Hilton Head Island: a banner day and three poems

Today is another glorious day in the marsh.  Sunny, 70F/21C.  Slight wind.  Another morning of my oiling interior wood.  After sanding the wood around the companionway and the cabin floorboards, I decided against painting the companionway white and am applying Deks Olje 1 as usual.  On sanded wood this is a coat a day which is partially absorbed as it dries.  No set number of coats.  Just applied until it looks right.

However that is not why this is a banner day.

I dutifully go to a doctor every six months for a skin cancer checkup.  I finally found an acceptable practice here and was checked this morning.  For the first time in as long as I can remember I was not chopped.  Only a few spots were even frozen.  Hooray!

This was not entirely unexpected.  I am experienced at identifying skin cancers and I did not believe I had any.  I didn’t.  No biopsies.  No stitches.  Hooray again!

Edward Murphy, Jr.’s Law—and yes, I looked that up—is not only wrong, it is dangerously wrong.   ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” is not normal.  Almost always things go as they are expected and intended which as an expert on airplane crashes has observed causes a false sense of security.  He also points out that in the case of airplane crashes often the cause is not a single failure but a cascading series of failures.  Anecdotally this is also my experience in sailboats crossing oceans, which is why I try to fix problems before the voyage unravels.

I think I have posted this poem here before, but not for a few years.  I came across it this morning as I have in the past in the BEING ALIVE anthology.

I am also currently reading ONE HUNDRED LEAVES, a translation of the HYAKUNIN ISSHU, a collection of short Japanese poems from the seventh to the thirteenth century.  My Kindle edition includes an illustration before each poem.  Here are two illustrations and poems.