I am a great believer in seeing the beauty in the small things in life, I don’t need the fancy stuff, the lavish meals and five star hotels. A bowl of chips and a tent in a field will do me just fine (so long as there’s mayo and a blow-up mattress).
Lately I have become a little obsessed with the pieces of sea worn glass that you find dotted along the beaches in Cornwall. It must be the child in me but when ever I pick them up I feel as if I have made some magical discovery. Still I have always been the same, I think from childhood I have wanted to be a discoverer.
Having spent hours walking up and down ploughed fields with a metal detector the oldest thing I ever found were some barely recognisable coins. Truro museum very indulgently identified them for me as being a couple of hundred years old and pretty much worthless.
Nature’s Treasures
I visited numerous ruins and ancient sites left behind by civilisations across the globe. From the Romans to the Mayans, Hittites and many more. At every site, especially the more obscure and overgrown ones, I have kept my eyes peeled for that bit of history that the excavators somehow might have missed. I have never found a thing (surprise surprise). When I was in Egypt we hired bicycles to tour the tombs in the valley of the kings. After seeing a couple of the ancient sites and then went off on my own. I spent hours looking for fossils of seashells in the sweltering heat of bare rocky hillsides. miraculously I did find quite a few and now keep them in a small wooden box which is full of other random bits and pieces. I call it my memory box.
So when that seaglass glints up at me from the damp sand somehow I feel as if I have discovered uncut diamonds. As I said in the beginning its the little things that make our lives shine. We should take trouble to look and find them. We should never stop searching for little bits of treasure to add to our memory boxes.
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