Seashells

(This post was orginally written November 28th, 2004 but was delayed in being posted)
For Thanksgiving my family and I went to Edisto, SC where my MawMaw and Jim built their new house. What a wonderful, peaceful place to be, so on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, instead of beating the crowds with my purse at the mall in Charleston, we (my mom, dad, brother, MawMaw & her husband Jim) toured Edisto and then went to the beach. We all began to look for seashells, as my search continued I realized that I wasn't keeping as many shells as I would have liked. I would bend down, wash off and then inspect the shell carefully, only pocketing the shells in which I found perfection in. And that is when I realized that my concept of beauty have been poisoned by the world. When I was younger I would pick and take home any and every shell I could without hesitation, because I believed that they were all beautiful. Even if the shell was missing pieces, cracked are therefore lacking from it's original form. That is when it dawned on me, when something as simple as my perception of the beauty of a shell changed as did my perception of beauty within the world. Just as the shells that have been stepped upon on the beach, washed up by the waves each and everyone of us lack perfection. We too have been stepped on by the cruelty that this world so often brings, but our hurts and scars should not make us any less worthy of love or deem for us to be thrown into the ocean.