Summer of the Shell

This summer has already been so full. Full of what I expected: the projects I’ve been building toward, all of which have decided, with no consultation from me, to come to a head in the very same few weeks. And full of what I didn’t expect: the personal things I’m still sorting through, the ones that arrived without much announcement and haven’t yet settled into anything I can confidently name.

There’s a particular vertigo in holding both at once: the known coming due and the unknown still unfolding, both asking for my attention on the same ordinary Tuesday. I’ve decided the dizziness isn’t a sign that something is wrong. Mostly it’s a sign that I’m here for all of it, which is its own kind of feeling. Some days I feel completely capable of the whole arrangement. Other days I don’t, and the list that felt manageable at breakfast feels like more than one person should reasonably carry by noon. I’m learning, slowly, not to argue with either kind of day, to let the capable ones do their good work and trust that the other kind moves through and out again if I don’t grip it too tightly. Through every bit of it, I keep finding myself meditating on the snail and the shell.

And once you start meditating on a thing, it begins turning up everywhere you look. A shell flower frog surfaced at an estate sale last week, tucked on a shelf I’d very nearly walked past. A quirky little snail patch that I lovingly stitched to my beat up and well loved Garden Party tote. They even keep appearing while I’m sourcing for clients: small ridged and spiraled things photographed on linen like jewels, asking to be wanted. I keep turning them up in the garden dirt, pale and chalky against the soil. There’s a growing collection of them gathering on the corner of my desk. Shells. Snails. Everywhere I look. I’ve stopped calling it coincidence and started taking it as a kind of instruction.

I have loved snails and shells for years, long before I could have told you why. There is something about a creature that carries its entire house on its back, that cannot be hurried by any force on earth, that moves at exactly its own pace and seems wholly at peace with the arrangement. A snail is never behind. It has nowhere it is failing to be. It is simply, fully, where it is, which happens to be the one thing I spend most of my waking life trying to practice. Watching one inch across my path in the garden while my phone buzzes insistently in my pocket has become a regular and useful humbling.

Shells, meanwhile, have come to mean summer itself. They mark the stretch of the year when our whole family slows down at the same time, when an afternoon can disappear entirely at a seafood shack while the children comb the beach for treasure. I can’t think of a scene more sentimental to me than sitting beside my husband, oyster in hand, while our children fill their pockets well past the point of practicality and squeal at every new find. The ones they carry home end up in the glass jars on my vanity, where they catch the light morning and night and remind me, without a word, exactly what that time is worth: all of us together, with nothing else pulling at our attention.

A few months ago I had a snail tattooed on my arm. After collecting the idea of them for so long, the images, the figurines, the actual slow specimens on their wet leaves, it felt right to stop collecting and start carrying. I like the small joke in it, since carrying its house is the snail’s one true talent, and now it’s quietly become a bit of mine too. It’s a simple thing, just a little coiled shell and a soft body, but it has turned into a genuine talisman. A reminder pressed right into the skin that presence, a true and bodily feel for how precious and finite this time is, is one of my actual gifts, and not some soft afterthought to be picked up later, once the important work is finally done. It is also, I’ve noticed, the very first thing to get crowded out in a season as full as this one.

Which is the part I want to say plainly. In the spring I wrote about arriving at slowness, that monumental, weather-like shift, when it finally moved all the way through me. Earlier this summer I wrote about protecting it, about learning to say not right now in a kind and unhurried voice. This stretch is asking something different again. The slowness isn’t lying around in the corners waiting to be noticed; these days have simply been too loud for that. So I’m finding that some days I have to carry it in with me, into the noise rather than away from it. The tattoo is for the loud days as much as the quiet ones. It’s for catching sight of it mid-juggle, somewhere between the desk and a crying child and a half-packed bag, and remembering that I am allowed to do every bit of this at the pace of the thing that carries its whole home on its back and is somehow, impossibly, never late.

Then, because this is how I am built, I went looking, and found I am in genuinely strange company. Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Ripley and was by every account an eccentric woman, kept around three hundred pet snails in her garden in Suffolk. She traveled with them. There’s a much loved story of her arriving at a London cocktail party with an enormous handbag containing a head of lettuce and a hundred snails, her chosen companions for the evening. She once said they gave her “a sort of tranquility,” which is the entire brief as far as I’m concerned. A misanthrope who found her peace in the slowest creatures alive. I understand it completely.

Advice I’m Giving Myself This Week

Why don’t you do one thing today at exactly the speed it wants to be done, no faster, and refuse to apologize to anyone for it.

Why don’t you let the garden, and not the calendar, set one full hour of your afternoon, and see who you are when you come back inside.

Why don’t you spend an entire walk with your eyes on the ground, gathering nothing but the broken and the spiraled and the chalky, and arrive home with heavy pockets and a quieter head.

Why don't you measure a single day not by what you crossed off but by what you actually noticed, and see whether it was the fuller day for it.

Why don't you find a way to sit in the unknown rather than wrestle it. Don't be angry at the pace. Find a way to pass the time in a way that makes it palatable. Time is not to be wished away.

A curated collection as I’ve been sourcing and hunting over the past week. For the links head to my shoppe here. Not a ShopMy member yet? Create an account here.