The Myriad and the Particular (2)

My beach friend found his two bottles, but when he unfurled the papers inside, neither one said anything surprising, or romantic, or even very interesting. Perhaps most people aren't terribly imaginative, but it doesn't stop us from sending messages and hoping someone will finally notice our tiny voice in its glass container, or on the Facebook page.

I sat on the beach made of millions of voiceless shells, thinking about human beings and their endless longing for connection, their almost-boundless capacity for hope; about the beauty of this peaceful sea that had gently cast up two fragile floating arks and about the thousands of bodies taken by the tsunami on the other side of the world, the thinner and thinner voices vainly crying for help coarsely mirrored in the cries of the gulls overhead.

Eventually it became too much, all this consideration of the many. And so my eye, seeking relief, kept noticing the individual: the bloom on a wild galliardia beneath the boardwalk down to the beach, the dead pelican, the stranded jellyfish, the horseshoe crab lifted out into deeper water, the subtle differences between cockle shells.

And in the airports, tired of reading, I pulled out my sketchbook and drew the people waiting alongside me: sleeping, resigned, fatigued, trying to go away and trying to come home.

 

Only hope can keep me together/
Love can mend your life/
Or love can break your heart/
I'll send an S.O.S. to the world/
Message in a bottle...