The Pearl Diver and the Tide

Among the Shimmering Isles, where the sea glows warm turquoise and green in the sun and the sand is as white and fine as sugar, there lived a young pearl diver named Coralie. She was the fastest swimmer in her whole village, and she could hold her breath underwater longer than anyone else, old or young. And more than anything else in all the wide world, Coralie wanted to dive down and find a perfect pearl of her very own.

So every single day she swam out past the shallows and dived down deep to the oyster beds on the sea floor, and she searched and searched and searched. But there was a problem — the same problem, every day. Whenever Coralie spotted a plump and promising oyster nestled in the sand, she would get so excited that she lunged straight for it, snatching and grabbing with both eager hands. And every single time, those fast, grasping hands churned up great swirling clouds of sand from the sea floor, until the water went murky and brown and she could not see a thing in front of her face. And by the time the sand had drifted back down and the water had cleared again, the oyster had felt her coming, and had shut itself up tight as a locked box — and the moment was lost. Day after day after day, Coralie swam home to shore with empty hands and a cross and frustrated heart.

"Why can't I ever find one?" she cried out one evening, flopping down on the white sand in despair. "It isn't fair! I'm the fastest swimmer, and the strongest, and I try harder than anybody in the whole village!"

A gentle voice answered her, rising softly from the water nearby. "Perhaps," it said, "that is exactly the trouble." Coralie sat up with a start. There, half-risen from the gentle waves, was a sea-nymph — a nereid — with long hair like drifting green seaweed and calm eyes like deep sea-glass. She had been quietly watching Coralie dive for many, many days.

"You try too hard, little one," the nereid said, and she was not unkind. "That is the whole trouble, right there. The sea does not give up its treasures to the fastest hands, nor to the strongest, nor even to the ones that want them most. It gives them, always, only to the calmest ones. Here — come with me, and watch."

The nereid slipped beneath the surface, and Coralie took a deep breath and dived down alongside her. But instead of darting and lunging and snatching the way that Coralie always did, the nereid moved through the water slowly, so very slowly. She drifted down toward the oyster bed as gently and softly as a single falling leaf, and she did not stir up so much as one single grain of sand from the sea floor. And when she reached the bottom, she did not grab at anything at all. She simply held both her hands open and still and empty in the clear water. And she waited.

And as Coralie hung in the water and watched, a truly wonderful thing began to happen. The oysters, calm and undisturbed, slowly, slowly began to open. First one, and then another, and then more and more of them, all across the wide sea floor, each one parting its rough grey shell to show the soft, glowing, pearly gleam hidden away inside. Because no grasping, frightening hands had come churning toward them, the oysters had nothing to fear — and so they opened up, every one, entirely of their own accord.

The nereid reached out through the still water, slow and smooth and calm, and from one wide-open oyster she lifted a single flawless pearl, round and softly glowing and lovelier by far than the full moon on the water. And she pressed it, ever so gently, into Coralie's open hand.

"You see now?" the nereid said, as the two of them rose slowly back up toward the light and broke the surface together. "When you grab and snatch at the world, you only churn up clouds that blind your own eyes, and everything you reach for closes itself against you. But when you are patient, and you keep your hands open, and you let the sea come to you in its own good time — then it opens, and it gives you far more than you could ever have snatched away by force."

Coralie looked down at the perfect pearl glowing softly in the middle of her palm, and at last, deep down, she truly understood.

The very next day she swam out and dived again. But this time she did not lunge. She did not snatch or grab. She sank down through the water slow and quiet and calm, exactly as the nereid had done, and she held her two hands open, and she waited — patient and still and unhurried — for the sea to trust her.

And all across the sea floor, one by one, the oysters opened.

From that day on, Coralie was known far and wide as the finest pearl diver in all the Shimmering Isles — not because she was the fastest, and not because she was the strongest, but because she alone had learned the ocean's oldest and gentlest secret: that the more softly and openly you hold your hands, the more the whole wide world is willing to come and rest in them.