A good wind

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The fog lifts slowly from the harbor this dull morning, revealing bits of a landscape I thought I knew, each aspect unmasked by the shredding, a landscape sheathed in ice over night by persistent sleet bound and determined to keep secrete the deeper keeps I ache to discover with each walk here.

Everything I thought I knew I must learn again, finding new maps through this changed landscape trapped in ice, fog and the bayside rocks, whole lives caught in the endless eddies none of us can fully escape.

My grandfather, the boat building, told me once that sails are only as good as the wind that blows them, and we all must trust to luck or fate before new can manage to steer clear of narrow places and shallow water upon which boat bottoms scrape.

Across the bay, industry imitates nature as great steel cargo cranes take the shape of the gentle egrets common on this side, mirror images distorted in the funhouse of the modern world where we are constantly confronted by real and unreal and must decide which is which and which we want to follow.

I walk this asphalt path along this side because it is all I know, the only solid ground upon which my feet can travel with any certainly, thought as time as proved, I have sometimes stumbled over potholes hidden in the haze, leaving me injured but with no choice but to rise up and walk on, tightening my sails the way my grandfather told me, hoping a good wind will take up the slack and ease me out from the narrow water eddies in which the world traps us all.

Somewhere high up a sea gull cries, making me long for the sea.