“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” --Kenneth Grahame
(Although sometimes, JT, knots or no knots, I think sailing is all about one thing getting accidentally caught on another thing. The main halyard wrapping around a spreader, the jib getting tangled around the forestay, the bowline running underneath and getting fouled in the prop, the main sheet wrapped around my foot, my foot accidentally knocking over the cooler and spilling the ice and beer…yeah, I think I’m ready for the America’s Cup…)
Yes, some of those things are bound to happen. It is little known, but Murphy’s Law was discovered under sail, not on land. That is why keeping everything Bristol fashion is important. Just curious, but how the hell does a bowline end up adrift in the water? Aren’t they supposed to be neatly coiled on the foredeck? And what is this prop thingy? What prop? And spilling the ice and beer? That comes close to criminality!
Whether poetry or philosophy, or philosophical poetry, it is all about un-tieing knots. Of course, one needs to know how to tie knots first in order to undo them. :-"
As far as knots go there are five basic knots I learned as a scout that have proved as useful sailing. Square, Sheet-bend, Half-hitch, Bowline and the Figure-eight. Guess perhaps the two bindings I use to secure a rope to a cleat could loosely be considered knots as well. It takes far more diligence to untie the knotting done to a free sheet thrashed about in a wind.
Kites planes and sailboats all have the most ingenious of inventions in common… a foil.
And on an other subject. One that causes me a degree of despair. We have a bird feeder suspended from a Sheppard’s hook. In its fashioning, where the hooks meet the shaft there is a pinch point. I found a bird this morning with its leg caught in this pinch. I ran out side to see if I could free it and in the process of getting its leg free discovered it was badly broken with compound fractures. That instant, the thought came that I should just twist its neck, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I pinched the mangled foot free and let it go. It did fly off, but I wonder if what I had done was the “right” thing to do. Will nature simply do what I could not. In the end nature does anyway.
Paganism? There have been a few threads regarding paganism and magic. And many of them get stuck in the muck of proof and labeling.
Perhaps paganism is a world view of inclusion rather then exclusion. A view whereby mankind can not be isolated from the world it lives in. There is much talk about individual responsibility. That to me is a separatist and disconnected view. Paganism seems to me to be a world view that does not begin with separation but rather with connection. The sensation that despite the failure of my senses to perceive the connections, the connections are there, for those with sense to see.
From a world view that all is connected it isn’t so difficult to believe in “magic” but beware of that term. To the magician, it really isn’t magic at all, while it remains quite magical.
To the OP, I grew up on a 32 Irwin and later lived on a 42 Hunter. Some of my best memories are of sailing and the dock life, notably riding the bow in 6’ swells off the outer banks of North Carolina. Alas, I’ve been land-locked for damned near a decade now.
Anyways, I do indeed have one such memory that stuck with me.
I was dropped off early one morning at the Montessori school that I attended for the latter part of my elementary education and took the wooden deck to the right of the building that circled around back to the student entrance (where you took off your ‘outside’ shoes and put on your ‘indoor’ ones). The air was crisp and dew frosted the fallen leaves (turkey oak and red maple, I believe). I noticed a small bird–perhaps a finch or flycatcher, I don’t recall–in the middle of the patch, evidently asleep. I inched towards it and with the utmost care picked it up. Though it initially struggled, it calmed down soon thereafter and I showed it to some of my classmates as they arrived and then set it free after I had soaked up their oohs and ahhs to my content. I went inside and proudly boasted to the teacher who was, to my surprise, cross and told me to immediately wash my hands because the poor thing must’ve been diseased. Of course it was, right? Beautiful things like that just don’t happen, right?
We all ooh and ahhh at everyone else’s highlight reel - and there isn’t anything wrong with that. But it is the small insignificant moments that fill our memories. I don’t believe in magic, but then I’m not sure that magic doesn’t believe in me because it shows itself to me not often enough. But if there is magic, it is on the water.
Is there anything more comforting than finding a patch of kelp in a small bight, dropping the pick, crawling into a bunk and being rocked to sleep in the gentle swells?
Life, beginnings and endings. birth/death, alpha/omega.
I am the beginning and the end.
That is damn odd. A whole universe contained within I am. A child that dies before birth, living a beginning and end? A person goes into coma, and seven years later comes out of it. An end and a beginning and an end and a beginning… It could go “on” like this for a very long time without having taken any time at all.
I wonder if our linear nature isn’t fucking with us just a bit.
Perhaps it is inappropriate to speak of after-life or prior-life, if “I Am” is what it claims.
Concurrent lives? Each a beginning and each an end. Maybe the same beginning and the same end. Chronology problems, not with standing, but perhaps it is merely linearity rearing its head.
A lot of possibility.
And there is one that boggles the mind. You is just me on another path, same beginning same end. It gets to a point where you just can’t kill your self and you can’t kill yourself either.
But on a positive note, yet another friend has purchased a kayak, (which is hardly comparable to a sailboat), and that’s one more person that I can get to go kayaking this summer.
Reflection on self: I wonder when calling a spade a spade, if I have involved the editorial aspect of adding “a talking out your ass” spade, as normally I haven’t worked with any spades that talk or have an ass and I garden and have played cards. Go figure. Personal note: try to recognize when I have done this and try not to do it again, and maybe remember to forgive when I do, (human nature) so help me, me.
Now perplexing that not, really, a spade as in anti-jive, but then who knows. Help is on it’s way says 411, however don’t hold ur breath, unless doing some sort of mantra. In fact, we both know of reductionism where that leads, but if not here it goes: Very basic exposure of elementary logic, a basic difference, and either or, we may or may not.
Understand this: There may not be a remedy at that point, only an Rx of truly inescapably irrelevant, and non synthetic alchemical formula? And if perchance there is which i do not doubt in the slightest, there is no scintilla of evidence, that it has ever worked, it has always led to sorry end, the case of Manet and and his friend with a bitten off ear, or of seasons in hell
and friend, so elementary Dr. Watson.
