“From Montauk Point”
By Walt Whitman
I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,
Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing,
(nothing but sea and sky,)
The tossing waves, the foam,
the ships in the distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps --
that inbound urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shores forever.
Even before I began this sea journey, I gave myself up to the currents and prevailing winds, to the present tense and the moment. I made my plans but if they changed, I changed with them. I wasn't always this way. I fought my fate, fought life's urgings towards the new and different with a dogged determination to have my way and no other. And even when I leaped at last toward a different future I still fought myself, only giving in to the urges of life after a struggle. It took me a while, but learned at last that listening to the small still voice of Self and Soul was not as hard as I had made it out to be all these years. For me, at least, there was a peace when I was on the right path and so I closed my eyes and walked that peace step by step, like a toddler, faltering at first then stronger and steadier, more graceful.
So during that last jump offshore, when Susurru covered too much distance too quickly and we found ourselves looking at arriving in Fort Lauderdale around 2 AM as opposed to the 9AM we had planned, we needed to find a place to wait. Bryan had done a lot of reading about the Bahamas and the weather was cooperative, the seas relatively flat. This lighthouse was our waypoint before we crossed the Gulf Stream and the guides said it offered mild protection if you anchored there, but only on a day of good weather, slight winds, small swells all of which we had.
Isaac Light is striking, the structure built for the 1840 Expo in London and then shipped to the Bahamas to act as a beacon. It's stark and lonely, the iron a bit unforgiving despite its austere beauty. There used to be lighthouse keepers stationed here, but not anymore. Now the light is digital, without the blinding sweep of the traditional lighthouses of my childhood, but steady and sure, bright enough to be seen for 23 miles. There is a lesson in that kind of shining, the simple determination to be yourself, do what is yours to do, and to burn bright, your bright, your glorious, non one else's.
It's a rare opportunity in a busy world to spend so much time in one place with so few distractions, to watch its changes over a span of time, to give our complete attention to something (or someone). A few weeks together on a sailboat changes your rhythms, especially if you are like me, bound to appointment books and the work day rush from one place to another. I'm not sure I've ever been so under my own command, driven by my own currents and weather. It's strange and wonderful gift I've been given at fifty-three, a world not stopped but slowed so profoundly I can at last catch my breath and get my bearings, finding who I truly am without the culture of distractions that seems to make up modern life. Of course the real trick will be if I can sustain this sense of peace and mastery once I enter back into the work force. Time will tell this as it seems to tell all things, another lesson of sailing, patient vigilance and considered action.
Once the anchor was set, we ate lunch and then each found our own ways to pass the time. It still astonishes me the solitude you can find with another person in the small space of a sailboat. I think it's the first time I came to understand a bit Rilke's urging in his Letters to a Young Poet: I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other’s solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness . . .
I am coming to peace with my own solitude, seeing it as just a part of me, something unifying me with others as opposed to the isolation I always believed it to be. I still have my moments. It takes a while to change a lifetime of being and feeling. I understand more and more on a visceral level how the therapeutic relationship gives us a place over time to experience life in a more positive way which we can then bring into the other relationships in our life
Much of my time was spent sitting in the cockpit, watching the subtle changes of Isaac Light throughout the day and documenting it with my camera and working it into my body too, a nearly holographic memory of sight and sound and smell and feel, not just the beauty of the lighthouse, but the sound of the ever-present wind, even on this 'mild' day, rushing past the ears, setting the lines to singing and wafting the birdsong from the island, a symphony of calls and cries. As you can see, I was captivated and greatly moved by my time at Isaac Light and yet I couldn't tell you really what specially I learned. No, this was a lesson of the body, of states of Self, of senses and sensibilities. It was for me the perfect Zen state, what every meditation from this point forward seeks to achieve. This was my Nirvana, my heaven, this still, waterborne moment, alone and not alone, the way we are in this world I think. It reminds me of another quote by Rilke: To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is nothing we can choose or avoid. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if this were not so. That is all we can do. How much better to realize from the start that that is what we are, and to proceed from there. It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far.
Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
Isaac Light taught me many things but this was chief among its gifts: to understand myself and to proceed from there.
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