Water with a Razor’s Edge

Tags

beauty, Creative Nonfiction, cruising, Essay, inspiration, liveaboard, memoir, Nature, ocean, paradox, sailboat, sailing, sculpture, water, waves

Photograph by Sebastião Salgado

One of my favorite pastimes when we were sailing was watching the wake the boat made slipping through still waters. The glassy surface of the ocean rose up creating a razor-sharp edge as it continuously slipped along beside us, like a wave that never breaks.

Not every wake was like this and so fascinated me. It came only under perfect conditions. When the sea was clear and still, smooth as a mirror. When the wind was non-existent or so light it was like a baby’s breath. When we were sailing lightly on a zephyr’s breeze, or motoring through calm, still waters. When the wind rose and rolled, the wake would change, shot over with foam, its curl not so distinct, its edge not so transparent.

I’ve searched everywhere for a photo of a wave or boat wake that captures what so fascinated me, but the closest I can find are images of sand dunes with that razor-sharp edge following the undulating line of its crest. Sand dunes have their own haunting beauty and they too shift over time, but even so they don’t do my memory justice, for the wake I watched was alive, vibrant, constantly moving, a steady companion.

It was sculpture in motion, the way it  curled up continuously creating that sharp, transparent edge. A slight undulation along the lip as it held its form was mesmerizing. Watching it, I thought, I never want to be anywhere but here. And, I never want to lose this. I sought to etch it in my mind so it would always be part of me.

Of course, it wasn’t just the sight of that never-ending curl, that razor-sharp edge trembling in the sunshine that moved me. It was the whole experience. The still sea stretching out forever, the soft swish of the hull parting the seas, the whisper of the wind against the sails.  It was the tang of the salt in the air and the balmy breeze stroking my skin with silk gloves. It was me, bare-legs stretched out against the warm teak decking, sitting absolutely still in a sea of motion.

It was my family tucked away with me within our living, moving, breathing home, miles and miles from anywhere, safely embraced by the sea and sun and breeze.

If anything clearly captures the essence of what it was like to live aboard La Gitana all those years, it was the poetry of moments like this, repeated over and over again, like glittering pearls strung along a string.

I think now what fascinated me then was how this was such a clear example of the ever-changing changeless: The constant subtle variations in the wake’s shape that made it so mesmerizing to watch and yet changeless in its constancy, it never-ending formation. And while it lasted for hours, it was ever a new thing, newly created moment by moment.

I wanted to reach out and touch that razor’s edge, but I knew if I did it would  dissolve beneath my fingers.  How could water, so malleable that it melts through your fingers, create such a sharp, clear edge and hold it so long?

These things fascinated me then as they do now and fed my interest in the sublime ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this beautiful world we live in.

My Roman Oaks

Tags

beauty, cycle of life, life, Nature, oak trees, photography, Roman ruins

Recently we had visitors who had just returned from Italy. We talked of how easily you can stumble upon ancient Roman ruins lying beside the road or tumbled along the edge of a parking lot. Paving stones from some ancient road where the legendary 13th Legion once marched; the foundations of a fallen aqueduct; broken urns and shards of pottery. None of it cordoned off to protect. None of it of much value.

It’s a common sight for the native populations, but an unexpected pleasure and exciting discovery for visiting tourists. In some ways these ruins impact us more deeply than the ruins we find with tourist guides or behind museum walls.

As we were talking, I pointed to the “Roman Oaks” in the meadow outside our window.

I’ve come to see these fallen giants, the ruins of ancient oaks that lie scattered in the hills outside our home, with the same sense of tender regard and respect. Once they had been huge and thriving ecosystems, little cities providing shelter and food for a vast variety of creatures large and small. Some dominated the landscape for centuries. Children were born and grew old and died in full view of their robust splendor. The trees that now surround these ruins were tiny saplings or green shoots or still bound within round acorns when these giants spread their roots across the hillsides and threw vast shadows across the land.

I’ve come to love these ruins. There’s beauty in the sleek stripped limbs, sculptured by the wind and rain and passing predators. Beauty in their moss and lichen painted bark. Beauty in the way their sharp ruins rise like flames against the sky. Beauty in their hollowed trunks and upturned roots. I walk among them with their fine mulch crumbled underfoot and feel a sense of timelessness. The past and present tangled together.

I’ve gathered a few photos here to share with you.

