Anatomy Trains

Last week, while the entire world was experiencing a loss of liquidity in the strange but useful energetic metaphor for love called ‘money’, I took off for as much literal liquidity as I could manage.

The one part of it you don’t want liquid is the boat itself, 35′ of ‘frozen spit’ (fibreglass) designed to keep the water out, but otherwise designed to dance between two fluids, wind and sea.

Here are a few images from the time I spent on the ocean:

The first few days, while the landlubbers were hot, we were in a grey dome of fog, a couple of hundred feet wide, like the grey dome of my brain, fried from assembling the book. Islands and rocks and the occasional fishing boat would loom up out of this greyness - reassuringly on schedule due to our radar and GPS - and then fall away again. The sameness, hour after hour, gets to you, but the water itself is in constant motion, even under the fog.

The huge seals of Matinicus Rock, sensing us somehow in the fog, set up a racket, shuffle into the water, and soon their heads are around the boat - curiously doglike in their confident wariness. Overhead, sea ducks (guillemots?) shoot out of the fog like bullets with wings, careening purposefully across our brief field of vision in straight lines.

Add the liquidity of night, slowly weaving itself into the fog in these summer evenings, long after the fog itself has gone orange and purple with the sunset.

The wind makes the air liquid, suddenly coming up on our second day, the mountain of Isle au Haut bouncing the fog into the air above us, the sails sculpted into shape by the fluid flow of the air molecules. The scud, tattered remnants of the fog, flies above us like the grey flags of a retreating army.

The boat is in constant motion, and the only time I stepped ashore in those first days - onto a dock in Frenchboro to find some eggs we missed packing - it is the solid dock whose floor seems to be undulating, not the boat. This illusion persists after the cruise - my house’s floor seems liquid too as I walk on it.

The tide brings another aspect of liquidity, that of pouring. The tiny motion occasioned by the moon (mostly) on the meniscus of the ocean means that 10 feet of water pour in and out among these islands twice a day. Sailing with the tide is a joy; sailing against it a challenge. As we round Ironbound, with its tall cliffs of granite looking in the afternoon light like a set of Easter Island faces, stone giants locked into the cliffside, waiting perhaps for their king, since there is a huge throne at the end of the island, an absolute straight ‘chairback’ (natural, not quarried) with a rounded back and arms of stone on either side …

Ooops, got pulled off into solidity - we were describing the liquidity of the tide - when we rounded between Ironbound and Jordan, we could literally see that the water was higher on the other side of the passage, and we were fighting that pouring water for every inch. But Tycha is true, and we made it uphill to the Porcupines and Bar Harbor.

The stark, shardy liquidity of the seawater when we drop into it on the next hot morning from the ten-million year liquidity of Penobscot’s soft-edged tawny pink granite rocks, the velvety liquidity of the quarry pond we dive into on Green Island to rinse off the salt.

The next day, sailing past Placentia, we see a strange shape on the shore that looks like a round orange tent or something.  We tease the boat toward shore to see more closely, and it is the body of a baby humpback whale.  About the size of a pick-up truck, this poor unfortunate is upside-down on the shore, its flippers and flukes akimbo, the hydrodynamic streaks of its underside visible on top.  The underside should be white, but the sun has tanned most of it a vivid orange. A bird perches atop the carcass, which seems to have dried rather than bloated, although liquefaction in the heat of July and August is an inevitability.
Sad death - why? - of a fellow mammal.  We tease the boat in close, but due to tide rips, the bold shore, and fluky wind, we cannot disembark to offer more than a hail and farewell across the water.  It reminds me of my earlier encounter with the whales on the Stellwagen Banks (see the first entry in “Sea Stories” under Tom Myers in Explore).
The last morning, we awaken to a tumble of the heavy humid air you find in the morning in the tropics. We know we’re in for some wind. Today the dance between the wind and water is passionate, heavy breathing, sweat, and the occasional uncoordinated bump and grind. The waves - the swells from Bertha, the cross chop from today’s wind - look like pewter mountains coming at us, but we rise each time to their peaks, only to find a hole in the ocean on the other side. The boat drops into the hole, the spray flying over us, the shrouds whistling, and the boat, bucking like a horse, must be reined into position second by second, a totally Zen exercise that keeps us in the very moment for hour on hour, while the sun and wind burn the skin off my face.

