There isn't really a muse thread.

[Mowk]

You know a place where you can just share an idea, some strange thought that for some reason was important enough for you to stop and go hmmmm?

For some reason this memory came back in this moment and it caused me to pause and go hmmm?

I'm a sailor, my wife and I sail a 23 foot old anchor out the city park in oshkosh on winnebago. It's a fairly large lake seven miles across and 29 miles long roughly. Enough back story.

We're sailing out towards the middle about a mile out and from off shore we spot a butterfly flying away from shore. We're on a tack running about 45 degrees away from the shore and this butterfly just keeps flying. It wasn't long before it had caught up to our boat, a butterfly easily can fly into a wind while a sailboat not so much and it was a fairly light breeze. So this brilliant blue and black butterfly chooses to land on my finger. Butterflies don't weigh much and I had a hand free so I didn't mind. For some reason I felt strangely honored. We sailed out into the middle and it was getting late in the day. That butterfly sat on my finger for nearly two hours as we sailed. It was getting time to head home and I thought to that butterfly "sorry we've got to turn back now" and no sooner was the thought thought that the butterfly took off in the same direction we had been heading. We came about and headed for home and that butterfly just kept on going.

Thanks.

[rainey]

Nice.

I have a 23-footer as well! Can't say I've ever had a butterfly as a passenger.

A muse thread would be good but ILP needs a sailing thread. Everybody knows that sailors make the best philosophers.

Thanks for sharing the story.

[Mowk]

Ahoy!

Sailing and philosophy do go well together, plenty of time to think when the sail is a gentle one, my wife's preference. What do you sail? You'd probably never heard of the boat we own. Aquarius by coastal recreation '72. The boat was built the year I graduated from grade school, LOL. The years that have passed have been far more gentle on me, certainly. There isn't much original left on the boat save for half the hull, the mast and boom. Its been gutted and retrofitted so many times its hardly the same boat. It can be launched from its trailer and our original thought was we'd spend far more time gunkin about then we have. Lake Michigan is only 40 miles away.

[Pandora]

Sailors make the best bullshitters.

[rainey]

Ahoy!

Sailing and philosophy do go well together, plenty of time to think when the sail is a gentle one, my wife's preference. What do you sail? You'd probably never heard of the boat we own. Aquarius by coastal recreation '72. The boat was built the year I graduated from grade school, LOL. The years that have passed have been far more gentle on me, certainly. There isn't much original left on the boat save for half the hull, the mast and boom. Its been gutted and retrofitted so many times its hardly the same boat. It can be launched from its trailer and our original thought was we'd spend far more time gunkin about then we have. Lake Michigan is only 40 miles away.

Can't say I've ever heard of an Aquarius but every sailboat is beautiful in her own way. I sail a Precision 23 on Tampa Bay. Here's a shot off her stern on a recent sunset sail.



Now, Tentative is around here someplace and he's ILP's most experienced sailor. He made me buy a book titled The Arts of the Sailor by Hervey Garrett Smith. A great book filled with all kinds of useful information. Every knot known to man is in there. I don't have the heart to tell Tent that I'm still tying everything with a square knot.

[rainey]

Sailors make the best bullshitters.

Isn't that what I said?

[anon]

I'm jealous.

[tentative]

Rainey,

I've been landlocked for so long that I no longer consider myself a sailor. I'm just one of the fogies on the dock committee. But the poetry without proper words never goes away. A light chop, a steady 10 knot wind, feeling the hull stiffen when heeled over 15 degrees. That's poetry without words. Feeling the tiller dance back and forth in your hand, as if listening to a silent song of the water, how does one convey that it words? Hot coffee drunk straight from the thermos thawing frozen lips... There is more poetry in wind,water, and sail than will ever find words... Man didn't set out in boats to discover new lands. That was just an excuse to be off under the spell of sail.

I forgive you being knot-challenged. Few have the luxury of time to learn and put into practice seaman's knots and bights. One can get by with just a square knot -until it upsets and a shroud line goes whipping through the blocks... Forgot the stopper knot didn't you?

Mowk,

A nice story. But beyond that, there is connection with nature in it's most simple and beautiful form. whether a butterfly or dolphins criss-crossing just in front of the bow, watching nature at play is just one of the benefits of being under sail.