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Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass

Tags

beauty, desire, loss, meditation, Meditation at Lagunitas, Nature, poetry, Robert Hass

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Wheeling Away on the Isle of Pines

Tags

beauty, Isle of Pines, Nature, poetry, spirituality

Certain poems I return again and again to tap into a state of mind that I was experiencing while writing them–often a deep sense of harmony and exhilaration. As if I was a still leaf being carried away by a swiftly moving stream.

The following is such a poem. It was written when we were sailing through the South Pacific and visited Ile des Pins (Isle of Pines) in New Caledonia, a group of islands just south of Sydney, Australia.

The island is well-known for its beauty—glassy, turquoise waves spilling onto sand as white as sugar and fine as flour. Walking ashore was like wading through drifts of powdery snow—each step leaving deep footprints.

The island is covered with tall, narrow native pines.

While walking through these trees, I became mesmerized by the beauty of the island. The sound of wind blowing through the branches, the sun slanting through the leaves, the fragrance of the pine-scented air, the greenness that enveloped me–it all flowed together and seemed to take me to a place beyond myself. Later, remembering how I felt and wanting to capture that,  I wrote this poem.

Ile des Pins

Tree ferns on Isle of Pines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a path
green and thin
that wends away
and wheels me in

Rising, falling,
tree by tree,
lanced by light
through sward and leaf

Breathing pines
that breathe in me
like heady wine
flowing, free

Green above
and green below
no in, no out,
no high no low

Winds are water
everywhere
I walk on water,
float on air

Drifting mindless
round the bend
bursting out
bursting in.

The hypnotic rhythm and rhyme help to capture that sense of being swept away, unable to resist. A deep underlying harmony carries me to a point beyond rational explanation, where the boundaries between self and non-self, this and that, disappear, and something extraordinary just beyond my grasp opens up before me.

Reciting this poem to myself I re-experience that sense of peace and joy and power. And whatever had troubled me before begins to fall away.

What moves you beyond yourself? What resources do you tap into to find a sense of tranquility or renewal?

Sated by Scent. A Quest

Tags

beauty, desire, Fragrance, Olfaction, Perfume, scent

Lately I’ve become obsessed by scent.  Perfume, to be more precise.  I seldom wear it and know little of it, which is why this obsession is so strange.

It all started with the quest to find the perfect perfume for my daughter’s bridal shower a few months ago.  I wanted something intimate and earthy, something that would literally become her.  A signature scent that would be all her own, by which she and others would identify her. It had to be perfect, like her–warm and rich and exciting, and deeply satisfying.  Something that made you want more.  That you would never forget and never forget wanting.

And in this quest I tumbled down a rabbit hole into a rich and sensual world where one single sense seldom privileged—smell—was given full rein to romp and roam and sate itself in scent.

We humans rarely give ourselves that pleasure.  We privilege sight, touch, sound, taste, and the feel of things.  Poor scent is a step-child to the other senses, neglected, forgotten.  Not so for other species where the sense of smell is primary with a full palette of colors and a symphony of sounds.

Often when I sit on our front patio overlooking the surrounding hills and valley below, my little dog sits with me, looking out as if as mesmerized by the beauty of the landscape as I am. She seems totally enraptured, her nose raised, nostrils quivering, her whole body trembling in delight.  But she’s reveling in smell not sight.  She’s drinking in that delicious flood of scents flowing uphill from the valley below.

I imagine her savoring each scent the way we savor each note when listening to a symphony, carried away by the trill of arpeggios, deep thundering drums, long sweet notes like violin strings, the soft low moans of cellos, blasting trumpets, cascading piano keys, all washing over her, tumbling together, fading away, like movements in a symphony of scent that I am deaf to.  How I envy her!

We’ve long known how smell and taste are intricately connected—in fact, we can distinguish far more flavors through smell alone—inhaling and exhaling—than we can by our tongues.

What’s new and interesting is how scientists are discovering a similar interconnection between smell and sound that gives rise to a new sensory perception quaintly coined “smound.”  If this new science bears out it will only confirm the old science.  In 1862, the perfumer G. W. Septimus Piesse noted how “Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees,” and he developed an “octave of odour” to measure those scents.

Musical metaphors are used in describing perfumes, which are said to have three sets of “notes” that unfold over time, each interacting with the others to create a “harmonious scent accord.”