Gone is the yielding, accommodative liquidity of a calmer day. Pushy, solid, metallic, with a jarring, slapping force, water becomes another element. Thales thought everything was made from different forms of water, and in the middle of this run I believe him, as everything around me seems water-born.

By the time we turn into our bay and the still-building wind chases us up the river (”And stay out …”), we see the result of another form of liquidity: Fire. While we were gone a freak fire took out one of the last local shipyards, the huge wooden building going up quickly in a series of explosions - propane, varnish, paint cans, acetylene. As we rounded up in front of it, there was a gap in East Boothbay like a kid with a missing tooth, a couple of tug-boat hulls still smouldering among the wreckage. No one was hurt, but a lot of folks are out of work.

By the time we are at the mooring, the wind is over 30kn, and has a solidity that makes it hard to speak into. White caps like a Barbara Cooney painting keep us from the mooring, and we have to seek the shelter of an island to get the sails down and creep ignominiously back to the mooring under engine. The wind is so wild we must leave everything aboard for tomorrow and we barely make it to the dock in the little dinghy, so insistent is the wind.

One more liquid: the absolute gratitude of a hot shower after all those days at sea.

(more…)

This morning in the early cool Quan and I turned away from the dramatic caldera view where all the pricey hotels are perched like birds (or guano, viewed from afar), and walked down the long apron of farms on the far side to the Aegean where the mountain of Anafi floats in the sky some miles out to sea. Oh, how I’d love to sail these islands! A few observations:

The old CD’s hang on strings and flash in the breeze to scare away the birds from the farmers’ crops.

The donkeys have stalls that are pumice caves into the sides of the cliff. The donkeys work all day carrying the tourists up the steep side of the caldera from the ferries and cruise ships to the tourist towns on the lip (“Asses for the asses”, quips Quan). With no natural water on the island, all the tomatoes and grapes and figs – as well as the donkeys – look dry as can be – and we wonder how they grow.

A large flat empty Go-Kart park filled a forest of every driving sign known to Europe, where they obviously teach the island kids how to drive (too bad so little of it sticks – we are honked at, swerved by, and it’s a miracle more accidents don’t happen). The ‘streets’ are very small; I imagine they use the numerous little dune buggies and ATV’s that are lying fallow tourist-free months of the winter.

After an hour’s walk, we cool our feet in the velvet sea, and meet an old widow gathering the red volcanic stones on the beach backed by badland formations of water-shaped pumice. I really have so little Greek, but as soon as I speak one word, she assumes and is off at 60 miles an hour, so I soon am at a total loss, but the gist is Obama up, Clinton down, Bush way down, and everything is expensive and going downhill. I am ashamed – I couldn’t carry on one coherent sentence in any language about current Greek politics, and this woman – certainly neither educated nor cultivated nor English speaking - knows more than many Americans about our election.

In the little harbor next to the beach, only two traditional caiquies remain; the rest are all fiberglass motorboats. Though the nets look the same as they ever did.

It was a long, hot walk back up the mountain, a couple of thousand feet up the squiggly road, back from the women sweeping the front terraces in their ‘jammies, back from the mustachioed men on their mopeds, back from the gangly children shuffling to school, back from the shady figs and hard green grapes, back into the indulgent world of the island visitor – the poolside sibilance of the Italian, German, and French sybarites taking showers on an island with no natural water.

