09/02/2026
I love collecting sea glass(beach glass)! For now I have my collection in pretty jars, reminding me of summer all through the year.☀️🌊
Sea glass was not always sea glass.
It began as something whole - certain of its shape and purpose.
A glass lifted in celebration, a window that held back storms, a jar that once held something precious.
And then it broke.
Not because it deserved it, but because life is full of moments that crash into us without ever asking permission.
The ocean took the pieces of that glass and that window and that jar.
It threw the fragments against sand and stone, through storms and stillness. They were pulled under by tides and pushed further than they ever imagined possible; the waves testing every sharp edge again and again and again.
Sea glass becomes itself in a way that is not gentle.
The sea does not promise comfort, only movement through the ups and downs.
And yet something remarkable happens in all that relentless tumbling.
The jagged places soften. What was transparent becomes mysterious, catching light in a way it never could before. The broken parts are still there: they are simply no longer the first thing anyone sees.
People walk beaches searching for sea glass not because it escaped the ocean untouched, but because it didn't. They treasure it precisely because it has survived the waves that should have reduced it to nothing. Its softness was earned. Its quiet glow came from resilience. Its beauty was made slowly, by all the things that tried to wear it away.
And isn't that the way of so many things?
We spend so much of life wishing we had never been broken,
never been changed,
never been carried into waters we didn't choose.
But perhaps survival is not about returning to who we were before the breaking.
Perhaps it is about allowing the tides to shape us into something that could never have existed otherwise.
Perhaps we are more like sea glass than we realise.
And perhaps the parts of us shaped by loss and by turbulent journeys, are not the parts that make us less.
Perhaps they are the parts that catch the light.
*****
My husband and I got into collecting sea glass on our summer holiday - and it inspired this poem. I shared it a while back with subscribers, but I've realised I never shared it here. It's one of my recent favourites.
Becky Hemsley 2026
Incredible art work by Ter Halle
