be considered a “work call”. It was with a colleague named “D.”, whom I had slowly come to know in a few different virtual community spaces. On one of these calls, I had asked of the group their experience in supporting a client who is struggling to move beyond a victim mentality; D. reached out through a direct message in the chat, saying that he had some thoughts on this and would be happy to discuss further, if I felt so inclined. And so it was that, a little over halfway into my time in Costa Rica, D. and I met for an hour-long zoom call.
I had signed on without any sense of expectation, and more than a little annoyance that I had agreed to schedule a work call during my vacation. By this time, the initial spark of curiosity that had catalyzed our meeting had long since gone out, and I was anxious to resume my new favorite past time in Costa Rica (laying in a hammock so that I could pretend to relax while anxiously ruminating about the state of my life). But now, when I look back on that day, I see that hour as a sharp delineation between my life before that call, and my life after it.
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In that one hour, D. had gently and systematically pried apart the trauma-informed framework upon which I stood — built upon a hill I thought I would die on — with deliberate, compassionate hands, and a very quick shovel. As the hour progressed, the rigid architecture of beliefs I had built around that precious framework had collapsed and crumbled at my feet.
We closed the call and I closed the laptop, promptly burying my face in my hands, elbows propped up on that dusty patio table. The sensation of something in my stomach falling away kept my breath shallow, my heart rate elevated; I was thankful to feel the assurance of a sturdy, stable surface.
In my mind’s eye, I surveyed the inner wreckage and splintered timbers: long-buried suspicions that, perhaps, this work might have been helping in some ways, yes, but how much might it have also been harming? After all, I did not feel more resilient or robust, but almost… enfeebled, often shrinking away from the edges of my life that felt too sharp or confronting. On those rare occasions when I would peer down into my creative well, I saw only darkness and dust.
And that’s when I cried, my head in my arms now, table shaking, the weight of this dust and ruin anxious to leave my body.
When I was finished, I sat back up in my chair, wiped my face, and considered what to do next.
I glanced back down into that dark, dusty well and thought, I need water. I need to go play.
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Half an hour later, I was buzzing around Los Pargos on a rugged e-bike, stopping to take photos of “for rent” signs whenever I saw them, because I had decided that I was breaking up with the United States of America and wanted to move away as soon as possible.
I knew the area well enough to make sure to take the prettiest roads, even if there was more mud or potholes. I delighted in the violently pink, magenta and purple bougainvillea that laced through the rough, uneven fences and climbed over stucco, popping like fireworks against the earthy tones of this tropical dry forest. These gorgeous flowers — a stunning feature of the Guanacaste region — had quickly stolen my heart and imagination, unceremoniously shuffling “poppies” out of their long-held tenure as my favorite flower.
I laughed aloud as I rode underneath a single, unlikely stalk of bougainvillea that had shot out an extra twelve feet from its bush, dangling comically over the dirt road. The stalk was completely empty and bare for eleven whole feet — until the last few inches, which had exploded into a large bunch of flowers, trumpeting a feisty fuchsia against the cornflower blue sky.
Breezing by a pasture full of the most enormous (and bored-looking) cattle I had ever seen, I banked a sharp right and slowly picked the e-bike down a narrow dirt path and around some trees, finally parking it next to a metal fence. As I locked the bike up, two startled geckos raced up the wire; I must have woken them from their afternoon nap.
The beach was almost empty. It was a smaller, private cove, more secluded than the popular beaches in the area, with enormous beds of volcanic rock that exposed themselves in low tide. Today, maybe eight or nine other people partook of the shore, which was long enough to ensure that everyone had more than enough beach to themselves.
I made my way back down to the sand, feet bare, picking my way along the line of shells that were sprinkled along the shore, as though a box of confetti had been tipped over along the leading edge of the water line. I didn’t stop until I saw a bright blue candy wrapper among some of the shells; automatically bending down to pick it up, I immediately recoiled in surprise: it was squishy.
Looking more closely, I could see that the bright blue, candy-colored blob wasn’t a plastic wrapper — it was a jellyfish. Sadness tugged at the bottom of my heart as I considered its — legs? — buried among the rough, gritty sand: what a hard, coarse ending for a being so soft and fluid.
Staying crouched down, I considered the rest of the shoreline, entranced by the way the water would wash over the shells, taking some back with it, always bringing new ones...and then, I heard it.
It was a sound — a shiny, sparkling, completely new sound, one that I had never heard before: the soft, porcelain tinkling of thousands of small sea shells being tumbled against one another by the waves that washed along the shore. I froze, captivated and waiting, needing to hear it again:
Clink, clink, tinkety-clink clink, shoooshhhh.
Clinkety clink clink, tinkle linkety-clink — shooooossssssshhhh.
The soft trill of this dance between land and sea was hypnotic; I sat down, right there, nestling my hips into the sand. As I began to settle in stillness, I took in the shoreline and was rewarded by yet another novel, natural delight: if I remained still, armies of small, domed shells would come to life and move, their pointy crab legs scootch—scootch—scootching along the sand, picking between other shells. The moment I moved even an inch, they would freeze in unison, becoming as stationary as the other stones and shells around them. The longer I waited, the more of them I could see: dozens of them, all coming to life for a few seconds at a time, risking a few inches — even a couple feet — before stopping to retreat back under their shells.
Beneath the richness of my wonder, I could sense the dry recognition of familiarity. I considered the wisdom of a more measured, sustainable journey, rather than the sprint to the finish line that United States culture seems to endorse across its many metrics of success. I looked up and found the fine line of the horizon, eyes unfocused, and suddenly understood: unless I had stopped, sat down and become still enough — content with merely being and listening — I may never have seen this extraordinary beauty.