Later, back in the tourist town, the Americans from the ships shuffling through the narrow streets among the Tag Heuer watches and €2000 gold chains and tacky Santorini fridge magnets have plastic stickers with numbers stuck to their chests designating what? Their boat? Their bus? Does it get any worse than this? Could they be any more like cattle?

Quan asks me what I will remember most, and the answer is the process of buying some religious icons in Oia, involving several trips to the dark below-street shop with its arching roof sheltering the angels and archangels, madonnas and apostles. We share coffee with the muscular painter with the ravaged face while both the art and the relationship are weighed, as that all figures in the final price in this negotiable culture. Another high point was sharing an hour of songs – trading back and forth between the English pop and the Greek traditional, using guitar and the tiny bouzoukis in the Mad Greek Michaili’s taverna served by the Californian who is a dead-ringer for Misty – hair, body, carriage, attitude. Bless her and keep her safe.

Within a few years, it will be difficult to find someone who speaks good demotic Greek, and the old signs, with the old Cyrillic alphabet, will be on sale in the shops as novelties. I suppose it is a good idea for world understanding that we are headed for one world culture, but in the particular, it just seems sad and demeaning to the establishment of centuries of individualized points-of-view.

George Kousaleos - head of the Core Institute, a ‘competing’ Structural Integration school, our host for this trip along with his wife Patty, and my co-teacher for the course part of it - is a large man. Not tall, especially, but broad and expansive, with an Old Greek smile that widens to take in his cheeks, and then his ears, and then the whole wide world. George has a flexible agility (he runs the morning stretch class, comfortably encircling his foot with his bear-paw hands where my thin artisan fingers are fighting my short hamstrings and bound hips to claw for my ankle), belied by his stocky legs and almost ponderous movement through his daily life. I feel like a darting hummingbird beside his calm ursine warmth.

His large head is necessary for all those brains; his bull neck was forged in rugby and football; only large ribs could encircle such an expansive heart. His girth probably started with a Greek’s love of food drenched in olive oil, but additionally I recognize a brother: he has been playing the role for a long time that I took up only a couple of years ago – that of padrone. He is literally a grandfather, with a Greek’s eye on the extended family of cousins, nephews, and assorted associations. But he also has his school, his employees, his students, and the bodywork community under the umbrella of his generous care and intelligent concern, and after a time this responsibility begins to induce a gravitas inside that expresses itself in a belly-centered heft outside. Or so I’ve found.

George and I have just discovered we were both at Harvard at the same time. He completed his degree in the famous Soc Rel (Social Relations) program that was sweeping Harvard at the time, which combined psychology with sociology in a world-saving reach. The real opportunity at Harvard, besides Widener Library, was that one could get close to truly great people, leaders in their field. While I was being inspired by the sonorous tones of the playwright William Alfred in Mem Hall and Shakesperean actor Dan Seltzer and learning evolution from Ernst Mayr, George was across Prospect St. in the William James building, riding the elevator with B. F. Skinner, and learning how to bring people back from addiction with Erik Erikson. What a playing field!

But the late ‘60’s was a rebellious time. George’s rebellion was not to complete his doctorate, a sin with which his father (“I’m only thinking of you and your future!”) beat him about the head. I was an English major (what you did in those days if you didn’t know what else to do, though for me it was a way of getting credit for what I would have done anyway – hang around the Loeb Theater), a year ahead of George.

In the ferment of ’68, when the ‘revolution’ was in full swing and the cops in the baby blue helmets clubbed us out of University Hall, I dropped out – not because of the heavy-handed response to the war protest, but because in the aftermath there was suddenly a socialist revolution, with all these classes on Fanon and third-world farming that I, television revolutionary, found unutterably boring. My father, a Republican WASP, kept his counsel with only a disapproving look on his face that well I could read. I went on to a minor college to study with Bucky Fuller and never went or even looked back to Harvard. George, however, is still associated with the Harvard Admissions, and says he could help me complete my undergraduate degree based on my book and other work – tempting.

