Pear tree

The fruit trees bloom this fine day with a luminosity that defies my humble powers of description. The pink flowers explode against the vivid, blue sky with a vibrancy that calls to mind the pointillist visions of Suerat.
I used to think free self expression the alpha and omega of art, but more and more this cherished self seems to dissolve into nothingness like the scintillating points of light emanating from Spring blossoms in Waterfront Park.
Claude Monet, who considered himself a nuts and bolts color scientist of the Industrial age was, whether acknowledged or not, as spiritual as the Russian icon painters. For all their alleged "realism", the Impressionists are forever beckoning us into the the arcane knowledge of the Brethren of Light. They may have jettisoned the stale claptrap of history and genre in an attempt to present modern Parisian life with unvarnished truthfulness, but in their glorification of light they achieved pure transcendence. Cezanne said of Monet: " He's only an eye, but what an eye!". I wonder at the meaning of Cezanne's ambiguous phrasing: Only an eye, but one that penetrates into the deepest heart of reality, where solid form dissolves into particles of Divine, rainbow light.
I don't pretend to speak for these venerable luminaries of 19th Century art, but even the darkest manifestations of human pathology reflects a call to spiritual release. Though seen as aberrant by the French Academy, the work of the Impressionists was an inspired response to the same impulse that drives the mystic into desert retreat or to reach for the bottle. Marion Woodman, in her work with anorexics, has explored stories and myths that can redirect this desire for liberation to healthier channels and show how these dysfunctional patterns conceal great, transformative energies. Buddhists have long known that all mental and emotional afflictions contain corresponding wisdoms.
The Gnostic's saw birth in human form as imprisonment in the darkness of matter, and the priesthood as prison guards whose task it was to restrain flights beyond our allotted sphere. Such themes of struggle are encountered nightly, when the fetters of the world fall away into the abyss of sleep, and dreams reveal psychic remnants in our collective memory of the first religious urge to seek salvation in light's triumph over darkness.
The great Sufi poet Attar, sang of the light at the end of the soul's journey and how all creation is but shadows cast by the light of God. The act of prayer is imagined as polishing the mirror, or increasing translucency in order to see the Divine radiance behind the play of the world's forms--to apprehend the symbolized behind the symbol.
So this pear tree, with all its opulent splendor, points to something beyond its role as mere stimulant of optic nerves, and becomes angelic presence.

Alright on the Jetsons

Some shore dwellers object mightily to derelict boats constantly before the picture windows of their vast houses. They have a point. It is important to validate the position of the "opposition". But when you have to get approval from a neighborhood association to moor in a marina, it is carrying things too far. One of the reasons I took up sailing, was to escape the gray/beige aesthetic of the American, urban landscape. My girlfriend just informed me that the BAMBI plan did, in a sense, call for a neighborhood association. That's the trouble with girlfriends, they have an irritating tendency to prick the self righteous bubbles of us menfolk.
But imagine , if you will, if the cliff dwellers of Athos had to conform to an officially ordained color scheme: Mediterranean blue with a dash of bougainvillea red. Or what if such fascist dictates were imposed upon the decor of gaudy, Mexican hacienda's? Pancho Villa would rise from the grave to lead that colorful citizenry in open rebellion.
I recently spoke to a local, well educated and tolerant woman who complained of her neighbor's color choice for his home. When I pointed out that it was the same hue and shade of the overhanging cedars, she replied: "Well, it's alright on trees!".
For a country that prides itself on our alleged liberties, we seem only too willing to abdicate our right to paint our dwellings whatever color we might fancy, whether it be chartreuse or viadurya blue. We cherish our freedom to choose between dish soaps over the freedoms that truly liberate us from the role of passive consumer; a role ruthlessly imposed upon our placid population by corporate "culture".
Once there was a live aboard in a lurid pink vessel that appeared to have zoomed straight out of the final frontier to land before the appalled citizens of the south shore, causing much gnashing of teeth among them. But the proud captain of this dilapidated, interstellar craft felt it worthy of a berth in the Museum of Science and Industry, and boasted of her status as a unique, Boeing prototype from Seattle's early sixties, golden age. Ah, but those days are long gone and I, for one, do not miss them. This was the era of the Jetsons aesthetic that brought us John Graham Junior's brutalist architecture and that phallic monument to Seattle kitch, the Space Needle. This abomination can be seen all the way from fair Wicca's deck. Can't some thing be done about that space hypo? I mean, it's alright on the Jetsons.

Death of a Liveaboard

2/15/10 1415 hrs. Easterly wind @ 8 knots, Sunny.

Another lovely February day in Eagle Harbor.
Yes, there are some sad looking vessels about. They tug at their moorings like forlorn pooches awaiting their master's return. Whether these craft qualify for the designation, liveaboard, depends on your definition of the term.
With all the regulations restricting liveaboards of late, I wonder if our venerable lawmakers have considered restricting other categories of boaters as well. What about a prohibition against zombie mariners? No Undeadaboards.
Since nothing exists apart from it's contrary, the sailor's life has death as steadfast shipmate, and death's dark aspect attends us all across the ocean of samsara until we reach either the blissful pure land or the fiddler's green. We may recall the words of that sorcerer of the active imagination, Don Juan, who councils his obtuse apprentice, Carlos Casteneda: "Death is your only ally, he is always following you, six inches behind your left shoulder". How he came by this precise data is beyond me. I can only trust it emerged from a very real experience undergone by an equally unreal character, whose presence looms all the larger for his fictive power.
With the physics of color, every hue produces it's after image, it's opposite on the color wheel. When an artist chooses a red, it's compliment, green, is immediately present and demands to be resolved within the whole composition.
As that great western sage, William Blake, said: " Without contraries there is no progression".
Waking is to sleep as life is to death. Given the logic of this metaphysical equation, it is only fair to rule out waking aboard as well. Imagine the shipping lanes of the globe navigated by somnolent sailors snoring through long watches at the helm. But with the advent of ever newer technologies, this proposal may not be so far fetched after all.
And what might be the final solution to the liveaboard problem? Death? They might get life, aboard floating penal colonies, hefting rocks for the bulkheads of wealthy waterfront home owners.
When it comes time for me to stand before Saint Peter or the Lords of Death, as a final act of protest, I would like to pass away aboard Wicca, thereby asserting my right to my own meaningful death aboard.