"It is never too late -- one is never too old -- to collect the shells of the sea, the fruits of the earth, the gifts of a day in one's life."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

I recognized the woman from the last time I had seen her on the beach. She bent her aged body over, her gray waves of hair rowdy in the wind, and searched for shells.

I knew she liked dogs from our first conversation, and I felt drawn to share my dog's joy with her because her own dog was not with her on the sand. I didn’t know I had a lesson to learn from her.

"Hello," I said. "Didn't we meet the other day?" I asked.

"Oh hello," she smiled. "Yes, we did. I'm just collecting shells. I have so many I don't know what to do with them, but I keep collecting them anyway."

We talked for a little about what to do with shells. Maybe she could glue them onto picture frames. Maybe she could glue them elsewhere. Or maybe she could give them back to the sea.

"It doesn't really matter," she told me. "I just like to collect them. It gives me exercise. It's good for me to bend over like this." She smiled over her work, much the way the sun watched down over her.

She wore the same argyle sweater she had the last time, its big v-neck letting her neck and a good portion of her chest glow in the fresh, raw sea air.

We chatted a little while before I went on my way. I saw her again yesterday, but I felt too busy to stop and talk to her. I know from our conversations that she can no longer live alone. I know she will move in soon with people in a nearby town. I know she is staying with her son now, close to the beach.

She lives a simple life, and her joy is equally simple.

She reminds me of an angel, the way she appears and reappears in my life with no extreme significance, just a simple, clear message.

It is never too late -- one is never too old -- to collect the shells of the sea, the fruits of the earth, the gifts of a day in one's life.

The shell collector, whose name I might never know, is joyful in an almost juvenile way in collecting her shells. She is intense, yet happy about it. She is clearly dedicated to her collecting, even without a specific purpose. It is as though she wants her days to be rich, her life to be full, even when she might be more limited than she once was in how she chose to live a day.

I ask myself now how often I stop to collect shells, how often I interrupt my business to bend down low to the sand, to the earth, to collect its wide assortment of fruits, of vegetables, of produce, of the harvest of God's world.

Sometimes I race down the beach so quickly to get my exercise that I forget to play, to breathe in the winds, the heavy sigh of the sea, or to watch the playful escape of a kite.

The shell collector walks slowly. She has nowhere to hurry to. She is not in a rush. These are her days, stretches of 24 hours that she can spend idly collecting her reminders of how simple a pure life is.

When was the last time I let my life be so pure? When did I last spend a whole day doing nothing? When did I take an entire day to simply be? When was the last time I collected shells, if only to prepare them to toss back into the mouth of their mother sea?

What shells would I choose to collect if I gave myself the time? Maybe I would choose prayers. Or meditations. Maybe I would pick books. Or soulful songs. Maybe I would collect loving thoughts, or kind words, or even pictures of people dancing.

Maybe I would find in collecting my shells that life is not what I perceived it to be. Maybe I would return once again to life's simplicity, to the wholeness and preciousness of life.

I close my eyes and see again the gentle fold of the shell collector's body as she bends down her knees in a sort of humble prayer, a thank you to how simple God has created the world.

Sometimes I think I belong in another time. A time when we all collected shells, and technology had not given us so many other choices that would be so easy to collect instead of shells.

I pray today that I might remember the shells of the earth and the shell collectors who are my angels, ever reminding me of God's simple grace.

Thank you God for the sea.

Thank you God for the shells.

Thank you God for the angels.

Thank you God for the abundance of it all.

Amen.

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