It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.
And if California slides into the ocean, as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this hotel will be standing until I've paid my bill.
On June 14, 1998, I pushed off under quiet gray skies from Nags Head, N.C, in the American Pearl, a 23 foot long boat made of plywood and fiberglass. I planned to row 3,637 miles across the North Atlantic to France. I was alone. There were no chase vessels. No one planned to drop food or equipment to me along the way. The physical goal was easy to explain: I was attempting to do something no American and no woman had ever done - to row solo across an ocean.
Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.
This Maya is everywhere. It is terrible. Yet we have to work through it. The man who says that he will work when the world has become all good and then he will enjoy bliss is as likely to succeed as the man who sits beside the Ganga and says, "I will ford the river when all the water has run into the ocean."
Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.
It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [sic], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?
If they don't have that extreme addict personality, you can never understand how a guy can blow 300 or 400 million dollars. If I have to live at the top of the world, I also have to live at the bottom of the ocean. I don't know how to live in the middle of life.
Saltwater heals, healing referring to its various forms; tears, cleanses and heals the soul; sweat, cleanses through labor; the ocean, heals in all its forms.
For the life of me I can't understand why BP couldn't go in at the ocean floor, maybe 10 feet lateral to the - around the periphery, drill a few holes, and put a little ammonium nitrate, some dynamite in those holes, and detonate that dynamite, and seal that leak. Seal it permanently.
There is a point of no return after which warming becomes unstoppable - and we are probably going to sail right through it. It is the point at which anthropogenic (human-caused) warming triggers huge releases of carbon dioxide from warming oceans, or similar releases of both carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, or both. Most climate scientists think that point lies not far beyond 2 degrees C hotter (3.6 degrees F).
There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.
Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves.
Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could.
If someone were to ask me whether I believed in God, or saw God, or had a particular relationship with God, I would reply that I don't separate God from my world in my thinking. I feel that God is everywhere. That's why I never feel separated from God or feel I must seek God, any more than a fish in the ocean feels it must seek water. In a sense, God is the "ocean" in which we live.
Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration.That's our natural state - to celebrate - as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state.
Participation is bliss because the whole universe is celebrating. Every moment it is celebrating. It is a great celebration, a constant celebration. Only we are not part of it. We have detached ourselves and are in misery. Man is in misery because of the mind. The flowers are participating in the celebration, the moon is participating, the stars are participating, the earth is participating, the oceans are participating, the air and the clouds - everything is participating in that continuous, eternal celebration.
Jesus! it is the name which moves the harps of heaven to melody. Jesus! the life of all our joys. If there be one name more charming, more precious than another, it is this name. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our psalmody. Many of our hymns begin with it, and scarcely any, that are good for anything, end without it. It is the sum total of all delights. It is the music with which the bells of heaven ring; a song in a word; an ocean for comprehension, although a drop for brevity; a matchless oratorio in two syllables; a gathering up of the hallelujahs of eternity in five letters.
We live in an ocean of words, but like a fish in water we are often not aware of it.
Bringing up teenagers is like sweeping back ocean waves with a frazzled broom-the inundation of outside influences never stops. Whatever the lure-cars, easy money, cigarettes, drugs, booze, sex, crime-much that glitters along the shore has a thousand times the appeal of a parent's lecture.
We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
... there was purity and there was the dream, and the adventure, and there was the counterculture aspect. It was like shove society, shove the nine to five, shove the rules ... we're just going to follow our hearts, treat each other well, eat well, and enjoy the ocean. It was not for money and it wasn't for fame ... that's what we're gonna do ... purely because that's what our hearts want to do. That was amazing.
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