What George and I both share from that time, more than any intellectual snobbery or revolutionary fervor, is a deep and abiding conviction that the body means something more than a vehicle for the mind, that this rise in massage and somatic education is more than just an upper-middle-class indulgence in sybaritic excess.

Both of us were inspired into this field based on an intuitive flash, and only later realized the fuller social and evolutionary – essentially anthropological - implications of the ‘Me Decade’, better named at the time as the Human Potential movement. Both of us stayed in it despite the re-appellation ‘New Age’ and the population of well-meaning but needy do-gooders who tend to populate the associated professions. Both of us conform to the laws and rules of schools, buffeted by market forces and everyday business realities rather than hiding in the tenured womb of academia.

George got his SI training from Bill Williams, one of the first of Ida’s ‘buds’ to feel the frost of the Rolf Institute’s exclusivist attitude that lasted 30 years until the formation of IASI, though it still remains in some hearts and minds. I confess to having the same thoughts myself – that CORE and Soma and Hellerwork were ‘cheapening’ the work by teaching it … what? Too short, not high concept enough? not in the direct line from Ida? – some such bullshit until in 2000 I myself was outside the pale and the scales fell from my eyes. In any case, George combines a massage school and the SI program, and has had deep ties with the development of massage as a whole and is a leading light in the AMTA, sports massage for the Olympics, and school standards – but his heart remains with the structural work. I lay on the table for him to demonstrate his take on Logan Basic, and I defy any Rolf-trained teacher to do a better job of freeing the back.

We are all doing our best to revivify and re-incorporate a society gone mad into somatic alienation, where physical education and remedial medicine daily walk ever closer to the robotic, disembodied way of doing things where human beings are just adjunct pieces to be used for the good of the stockholders, whoever they may be. George’s intellect, coupled with his intuitive sense, is a force for re-inventing our society in its fully psychosomatized form, where we prepare our children for the demands of the 21st century, where we teach the Neolithic bodies our children are born with to live fully, successfully, sensually, sexually, and autonomously in this electronic world. Thank God for his intelligence applied to this problem, for his calm warmth, and for his steady, water-like pressure on the cold logical machine of maximum profit and minimum involvement. George is a human, in the sense the Greeks invented them.

We have our first view of the Santorini caldera exactly at sunset (I am sure George engineered it this way).

Easy enough to find pictures; hard for those pictures to convey the drama of emerging from the close little alleyways of the town (almost Arabic in their coolness, though totally cruise-ship oriented in their contents - good jewelry, bad painting, “We ship anywhere” on crockery) to a sudden view of the whole circle of the volcano - raw, edgy, dipped into the sea opposite us, but clear in its crescent moon-like embrace of 24 square miles of ruffled water dotted with ships, bigger than Haleakala in Maui, with us perched on its highest point above the absolute black cliff straight down a couple of thousand feet into the harbor far below.

The explosion of this volcano, around 1600 BC, shook the Mediterranean world. The ash has been found in the Greenland ice, and in the rings of fallen sequoias in California. It produced a tsunami of 500 feet (the Javan tsunami of a couple of years ago was 60 feet). The island of Santorini itself was of course obliterated, and the island of Kriti (Crete) to its south took the full force of the tsunami and earthquake, and these two islands were the seat of the ancient Minoan civilization, that of the House of the Ax and the Labyrinth, the bull dance and the mosaics of Knossos, which ruled the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond before the rise of the Phoenicians, the Athenian states and the whole Platonic school (Plato himself, writing many centuries after the event, theorized that the earthquake and volcano sank Atlantis, placing Atlantis here in Santorini), and way before the Roman triremes ruled the waves. The mighty Minoan empire was wiped out in a matter of days, never to rise again. See Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for a fictional but brilliantly realized tale of this time.

