The sky presses close to the shore when Silas, Rio and I trip down to Clover Point for a long weekend, Sunday afternoon gallivant. Silas is asleep in my arms as we make our way over the rocks and logs. Rio, armed to the teeth with swords and a Power Ranger’s spear (early Halloween custom accessories) deftly navigates the obstacles. Silas continues his sleep wrapped in a fleece blanket, while Rio and I hunker down at the shore line. First we bat rocks with flat pieces of driftwood, a favourite beach pastime. But that grows dull, and Rio asks for a new game.
I’m stumped. I’m on my knees picking up dollar sized stones to bat and instead of rising and knocking them out to sea, I dig a little deeper. I find a speck of clear beach glass, polished and wet, just under the top layer of stones on the beach. Rio says it looks like a jelly bean and speculates on its flavour: pop corn. I push a few more rocks aside and find another one, and another. Soon I’ve dropped the fist full of stones I had collected and Rio and I are pushing layers of beach rocks aside, finding dozens of tiny brown, blue, green, white, and even red specks of glass.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the beach, but I’m rarely the one who brings home the big find. My good friend Jack could walk along any stretch of beach and find something extraordinary: half a dozen Japanese fishing floats, a Pepsi bottle from the 1940’s, a glass eye from a sixteenth century pirate, something that he lost in Baja California in 1969. Me, not so much. I once found a hockey glove at Cape Scott. I think it might have been part of a load of such items washed off a container ship somewhere far out in the Pacific. I left it on the beach for others to enjoy. That’s about it.
So finding such a wealth of tiny specks of beach glass under my feet in a place that I visit often (three times this week, for example) was nothing short of amazing.
Of course, its always been there.
It reminded me that the scale at which nature presents marvels is infinite. Its fractal.
It was the second time this week that the word had been appropriate.
Silas slept, while Rio and excavated. Rio thoughtfully put up barriers to keep the tide form washing over our prone bodies. In an hour my pockets were full and we were onto filling our Frisbee.
Each tiny piece of glass, none bigger than my pinkie fingernail (that’s a precise scale of measurement, similar to comparing clear cuts in Northern Ontario to the various Atlantic provinces) was unique, but similar in shape. Most were shaped like a kidney. Wet they are magical, refracting light in varying degrees of translucence.
For an hour Rio and I were absorbed in our task. I thought of little else. He danced, waved his arms like a maniac, built barriers, laughed when my shoes got soaked because I wasn’t paying attention, and came dutifully to inspect each piece of glass I thought worthy of his perusal.
I kept saying to him, "this glass is always under our feet at Clover Point, like a secret treasure buried just beneath the surface." He kept on dancing.
All we need to is push some stones aside, and there they are, if we care to look. Just one layer down.
The fractal essence of nature’s marvels, its patterns, its gifts made me think of a conversation with my friend Dan Spinner late in the week. We were talking about some of the intense lessons I’ve been learning, and re-learning, over the last month. He reminded me that these lessons were fractal: that when learned in one area of my life, they could be repeated in many others. The lessons I’ve learned around success in work, therefore, could be applied to my recent conflagration in my love life, and in raising my children.
Silas woke and we had snacks and then walked along the beach for a while, Rio dashing ahead, swords flashing, while Silas and I tottered along at a two-year old pace. I felt the stones shift beneath me, and under them, millions upon millions of kidney shaped specks of brown, blue, green, white and even red specks of beach glass moved too.
I felt my concept of deserve shift then and there as well, the fractal equation of beach glass being applied at a completely new scale.
(Read: The Next Step in Deserve)
