Spring Moon of the Southern Cross
46 degrees 28 minutes S 56 degrees 42 minutes W course heading 004
Sun light on the ocean gives a brief brilliance to a bit of wave, water lifted up higher than the main body. Quick as a blink or quicker the dash of bright flares, then disappears as wave and ocean become one again.
This is life as I now understand it. We rise up for a moment, a second in the grand clock that ticks away in the heart of the universe, shine with the vitality of consciousness, then subside, absorbed back into the universe which accreted in that one instance to form our distinct, unique Self.
Does this have meaning? Damned if I know.
My guess is that it does, in one sense at least. Our moment affords the vast project that is the movement of matter from creation to eventual extinction or reprocessing (whatever cosmology soothes you most) a chance to reflect, to notice, to be aware of itself. Our brief sunlit moments then may be to the universe as mind is to our body, an epiphenomena unsuspected, unpredicted, but nonetheless appreciated. That may well be all ye need to know.
When we float on the vast world ocean between ports, over deep water, water now 13,500 feet deep, my Self dips down into the collective unconscious with great ease. It may be the womb like sloshing of the ship or it may be deep calling unto deep. Whatever it is, I dream and dream and remember.
Last night my dreams all had a common theme. There were three, one in which I was a new teacher, another in which I developed a vast foundation and a third with knowledge spread out in a quasi-religious setting. The common theme lay in crossing from one domain of knowledge to another, knitting disparate disciplines together, finding the filaments that underlay them all.
In the first, as a new teacher, my principle, an African American woman, looked me over and put me in a building devoted to concrete teaching. Students learned gardening by building tools, sowing and harvesting. They learned mathematics and science by building machines, language by engaging in trade with others who spoke a different language.
In the second I had convinced Mark Dayton to put together a foundation that knitted together philosophy, literature, politics, science and painting, all represented by different patterns of tile on the floor of its huge lobby.
Finally, in the third, Glass Bead Game-like, I was part of a group that had assembled various distinct disciplines in different liturgical styles. One had an emphasis on textiles, colorful and large, hanging from stone walls. Another had altars of stone. Yet another gathered its disciplines and represented them through music. Another through painting.
In this last dream a fire caught the textile chapel on fire and threatened the whole cathedral though it eventually burned itself out since the whole structure was stone.
Today we’re between the Falklands and Buenos Aires, Atlantic as far as the eye can register light on any side, the water deep and the sunlight bright. A good day to relax and read.
We will pass the 45th degree of longitude today, headed to Buenos Aires’s 38th. That means we will move out of the Canadian equivalent longitudes and into our own. From that point on we will be heading into warmer and warmer climes.
On Thanksgiving eve we will board a plane in Rio headed for Atlanta, Georgia, then the cold, cold grass of home.
