Shadows is as I am sure all of you know the title of a novella by one of our finest writers. It is also what the sun is casting this morning for the first time in a long time. Blue sky with a few puffs of white clouds. South wind ruffling Spanish moss.
The USGS Skull Creek rain gauge shows 9.91” of rain in the past seven days. A lot, but nothing like the 20”-30” once forecast. There has been some damage. The roof of a gas station collapsed and some homes have been flooded and roads damaged. A thousand year storm it was not. Even if it had been the greatest storm in the last thousand years, I expect it would be far less than another thousand years before it was equalled.
We walked to GANNET this morning. There was a little water on both pipe berths, but much less than I expected reinforcing my opinion that the direction from which the rain comes is decisive. From the bow and the forward side of the spray hood, not much. From the stern and captured by the spray hood over the companionway, much.
GANNET’s bilge is a narrow sump, 18” deep and a few inches wide. It was almost full. I used the portable hand pump to clear it.
It is very pleasant to see the sun again.
From NASA’s Earth Observatory site comes a counter-intuitive post about ice blocking the Northwest Passage.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153166/sea-ice-chokes-the-northwest-passage
In reading some ancient Chinese or Japanese poetry each morning I am struck, as I have been in sailing the world, how much we are mostly alike in times and places. Mostly we want love and peace and enough to eat and a little joy. Why, I wonder then, do we repeatedly let monsters of ego—Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, to name a few—kill millions of us?
Here is a poem by Pan Yue written almost two thousand years ago. I include the introduction because I like the legend of his beauty.
Of modern Western poetry I am presently reading the works of Frederico Garcia Lorca who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. This morning I was very impressed by his ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias’, a bull fighter. I do not like bull fighting. I do like the poem which is too long to include in this entry, but here is a link. I believe you will find it worth your time.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/161884/lament-for-ignacio-sanchez-mejias-65a9932a17868
“Go with the flow” was popular with hippies in the 1960s. I was in my 20s then, never a hippie, never a believer in going with the flow. Neither was Tao Qian, who lived 1600 years ago
Too early for wine today. So later, To Life.
No comments:
Post a Comment