Hermit Crab

A poem about stewardship, despair, and remembering the scale at which a human life can actually act.

This piece follows a small moment of cleaning trash from a beach and unexpectedly encountering a lesson about care.

It explores the tension between witnessing overwhelming problems and (mis)believing that small actions do not matter.

Sometimes meaning arrives quietly.

• One shell.
• One creature.
• One choice at a time.

This poem came from a real experience that surprised me.

I started by cleaning trash from the beach because it felt good to contribute something tangible. But at points I noticed despair creeping in.

• Four bags.
• One beach.

What difference does that make?

And then I realized something:

despair often masquerades as realism.

It tells us that unless our actions are total, they are meaningless. But action itself changes something. Not only externally.

Internally.

When I chose to act anyway, I felt something return.

• Agency.
• Connection.
• Participation.

Then the hermit crab appeared. And I accidentally dropped him into the trash bag.

There was something strangely perfect about that moment.

I had gone there trying to care for something bigger than myself and immediately found myself responsible for something small and immediate instead.

That ended up becoming the lesson.

• Not save everything.
• Not fix the whole world.
• Just notice what is in front of you.
• One thing at a time.

Whatever you can do is enough.

One of the things that stays with me most from my 2025 visit to Bali was not from the retreat itself but something that happened afterward:

I had come for a yoga retreat and was staying a little longer at a small beach resort nearby. Several times each day I found myself walking down to the beach.

At first I expected to find the things people often travel for—the soft light, the black sand, the turquoise water, the quiet after days of exploring and practice.

But what I kept noticing instead was the debris scattered along the shoreline.

Plastic bottles, food wrappers, broken bits of packaging, tangled fragments of things that had traveled farther than I had.

Part of what stayed with me was realizing that much of the trash likely had not originated there.

What hurt almost as much as the trash itself was watching people pass by without seeming to see it. Locals walked the beach, talked, carried on with their day.

It hurt, but not because I thought it was their responsibility to clean it up. But because I realized they had likely lived with it long enough for it to become ordinary. Familiar. Part of the landscape.

Standing there, I felt visceral, uncomfortable recognition: the culture I come from—and Western consumer culture more broadly—plays a significant role in creating conditions that leave places and communities carrying costs they did not choose.

For a moment that recognition became despair.

I remember filling bags with what I could collect and then looking back at the stretch of beach that still remained.

Four bags from one beach.

What difference does that make?

But eventually something shifted.

I realized action does not become meaningless because it is incomplete.

Maybe responsibility is not only about fixing what you caused.

Maybe it is also about responding to what is in front of you with care.