As I wandered along countless cosmetic counters in the search for the perfect perfume for my daughter, spraying sample scents on slips of paper and waving them in the air, or daubing them on my wrists and forearms and inner elbow, knowing how scents change when applied to skin, mixing with our natural pheromones and warm pulses, I was savoring those musical notes: light florals steeped with sandalwood floating on a musky base.  Amber and lotus blossoms with a hint of peach.  Cardamom married to rosewood.  Lavender and rosemary.  Vanilla and violets dampened by oak moss.

But there was more to the whole process than scent–the name had to be perfect too, evocative and mysterious, lyrical and alluring.  The shape of the bottle had to be sensual or simple, daring or dreamy, as fitted the fragrance and the name.  It all had to flow together.

I finally found it, amazingly. The perfect perfume for my perfect daughter.  She loves it, and her lover loves her in it. So I’m happy.  But still hungry.

Still wanting more. More of my own to daub on earlobe and wrist, to line along the window sill like colored glass or exotic orchids.  Scents to soothe and stir, arouse and savor.

I want to collect scents the way I do books.  To sit quietly, alluringly, on my shelf, its richness and beauty and promise in full display, just waiting, waiting, waiting, for the perfect moment when I take it in my hands and lift the stopper and let the initial scent rise, and all its sweet layering, lingering notes play over me again and again.

I want scent to light up every neuron in my body.  To flow through me, light and airy, like champagne bubbles. I want to hear it taste it see it feel it popping all about me.

I want, I want to be.  Sated in scent.

Wabi Sabi Writing

Tags

beauty, Impermanence, Japanese art, poetry, Wabi Sabi, writing

One of the things I love most about reading is discovering in another’s words something about myself that I had never realized or articulated in quite that way.  Even more rewarding is finding this coming in a serendipitous way, as happened this morning.

I was searching for the poem “Joy Ride” by a blogger called “Wabi Sabi”, a poem I had read recently but failed to save. In my search I came across other blogs featuring the practice of wabi sabi and stumbled upon a book called “Wabi Sabi for Writers” by Richard R. Powell.  I was struck by how he seemed to describe my writing practice in a way I had not yet realized.

Now I had long been fascinated by the idea of wabi sabi, the perfection of imperfect things, how the little seeming flaws in things add character and beauty and depth.  But I hadn’t realized how much it influenced my writing.

Contemporary wabi-sabi tea bowl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On my shelf is the book “Wabi Sabi –The Japanese Art of Impermanence” by Andrew Juniper, which I took out again to revisit.  He writes of how difficult it is to define the term:  “Wabi Sabi is an aesthetic philosophy so intangible and so shrouded in centuries of mystery that even the most ambitious Japanese scholars would give it a wide berth . . . talking about it only in the most poetic terms.”  He goes on to say that it “seeks beauty in the imperfections found as all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing.”This description struck a chord with me.  It is an idea that I return to often in my writing, what I was trying to capture in my post on fog and mist when I wrote:

“I think photos of mist and fog speak to me because they ring true. They reveal in stark and dreamy notes how ephemeral it all is, this life we live, the forms and forces of nature. All in flux, in constant motion, emerging and dissolving over and over, without end.

For what could be more constant and eternal than the fleeting? Or that which emerges, fragile and half-formed, from the fertile wombs of earth and stars, seas and seeds, dreams and desires and the lusts of ages that brought us all to the brink of being.”

The post on “Birthing and Rebirthing” attempts this as well.  I wrote:

“We live in a universe of relationships in which everything is connected to and influenced by its surroundings. We are all tumbling together in the wash of time and space, breaking against and polishing each other.  Shedding what we were in becoming what we will be.

What if all we are is a constantly becoming with no end in sight, with endless sights and sounds and relationships and experiences to sculpt and renew us? Birthing and rebirthing each other, over and over, ad infinitum, en potentia.”

Juniper also tells the story of the monk caught between two hungry tigers who reaches for a wild strawberry and savors its sweetness, right there while facing his own impending death.  He claims wabi sabi is like this tale, “an expression of the beauty that lies in the brief transition between the coming and going of life, both the joy and melancholy that make up our lot as humans.”

Without remembering where I first heard this tale, I wrote about it in my post “A Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry.”  I end the post with this:

“Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, and there truly is no escaping, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

In his introduction to the book “Wabi Sabi for Writers” Powell writes about how a “heightened awareness of both beauty and suffering leads some people to despair,” and how to move beyond that.

One way to understand Sabi is to see it as a step beyond sensitivity to things, to see it as a deep awareness of the poetry at the heart of all things. The curious magic of this literary awareness is that while you are focused on the poetry in each object of attachment, your ego is quieted. To have a sabi mind you allow ego to rest in this un-voiced poetry. This new understanding of Sabi as an antidote to despair was Basho’s most important discovery. Sabi, he realized, was central to the Way of Elegance.

