I saw the most perfect shell today. A beautifully proportioned cone shape, with the pointy tip still fully intact. Its exterior a brilliant white with broad peach-coloured stripes. The setting in which I found it added to its earthly beauty. A perfectly smooth white sand beach, backed by a turquoise Indian Ocean, with my one-year-old daughter playing in the diluted morning sun exactly where the two meet.

I picked it up and placed it carefully in my linen tote bag. This shell would store the beautiful memory of our first extra-continental adventure with our child, a memory that, while still expanding as we have one week left as I write this, I already hold so dear. Every time I would see the shell in my cupboard at home, this memory would reveal itself to me, and I would feel as warm and happy as I do now.  

Still, after a few minutes, I took it out of my bag again and placed it in the sand, exactly where I found it. The “waaaaaw” my daughter exclaimed when she saw it, didn’t make me put it back in my bag.

“We can’t take it, can we?” I asked my boyfriend. “No, we can’t”, he said. “Yesterday, I saw a shell like this with a creature living in it. A crab or a small lobster.” “Yes and remember that scene from BBC Earth, where those crabs line up in order of size and then simultaneously leave their houses and move to the next, bigger one? We would rob a crab of a potential perfect house.”

We, humans, have robbed our fellow earthlings from their homes more than enough. By destroying their habitats and replacing them with our own cities, or with cows, pigs or chickens that we fatten so we can eat them. By heating up the planet so much, that the trees that they live in  burn down and their homes made out of coral bleach and die.

Placing the shell back where it belonged was my tiny act of resistance. My way to say: I won’t participate in taking away your homes for my own benefit. And so I took a picture instead. Of the most perfect, beautifully proportioned, white and peach shell, laying waiting on the smooth sand until a crab would find it just as perfect as I did, and would take it back into the turquoise Indian Ocean.

Love, Nina