I turned my attention to the water in front of me, losing my thoughts among the waves for a time before refocusing down at my toes. As the tide began to rise, the water would occasionally brushing up against my feet and past my hips, bringing with it a swell of sea shells. I was struck by the variety of colors: bright, poppy-pink underbellies, creamsicle-orange and white swirls, beautiful soft, white spirals, purples and violets, and, my personal favorite: watermelon-rind green half-dome shells sprinkled with thin, red lines, each with a hole right in the top and center of them.
Who used to live in there? I had never seen a shell like that before.
And how glossy and smooth they were! Like bits of pastel-colored blown glass; little jewels, all of them, the treasures of the sea, washing up around me.
If I just sat there, present, and waited, the waves would come when they came, and with them, they brought new shells. I didn’t have to stand up, look around and search for them. They simply washed ashore, at my feet, if only I sat and waited long enough.
This was a new experience for me. I’ve always searched for sea shells on the beach; I remembered what it was like as a kid, bag in hand, headlamp if it was dark, the thrill of the search and digging…it had never even occurred to me that there might be another way to do it. Settling back in to the rhythm of the swell of salty water, another understanding materialized, simple and clear:
When I do things, often, it’s because I don’t trust that they’ll get done unless I do them myself.
… Huh.
Yep. That tracked.
I began to scoop up handfuls of sand onto my feet, building a mound of earth around them, enjoying the feeling of the heaviness, the warmth, a part of me recognizing that I was building this because I wasn’t about to go anywhere, which felt delightful. I settled back into the steady rhythm of Playa Blanca, its warmth, the breeze, the water sighing up and down long lengths of sand and the musical symphony of millions beautiful sea shells waxing and waning along the shore. The dust clouds that had arisen within my heart as the Known and Certain collapsed seemed to have disappeared on the breeze; I could breathe again, and I could see more clearly.
Perhaps the Frameworks and Pathways, the Known and the Quantified are never quite as stable as they seem. I began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t me that was the problem; perhaps the problem arises when we try to “fix” our idiosyncrasies and protections, scars and destructive adaptations, by forcing them into these stale, static frameworks?
Is the first misstep taken when we mistake a stepping stone for the finish line?
Have we forgotten that we, humans, are Nature too — Life itself — undulating and unfolding, emerging and evolving in its own brilliant perfection? What if the human condition wasn’t the problem after all? What if the intricate inventions of the psyche, erected by mind and nervous system to protect our hearts and bodies from threat and pain — while inconvenient and often troublesome — are working in favor of our evolution, and not against it? What if, this whole time, we’ve just been reading the river wrong?
I thought of the long, wandering path of healing — the digging and excavating, the intensity of long-buried emotional releases that shake window panes as they’re finally freed from a human body. I thought of the searching and striving and the blind leading the blind, the hunt for the pain that is booby-trapping the lives that we are trying so hard to build for ourselves, the ever-moving goalposts and new data and new modalities and promises that this framework will take care of it, this will be the thing that neutralizes the brilliance of evolution. We’ve done it — we’ve finally outsmarted it — and now, we can conquer it.
I thought of the Ticans, the native Costa Ricans who lived here in Los Pargos, outliving the rest of us with their slow living, loose schedules and unfinished roads that, season after season, would spook the particularly calcified American tourists right back into the systems of efficiency and striving that they had spent their carefully planned vacation trying to escape from in the first place.
If we are conditioned to know strife, will ease seem like the bigger threat?
The shells continued to wash up around me, unbidden, unhunted. I thought of the many times that Life had done same, washing up long-buried grievances or painful memories in chance occurrences at grocery stores, or while watching movies, or trying to understand a loved one, or on my honeymoon, or smelling flowers at a farmer’s market, or right before a big presentation. How frustrating and unfair those invitations had felt in the moment — how dare they? Why couldn’t they just leave me alone and let me enjoy my life?
But this is what I have found: Life brings us these opportunities for healing and resolution often and unexpectedly. Do we refuse them because we didn’t ask for them? Or because we’ve been taught to see these moments as inconveniences and injustices, bad luck or God’s wrath or some kind of karmic recompense for some forgotten deed?
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
As I buried my feet more deeply into the sand, a gush of salty water rushed over the mound I had so carefully created, washing away my efforts with no apology. My painted toes stuck out of the sand once more, glinting wet in the sunshine. For all of the recent tumult and collapse, something was emerging from the wreckage; it wasn’t another structure, but rather, a living, breathing idea, a singular expression of the Life that was, in that moment, doing its best to move through me:
We cannot contain Life in cages, nor can we pin Life down into static frameworks. Life will always break free of our attempts to bind it, to measure and quantify and bend Life itself so that it might protect us from the weight of our own existential fear and insecurity. We try, and when Life refuses to play ball, we end up with our heads on picnic tables, crying as those structures that never really even belonged to us crumble, and we have to start all over again.
Now, one year and three months later, I look back on what grew from the wreckage of that inner collapse and I feel the promise of what has grown in its place: something more fluid, more flexible and free. In my own system, it feels easy to trust the natural cycles of death and rebirth.
Now, one year and three months later, I look forward into the collective, and it feels far less easy to trust the natural cycles of death and rebirth when it is so easy to imagine the dust and the wreckage that looms: the barren soil, the hungry humans, the skies empty of birdsong and bee.
I wonder if we will try to find our shelter beneath the crumbled remains of those shining, empty promises of innovation, convenience and equity for all?
In my heart, I wonder what may have been — and, perhaps, what may still be — if we all refused to wrestle the Nature within us into subservience, to beat it into submission, or to twist and contort it into man-made delusions.
I stand before the coming wreckage, and I feel the grief of a planet who is waiting for us to remember.
Related:
- Patti Cobian (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: Health and Wellbeing