sailing

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.

When a great adventure is launched with a powerful thrust, fatigue in the muscles and doubts in the mind are swept away by a fullness that moves life along like a breath from the depths of the soul.

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is for breaking a man, even though he may a very strong one.

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?

When I'm all grown up, come what may,I'll build a boat to carry me away

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded _ not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, __here can be no better place in the world than this.__enderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn__ matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book _ word by word _ or crossing a country _ step by step _ each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside _ ports were places of freedom.

His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.

Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me

She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.

and I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain...

hark, now hear the sailors cry, smell the sea, and feel the sky let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic...

Midnight sail and moonlight. I remember sunset, and gentle breeze. Leaving the city lights behind, and gazing at the moon. Mountains of clouds. Waves slapping our boat. It was easy to forget that love has no direction, or need for compass. Let it guide you to its destination. ~ Fidelis O Mkparu, 2016

To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, __hrough seas that keel has never cut before._ If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.

I have a hunch the world is darker than I could ever imagine and there is less reason for hope than I am able to see. It makes me grateful there is only so much I can see, and I am left mostly with questions. Grateful, also, that hope is not a reasonable thing. Though I have seen my share of darkness, I am spared perceiving much of it. And here is why I hope beyond a reasonable doubt: I think that as the darkness grows, it makes the dim lights that are left seem brighter. And the darker it gets, the brighter the light appears, until it is so luminous, eventually, even falling shadows are filled with it.