Introduction

Her ocean voice fills me completely, lures me from a dangerously deep sleep. Partially waking into an impenetrable darkness, waves of fear, troughs of peace, and the sounds of surf are the only reality. Sweet incorporeal reverie, unhinged from physical preconceptions, there is no distinction between me and the sea.

Reality shifts, dreams weave into consciousness ... what is this place? Did I die in the night? The wind moans as it twists through the rigging, sweeps into the cabin and across my face. Salt air fills my lungs. The rhythmic motion of the sea presses my body into the bunk. I feel, therefore, I am, alive.

The ocean is but a few inches away on the other side of the fiberglass hull. Her powerful rumble surrounds me, flows through me, carries me gradually from the last of my dreams. The hand of Neptune slips from mine, drops me back to the mortal world.

In my free fall towards consciousness I reflexively lunge out, grab for anything to stop my fall, and am surprised to clutch the cocoon of my bunk, the lee cloth, a fabric wall tied from my bunk to the overhead which keeps me from rolling out of bed. My body wakes as my soul hits bottom — where? Eyes snap open into the faint starlight of night; only a precious few moments of sleep have passed. Renaissance, my tiny sail boat, shelter, and home, endlessly surfs the breaking seas.

Sleep is danger with no human at the helm. Minutes, maybe hours have passed since the horizon was surveyed. Risk increases with every moment. A lookout should be kept for ships, storms, land and reefs. Ships are one thousand tons of steel in motion which can crunch my little sailboat with no more effort than a tap of their bow into a wave. My boat is a small target, a fleck on the ocean which can be missed easily from the high bridge. I cannot depend upon them seeing me. My white sail appears as no more than a smudge of sea foam, my reflection on a ship’s radar screen is but a green fleck of static, my navigation lights, low to the water, hide in the waves. It is I who must watch for them.

The dangers are real, but no longer do I permit the waking panic to grip me. No longer do I succumb to the beast, Fear personified, a creation of the rational and irrational, my unwanted yet unshakable companion. The beast is as real as the storms, reefs, ships who threaten my safety as I sleep. The beast is the mélange of all possible dangers, who prods me with his daggers and sends me leaping from bed to make sure everything is okay.

Fear whispers of imminent dangers, signals false alarms, jabs me again and again. I tire of his presence, of the state of mind he brings, and resolve to expose him, he who lurks in the shadows of thought. I sit Fear by my side and we voyage together, look each other in the eye, come to terms. In this balance, my calmed sprit embraces the dual extremes of infinite sadness and infinite joy. For only when Fear rules have I been limited, confined, always searching for safety, but with Fear in balance nothing binds the flow of thought. True life is in my mind and I am fully alive. So, in spite of the physical risks to safety, I lie in my bunk with this mood and do not jump up to look for ships. If it is my time to die I can ask for nothing more than to die in peace, in balance, in her ocean arms, as another part of this Life adventure.

Powered only by the wind and the sea, the vane autopilot is at the helm. Neptune stands watch. The sun sleeps below the horizon. Twelve hours removed from the influence of our great stellar furnace, the hot tropical air has been mellowed by the temperate sea. It is perfectly warm, perfectly cool, in this pre-dawn hour. The moist salt air, the scent of the waves floats down below, into my bunk and draws deeply into my lungs. My energy and the ocean's energy come closer into harmony with each breath. My bare leg wraps around the lee cloth which serves to cradle me in my bunk. Ah, the wind, my lover, I feel her caress.

The world outside comes into view as I tilt my head back over the pillow. The companionway frames an obsidian sky flecked with diamonds amongst a sweeping radiance of Milky Way. In the daytime it is impossible to see beyond our planet; sunrays disperse through the atmosphere, diffract and scatter brilliant primary blue. On this clear night, away from the lights of the city, there are no barriers between me and the universe. The sky is a transparent dome above my head; the stars are bright and close; the Milky Way is the lume of a distant place which awaits a visit; the planets march across the sky as gods who chase each other, then run away. At night the clear dome of atmosphere which separates us from the void of the universe is easily forgotten until some stray mote of space dust or fragment of an ancient planet burns into a shooting star overhead and betrays the atmospheric barrier with its ephemeral brilliance.