The Way of Elegance encourages a creative response to challenge and difficulty and produces eccentricity, pluckiness, fortitude, and resourcefulness. Yet sabi by itself can be overdone. The depth and character that comes from this clear-minded approach to life can make you feel mature, seasoned, and even superior. This is where wabi comes in. Wabi is the humbling factor, the stabilizing reality of the vastness and complexity of nature and our own place in it. When the two are balanced, they produce a lightness in a writer’s work which Basho called “karumi.”

Finding that balance between the beauty and fragility of things without falling through the gap into despair, is something that I strive for, in life as well as in my writing.  But it’s not always easy, as I write in “Saving, and Savoring, the World.”

“The unbearable lightness of being,” is how I think of it. I’ve always loved Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” but I fell in love with the title long before I ever read the book.  The word “unbearable” can mean something so heavy and burdensome that we can barely bear up beneath it.  But it can also mean something so ineffably sweet that we can barely contain our joy.  It’s the second meaning that resonates with me.

It is this quality that made me fall in love with the poem “Joy Ride” by Wabi Sabi.

I finally found the link so you can read it here.  The poem is all about the “impossible joy-ride” we embark upon at our “naked, gasping birth.”   Here’s a few of my favorite lines to entice you:

. . .  how a river of pleasure runs through your nose

when a rose shrugs off its holy fragrance

and oh,

feel how your heart pumped as you jumped on your bike

willing your eight year old legs to ride forever

how you soared, when you stopped on the road to Yosemite, awed

and had to lie on the hood of the car to keep from falling into the stars . . . .

Emily Dickinson once wrote that “life is a spell so exquisite everything conspires to break it.” So exquisite.  This unbearable lightness of Being.

Related articles

• Wabi-Sabi – Beauty in Impermanence (everydaygurus.com)
• Wabi-sabi Rainbow (grandmalin.wordpress.com)
• Esprit Wabi by Axel Vervoordt (justinlovewithberni.wordpress.com)

“A Scattering of Rocks” — Zen in the Garden of Eden

Tags

beauty, human consciousness, Nature, Pago Pago, poetry, writing, Zen

Sometimes there’s no other way to capture a moment–a way of seeing or being in the world–than through poetry.

So while I prefer writing prose (I know I’m no poet), I find myself returning again and again to certain poems I have written, as if they were traces in the sand leading me back to the very time and place where something singular and significant rose briefly to mind.

I think of these as my Zen moments.  A sudden clear perception of something so extraordinary and subtle, it can only be experienced in faint, fleeting whiffs.

But the scent of it lingers in mind long afterwards, as if waiting to be re-released, like rosemary or thyme planted along a garden path waits to be crushed underfoot.

It’s like the story of a student begging his master to explain the meaning of Zen. But the master, cruelly it seems, keeps putting him off until one day as they were walking together through the mountain laurels the master suddenly exclaims, “There!  Do you smell it?” So happy at last was he to help his young student grasp what he was after.

It’s like that. Nothing after all was ever hidden.  It’s just waiting to be crushed underfoot.

The poetry I write attempts to capture some of that, or at least to trace the footsteps leading to the moment where it all came together, where the heel of my foot accidentally, spontaneously, released the scent of something rare and fleeting and not to be forgotten.

I’ve shared a couple of these poems already on these pages, in “Walking Among Flowers,” and “Night Howls.”  Although what I experienced and tried to capture in those poems was something more visceral than a mere whiff, more like the thwack of the master’s cane coming down on my back, although just as fleeting.  The poem I share below, “A Scattering of Rocks,” captures something more like that walk through mountain laurel.

We were living in Pago Pago, American Samoa, aboard our sailboat La Gitana.

My husband and I were working to supplement our cruising kitty, he as a welder in a local boatyard, while I tutored Korean children who lived in small communities scattered among the foothills.  Every afternoon I would row ashore and walk back through the lush green mountain valleys along dirt roads to the children’s homes.

I loved those walks.  Often I practiced what I called “no-thought,” emptying the mind and just letting sights and sounds and smells wash over me wordlessly.  But more often I was overcome by the spectacular beauty I saw all around me and my relative insignificance, humble in the midst of such awesome power. And then one day it happened.  I smelled it.  A scattering of small rocks along the wayside was the trigger.

