Quantum Surfing

The seas of the world; the oceans of love.

Amongst the tangled sun struck eucalypts, dry and heavy with summer heat, the track down to the point is as I remember it - a haphazard scuffing of the thin grass and topsoil, unmaintained, leaving only eroded gravel from the soft conglomerate stone beneath. Here and there knotted tree roots scrabble for purchase on exposed rock. Life is tenacious.

So is consciousness. So is memory.

How has my mind brought me here? Why are my memories of this place so tinged with colour, scent and taste; love and loss and longing?

I have read, recently, the theory that our thoughts are more than just electrical signals sparking through meat, but are instead the collective consequence of vibrations in the fundamental structure of the infinite sea of space and time and matter in which we swim - the waves of it ever forming, ever cresting, ever collapsing then forming again.

Our minds are antennae attuned to the universe and “…consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions in tiny structures called microtubules that are found inside neurons – and, in fact, in all complex cells.”¹

Could that be true? I don’t know. Maybe. I like it better than electric meat. What I do know is that, today, my mind has brought me here….

And - Oh! - my mental antennae is sparking, skittering, glittering with thoughts as fine and fleeting as the sun glinting on the surface of the sea below. I am here, again.

I have come on a whim - a momentary decision - midway through a visit to my old home town when all the other things I could have done seemed at odds with the warm blue sky, with the soft sea breeze lapping at the city tinged with salt, with the sense of Summer slipping by and a world full of places calling me to come.

So I have, on an easy drive up streets grooved so deep in my life I can thread them instinctively, winding into suburbs, then a back road, and a turn off under the trees of the bushland by the coast. Knowing where to stop. Getting out into this seductive heat and onto the track and down the hill with all the rest of the day waiting for me, expectantly, somewhere just ahead. Through the bush, to where it pauses, falls back and the land gives way to the sea.

A patch of grass overlooking the ocean, and the waves…

This is a point break - a place where, when the wind and the tides are just right - the long slow powerful swell of the wild Tasman Sea slides in, diffracts around the point, and perfect waves are generated, slipping down along below the cliffs, letting those who are good enough - and sea wise enough - to surf them parallel with the shore, into the shallow bay.

It’s always been a little secret, passed on amongst the local surfers and not easy to find otherwise. Not visible from any road and not advertised - at least until the internet came along. Here on this grassy shelf you can find them sitting, on the right day, waiting for the waves to form up, and telling the stories they tell about themselves, and the even wilder ones they tell about their mates.

I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, and nothing much seems to have changed, but time does move on, and all those other kids got older too, and some moved away, and some died, and some just…. forgot or were themselves forgotten, and other kids turn up each year like Spring flowers, like Summer waves.

But collectively, there is a memory. The board riders are clannish and like all clans they have their rituals and their remembrances. Here on this hill above the ocean of their love they keep a memorial, as informal as they are.

It is decorated with the things the sea offers - shells and water smoothed stones, but also with powerful talismans the riders bring - the snapped fins of broken boards; little quantum shards of a shared dream.

I pass by, down the steep path to the sand and out along beach, which despite the perfect day is almost empty of people. Looking back I can see the point I have come from, the small grassy terrace, and the little creek which creeps sinuously out of the hills and forms a lagoon of fresh water behind the dunes, perfect for children to play.

I was one of those children once, with proud and patient parents encouraging me to walk the whole way, the promise of a picnic lunch and a swim as my reward, but for tens of thousands of years children have played here, and parents have fished and hunted. This is the land of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, who have lived here time out of mind. If you know where to look, you will find shell middens all along this coast - piles of white shell bleached of their colour by sun and salt and time - the leftover of meals of pippis and oysters, and fragments of stone tools.

Now plastic bottles wash up along the shore, and pieces of perspex, glass, nylon fishing nets and rope…

There are other things too. Like all the land around this city the sandstone and conglomerate is underlaid by beds of darker stone - black, soft and shiny - quite starkly beautiful in the sun.

