The point of it all

2/12/10, 1400 hours, wind N.W. @ 10-15 knots
The sun emerges again after a brief shower. Wicca is undergoing a refit after her perilous crossing of the Straits. To undergo such trials may be asking too much of the old gal who, face it, is no longer the spry ship of her prime when she shoved aside the most riotous seas with haughty disdain. Maybe it's time she rest on her laurels, anchored up some peaceful creek, far from the uncouth caresses of the turbulent ocean. Old mariners will stop their morning constitutional to gaze wistfully at her graceful lines, and hearken back to youthful days when Wicca's brave tops'ls could be descried running before a stiff southerly breeze off Hecate Head. "Aye, she sails like a witch."
After her sinking in Eagle Harbor, Ray stripped her soggy interior and now you can see in her cobbled frames, evidence of a venerable legacy of shipwrights, amateurs and neophytes who, over four decades, kept her sailing into posterity.
Her interior is cozy, with a spaciousness that seems to expand to the unbounded horizon.
1500 hours
A seal rises like a submarine to a surface dimpled with the drops of a fleeting shower. Captain Jack, a pleasant smile for everyone, hails Wicca as he rows past brandishing a honeycombed piece of corroded aluminum: "found art is everywhere" he calls, and tells of electrolysis produced by the ferry maintenance yard nearby. "Ten Amps a day", says he, or some figure that escapes recollection now. Jack comes from one of Bainbridge Island's founding families, with a street in Eagledale named after them. He is full of such maritime wisdom, and warns of swamped properties along the waterfront due to melting icecaps.
I'm still contemplating the Noah story. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, "Buddha of the North", Noah's time was when "the deceitful persuasions of man's being suffocated all truth and good". The Ark's cargo consisted of "everything that life still possessed and was worthy of possessing" after the essential truths of the most ancient church were mostly forgotten. These truths, hidden behind the arcane language of the bible, are the remnants of a time when man had immediate access to the Divine influx from Heaven, and was still connected with good of faith united with love and charity.
Swedenborg apprehends the story as one of an inner history of the soul. We are threatened with suffocation when the esoteric truths are immersed within us by an exclusive preoccupation with literal meaning and a need to have spiritual realities verified by the physical senses. These preoccupations drown out man's ability to speak with the tongue of angels, to hear their call, or even trust in their existence, since the physics of Angels do not conform to our obsession with "facts".
How do these themes play out in our own day? Is Noah still out there floating in some aged, barnacle festooned tug with no engine?