What Helped Me Understand Abundance
It started like one of those silly little things that doesn’t seem important—until the universe winks.
Day 1: The Men with Sticks
I was walking along Sandy Beach in Puerto Peñasco, shoes off, mind wandering, when I spotted a man crouched near the rocks with a long metal stick. He wasn’t in my path—I wandered toward him. Curiosity tugged me closer. He was digging. Looking for something. As it turned out, he was hunting for octopus.
Twenty minutes later, another man appeared, also with a stick, also digging. “Are you looking for octopus too?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Snails.”
His English was thin; my Spanish was thinner (unless we’re talking tacos and tamales). Still, we talked. He had come from Mexico City—by train. It had taken him a week. A week. And I had been afraid of driving through Mexico. The danger? All in my mind. This man had traversed a country to find snails, and here I was, fearful of the shadows I’d never even seen.
Even with no shared language, we understood each other. Which makes sense, really. Every language was made up by someone like us. We forget that. Communication isn’t about grammar. It’s about heart.
Day 2: Snails, Sunset, and a Shared Table
The next morning, Jon and I went to a different beach—because, of course, the one in front of our condo wasn’t “snail-worthy.” We were on a mission.
After an hour of scavenging, my score was 10. His was zero. Jon—the strong, determined, Hercules-of-a-man—looked defeated. But I knew how these things go. By the end, he was flipping over rocks and finding four or five at a time like it was nothing.
The tide eventually forced us back. We carried our loot with no clue what to do with it.
We turned to the internet: “How do you cook wild snails?”
Unsurprisingly, Google wasn’t much help. So we called our new friend, José, who graciously came over. While I made pasta, José and Jon cleaned the snails and prepared them. Then José brought Irving (my new tech angel, currently helping me upload products to my site), and the four of us sat on the deck, watching the sun melt into the sea, eating snails and pasta, and talking about all the creatures that lived beneath the waves.
That night, the ocean tasted like community.
Day 3: When the Beach Gave Us Everything
The next morning, even though the snails were… well, a little chewy, we couldn’t help ourselves. We were back in the car, heading to another stretch of beach, determined to find more.
And we did.
Within twenty minutes, we found starfish—beautiful, delicate. Then: three mesh bags overflowing with hundreds of snails. Hundreds.
That’s when it hit me.
Abundance isn’t just a metaphor. It’s not a pretty word for vision boards and manifestation journals. It’s a truth embedded in the fabric of the universe. Whatever we focus on expands—sometimes gently, sometimes like a tidal wave.
The Shell Hunt and the Lesson We Almost Missed
Another afternoon, we were walking along the same shore. I spotted the most beautiful shell I had ever seen—large, intricate, like it had been carved by the sea itself. Later, I learned its name: Lovely Ramose Murex. I couldn’t wait to show Jon.
When he saw it, he turned into a four-year-old. “I want to find one too!”
And so the hunt began. Two hours of walking, searching, scanning the sand. I found one more, but none for him. I was secretly wishing he’d find his—because what joy is joy if you can’t share it?
We were about to give up. The tide was rising. Our feet were tired.
And then—I saw Jon waving his arms. Wildly. Joyfully. I ran over. And there they were.
Not one. Not two. But thousands of those shells.
Covering the beach. For miles.
What had once been a rare treasure had become so plentiful we couldn’t decide which ones to take. And strangely, with so many of them, the shells began to lose their magic. They became just… things. Just stuff. We could’ve filled our arms. We didn’t.
The Grandson and the Flowering Tree
It reminded me of a walk I once took with my grandson. He was four years old at the time. We were strolling through a park in Las Vegas when he saw a tree—full, alive, bursting with vibrant blossoms like a firework caught mid-bloom. He ran toward it, wide-eyed, then turned to me and said with utter conviction, “Grandma, I want to take it home.”
That was his first instinct: This is beautiful. It should be mine.
And isn’t that so human? That first innocent desire to own the beautiful—to trap it, tame it, carry it home like a treasure. It’s in all of us. Maybe the very first time we see something that moves us—whether it’s a tree, a shell, a person, or a sunset—something in us aches to keep it. To make it stay. To belong to it, or it to us.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
Nothing we try to hold onto can ever give us more than the feeling we had in that first moment we saw it.
That flash of awe, that ahhhh that lives in our chest—it doesn’t come from ownership. It comes from wonder.
We think we want to possess beautiful things, surround ourselves with them, collect them like charms against emptiness. But beauty loses its voice when it becomes ordinary. Once we’ve taken it, stored it, placed it on a shelf, the magic begins to fade. We become accustomed to it. Numb to it. It blends into the background of our lives like wallpaper.
I knelt beside my grandson and said gently, “Some things we have to love where they are.”
And he nodded, the way children do when they understand far more than their years should allow.
I saw myself in him. I still do.
Final Reflection: The Tide Gives and the Tide Teaches
Sometimes what we think we want is just a doorway to something we need to understand.
I had wanted just one beautiful shell. The universe gave me thousands. But in that moment, the lesson wasn’t about collecting—it was about appreciating. About timing. About letting go when your arms are full of more than you asked for.
Abundance doesn’t always arrive as a paycheck or a partner or a perfectly planned life. Sometimes it comes in the form of strangers with sticks, chewy snails, seashells you leave behind, and stories you’ll remember long after the tide has gone out.
With love,
Gulten Dye
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