Over the winter holidays I was in central Florida with my spouse and kids, visiting my in-laws. One of the many things we did to keep the kids entertained was to go to the Marine Discovery Center, a place my mother-in-law’s late partner had worked, as the captain of their boat “ecotrip” tours. Initially, I thought this would be a ten-minute outing at best and feared the havoc my two five-year-olds would wreak on a place already struggling to sustain itself within a larger inhospitable, even hostile context (Florida). But as one of the staff started telling us about their “oyster recycling” program, I found myself enthralled by what she was saying. Oyster recycling isn’t as disgusting as it sounds—or at least, not once you get past the first stage. Instead of putting them in the trash and sending them to landfills, local restaurants keep their shucked oyster shells, which are collected by volunteers of the Marine Discovery Center and brought back to the centre, where they are left out in the sun to dry. Then, they are placed in oyster bags and mats, which are positioned within lagoons. The bags function as a sort of landing pad where spat (tiny floating oysters) settle and grow. As this process multiplies, the oyster bed grows and the cumulative weight builds and strengthens destroyed or vulnerable shorelines.
What struck me immediately was that the empty oyster shells, explicitly invoking death or at the very least depletion (“she was a shell of her former self”), having a centre with nothing in it, are the source of new life. They self-sustain and even clean water while they do it.
Many people are aware that oysters have this capacity, of course. I wasn’t struck by the fact of it, incredible as it is, but that it recalled for me a Tara Brach talk I had listened to recently. In the talk, Brach discussed different forms of intention and she gave the most warm reassurance that when we intend to do something like be less reactive, or to radically accept ourselves, or love in a more open, capacious way, we intend it because that is already “what we really are.” We want it and wish to move toward it because it is already within us. This subject appears in many of her talks. Sometimes she references Rilke in calling these aspirations “the winds of homecoming,” and at other times she references the writer John Bradshaw’s notion of homecoming, among others. For Brach, these intentions aren’t superficial ones like goals (write ten books!) but deep intentions about love, awareness, and connectedness. So, of course there are things that have gotten in the way of those aspects of ourselves. Many, many things block us from being these true versions of ourselves: our relational histories, trauma, world history, circumstance. But I am in love with this idea that when we want to be more loving and connected, it’s because that’s who we really are, and we need to do some work to bring that back to life in some way. Even if we are alive and not a dead oyster, we might actually be depleted, like a shell with nothing in it. Or a shell polluted with things that don’t belong, or just keep the shell in the garbage heap, blocking what it can actually do. Some of us might be a shell in the wrong place, who should have been collected and put lovingly in a place where we can help grow something.
The point here is that it is a return1 to something that already existed, even if that existence was heartbreakingly brief. It is not about striving and shaping in a way where the imperative to be “radically accepting, loving, less-reactive, more compassionate” is actually harmful and hateful and shaming to the self. It’s about finding a way to return, to come home. I find that idea so enticing as we start a new (Gregorian) year, a time that is usually rife with shaming and self-hatred disguised as growth and intention.
The staff person at the admittedly drab Marine Discovery Center also said that behind the building was “the second biggest hill in New Smyrna Beach.” We laughed at this seemingly self-deprecating description. Turns out it was stunningly beautiful, and just behind us.
*Incidentally, Return to Life is also (part of) the title of Joseph Pilates’s book introducing his Pilates method. I love thinking about that phrase when I’m clumsily tumbling around like a ball on a mat in my living room.
This reminds me of a talk I attended where the speaker had us think of a person we admire and then write down several words we'd use to describe them. And then the twist was, OK, these words you've written actually describe you! It sounds gimmicky but it was actually sort of powerful.
beautiful, really just beautiful