“This afternoon is about looking for patterns,” I announced as Jenn and I walked down the trail to Botanical Beach, along the rocky terminus of the Juan de Fuca Trail. We’re two hours drive north of Victoria but we feel like we’re at the edge of the world.
The day was overcast, thick mats of fog rolled over the Straight that separates Vancouver Island from the Mainland Coast Mountains of Washington State. Flat light: the horizon would be dull, but the details of plants and the lush coastal understory will stand out in sharp relief; this is ideal for macro photography. It’s perfect for close examination.
Of course, when I’m looking through the lens of our Nikon, I’m also looking through the lens of my heart. One helps to focus the other.
The night before Jenn and I camped on the typically crowded Sombrio beach. Once a commune for back-to-the-land hippies and homesteaders and their goats, today it’s a hang out for guitar playing, beer drinking twenty-something’s. We made our way as far from the trail as we could and found a quiet place away from the ruckus to while away a sunny summer afternoon. Drinking beer. Wishing I could play guitar.
At sunset Jenn and I stood on a rock, the tide washing at our feet, and wrapped our arms around each other and held on tight. The coursing of the surf beat out an irregular pulse through the night.
(Sombrio Beach above, and falls and canyon of Sombrio Creek below)
Come morning the summer sky had paled and we headed into Port Renfrew for coffee, tea and sustenance (I packed coffee and tea; I just packed it in a bag we left at home…). It was a day without an agenda; a good day, a day when whim and whimsy rule. We ended up at the trailhead for Botanical Beach and thought we’d just take a quick run down to the water for nostalgia’s sake.
That’s when I started looking for patterns.
This last week I’ve become acutely aware of patterns in my life. We are creatures of habit some say; I assert we are creatures of pattern. Of repetition. Of stimulus and response. We’re wired for patterns. Our brains like to follow them, and it makes it easy for us to repeat, and hard for us to break the patterns in our lives.
There are many scales to these patterns. Our bodies are made up of patterns of cells forming muscle, organs, skin, even our brains. Our brains themselves are complex machines composed both of physical and neurological patterns. Within them the electromagnetic pulse of thought and consciousness both follow patterns and create them. The vastly complex neural net that is both subject to and the creator of our habits, responses, and reactions can sometimes seem a slave to the patterns of our lives.
Aware of the complex net of patterns around and within us, we sashay down the trail, zooming in tight to snap pictures of False Lily of the Valley and Deer Fern.
Zoom in even tighter, down to the cellular level, right to the foundation of our existence, and the patterns seem to disappear into randomness. At this scale, where Newtonian physics is replaced with quantum mechanics, the predictable patterns are lost. Electrons blink in and out of existence. Matter can exist in two places at once, and remain connected even if separated by vast distances. Electrons can even make the leap from one quantum state – or energy level – to another without passing through any state in between. This quantum leap is as close to instantaneous as is possible. Where the electron goes between quantum states is a mystery. The space and the time between one state and the other do not, for all practical purposes, exist. When an electron makes this leap, however, it creates photons, or light, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, such as radio waves or ultra violet radiation.
It takes something as indescribable as a quantum leap to make light.
We discovered some lovely designs on our short stroll to the surf, but as it turns out the patterns I was seeking weren’t really the obvious ones along the leafy trail. I was looking for the reflection of universal patterns on the inner landscape. Big surprise.
(False Lily of the Valley (above) and Deer Fern (below))
Here we are forced to zoom out from the micro to the macro and witness patterns in our individual behavior – the fleshy collection of atoms, cells, and body parts stumbling around in the woods. Sometimes I think I am little more than a stimulus and response machine, so habitual I am in my response to events and thoughts. But even for the most custom prone mind, it is possible to rewire the circuitry to crate entirely new behavior.
Go wider still and witness the patterns and between the organisms: society, civilization, humanity .
All of this consideration of patterns at the micro and macro level has a point. On the Thursday before our visit to Sombrio and Botanical Beach my position at Royal Roads University was eliminated. Hard times have lead to cutbacks, and my position, along with many others, ended up on the chopping block. I’ll pen more on this turn of events in another posting, but needless to say, I was curious what would happen next, and what, if anything, this change meant.
I believe that there is a pattern to the universe, and that pattern is discernable and identifiable at multiple scales. I also believe that the pattern is composed, at the most rudimentary level, of random events. When seen at the microscopic level, the pattern seems arbitrary. Its only when we step back does the pattern make sense.
I also believe that people can create their own patterns. When we interrupt our response to an event – an angry reaction, a comment made out of frustration, the clutching fear we sometimes feel – we are consciously remapping the neural network in our brains. We create new pathways. Part of the reason it’s hard to change our behaviour is because the neural pathways in our brains are entrenched. They are comfortable: they like to keep firing along the same rutted path that they have always been firing along.
It takes a cognisant effort to overwrite one pathway with another. In doing so, however, we might create new, healthier blueprints for our actions.
Finally, I believe that we can do this instantaneously, without passing through time or space between patterns. I am convinced that a moment of blissful insight can change how we perceive the world, and how we conduct our lives within it. Rare as they may be, these quantum leaps – however grand or humble -- allow us to become part of a new pattern all together.
And when we do this we create light.
(Botanical Beach)
Jenn and I spent a few hours exploring the inter-tidal zone of Botanical Beach. The tide pools along this rocky shore are truly extraordinary, deep and festooned with sea grasses, teaming with life, rich with diversity and ripe with patterns. As we picked our way around the jetty of stone that separates one beach from the next; here we scanned the water offshore for signs of life, and found it. The tell tale plume of mist and water rising high into the air alerted us to a whale just off shore. Jenn clicked away with the camera while I scanned and spotted for her. At first we thought we were watching a grey whale working its way along the bottom of the reef break a few hundred feet off the rocky coast, but a distinctive dorsal fine suggested otherwise.
The dorsal told us that a least one, and maybe two Orcas – the largest members of the dolphin family – were cruising along the rocky reef. These “killer whales” were transients – not members of the local pods of Orca’s that these passages are famous for – and they were hunting. We watched for an hour or more and left more curious than we came about what we were really seeing. After the orca’s seemed to vanish the distinctive ribbed spine of a grey whale reappeared just a hundred feet of shore, this time in the thick mats of a bull kelp forest; a place where a baleen whale that feeds of krill really shouldn’t be.
The experience was fascinating, thrilling and curiosity provoking. Jenn beamed as she watched the aquatic parade of creatures and couldn’t wait to get home to our shelves of marine guides to figure out exactly what we saw.
In at least one of our photos from the afternoon we’re certain we can see both the dorsal of an Orca and the ribbed back of a grey whale.
And I was left wondering about patterns. I started by searching for patterns at a very small scale – the forest floor – and ended up watching two members of the largest class of creatures on earth – order cetacean – commonly known as whales and dolphins. Jenn and I even joked that as we were crawling around on hands and knees peering into tide pools, killer whales were chasing a grey whale a few hundred feet away.
(Grey Whale above, Orca below)
We have to see all the patterns at once. We must tune ourselves to their overlap and their interplay. What is happening at the quantum scale in each and every one of our atoms is mirrored in the vastness of the dark green ocean below and the arching blue sky above. The light of our leaps from one set of patterns to another reflects the perfect, if not mysterious, order of the infinite and extraordinary universe. There is a meaning in these patterns. We can understand them. They can help us make the most of our brief, amazing lives.
