November 9, 2019

by drplasticpicker.com

Ocean plastic picking has reminded me that time is not linear. Life is not linear. One of my favorite books growing up was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. In this book I was first introduced to the idea of the tesserect. That the shortest distance between two points is not a line but a wrinkle in time or a tesserect. Indeed the actual mathetmatics is complicated, but the concept is an intriguing one.

As I wandered along the beach this morning, I do the opposite of tesseracting. I take a longer meandering path. Rather than taking the shortest path, I follow bright pieces of plastic up and down the beach. Going slowly from piece to piece, wandering wherever my subconscious takes me. I concentrate on those pieces of plastic, trying to find the small and large pieces thinking alternatively between the whales that might ingest the big pieces to the birds that prefer the bright small ones. Then once in a while, I look up and I find beauty.

In the first photo at the beginning of the post, you will see an orange bottle cap. That is what brought me to this part of the beach. A beautiful human laying on her side, with her face upturned into the sky. An alluring figure. I was taking a few pictures between collecting bits of plastic, when I noticed on the ledge was the artist’s tools.

It was truly a chacoal drawing, scratched with a burnt piece of wood. Was the piece of wood the remnants of a small fire, where a pining young man sat thinking of this mysterious figure? Her body resembles the undulating ocean waves. I imagine he drew her early this morning as the sun was just rising and slipped away before the surfers and drplasticpicker descended on the beach.

I continued on my journey headed back along where I had come. Saturday mornings there are always plenty of plastic to collect and items to salvage for Goodwill. I found 3 pairs of children’s sandals this morning. Those were burried in the sand without a child in sight. I cleaned along where the surfers are and less sunbathers, and there were many pieces of plastic festive ribbons to pull out of the dried seaweed and I found particularly large amounts of plastic corded rope.

The sun was coming out, and I try to stay in the shade provided by the sandcliffs above. When I’m closer to the sandcliffs, there are plenty of cigarette butts and remnants of vaping pens to collect. I do wear gloves dear readers. As I finished for the morning and after depositing the heavy grocery bag of debris into the trash receptacle, I began typing into my iPhone the updated totals for the bags collected and items salvaged today. I stood in the shade updating my totals as others wandered past where I had just come from. In the back of my mind, I did wonder if they thought I was a crazy woman wearing scrub bottoms, Disney marathon shirt, and bucket hat. Then I heard beautiful music.

I stood there is the shade and had the Google Analytics Page of this blog open on my iPhone to see the current pageviews, but I was not really looking at it. I was listening to this young man’s strumming and his music. It was a beautiful simple song with no one else really there. I imagine he was playing for himself and playing for the ocean or perhaps playing for a beautiful young woman, whose image he had in his mind. I snapped this picture from him from afar. I hope he does not mind. What a beautiful morning.