          A Scattering of Rocks

Many times I walked this way, a dirt path

parting from the road through yonder valley.

And always, the high green mountain wall

stared down from its dizzying heights,

while the spacious valley opened up,

opulent and serene.

But only once was I struck by a mere trifle,

a scattering of small rocks tossed haphazardly

across the path.

There was no significance in this.  No meaning.

Yet the sight so lightened my footfall, 

I might have been a leaf blown yon,

or a pebble tumbling carelessly away.

So amazing were my antics

even the high mountain wall and verdant valley

broke loose, doubled over in laughter.

Now I cannot pass this way without us sharing,

like old friends, a light skip and chuckle.

I don’t know if this poem will mean anything to anyone other than myself, but I’m hoping those who have had similar experiences will capture a whiff of what I was after.

What’s significant to me is that while I was steeped in the deep beauty and sensual richness of that tropical landscape that could, quite literally, take your breath away, it was something as mundane and homely as a scattering of small rocks that was the catalyst to this singular experience.

The awesome beauty that surrounded me melted away into mere laughter–a shared experience, but not the thing itself, not that which gave rise to the laughter.

Not perfection, not imperfection, not perfection and imperfection together, but the sudden acute realization of the perfect imperfections that permeate life and percolate almost imperceptibly to the surface. Spontaneously, like alliteration, like rhythm, like rhyme. Like verses from the nursery which make no sense at all—until they do.

“With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

we will make music wherever she goes.”

It’s like that, making music wherever we go.  When suddenly, we slip upon it, there we go too–tumbling carelessly away.  And everything breaks loose in laughter.

[The poem has been revised since first posted, moving some of the line breaks as readers below have suggested. Let me know what you think.]

Riffing on Roses

Tags

aesthetics, beauty, flowers, photography, roses

Lately I’ve been playing with roses, photographing them at different stages in bloom, at different times of day, against varied backgrounds, just to see what I could capture.

I love this first one, the delicate color, the fat soft petals, open, exposed,  framing the center. The way the gentle light catches the edges of the petals and swirl in toward the center where the deeper shadows lie. 

The eye moves from the edges spiraling ever inward, round and round toward the tight bud.   This is where the eye rests, at that center, probing the inner depths, where the spiralling continues past where we can see. 

The spiral is a symbol of infinity, an inward eternal flowing.  Water spirals, wind spirals, dancers spiral, galaxies spiral. Thought spirals round and round, ever inward, toward a place past knowing.

This next one stops my heart, I don’t know why. 

The color is so tender, the center so closed, the outer petals so utterly open, leaving the center defenceless.  There’s a feeling of vulnerability, a careless disclosing, an utterly unstudied becoming.

Here it is again from a different angle.  See the way the light flows upward through the petals?  It breaks my heart. 

And the one below . . . I have no words.Now we go outside to where I pluck the roses from the only bush that has survived the deer and gophers.  It’s a tall, gangly bush that grows outside our bathroom window where we see it every morning, watching the roses burst and bloom from one stage to another. 

I cut only the ones that grow below and above where we can see and bring them into our home–orphans, offerings, honored guests, gracious gifts.

This first one is stunning.  The contrast between the deep rose and deeper blue.  I’m thinking flags flying, sails billowing, kites dancing across the sky. 

Hotdogs? Baseball? Blasting trumpets?  There’s something heroic, cheering, utterly wholesome and deeply comforting about this photo. 

That shade of blue in contrast with bright colors heralds all our summers, all our bright hopes, all our pride and enduring optimism.  Endless summer.  It lives like a flame in our hearts, in the faces of laughing children, in the roar of jets, in  fireworks bursting against a twilit sky. 

This deep blue sky is the background for all our hopes and dreams and unites us wherever we live in the world.  The whole rounded globe is cupped in this blue.

The next is especially sweet and hopeful.  The way the light shines through it conveys a sense of innocence, purity.  There’s a freshness here.  You can almost smell the sweetness.

The following seems more serene, mature, even though it is the same rose against the same sky, but the light is different,  There’s an intensity here, a romantic allure.  I’m thinking candlelit dinner, silk stockings, love letters strewn on a bed.

The one below is pure happiness.   I can only smile and smile.

What more can I say?

The following photos evoke something else.  The rose and the clouds seem to drift across the sky, lightly as feathers. 

 We sense movement here, of passing time, fleeting moments.  

There’s a dreamlike quality with the soft focus, the soft petals, soft as the clouds they float upon.

