I Found a Rock at the Beach…

Reflections on Belonging, Grief, and Care for the Earth

Over the past year, I’ve been exploring what it means to belong to the world, to care for it even when it’s breaking, and to keep noticing small miracles in the middle of it all.
This reflection came after a walk on Bracklesham Beach.

I found it on Bracklesham Beach, at low tide. The sun was out, the clouds were racing. Light bounced off the wet sand and pebbles - everything alive and shimmering.

I found it on my birthday. Turning 43 and feeling deeply grateful for the past year - a whole process of coming home to myself, in the most honest ways I know.

I wasn’t looking for anything, not following a path, just walking.

And then there it was, right there in the shingle. The outer edge was iron-stained, rough and orange. A big lump of orangey rock, delightfully ugly, intriguing, impossible not to notice.

Turning it over… what a treat! Inside was a cluster of lilac bubbles, catching the light, sea-worn. I couldn’t believe it.

Picking up the rock, I felt its dense weight. I needed two hands to turn it and see all it was. I was a long way from the car, and no pockets were big enough for this beast, and I knew it was coming with me, no question.

This has happened to me before on the beach, in the woods. And it happens more and more as I listen to it. My attention gets pulled. I don’t know why I chose to walk that way that day. I normally go right along the shoreline; that morning, I went left.

I knew I needed to go to the sea that day. I hadn’t been for weeks, maybe months, but she was calling. Something took me there, and it wasn’t my mind.

There is something deeply powerful in moments like this - choosing to believe I belong. That choice has been the work of this year: to keep showing up, to keep engaging with nature and myself, to meet both grief and joy in the same breath.

This rock has been rolling around in the sea for something like fifty million years, a chalcedony nodule from the Eocene Bracklesham Beds, once part of a tropical sea. Holding it in my hands, it’s hard not to think about deep time.

The Earth is as it is. The climate is as it is. I know that in my lifetime I’ll see extreme loss, more extinctions, mass migrations, broken weather, and pain.

And we cannot go backwards, we can’t stop it. So how do we go forward? Stewarding this world rather than exploiting it?

I don’t have all the answers, and parts of me really wish I did.

Eco-psychology, ecotherapy: these are my radical acts of care for the world. This is my activism.

To care in a world that wants us to focus on anything else is activism.

Reciprocity looks like many things.

It looks like picking up the plastic I see on the beach and taking it to a bin.

It looks like cleaning up the footpaths as I go.

It looks like loving the plants and trees in my garden.

It looks like saying good morning to the trees on my dog walk.

It looks like standing still in the woods, feeling grief and joy all at once.

Maybe that’s what it means to belong. To pay attention. To love anyway.

I keep thinking about that day - about how often we’re guided without knowing why.

Belonging begins with attention: to place, to feeling, to what’s right in front of us.
If this piece speaks to you, take a walk, pick something up, listen for what’s calling.

That’s where the work begins