And oh yes, one other minor effect of this huge cataclysm: the initial pull of the tsunami drained the water around the head of the Red Sea, allowing a small group of escaping slaves from a minor tribe on the Levant to cross to safety from Egypt to the Sinai, while the pursuing army was caught in the returning water of the tsunami itself. “Pharoah’s army got drownded, Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

“Oh, Greece”, I cry with my arms outspread in prodigal welcome and heartfelt love of your wine-dark Aegean under your flawless turquoise sky, love of your good-humoured folk with their seductive gift of gab fronting for their fundamental generosity of spirit.  My cry is tinged with despair and nostalgic regret at the invasion of American music and Anglophonic Europeanism into your unique corner of the world.

We are but a mile or two from our arrival spot, a jetport on the ancient island of Thira, known to all now as the island of Saint Irene – Santorini.  I have never visited here before, but I have visited dozens of islands just like it here in the Cyclades, so it feels like a homecoming.  And a homecoming one both welcomes and holds one’s hands against – the tiny fishing village of the 60’s that would have had a pension with a couple of rooms for the few Germans intrepid enough to cross the island by donkey is now a distended strip of tourist restaurants, with menus in English and French, everything written in the Roman alphabet.  Restauranteurs solicit the tourists like touts, with a bit of the old Greek insouciance, but a tiredness and desperation that speaks of a Johnny-come-lately to the European Union grasping for euros in place of the old drachma, no longer the proudly independent inheritors of the cradle of Western civilization.  Now they’ve inherited the printed towel maps and the crappy tourist dreck that follows the money everywhere.

This morning I stirred at 7 to find a cloudy day.  I slipped from our bed and put on my sneakers to climb through the village to the switchback road that led up through the olive groves to the pass between two mountains. It was an hour’s upward walk, getting wilder and windier as I rose above the beach and town.  The winds were flaring down off the slopes across the sea, cat’s paws and williwaws among the few caíques moored offshore.  By the time I get to the crest of the pass, the tops of the mountains on either side are shrouded in swirling cloud, the wind so strong that I am being pelted with small stones as I stood leaning into it and looking down to the similar beach town far down on the other side of the island.

On the way down, loath to take the same route home, I followed a little path across the steep slope just to see where it would lead, and ended up at one of those ubiquitous Greek shrines – a little building of blue and white so small I had to duck as I entered.  I cross myself not in homage to the Olympian gods or God of the Book, but to the Greeks and their orthodox faith.  The tiny building is full of icons to St George, St Nicholas, and the Virgin Madonna, and incense and candles and spent matches and little burners for the faithful who make the climb to this altar nestled into the rocks in the side of the cliff.  A little more investigation and I find out why it’s here in particular – a cave snakes into the hill from behind the building, and deep within, my eyes adjusting to the trickle of light, is a trickle of water that has made, over centuries, strange-lipped pool formations in the cave.

The water is presumably consecrated in some way; people use it for offerings.  I suspect, as in England, this little church is a Christian overlay on a pagan sacred site, an intuition later confirmed: this was a sacred source of water for the ancient Thirians priests who had their acropolis fort at the top of the hill. Putting thoughts of bat-shit and snakes aside, I scramble into the dark, following the sound, and drink the sweet water, tangy with the mineral earth.

As I descend the smaller switchback path, braking myself with my jelly-like quads, the peculiar heaviness, almost grief, that comes from descending back into the human world from an accomplished height accompanies me back to the sea-level hotel.  The town of Kamari is now up and moving - cleaning the streets, opening the stores, setting out the racks of postcards, and the early tourists out to get their sun cream and plan their days, overfilling them as they do at home, spreading their endless money indiscriminately among these ever-more impoverished people – in my opinion, having known them when they were really poor but still rich in culture.  Blessed, sayeth the Lord, are the poor in spirit.