My legs swing around the lee cloth and feet land upon the night dew which has formed on the teak cabin sole. Habit guides me through the shadows of this dark space to the life harness stretched across the companionway, the web poised to catch the sleep walker before he saunters over the side.

Clipped to a through-bolted stainless steel eye on deck, the harness is my anchor to the boat. It is there to hold me if no other force will. The criss-cross of webbing, a sturdy one-piece combination of wide, tough, suspender straps and belt slip on like a second skin.

Up the four steep wooden steps to the cockpit, My face instinctively turns into the wind, instinctively scans for ships. There are none. There is no sign of human life as far as the eye can see to the horizon which curves away from me.

The ocean roars again, another wave breaks. She calls, beseeches me to join with her. I am compelled by her request, by her infinite, boundless, formless nature, free of the body, I am compelled to forever blend my energy with hers, but our love must live apart, for now …

In the east-southeast, Dawn begins to stretch her rosy fingertips over the horizon with plumes of soft pink fanning upwards through a black sky. She reaches from the exact location of the sunrise-to-be with the hand of a sleeping day to make the first suggestion of morning.

The wind becomes light. The sea calms, in reply. I unclip from the stainless steel pad-eye under the spray dodger and clip on to the jack line, which runs the length of the deck fore and aft, bow to stern on each side of the boat. The jack line permits me to walk the deck and stay attached at all times. From behind the protection of the spray dodger I step onto the deck and expose myself to a light spray kicked into the air as the hull slaps into the sea now and then. Renaissance moves under my feet and Balance instructs my legs to yield, conform to the pattern of the sea. I expect and prepare for rogue motion, give in to the unexpected. My torso walks straight while my legs do a rubber dance beneath. At the shrouds, I stop, wrap one arm around the stays, the strong mast-supporting wire, and relax.

Multitudes of bioluminescent organisms give bright green sparkling dimension to the two miles of ocean water supporting my little boat. Excited to biochemical radiance by the disruption of Renaissance as she stirs the sea, these organisms are a tail of comet fire in our wake. The stars above are not as bright, have not the intensity of this great swirl of tiny lights on tiny lit creatures, spinning in thick clear liquid glass beneath.

The western horizon, away from Dawn's reach, is black and without dimension. At a distance, through the clear black glass of the night sea, something bright green and glistening streaks towards the hull of Renaissance like a torpedo. At the moment of anticipated impact it dives, vanishes, then reappears on the other side of the boat. The torpedo, churning the bioluminescence, abruptly turns and rides with me. The familiar squeak and click of the dolphin echoes through the hull and is joined by others: three, then five, then at least eight dolphins arrive to escort me. As they blow air, they send their salty breath into the wind and onto my face. The dolphins love to ride the wave of water pushed forward by the bow. I lean over, extend a hand to them, greet my morning guests with a touch. They turn sideways as they swim and our eyes meet.

The joyful spirit of their moment calls to me, to evolve or regress, to shed my weights so I can be as they are now, in blissful innocence. But there are impediments to my soul, weights which hold me back from self, from the universe. I long for my wife; I long to be home, with friends and family. I have become so accustomed to my love flowing through them, in relationship to them. Without them, alone on this boat, I feel incomplete. I can not fully feel love in the moment. I am constantly plagued by the feeling that I will be alone always. I fear that which Is, and my fear is thus a conspicuous waste of time.

Of course, I am alone, in the shell that is my body. I am isolated, in the isolation of my mind. My earthly lover, for all of her good intentions, does not understand. She can not be the savior of my spirit. I, alone, must come to terms with the pain of my disconnection. I must explore the loneliest parts of my soul. But then, can I share them? Or are they to be forever a private communication between myself and god?

Without human companions, alone at sea, the physical connection to others severs, painfully, so very painfully. I will not remain isolated! I am alone, but must I remain isolated? With no human alternatives present, my soul seeks pathways for connection, for reconnection, to my world and universe, and finds them…