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Charmouth beach on the south coast is famous for fossils. In 1811 Mary Anning found a full ichthyosaur skeleton there, when she was just 12 years old. It was big dinosaur news.
So this summer, we decided to take Jos and Eva there, as Jos in particular is big into collecting and obviously dinosaurs are dinosaurs.
Charmouth beach
We turn up to the beach at the end of a glorious sunny afternoon, the crowds are just packing up, heading to the car park and the long strip of beach between the collapsing hillside and the sea empties in the sideways evening light.
Perfect. I breathe deep. We can just wander along, enjoy the sea and maybe even find a fossil.
Not exactly. Something about this beach is WEIRD.
Normally on the beach everyone is gazing at the sea, or lying with their eyes shut, splashing in the shallows... but not here. Not this beach. On this beach, everyone is walking around looking at the floor, as if they’ve all simultaneously lost a contact lens. (Mate how annoying would that be on the beach.) The air is thick with tension as everyone subtly watches everyone else from the corner of their eye.... “Have they found a fossil yet? Is it better than what I’ve found?”
I laugh to myself, feeling superior. Ha ha, look at them all, so desperate to find a fossil. I don’t care. I’m just here to enjoy the sea. And if I happen to find a perfect ammonite or a small dinosaur skeleton, so be it.
A man near me bends down and picks something up. Not that I’m watching.
He throws it away again. Not that I care.
We wander further down the beach, away from the crowds. Not because there is more chance of finding something there. Just because you know, it’s nice and quiet.
We walk along the edge of the sea, tracing the tide line, paddling a little. We are here for Jos, but it would be nice if I could find something for him to take home, so we talk to an expert who is on the beach doing the rounds. Jos calls him the “fossilised man”. It suits him. He shows Jos the things he has found on the beach that day. Four ammonites and something else I forget.
Ok so now I really want to find something. Pretence is tossed out to sea on the wind and my head is down with the best of them, scanning every grain of sand. Eva and I walk further and further up the beach, picking up clods of mud to examine them for traces of what may or may not be a tiny ribbed line of an ammonite.
More people come up to our quiet end of the beach. Their heads are down too. Pressure hangs in the air. I’ve got to find it. I’ve got to find it first. Minutes turn into hours. I try to enjoy the sea but I am completely focussed now. Where’s ours? Where’s mine? I’ve invested too long looking now to go home empty handed.
And finally, finally, there it is! Eva pulls it from the sand. A grubby little lump of rock which was almost certainly once an ancient shrimp. I am filled with awe and wonder.
No I’m not. I’m relieved. Thank goodness. Now we can go back to the caravan. And then I turn around to go back towards Jos and Sam. I am completely relaxed of course, and most definitley not keeping eyes trained on the floor. Just in case there’s another one. A better one.
When we get back to the boys they are sitting in the sand with their toes buried, laughing and chatting. They have also found something.
“We found a fossil!” Eva cries as she runs towards them. That funny sinking feet run you do on the beach. “Did you find one too?”
But they haven’t found a fossil. They’ve found sea glass. And they’ve found loads. Jos holds out his hands and shows me.
“For our collection mummy!” Hundreds of tiny pieces of glass uncovered, the softest of treasures. Oh Man. That is waaaay better than our fossil.
Still, the next day we take our grubby little ammonite and we go to the Charmouth museum where they show you all the amazing things people have found on the beach over the last however many years. Vertebrae of plesiosaurs, ammonites bigger than your head, David Attenborough’s sea dragon. We wander round looking at the skeletons and fossils and I experience two things.
One is a really weird sick feeling. Our ammonite is rubbish. You can’t even see the swirl properly.
The second is an overwhelming urge to scour the beach day and night until I too become the proud owner of having found a treasure that deserves a place in the museum.
What??! I don’t even like fossils. What has happened to me?
Thankfully Sam is not affected by the demonic call of the ammonites so we have an ice cream instead.
Museums of comparison
Anyone else end up walking along the beach looking at their feet? Searching for the next best thing? I am ashamed to admit I often live patches of life like this. Especially if I’ve been wondering around museums of comparison.
I mean imagine a museum where the exhibits were rated by the viewers. In some crude way like say, a thumbs up. Imagine if exhibits got a good position not because they are interesting or beautiful or even true but if they could keep the viewers attention for a long time. So a really tiny poo would do better than a piece of art.
Imagine all the exhibitors had to put up new content all the time and old stuff was put in the store room after 24 hours.
Imagine a museum thats aim wasn’t to offer education or enlightenment but to trap exhibitors into creating content like slaves, constantly circling and comparing their own work with others so that their growing insecurity and sense of inadequacy causes some to give up and trail around despondently, and others to create more and more content, spiralling into a mass of empty productivity, which is there only to keep other people’s attention, which actually their own attention, in some vague attempt to meet the original aim of having a better position in the slave-owners museum in which they are all now trapped.
I mean who in the world would go there?
And it’s not just social media. We build museums all the time. There are museums all over my mind where I put myself up against other people, exhibit myself to an invisible audience.
So, how do you feel after a visit to the museum?
Somehow, my contribution always looks worse on the wall of a museum. It always feels smaller. It always feels like not quite enough. When I compare myself to other people I just feel hollow. I feel that I would be happier and more for-filled if I had an ichthyosaur life.
It is painfully obvious to me as I write that this is not true. That I would not be happier if I found a better ammonite. I am sick of the carrying the weight, I am sick of the watching. But how do I sit and find sea glass in a world that is addicted to finding the next spectacular show-off worthy thing?
Chestnut pockets
We spent autumn half term in Suffolk. In a house that was GIVEN to us to use for the week by some lovely friends of ours. We were so grateful. We spent the week absorbing every moment of togetherness: the leaves turning gold, a wood burning stove, walking in the twilight.