One of the most vexing questions in evolution is why and how we got up off all fours and started to walk on two legs.  The plantigrade human posture is quite unique in the mammalian world, and no other primate adopts it for long, let alone as a lifetime strategy.  Owen Lovejoy posits throwing (rocks at stationary or moving prey, or indeed predators, as the baboons still do today, standing on three legs and bravely seeing off a leopard with a hail of stones) as the basic impetus for getting up on two legs, and even for developing calculation and language.

(http://williamcalvin.com/1980s/1983JTheoretBiol.htm)

Don’t tell meine freunde Simone, as she is quite wedded to another controversial theory - the aquatic ape theory that we went through a period of being aquatic (and therefore lost our hair, gained fat, and a number of othet things that can be explored via the articles of Aliter Hardy and the books of Elaine Morgan, et al.) where we learned to stand, hold our breath (and thus initiated the impetus to speech), lost our hair, stood up in the bouyant environment, and came back to land a changed monkey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis

The throwing theory has a lot going for it, though it does nothing to explain how we lost our hair, but then the aquatic ape theory does nothing to explain why our eyes moved around to the front of our head.  The bicameral mind that results is certainly different from the whales, dolphins, seals, rabbits, and squirrels (for instance), who kept their eyes on the sides of their heads, the better to spot attacks from the side and behind (lions and tigers and bears, oh my).

Bringing the eyes around front - generally a hunter’s strategy - allows for parallax, which is useful in catching a branch while brachiating, and it also allows the calculations for a ‘launch window’ and trajectory for a stone thrown now to collide with it’s object somewhen and somewhere later.

Whether we stood and walked from throwing, or stood and walked in the water and later put our new-found hands to throwing may be put to rest in our lifetime, or it may remain part of the wonderful mystery that surrounds our origins.  But there is no doubt that throwing is an art we have taken to, developed, and finally perfected in a big way.

The image that ends the first scene in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, of the ape throwing the bone-tool into the air and it becoming a space station (cue the Strauss waltz) is an accurate one.  We have become so good at throwing that we can throw cars down the highway at 120 km/hr.  We have become such adept hurlers that we can hurl an airplane at 1200 km/hr.

But the real test of throwing comes in our ability to throw small ’stones’ at other planets.  After a couple of trial runs, the folks at NASA have just succeeded in throwing a half a ton ‘rock’ at Mars.  Not only are we good enough at throwing that we can accelerate a rock fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravity, we can then aim that rock at a planet that is 35 million miles at its perigee, which means it takes more than 3 minutes for any light-borne electromagnetic message to get to the ’stone’ of the satellite for any course changes we might initiate.

Anyway, not only can we throw this stone out of the Terran pull, but ‘hit’ a planet more than three light minutes away.  Not only can we hit Mars, we can just miss Mars at precisely the right angle so that our stone goes in orbit around it.  Not only can we go into orbit around it, but we can take a half-ton piece of it and so calculate our throwing such that this 1000-lb piece will land where we want it, within one degree of the angle we planned, and with such a soft landing that the machinery inside the stone will still work to take pictures, dig, analyze the results, and report back to Earth over the vasty spacingness in between.

This is what has happened with the Mars lander:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

I salute the men and women of the team that accomplished this refined form of throwing, which may help us know whether life is easy or difficult to start in this universe (and thus whether God is a K-related or r-related species - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection).

I suppose I should salute those who are throwing bullets and shells with a smaller but deadly accuracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I find it hard to justify this aggressive or defensive throwing, as it seems just one step above the murderous ape in 2001.

But our ability to throw extended into space seems not a waste of money to me, as war does, but a very refined development of a basic ability.  If we were to look at the same thing applied to swimming, we can certainly point to the development of the aqualung and fins, and maybe sailboats and navy ships, but nothing up against this wonderfully precise application of throwing we call the space program.

