1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.
2.
The question is,
what will it be like
after the last day?
Will I float
into the sky
or will I fray
within the earth or a river—
remembering nothing?
How desperate I would be
if I couldn’t remember
the sun rising, if I couldn’t
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.
3.
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
so why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
4.
Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?
Voyager is so happy, because it’s the bravest satellite of all. It has gone the furthest. And it’s not lonely, because it’s talking to us. It phones home. And it tells us all about the wonderful things that it’s seeing. There’s a whole universe to explore, and it’s just leaving our Solar System right now. It’s very brave and very lucky to be doing what it’s doing, so it’s not going to get lost. It’s traveled further than anything we’ve ever built has traveled before. It’s actually showing us the way.
It might have been safer for it to just stay home, and stay inside a building, but then it would have been sad forever, because it never would have done its purpose. It never would have discovered things. It’s all a wonderful story of great discovery and success, and it couldn’t have happened if Voyager hadn’t been brave.
It’s not really the fact that everything always has a start and an end, it’s what happens in the middle that counts. What do you while you’re alive? What do you do while you’re laughing? And I think we’re doing exactly what makes Voyager joyful and as happy as it could be.
Think about the fact that you’re a little bit like Voyager. In that you’re going to go see the world, and you’re going to call your mom on the phone and tell her about the wonderful things that you see. You wouldn’t want to spend your whole life hiding under your bed and never seeing anything in your whole life, you want to be able to do what makes you happy and joyful and learn about things to discover. You might be the person that discovers something really important for everybody else on the world, but you can never discover that if you just hide and only do things that are safe. So think about yourself a little bit like Voyager. What makes you laugh? It’s not just staying, hiding underneath your bed safely at home.
”
– Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, reassuring a five-year-old who was worried about the Voyager satellite (source)
Grand Bank fishing schooner Bluenose, from “Goose-winged and Heading for the Open Sea” series. W.R. MacAskill Nova Scotia Archives accession no. 1987-453 no. 4026
Balaenoptera musculus, largest animal ever to live on earth, coming by to check us out. I’ll post video later, but here are some gifs courtesy of the mobile app.
Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks Empty of you Tell him that we were made On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo Winding along your inner mountains Unheard by us And find its way out Leaving behind it the future Dead And ours
When you will not see again The whale calves trying the light Consider what you will find in the black garden And its court The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless And fore-ordaining as stars Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs Tell him That it is we who are important
We sleepyheads got going a little late today: hook wasn’t up until 0608. Anyway, we’re off. Goodbye Santa Cruz; I hope to come back and spin the pokestops on your pier some day.
I’ve discovered that one difference between passage-making on a sailboat and on a powerboat is that on a powerboat there’s more time for sightseeing. Today the wind was light and southwesterly, which was ideal for the longest leg of our trip past Big Sur, the Monterey Peninsula, and Monterey Bay.
There was so much to see! Images above:
– The fog lifting to reveal Point Sur.
– A flyby by a black-footed albatross off Cypress Point. I saw more albatrosses today than I’d previously seen in my entire life. They’re amazing!
– A badly framed shot of a humpbacked whale sounding. There were humpbacks everywhere.
– The huge flock of sooty shearwaters we plowed through in Monterey Bay. We also saw pink-footed shearwaters, rhinoceros auklets, common murres, red-necked phalaropes, some kind of murrelet, pigeon gulliemonts, Forster’s terns, western gulls… The birdy highlight for me, though, were the aforementioned albatrosses.
– My dad steering us into the anchorage in Santa Cruz.
– The view of the pier IRL.
– The view of the pier in AR. Ahhhh! There are raids happening right now just a few yards away!
It’s okay. I can wait. The plan for tomorrow is another crack-of-dawn departure and the final leg of our trip. With luck we’ll soon be at the West Coast mecca for boaters and Pokémon players alike. Wish us luck!
