I have spent endless hours walking beaches: fine white sand, cobblestones, grassy edges with weedy bottoms. I love to forage, to let my eyes scan the area before me. I love the pull of allurement I feel from a shell, pebble, or driftwood stick. Most I pass over. But I few I pick up and inspect up close. I slip a few into my pocket. Correspondence.

Consider this description from Braiding Sweetgrass.

Walking the shore, I spotted a smooth green pebble threaded with carnelian, just like one I’d passed by a few steps earlier. I walked back, searching the strand until I found it again. I reunited the two pebbles, letting them lie together, shining wet in the sun until the tide came back and pulled them apart, rolling their edges smoother and their bodies smaller. The whole beach was like that for me, a gallery of beautiful pebbles divided from each other and from the shore. Linden’s way on the beach was different. She too was rearranging, but her method was to place gray with black basalt and pink beside a spruce green oval. Her eye was finding new pairings; mine was searching out the old

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Interiority – How we guide our eye. How we transform allurement into a foraging mission, “searching the strand.” Letting our eyes scan the surface of correspondence by water and beach.

Finding “pairings,” forming groups, “rearranging.” Reuniting two green pebbles threaded with carnelian. Seeing backward into the past when they were part of the same rock formation. Pebbles and water, erode the surface until the rock formation becomes pebbles. Correspondence.