Speaking of the boat, I spent 7 hours at the wheel yesterday without a break.  I escaped the endless list of the home front at 2:15 and beat my way downriver (but uptide and against a freshening SW breeze) into the bay.  These springtime days bring sudden strong winds, cold and sharp-tongued as your 5th grade teacher. By the time I cleared Thrumcap Island, I was rail under, hard on the wind, chop spray flying overhead and salting my glasses, riding the edge out to sea with straining sails and sheets.

The goal was Damariscove Island, a long, thin treeless and haunted offshore island, the last before the deep Atlantic.  Damariscove is distinguished by having been the stopping place for Maine’s first tourists, the first ’summer people’. English fishing boats followed the explorers over to gather the cod when they were too numerous to count.  They set up on this island as a shelter and resting spot, to store gear they wouldn’t have to carry back to Old Blighty, as a place to dry the salt fish, and as a gossip and trading post. It was far enough ‘off the main’ to be safe from the ’savages’ that prevented permanent mainland settlements.  Although no one knows when the visiting first started, it was certainly in full swing in the late 1500’s.  The island is named for Captain Dameril, who set up a store there in 1608.  It is hard to credit that maybe thirty ships sailed out of this tiny sleepy harbor fully 400 years ago.

But the Pilgrims, landing a couple of days’ sail south on Cape Cod, and desperate after the deadly winter of 1620, sent a boat up to Damariscove in the spring of ’21 to get fish and other things, and were generously assisted - so this summer settlement helped save the Pilgrims.  It was also the rendezvous for English, French, and Dutch ships making their way to the colonial settlements in Virginia and New Amsterdam (New York).  Men drank, gambled, quarreled, bartered with each other and the Indians – in other words, a typical commercial seaport.

The harbor is mightily thin and open to the southwest, which makes it a challenge for single-handed boats from that day to this, so I rounded up to take one of the moorings near the old Coast Guard station, only to find at the crucial moment that my batteries were dead.  (The floating switch on the bilge pump had packed up and run them down.)

In a high wind, you have only a few second to get a mooring secure, and I missed my moment. I couldn’t hold the mooring pennant, and without an engine was pushed ignominiously up the tiny harbor to rest bumping against the rocks.  Desperate, breathing hard – it was a falling tide, I was alone, and I had been in this situation before without good result – I used the whisker pole to push myself off before I got stuck fast, got the sails up again, and – shaking - short-tacked my way up the cove past the ledges to the open water.

I decided to spend the night closer to shore, as I would have no power for lights, stove or anything. Starting at 6:30, I opened the sails and made my way shoreward, fighting the ebbing tide, but helped by the wind that persisted long after the sun had gone to bed, I decided to try to make it all the way home, and arrived back on the mooring at exactly 9:15, far into nautical twilight – I put the sails away mostly by feel.

Except for a 30-second run down below to check the bilge, I had not left the wheel for 7 hours.  It was a great lesson, and one that ended with a welcoming committee (no one should have been out alone on such a windy day, so Annie, Quan, Peter and Sarah, knowing I was out in the airy dark, were anxiously awaiting my return) and with me in my soft bed – not bad therapy.

In these few brief days between the coming of the light and the arrival of the bugs, it is good to get your hands in the earth, turn the soil, pluck the weeds, set the seeds - Maine is glorious at this time, so don’t tell anyone else.  These nails of mine - that spend too much time coaxing sense from these computer keys and feeling for the terrain under the human skin - need dirt under them.  By the end of these days, between the boat and garden, my city hands are scraped and gouged, no good for bodywork, but they feel like hands again.

Does anyone have a copy of Light Years Away?  A sleeper film from the early 80’s maybe; doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list (like Netflix). Trevor Howard plays a spiritual teacher in back-of-beyond Ireland whose quest is to fly.  At one point he is pecked, scratched, and torn by all his raptors, and he has his assistant bury him up to his neck in the peaty soil for three days and feed him soup by hand.

