MS Bolette, almost identical sister ship to MS Borealis, gathering with other ships off Funchal, Madeira, for tonight’s New Year Fireworks Festival 🎉😊
NYE in Funchal, Madeira
Month: December 2021
San Sebastián de la Gomera
There’s ever changing
beauty in this world at times
beyond all telling
La Palma Sunrise
Sea Cloud
It’s pleasantly warm here in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria this morning. One of the joys of a cruise voyage for me is the never quite knowing what a day will bring – the people, places, or the weather. Every hour of every day brings someone or something new – and I pinch myself sometimes as, on board a ship, ambling around a port, or dining in glad company, my boyhood dreams of sailing the seven seas keep coming true, but better than anything dreamed of then. Ships have wonderful personalities of their own, as do the people who sail in them!
Little boat, wide ocean
I am a little
boat sustained and held by a
wide ocean of love
Santa Cruz
A warm Boxing Day amble in Santa Cruz, followed by a swim beneath a royal blue sky: or maybe I’ve fallen asleep after lunch and I’m really only dreaming?
🎼🎶🌟in the morning
and for a little
while nobody spoke a word
for none were needed
One of the astonishing array of suspended lanterns made by the wonderful crew of MS Borealis, 2021
Fair winds for Tenerife
Happy Christmas Eve for loved ones near and far 🎄😘
Fab-u-lous!
I’ve only arrived at the Strictly Come Dancing ballroom in time for the Final this year, but alongside my mother’s lovely Christmas Tree, and in her enthusiastic company, I find myself with decidedly moist eyes and speechless with admiration. What a spellbinding connection between John and Johannes! And pure, shining magic between this year’s winners, Rose and Giovanni. Late in the day I may be, but – worldwide gloomy news notwithstanding – I can still join the huge chorus of gratitude for absolutely show-stopping and joyous inspiration.
Today …
today is a large
orange with dark chocolate
kind of a Thursday
The authority of the clock
[1348 AD] … word had reached them yesterday, spreading fast through the countryside, that a machine to count the hours had come to Shaftesbury to be put in the church and anyone could go to see it …
… It took them half the morning to get there and for the last quarter of the journey they could hear a bell, growing steadily stronger, ringing first once, then after they had gone perhaps another mile twice more, then three times as they approached. It was set up on a wooden frame outside the Abbey, on display, waiting to be lifted up to the platform now being built inside the tower …
… ‘It is ten hours in the morning,’ shouted the man, ‘by the precise authority of the clock,’ and a burst of cheering went up. Ferney suddenly turned away. ‘Let’s leave,’ he said, ‘I’m thirsty.’ He sounded unhappy …
James Long
Ferney (extracts)
Further to my musings yesterday about time and timelessness, I return, as so often before, to one of the most moving reflections I’ve ever read about ‘the precise authority of the clock.’ James Long’s glorious ‘Ferney’ is a novel about love, and about time, on many levels and through generations. Here (around 1348, so far as Ferney can recall), crowds walked miles to see the new ‘machine to count the hours’ that was about to be installed in the tower at Shaftesbury Abbey. Deeply fascinating a sight on one level, yet Ferney and his companion Gally soon enter into deep and concerned conversation about the very reshaping of our humanity that the clock would chime into existence. Ferney was not happy – not at all taken with the idea of a machine’s having ‘precise authority,’ and – with the prophetic perception of the seer – detailed for Gally why. For this little (and I think, very worthwhile) contemplation alone, I cannot recommend Long’s 1998 novel highly enough. And there’s more in it. Much, much more.
The dew looks up
Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
W S Merwin
Dew Light
The Moon Before Morning
The blessed days of more and less: the happy and absorbed red squirrel is certainly more! As is the woodpecker who is not in the slightest troubled by my daily stopping close to listen at the portal of his own persistent more and less-ness. The quietness up here, and the wide space, is less and also more, so simultaneously both.
It’s all like one of those lovely old retro clocks that stops frequently, because in our modern day we forget to wind their battery-less clockworks. More and less, less and more. Absence of mechanical time. So yes: blessed.
Though it requires a bit of effort on our part, to place ourselves often enough, and quiet enough, into the spaces of timelessness, it’s worth it: for in the encounter there we hear the Ancient Echo, and the dew atop the wooden gate holds our own reflection.
ancient telling and art in today’s morning sky …
At all times
Oh, speak, poet, what do you do?
– I praise.
But the monstrosities and the murderous days,
how do you endure them, how do you take them?– I praise.
But the anonymous, the nameless grays,
how, poet, do you still invoke them?– I praise.
What right have you, in all displays,
in every mask, to be genuine?– I praise.
And that the stillness and the turbulent sprays
know you like star and storm?– because I praise.
December 1921
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Poet Speaks of Praising
Still, whatever the weather, or the degree of turbulence visited upon our lives by daily news – personal or corporate; still, no matter the headache, or the slight creaking we notice in our bones, or the cold, or the heat; still, at all times, there remain the invigorating vistas of the grand scale, of the micro-view, of the scents of baking, and of good post-walk coffee; still we may take confidence in the memory of the myriad perspectives we’ve encountered before, and will again; still, in every moment, awake or asleep, we may find cause to praise – and thereby know ourselves fully alive.
Aware
Evolution is divinity at work
We are nature made aware of itself
Science is the most spiritual pursuit
To learn the patchwork of existence
Is to understand ourselves
Brianna Wiest
Salt Water, p.71
With that thought I set off on my morning walk, in company with millions of others around the world who, in their daily lives, watch their awareness – reaching out into the unknown, glad to know, somewhere deep and primal within, that they are not, and never will be, alone …
I greet you, in awareness, and in love …
Oblivious …
Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset
@wisdomlovetruth, Instagram
Are you ever awestruck when you come across someone who appears blissfully oblivious to the busyness around them? Few sights and sounds are more calming to the soul. Here, the languorous lightness of touch, together with the sight of and the light in these fingers, combine to make it almost possible for us to hear the soft melody from afar …
‘Santa’s world’ has a fair degree of busyness – and sometimes anxiety – about it: imagine being an elf at this time of the year! But it is actually possible, even if only for a few grateful seconds, and perhaps caught unawares, to sit, or stand, and just listen. Oblivious. And maybe catch a quiet vision of a beloved infant, beneath a starry sky, breathing softly, fast asleep, new life and promise in a crib, yesterday, today, or forever.
wind in my wheels 🌱 