I’m thinking of a rowboat rocking gently on a pond, fingers trailing in the cool water, eyes gazing at the sky above, clouds gentle as a breeze gazing downward, stroking soft skin.No we go indoors again. 

These roses are shot against a gold wall. I like the way the pink  and gold play against each other. The contrasting colors startle each other, but they do not clash.  The boldness of the gold deepens the warmth of the rose, releasing its sweet aroma. Can you smell it? 

There’s a tropical feel here.  It reminds me of a conch shell I have sitting near my bath, the deep rose at the center of its hollow, the broad lip curling outward turning shades of gold, the whole sculpture a study of pink and gold, of curls and whorls and crowns.  The smooth inner lips reflecting the light, the rough and rugged shell absorbing it.

This following was shot out of focus against rippling water. I filtered it to see what would happen. 

It’s hardly a rose anymore, hardly water, it’s all melted together, water and rose. 

There’s a surreal quality, what a rose might look like painted by Van Gogh, underwater, floating among the seaweed.  A still face just below a rippling surface, holding you with its gaze.  Trying to tell you. You strain to hear.  What is it?  What do you hear?

The next is also filtered, shot against the travertine tile. Romanesque, don’t you think? An old world quality.  Ivory and old lace.There’s a coolness and stillness here, yet the light still brightens. 

I’m reminded of ancient statues, the way the light wraps around them, tempering the cool marble with its warmth.  The skin of the rounded limbs, the muscled thighs, the bent elbows, broad shoulders, soft and silky to the eye’s touch, the embracing gaze.

Can you feel the cool, soft petals?

The following is one of my favorites.

She’s just past full bloom, just a shade before fading, still buoyant, full faced, gracious in her giving, nothing hidden, nothing withheld.

The sepia tones capture that inner light, the golden glowing, the gracefulness and graciousness. We know where this ends. But the end is not here, not here at all, not in her, not in this elegant awakening, this gathering awareness, this full-throated opening to all there is.

Here are my lovely ladies, gathered in a crystal vase, growing old together. See how the petals sag ever-so-slightly?

You want to cup them and hold them up, you want to feather your face against them, you want to say, it’s okay my sweets, I love you still, I love you ever more, I love you just this way.

Never has your beauty been more achingly tender than in its fading, its falling away, it ethereal effervescence.

Your beauty is past knowing, it’s all past knowing.

Sea Saga, Part III – First Stop in Paradise, the Virgin Islands

Tags

adventure, bareboat chartering, beauty, Dreams Come True, lifestyle, Nature, sailing, snorkeling, Virgin Islands

“This is where it all begins,” Dale whispers to me we take off, rising through layers of clouds thick as fog. “This is where we leave the beaten path forever.”

We are leaving Puerto Rico International airport aboard a tiny six-passenger airplane bound for the British Virgin Islands and nine days aboard a bare-boat chartered cruise. This was to be our first step in testing the waters of living about a cruising yacht before deciding to consummate our long-delayed dream of sailing around the world.

“Start slow–and taper off” is the motto for island living we’re told by the manager of the West Indies Yacht Charters at Maya Cove as he greets us and our good friends Steve and Kathy with rum punches when we arrive.

We whole-heartedly comply as we sail away the next day on our O’Day 37 and anchor off lonely Norman Island, which is said to be the inspiration for Robert Luis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Somehow I’m reminded more of something written by Jules Verne as we set off early the next morning in the dingy to explore the caves hidden in nearby cliffs.

There’s an eerie beauty that clings to the island as we slip though long, cool shadows cast by the dark cliffs rising steeply from the water. Above us large sharp-winged albatross circle the pale sky and screech like ancient, flying reptiles once might have done. While in the seas below, I can almost feel the whirlpool that could soon be sucking us down to some prehistoric paradise beneath the ocean. We pull the dingy onto a small, rocky beach where two angry gulls swoop down from the cliffs, diving noisily at us. Soon we are snorkeling toward the caves, finding that the watered world below holds all the primeval beauty and excitement we anticipated.

We tack across the channel toward Virgin Gorda the next morning, where we stop briefly at “The Baths” and climb among the giant-sized boulders strewn along the beach.

Later we press on toward Spanish Town, where we wander down a narrow, squall-puddled lane amid wild orchids and flaming Jacaranda trees to find Fischer’s Cove Restaurant. There we dine on spicy-sweet pumpkin soup and the most succulent lobster that any of us can remember tasting.

