Before all that, the above is what I glanced up and saw last evening.
I had an email from a friend this morning about the violence in Israel and Gaza. I responded that we are a savage and mostly unintelligent species so I try to find what beauty, peace and serenity I can.
The marsh is beautiful this morning and was last evening.
I thank Ron for a link to a short video about life on a ship in the Chinese squid fishing fleet. Rather a different experience of sea than mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4ozyeFZImk
I was curious about how much the world’s population has increased during my lifetime. In 1940, a year before I was born but close enough, there were 2.3 billion of us. Now there are just over 8 billion, and that despite our slaughtering maybe 200,000,000 of our fellow men, women, and children. In trying to learn just how many have died in wars during my lifetime I googled and found this shocking entry in Wikipedia. I recently wrote that after sex war may be our most common activity, but there have been more wars than I ever imagined. Here is the link to that page, which is an education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
In 1992 on a nonstop passage from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, after rounding Cape Horn we sailed west of the Falklands. One evening as the sky darkened I was startled to find a loom of lights as though from a major city off to the northeast. I had my first GPS device on board and thought I knew where we were and there should have been no land to the northeast, but I went below and studied the chart just to be sure. As we saw the following day the loom came from a vast fishing fleet that stretched horizon to horizon and beyond.
Carol and I saw a similar fleet off West Africa ten years later.
8,000,000,000 is a lot of stomachs to fill.
While I don’t even like heights, I have often thought that my sailing has more in common with some mountain climbing than it does with most sailing. A visually stunning documentary recently added to Netflix, RACE TO THE SUMMIT, about two Alpinists who became engaged in a competition to climb sheer mountain faces fastest, caused me to see some similarities between myself and the two climbers and some very big differences. Were I a climber I would surely climb free solo as they did. If you watch it, I advise not reading reviews first. You will find most say it ends tragically. I don’t think what happens is tragic, any more that it would have been tragic had I died at sea decades ago. Here is a link to the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzoqk5jdMs
Two poems from the anthology, BEING ALIVE:
A few have suggested that I write my autobiography. I have been doing that now for more than fifty years. It just needs editing.
I have given the idea some thought and decided that I won’t make the attempt for two reasons.
One because I don’t want to write about my childhood, which I have dealt with in two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2wOtKmrh4&t=117s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27K9pP_-DaM
And that’s enough.
The second reason is that I don’t know how I could write about the women in my life without compromising their privacy.
The revision is related to the above. I have often said that I am a writer more than I am a sailor. I have decided that is not true. Writing, sailing, and my relationships with women are all equal. Subtract any one of them and I am not me.
That Wikipedia page is indeed shocking. The number of deaths during the Three Kingdoms War is especially striking, considering there were only approx. 300 million people worldwide at the time.
ReplyDeleteI agree, particularly when you realize that they had no means to kill on an industrial scale as we do now, except famine. It was mostly done one to one and one by one. The Chinese poetry I read often is about their wars. Of men being conscripted. and never coming back or coming back decades later broken.
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