Beach Treasures
Resting among beach shoes & other detritus - Happy Anniversary!
Dear Readers,
Happy September…and Happy Anniversary!
It’s been a year since I first posted on Substack…and I’m still here exploring what it takes to live in balance - - with the planet, yes, and also with myself.
If you read my last post at the beginning of August, Rest: Is it Possible, you’ll know that I took a month ‘off’ to recover from a hectic summer…and to hang out with family by a beach in Maine.
As it turned out, resting was much harder than I had hoped. Yes, I napped and walked and noticed rivers of sand and beach greens.
And yes, I laughed with an extended network of family and friends and watched the tide come in. As my father might say, I was ‘living the good life’ by a beach in Maine.
And I noticed that for the first two weeks I never carried my camera. It was all I could do to just be…Until August 20, when, for no particular reason, I found the headspace to interact with what I was experiencing, to look closely, focused, through my lens…and pay attention to what really lights my fire: Beach Treasures.
…Like plastic shoes on the sand…and stuff washed up on a full moon.
And a few days later, I felt compelled to compose what I had seen, in a pile, with a view…
…And to create a second pile, on a table, with smaller treasures…found on the beach and in hidden places around our meandering multi-family house.
I continued to walk…
and the pile grew.
And it seemed that everything was bright green…
…from kids beach shoes, to a moldy shoe box containing my mother-in-law’s photo archive, recently salvaged from the flooded basement.
Those archives beckoned, but I wasn’t ready, yet, to dive in.
The piles of beach treasure grew…on the table…
and by the path going to the beach.
It seemed that some beach shoes were washed away…along with wayward ropes, plastic toys and foam buoys.
And then I noticed more color trends, like the two blue-ish muscle shells and the pair of light blue beach shoes…
…and the dark blue broken glass and the darker blue beach shoes.
What’s with all this blue…and how many of these plastic blue shoes will one day end up washing up onto the beach someday?
But that question floats away, because I’m resting…and am with family…and want to just experience what is before me…like the fact that I might not have noticed those pairings if it hadn’t been for those two muscle shells.
What’s interesting is that while vacations usually imply not doing ‘work,’ it is my work that actually allows me to rest…images lure me away from macro problems and questions. Photography, in all its forms, invites me to focus on micro moments, finding joy in the simplest of places.
So it was in this state of mind that, during my final week in Maine, that I dove head first into my mother-in-law’s damp and mildewed photo archive. This shoe box, one of many, contained mostly old negatives, but also many extra long-forgotten duplicates.
My goal was purely damage control.
Save what we could save.
Remove all that was damp and damaged.
In the end, yet another pile of treasure emerged,1 and the beach garbage kept presenting itself - - blue toys, red fiber and lots of foam.
It is true that I love nothing more than Composting & Composing A Life - - creating something from ‘nothing,’ transforming stuff and offering that stuff new life, merely by reframing it in my camera’s lens. In this case, long-lost objects, some of which might have once made a child laugh, now invite me to play too…
…and be with the wonder of an unexpected Horseshoe Crab or a broken, rusty lobster pot.2
And on the last day, all but the sand dollars, clam shells and Horseshoe Crab end up in the garbage destined for the landfill where they will stay, protected from the ocean’s tides and all those creatures needing clean water free from our detritus.
This is definitely a ‘drop in the bucket,’3 but for me, this small pile is yet another example of showing up, one day at a time, expressing love, 13 tons of it, for all living creatures, big and small, on land and in the oceans.
Thank you for being here and sharing the love. My hope is that in the next twelve months our conversations will go deeper as we build community and walk this path together…always celebrating our collective visual joys and reflective meanderings.
As always, thank you for you sharing your time and this space with me. Happy Anniversary!4
With cheers and gratitude,
Lyn
PS: In the coming months I’ll be exploring new ways for us to connect. What would you like to see or learn more about? Please let me know by commenting.
I will return to my mother-in-law’s salvageable negatives and images at another time…and will of course share what I uncover here. As tempted as I was to dive deeper, now was not the time. Stay tuned…
As a child, we used to see Horseshoe Crabs a lot, often still alive, on the small pebbly beach we went to in Rhode Island. I’ve never seen one in Maine before, though apparently their habitat ranges from Northern Maine to the Yucatan Peninsula.
According to the Recycle Track Systems website, there is currently somewhere between 75 and 199 million tons of plastic waste currently in our oceans with 1.65 million tons entering the marine environment every year. There is plenty of frightening information about the impact of single use plastic on marine life, so I won’t go into it here. The bottom line, though, is that if my removing even a small handful of plastic can ensure fewer particles, however tiny, being ingested by living creatures, then I am inspired to continue the next time I go to this or any other beach. Every bit matters. Always.
Fun fact: September 5, which was yesterday, was my 32nd wedding anniversary. September has always been my favorite month - - a time for starting new adventures and celebrating the possibilities that transitions of all kinds offer. Sending love to all.