Zen and the Art of Barnacle Maintenance

“To sit beside a rockpool is to observe the universe inside a teacup.”

As a child, I thought the rockpools could speak. They clicked and whispered and fizzed, each bubble a syllable, each crab a conductor, each ripple a line of poetry. I would kneel down on the sandstone rim of New Brighton’s shoreline, toes curled over barnacled edges, peering into what felt like another world—a world quieter than ours, but somehow more alive.

I called it The Garden. No one else did. They said it was just where the tide got trapped when it rolled out, a puddle for sea lice and limpets. But I saw bonsai anemones, sand-worn stones arranged like raked gravel, and blades of seaweed that bowed like monks in green robes. I didn’t know then what a Zen garden was. But somehow, I was already in one.

I brought a brush. Not a real one, just an old toothbrush with the handle bitten from when I was anxious. I’d sit and gently scrape the barnacles, not to clean them off, but to make space for their breath. I imagined their shells were windows, fogged by salt and time, and it was my duty to polish them, to keep the view clear.

I called this barnacle maintenance. It made me feel useful, necessary, even if the sea undid my work twice a day. But that was the lesson, I think. Do it anyway. Do it even if it’s washed away. Do it because it matters while it lasts.

In later years, I would learn about the temples in Kyoto, where monks tend dry gardens for hours—knowing full well a single leaf will fall and disrupt the pattern. I think I’d already understood that, in my own way, with my toothbrush and the barnacles. The tide was the leaf. The world would always rearrange itself. The point was not to stop it—but to notice.

When I look back now, I don’t remember the world around me—just the pool. I don’t remember what school I went to, or what I had for tea, but I remember the slow-motion crawl of a hermit crab dragging a borrowed shell. I remember a bubble forming on a sea-snail’s back, holding the whole sky in its curve. I remember seeing my own face in the shallow glass and thinking I looked like a ghost.

Some say these places don’t exist anymore. Climate change. Coastal erosion. Urban expansion. The drone of commerciality pressing out the small, quiet things. But I think The Garden’s still there. Maybe not in the same spot, maybe not with the same rocks. But it’s there in every overlooked corner of the coast. It lives in stillness. And stillness is eternal.

Now, I walk the beach with my own son. He finds his own rockpools. He calls them lakes. He talks to the barnacles. I never told him what I used to do. But the other day, I saw him brush one with his finger, gently, instinctively.

I stood very still. I didn’t say anything.

The tide will take it. Of course it will. But until then, it matters.

RW