One morning we were walking under some trees when we came across a load of chestnuts. Once Uncle Harry had shown Jos not only that you could collect them but that you could eat them, he was away. We returned home with unnecessary amounts of chestnuts, on a mission to work out how to roast them. On an open fire, obviously.
It turned into one of the highlights of the whole week for me. Pockets full of glossy chestnuts, roasting them in the woodburner in a little iron pan that a neighbour kindly lent us, peeling them in pyjamas and the smell of autumn and family and nut, filling the whole of our little cottage.
The magic of sharing
The difference between fossil hunting and chestnut collecting (or sea glass for that matter) was that one was all about sharing. The aim was not to find something worth comparing, but to share.
Aren’t the best moments of our lives those we share?
The other night I realised we could see the big fireworks display at Chester racecourse through our window and Eva was asleep and Jos and Sam were out and all I wanted was to have someone to share that moment with.
Later that night I was in A&E with a sleeping Jos on my lap, listening to his breathing finally returning to normal. The receptionist brought me a cup of tea. It was horrible. And it made me cry. In those deep hours of the morning, she shared a few minutes to make me a cup of tea and it was the most beautiful cup of tea I’ve ever had.
My diary - August 29th
My friend cries as she passes me her baby, she shares the stress of a morning, of exploded nappies and arms tired from rocking. I feel needed and wanted.
Jos runs into the room shrieking with joy, sharing his overflowing excitement because “Fernandez scored a hat-rick!!”
At two thirty in the morning I crawl into Eva’s room, to share her panic and her anxiety and her duvet.
Sharing, not comparing
The deepest, realest, most whole moments of my life are not my achievements. They are not my successes. They not me being very good and loving and sacrificial and doing something amazing for the whole community, the whole world. They are when I share.
As I think about these moments I realise that there is a lot of joy in sharing. Not happiness necessarily but certainly joy.
Sharing or paying?
I am using this to question myself. If there is no joy in something I’m putting out there, perhaps it’s not a moment of “sharing” at all. Perhaps I am sharing to get something back. I am not sharing, I am paying. Paying to feel like I mean something. Paying to be someone.
The point is, it’s not being world class and the ‘next big thing’ that’s going to sort us out is it? It might make us feel good for a bit but it's never going to make us whole. It’s not being amazingly talented or exceptionally kind or famously popular or undeniably clever or wonderfully successful or even incandescently happy.
In the song “Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes” from Rent they talk about how you measure a year. “In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee?” I think their conclusion is right. We measure it in love. In moments shared. Be it with God in the quiet of an unpacked morning or a street corner full of people sharing our neighbour’s fireworks.
Sharing what we have been given
I think the word 'sharing' is helpful too because it suggests you are giving from what you have. We cannot give and give and give from ourselves and expect to be anything but dried up can we? I've tried that and it didn't end well.
The best things we have to share are an overflow. The result of a loving God pouring out his love on us and us enjoying that with others. They are the result of hanging on to Jesus’ heavenly train, or if you prefer, sticking around at his dinner table. Sharing is a life call not because we have to huff and puff and do good things and be nice, looking inside ourselves to find something wonderful, but because we are beloved children given good things and everyone KNOWS sweets taste better when you share them.
There is a sweet spot to find here, of living by receiving and sharing, not just pouring out of an ever emptying well. Sharing what we have, our time and who we are, because all these things have been and continue to be abundantly given. In work I find joy when I give out of the overflow of a full life, not just the dregs. This is sharing. We give our gift or our ability, our wisdom, our experience, our care, our crop, our hope, our-expert-tea-making despite it being the middle of the night.
Best of all is when we share our very selves with people. When we connect. When we share our hearts. This is the Jesus share. First and foremost, He shares himself.
Sharing light
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill can not be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand and it gives light to the everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven.”
Matthew 5:14-16
I think I am guilty of taking Jesus’ words here and thinking that I have to be some kind of torch. The beam right up in someone’s face because I am just so crazy shiny. But Jesus’ life and work was about sharing with us. Not impressing or shocking or wowing us with his incredible awesomeness (although in all history he would have been the best at that.) And he doesn’t just give and run. He sticks around. It’s not a hand out. He shares.
This is the Christmas story isn't it. The God who climbs out of heaven to share the chaos and darkness of our lives with us, so we don't have to do it alone.
Its the Easter story too. The God who rips apart the divide between earth and eternity, because he's so crazy desperate to share heaven with us. The God who shares his life and his death with us, to make a way where there is none.
As I let him, Jesus shares more and more of himself with me. He shares his beautiful world with me, one chestnut at a time. He shares my silence and my raging questions. He shares my darkness. And his sharing brings the light.
A new aim
So this is not a competition. I don’t need to compare myself. There is not a rush or a pressure to be something special, experience something incredible or reach some imagined height. I refuse to continue to walk down the beach feeling pressure and stress to serve a museum I don’t even like. I don’t work for you! I refuse to keep one eye on other people to check and measure my value. I refuse to believe my life can be measured by likes, or financial value, or attendance, or impact. I am going to walk through the museum, to the courtyard round the back. The place strung with lights, full of conversation over good food. And I will take my place next to the one who lights up my days. I will share and enjoy and be glad. Enjoy what I have been given. Enjoy sharing.
Let's share and be the bright spot in someone else’s day. That kind of light is what makes the whole world see.
Katy x
I'd love to hear from you! Please do leave me a comment or send me a message.
Feel free to pass this on to anyone else who it would encourage. It is such a joy to me when this feels like sharing!
© Words, images and audio, Katy Hollamby 2021
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