Coal - the reason the Europeans first invaded this part of Awabakal and Worimi land. Initially, picking it up from exposed seams along the cliffs, then digging deeper, making the first coal mines. They even built a railway - and the first railway tunnel on this continent - to carry the coal away. Each year there is less of it to see, but all you have to do is look.

The sea will always win

The waves are lapping around my feet - cool on my hot skin - but I have to be careful, because the winds and the tides have brought other visitors.

The Bluebottle, Physalia physalis !! Essentially the same as the Atlantic Ocean’s “Portuguese Man ‘O War.” There are fleets of these miraculous creatures drifting in, driven by the wind. Not actually a true jellyfish - this incredible feat of nature is actually “not a single animal but a colony of four kinds of highly modified individuals (zooids). The zooids are dependent on one another for survival. The float (pneumatophore) is a single individual and supports the rest of the colony. The tentacles (dactylozooids) are polyps concerned with the detection and capture of food and convey their prey to the digestive polyps (gastrozooids). Reproduction is carried out by the gonozooids, another type of polyp.”²

But Oh!! Those tentacles…. they can stretch for a couple of metres and all swimmers beware… Unlike the fearsome Box Jellyfish found in our tropical waters the Bluebottle won’t kill you, but you will never forget their embrace.

This one is newly washed ashore and still alive, the muscles around the air sac pulsating rhythmically in a wave like motion, but the sun will dry it our soon enough and there is nothing I can do. Behind me, the last high tide mark is littered with the dried out husks of a million Physalia looking like washed up plastic bubble wrap - their air sacs pale and brittle. They make a pop pop pop sound just like bubble wrap if walked upon - a popular game for children who soon learn that you cannot safely step barefoot on the tentacle of a freshly arrived Bluebottle like this one.

I walk back to the point, and scramble below the cliffs. The stones here are jumbled and tumbled and sea wave washed and smoothed. This is the land being broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, and ultimately into sand - the smallest quantum of something that can still be recognised as stone.

Each stone is an inadvertent artwork, laid down as soft sediment once then covered, buried in the deep deep printing press of the earth, flushed with mineral rich waters and coloured, compressed and preserved.

Now the sea - like a good curator - is uncovering them one by one and setting them out under the sun for anyone, Poets and Boardriders, to admire, and this is one that I love. I bend to take a photo, my back to the waves, and of course as I do that one extra large wave breaks and the dry unblemished stone is splattered with fat salt drops of water.

If I wait, they will be gone in a minute - evaporated - but I take the photo anyway.

Mandala: Mixed media - solidified sand with iron salts, time, and added seawater

And then I come to the cave, and the last wave of this day, the earth itself curving. reaching, arching above me as I walk beneath….

We are all Earth Surfers

After that I climbed back up and sat here by the surfer’s memorial for a long while, to watch the ocean. I took a wide angle view to show the whole scene in one photograph, and that’s why everything is slightly distorted, as you can see below; not quite the shape it really gets to be - but memory is like that too.

I was here once. I went away. Now I’m back. Soon I will be gone again.

Just like a wave

Forming

Curving

Cresting and Collapsing

Then forming again.

Space and time and whatever physicality we temporarily happen to have, and all the infinite quantum waves of love.

Afterwards:

I walk back up the the track, past a tree which reminds me of my Father - not that he literally looked like a tree, but because he had that solidity, that sense of clarity, of reaching for life and accepting it for all that it is, as I now try to do.

And of course, because I know he would have loved a tree that looked like this, as I do, also.

********************************************************************

This post is my fair weather sequel to the stormy day of Splash Zone

More On Quantum Consciousness:

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/brain-consciousness-quantum-entanglement/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=128000

1. George Musser: https://mindmatters.ai/2024/01/the-theory-that-consciousness-is-a-quantum-system-gains-support/

2. https://australian.museum/learn/animals/jellyfish/bluebottle/