The next day we sail into Gorda Sound and spend a quiet evening at Robin’s Bay, cleaning and cooking the tuna that Kathy caught on the way. In the morning we head to Mosquito Island and anchor off the reefs where we go snorkeling.

We circle past beds of plump brain coral and wander through the lavender gardens of lacy fan coral where fat butter-and-black striped fish seem to hover like bees. Swimming past the rocky point, the sea becomes so deep that we seem to be tottering on the brink of some dark, fathomless cavern. We dive down into these cooler waters and are suddenly swallowed by thousands of tiny silvery-quick fish. Always, lying just at the edge of our vision, wait the pug-jawed barracuda, like wary watch-dogs. We surface on the far side of the island and sun ourselves in a quiet, sandy cove before hiking back across the island through an intricate maze of sea-grape, palms and cacti, then swimming out to our boat.

That night we anchor at the Bitter End Marina, an appropriate name it seems. Sleeping under the stars on the deck, looking out between Saba Rock and Virgin Gorda, it seems we’re perched on the very edge of the Caribbean with all the Atlantic and the dark shores of Africa hidden in the night before us, blowing its hot jungle-scented breath across an ocean to touch us where we lay. From a nearby boat, men are singing a low, rowdy drinking song, floating across the water like remnants torn from a colorful, pirate-ridden past. Even the stars seem half-submerged in a night swollen with dreams. It’s our first night of no-rain, and we lie there in our pool of moonlight, talking quietly and sinking slowly into sleep.

The next morning as we head back toward Tortola the rain that avoided us the night before is close on our heels and Steve and I are busy snapping shots of the dark, but lovely on-coming squall. Too soon it’s upon us and I barely have time to put the camera away before we are heeled over, topsides awash. Kathy is furiously reeling in her fishing line, her bikini top blown down about her waist, while she slides helplessly over the side. I just manage to grab hold of her before she’s washed away, when Steve calls for her to run and get the soap so he can take advantage of this tropical shower. Within fifteen minutes the squall has passed and I have my camera out again. This time I make the crew line up and pose, asking them to look as much as possible like drowned rats. Steve, especially, seems well suited for the task.

The northern shores of Tortola are exceptionally lush and inviting with several deserted coves becoming our own private play grounds.

Here the water seems spilt from a paint box—deepest indigo flowing into turquoise, and then rinsing out to a pale sapphire on the soft, white sand—while behind rise groves of palms and steep, forested mountains.

Cane Garden Bay is but a wider, populated version of this.

We lay at anchor in her large generous mouth with run drinks in hand, a kind of easy languor settling over us as our senses become well sated. On shore we measure the progress of an old man on a donkey riding out of the steep hills, disappearing in the foliage, and crossing a stone bridge.

Nearby a boat plays at spinnaker-riding. We watch as the wind catches the brightly colored sail, lifting it high about the mast like a giant kite, while swinging on a line drawn between the clues, a young woman squeals with delight.

Toward evening, colors grow mute and sound emerges—faint tinkles, soft drumming, a syncopated beat. The two sleepy beach bars are finally stirring and soon a battle of the steel drum bands is in full swing. The hypnotic, calypso music is wafted through the balmy night, across starlit water, luring wayward sailors ashore. In time, we too succumb.

We make our last anchorage at Little Harbor on Peter Island. Kathy and Steve catch a red snapper and king fish on the reefs that we barbecue for supper. The moon rises plump and round over the mountain, dancing briefly with roguish clouds before another squall blows in. We sit below the Bimini in a womb of water, none of us wanting to go below and put the night to sleep. When we do it is one by one, each along, like candles that burn out slowly and separately in the night.

It is a rare occurrence, these last nine days in the British Virgin Islands—a trip that surpasses even our inflated fantasies of it. The best part is the naturalness of it all: the rising to a shared breakfast beneath the early morning sky, the daily scrubbing of decks, dishes and laundry, then festooning the life-lines with drying clothes; the fascination of snorkeling and sensuousness of sailing, when the sun and rhythmic seas soothe the soul even while vigorous winds and drifting vistas stimulate the mind.

There’s the feeling that this is life at its most eloquent and elemental form—a life worth pursuing. We leave the islands with one conviction firmly in mind: It’s time for our dream of sailing around the world to begin ripening into reality.

But before we do, we take one more bareboat charter into the tropics—this time to the Bay Islands of Honduras with Dale’s father.