At the end of the three days (a little heavy on the symbolism here), he rises from the soil with his skin restored.  I have never tried the method (we hit Presumpscot clay within a foot or two here), but I wonder if the skin can absorb minerals directly from the soil.  Between that and the bacteria that could act commensally to seal the skin, it looks like a good idea.

Spring here means the ‘Order of the Bloody Knuckle’, seasonal changes around the boats, docks, plumbing fixtures and the barn are hard on the hands.  Working the soil speeds the recovery.

New York, this time, is by turns wonderful and awful.  From the pleasant spring sunshine of Maine, I dive into the canyons of the city, where a cold wind tunnels down between the buildings, turning umbrellas inside out and getting in your crevices.  The clerks seem hostile, the traffic aggressive, the streets dangerous.  Intending to take a long walk, I get some water instead and quickly return to Michael’s loft, softly lit, warm furniture, full of good cooking smells.

By yesterday the sun is warm and the clerk at Starbucks gives me a coffee rather than break my $100 bill, and I am so warmed I come back to give her both the money and a tip later when I have change.

The course - my last in a long string of traveling gigs - is likewise up and down as we search out a modus vivendi for conveying what we have in bigger ways to the yoga, Pilates, and personal training professions.  Sometimes I feel we have a coherent message, and sometimes it feels as if we are being spread way too thin, but such is the nature of experiment and working into new areas.

But I am too tired to really pop in the class, so let’s go home and see if there’s a rest available for me to recharge the batteries for another round later this year.  Fatigue is something I often feel temporarily, but this  - 45 of the last 54 days teaching or traveling (so those 9 recovering, packing, doing laundry) – feels a deep tiredness – systemic, a more profound level of chemistry, and a Dantean level of lostness that goes along with it.

The fatigue spreads like a virus – I am tired of the election.  I am tired that after one or two debates last winter where, for one brief shining moment it looked like we might have a discussion of the truly pressing issues at hand.  But instead we have been dragged back into old-style gutter politics by the very first woman who had earned our grudging and then genuine admiration as the first woman to contend on the playing field of the presidency.  I am tired of the non-work on energy and the silly prating of the chattering classes while the world spins out of control and we, the people, can seemingly do nothing, and evince no interest in doing so.

So it was with some interest that I emerged onto the street to the sounds of 60’s protest chants, and the sight of banners across the sidewalk.  It was a small but well-organized protest by W.A.R. – a PETA-like group called Win Animal Rights – who had discovered that Roger Waltzman, an executive with ties to a lab that kills test animals, lived across the street, and was embarrassing him to his family and neighbors by holding this noisy protest outside his home.

“Huntington Life Sciences Kills 500 Animals Every Day – Novartis Pays Them to Do It” read the headline on the paper they were passing out.  Huntingdon Life Sciences kills these animals for product testing – toothpaste and tanning lotion in the eyes, poisons, cuts, burns, broken limbs – if it is all true, then more power to these folks, at least they are up and doing something.

Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, publishes Netter, a great service to our trade.  But if you want them to stop being associated with killing animals, you can email Roger Waltzman at roger.waltzman@novartis.com, or follow up with WAR at http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights.

May my children, real and children of spirit, rise up and take control of our country.  “The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases,” I paraphrase Nietzsche, “and one of those diseases is Man.”  Are we a disease or an embryonic demi-urge?  The next few generations will tell, and it seems a pretty close run question to me.  I am interested in the continuation of the human experiment, but not at the cost of all these innocent animals, all these innocent children, all these nascent countries, and the exquisite resources of the earth – our yolk sac for this developmental journey.

Cheney has amassed $40 billion out of this war and the attendant oil profits. The continued ascendancy of him and his ilk is the most fatiguing thing of all.  He deserves to be on trial in Den Hague.

I’m with David Mamet, who says:  “I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly.”

Here’s the full paragraph, quoted from the New Yorker:  “I hate the computer, I hate their spell-check.  I won’t ever do email.  I love working on a typewriter, the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do too.  I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work.  I love to write.”