From the first time I read Emerson, I understood my inherent need to look at the natural world as a metaphor for my inner world. As without, so within, as within, so without, were my watch-words long before I had heard the name Hermes Trismegistus. So, for those who know me, it wasn't hard to guess that my journey the last few months - the boat, the islands, the ocean - would find their way into my musings and my understandings of this of my life. I called this new love an Odyssey from the beginning, paying homage to a book that has influenced me most of my life. I called it that before I knew that I would be actually sailing the ocean, through islands, trying to make my way to my new home.
Boats have been a physical part of my life since I was young. Even after I found my way to the river town, Sacramento, boats called to me and I felt a continuing hunger to find my way back on them. Bryan and I reconnected over his purchase and refurbishing of his sailboat, a Kelly-Peterson 44. Then of course there was the sail from the Virgin Islands to Fort Lauderdale. Boats apparently had a deeper meaning for me, given the role they were playing in my life. And so I began to think about boats and they're meaning for me, especially as was making a sailboat my home. Jung believed the house a metaphor for the psyche so it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine this boat was a metaphor for Bryan's psyche and mine.
The Sufi's used the boat in the sea as a metaphor for escaping the mundane atrocities of daily life and floating peacefully on the Sea of Spirit. Rumi, the Sufi mystic, uses the boat as a metaphor in his poems, but took further. In his poetry he often talked about the fact that the sea is not always peaceful, that it is sometimes a Sea of Chaos, and that the boat is a metaphor for our physical and spiritual strength, the integrity of our "boat" telling us much about our own state. Rumi called every man to learn if his "boat" is seaworthy, if he will sink or sail.
Living on a boat, making my life on the sea, I think more and more about the state of my "boat." It struck me the other day, plugging leaks and sopping water up during a Florida deluge, that holes in the boat are necessary, how else to find your way into the cabin and out, to let air in and out, to help water found the right way in and the right way out? But there are holes that don't serve, And in the case of the boat I'm on, undergoing deck refinishing and therefore full of holes, some un-patched necessary holes and some manmade holes awaiting repair, what did that say about me who now calls this boat my home? What is the integrity of my vessel?
I suppose I'm saying that this search for a boat was not just a physical search but a spiritual one too. And refurbishing it, getting it to suit you, reflects I think, getting your Self in order. For the Captain of this boat, it all started when he was at the hard, horrible place of getting through each hour, each day. Then there's the cleaning up, the getting into order. fixing the essentials, hosting the dreams of what you might do until you can determine what you will do. And there's the sailing, which is what sailboats were born to do, for they are themselves as much as they are reflections of us. Ships have souls, worked into the very wood and fiberglass of them. Sail on them, make them yours, and the souls, yours and its, join in an alchemical way, like the divine marriage.
The storm passed. The leaks dried. I'm still waiting for the decks to be finished and in the meantime, I"m making my life on a 44 sailboat with the man I love. I think I'm still discovering the ships I'm sailing, both Susurru and the ship of my soul. I'm still refurbishing and refreshing, determining what repairs are needed, what I need to make my boat seaworthy and what I need to make my ship the ship I want it to be. I suspect this is what all of us are doing, every day of our lives, making ourselves seaworthy and testing the waters. The seas are not always smooth, but a good vessel, one with good bones, can navigate even troubled seas and help us find our way home. May all of us have good ships, worthy vessels.
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