[Stay tuned for Part IV of our Sea Saga—The Bay Islands of Honduras]

Walking Among Flowers

Tags

aesthetics, art, beauty, flowers, French Polynesia, human consciousness, Nature, poetry, sailing, Tao, writing

Landfall in Nuka Hiva

Out of the dark blue sea rose a lush-green mountain ribboned with cascading waterfalls.This was what we saw after 29 days at sea, our first tropical landfall on our round-the-world journey–the Marquesas Islands

Walking through the village on Nuka Hiva down narrow, winding roads, past pastel-colored houses surrounded by gardens overflowing with flowers and dense tropical foliage, melting in the heat and humidity and the perfumed air . . . . . I felt physically and mentally assaulted, overcome by the intensity of the colors and the abundance of the beauty that surrounded me.

EK Photo & Art Layers of Blue

Perhaps it was because we’d been so long at sea, or because this was our first glimpse of a tropical paradise. Or perhaps it was for me as it has been for so many artists and travelers coming to the South Pacific for the first time.

Colors exploding all around me, shattering the senses—sight, smell, and sound washing together. Undulating waves of color, wrapping around me, streaming through me, carrying me away.

EK Photo & Art Luscious Pink

This sense of being awash in, or assaulted by, color, stayed with me and revisited me often on our travels through the South Pacific. Sometimes it was a soft, sensual immersion. Sometimes a harsh, brutal slaying. It knocked me off my feet and broke me open. I swallowed it whole.

It all came together one day in Moorea in the Tahitian Islands. La Gitana was anchored at the end of a deep cove, with green mountains walls on one side and a valley opening up between them.

Anchored in Moorea

On the other side was a bluff with a small cottage surrounded by a flower garden that trailed down the rocks toward us.

EK Photo & Art Magnolia

Each afternoon magnolia tree blossoms would drift down into the sea and our daughter rowed among them, gathering the sweetly scented flowers.

As beautiful as it was down here on the water, I kept wondering what it would be like up there, in the garden on the bluff, walking among flowers.

At the time I was reading Creativity and Taoism – A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry by Chang Chung-yuan. He writes of the “interpenetration of Nature and Man” by which ”the artist reveals the reality concealed in things [and] sets it free.”

One of my favorite drawings in the book is Flower in Vase by Pa-ta san-Jen(1626-1701). There is nothing beautiful or delicate or uplifting about the drawing, but it affected me deeply, physically, like a punch in the gut.

Chung-yuan explains the drawing this way: “No attempt is made at beauty or refinement of form, merely the primary essentials of the object are given. Here we see innocence or the quality of the uncarved block at its best. What is within is manifested without.”

EK Photo & Art Orange Tulip Painting

The “uncarved block” is elsewhere identified as “original simplicity,” “simple, plain,” “obscure and blunt,” “unattached and depending on nothing.” It has “no artificial efforts” or “ intellectual distinction.” It is “not self-assertive but disappears into all other selves” thereby “moving within the forces of the universe.”

Heady stuff. All I know is that the drawing affected me much the same way I felt when being “assaulted by color”: something in me is shattered and released at the same time.

The poem I wrote that day in Moorea captured something of that.

EK Photo & Art Poppy to the Sky

(Robinson Cove, Moorea, French Polynesia)

Walking among flowers

Drowning in scent

Petals assault me

Cool and bent

Pistils are pounding

Stamens stab

Colors exploding

Stun and grab.

Walking among flowers

I die a keen death

Bloodied and trampled

Bourne by my last breath

I lay like a light

On the garden wall

Then swooping, swallow

Flowers and all.

Beauty is not always gentle and soothing, or sweet and sensuous, or uplifting and reassuring. Sometimes it can be blunt, brutal, shattering. As “red in tooth and claw” as the untamed wilderness Tennyson wrote about.

I doubt beauty is meant to simply sooth or sate or inspire us, but to break us apart and open us up. Much like all great art must do.

Think of Van Gogh’s starry nights, or Picasso’s abstracts, or O’Keefe’s flowers.

EK Photo & Art Fiery Sunflower Painting

Was Monet’s impressionism or Seurat’s pointillism pretty ways to put paint on canvas, or ways to reveal how light and color and shapes and all manner of things break apart and open up and take us in. Ways to become immersed in the stream of things.

“Walking Among Flowers” is my way to revisit again and again that shattering into the stream of things.

[Many thanks to EK Photography & Art Gallery for use of the beautiful photographs and paintings. More can be found at http://ekphotoartgallery.wordpress.com/ ]