[rainey]

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." --Kenneth Grahame


(Although sometimes, JT, knots or no knots, I think sailing is all about one thing getting accidentally caught on another thing. The main halyard wrapping around a spreader, the jib getting tangled around the forestay, the bowline running underneath and getting fouled in the prop, the main sheet wrapped around my foot, my foot accidentally knocking over the cooler and spilling the ice and beer...yeah, I think I'm ready for the America's Cup...)

[tentative]

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." --Kenneth Grahame


(Although sometimes, JT, knots or no knots, I think sailing is all about one thing getting accidentally caught on another thing. The main halyard wrapping around a spreader, the jib getting tangled around the forestay, the bowline running underneath and getting fouled in the prop, the main sheet wrapped around my foot, my foot accidentally knocking over the cooler and spilling the ice and beer...yeah, I think I'm ready for the America's Cup...)

Yes, some of those things are bound to happen. It is little known, but Murphy's Law was discovered under sail, not on land. That is why keeping everything Bristol fashion is important. Just curious, but how the hell does a bowline end up adrift in the water? Aren't they supposed to be neatly coiled on the foredeck? And what is this prop thingy? What prop? And spilling the ice and beer? That comes close to criminality!

Whether poetry or philosophy, or philosophical poetry, it is all about un-tieing knots. Of course, one needs to know how to tie knots first in order to undo them.

[Mowk]

As far as knots go there are five basic knots I learned as a scout that have proved as useful sailing. Square, Sheet-bend, Half-hitch, Bowline and the Figure-eight. Guess perhaps the two bindings I use to secure a rope to a cleat could loosely be considered knots as well. It takes far more diligence to untie the knotting done to a free sheet thrashed about in a wind.

Kites planes and sailboats all have the most ingenious of inventions in common... a foil.

[Mowk]

And on an other subject. One that causes me a degree of despair. We have a bird feeder suspended from a Sheppard's hook. In its fashioning, where the hooks meet the shaft there is a pinch point. I found a bird this morning with its leg caught in this pinch. I ran out side to see if I could free it and in the process of getting its leg free discovered it was badly broken with compound fractures. That instant, the thought came that I should just twist its neck, but I couldn't do it. Instead I pinched the mangled foot free and let it go. It did fly off, but I wonder if what I had done was the "right" thing to do. Will nature simply do what I could not. In the end nature does anyway.

[rainey]

Bummer.

I'd have done the same. You erred (if you erred) on the side of life.

[Mowk]

Bummer.

I'd have done the same. You erred (if you erred) on the side of life.

An appealing sentiment that speaks volumes in adjacent arenas of thought.

[Mowk]

Seems like one sort of kind a has to trust; with eyes to see, you do.

Benefit of doubt won't cut it, but perhaps faith with out certainty will? That sort of kind a sounds like magic, but my hearing ain't so good.

[Mowk]

Correlation is not proof of cause?

discovery channel new series: Brain Games and Numbers.

[Mowk]

Or maybe it was Nat Geo as come to think of it, I don't get Disc anymore since the cable provider changed the line-up.

[Mowk]

Muse ON

Paganism? There have been a few threads regarding paganism and magic. And many of them get stuck in the muck of proof and labeling.

Perhaps paganism is a world view of inclusion rather then exclusion. A view whereby mankind can not be isolated from the world it lives in. There is much talk about individual responsibility. That to me is a separatist and disconnected view. Paganism seems to me to be a world view that does not begin with separation but rather with connection. The sensation that despite the failure of my senses to perceive the connections, the connections are there, for those with sense to see.

From a world view that all is connected it isn't so difficult to believe in "magic" but beware of that term. To the magician, it really isn't magic at all, while it remains quite magical.

[_________]

To the OP, I grew up on a 32 Irwin and later lived on a 42 Hunter. Some of my best memories are of sailing and the dock life, notably riding the bow in 6' swells off the outer banks of North Carolina. Alas, I've been land-locked for damned near a decade now.

Anyways, I do indeed have one such memory that stuck with me.

I was dropped off early one morning at the Montessori school that I attended for the latter part of my elementary education and took the wooden deck to the right of the building that circled around back to the student entrance (where you took off your 'outside' shoes and put on your 'indoor' ones). The air was crisp and dew frosted the fallen leaves (turkey oak and red maple, I believe). I noticed a small bird--perhaps a finch or flycatcher, I don't recall--in the middle of the patch, evidently asleep. I inched towards it and with the utmost care picked it up. Though it initially struggled, it calmed down soon thereafter and I showed it to some of my classmates as they arrived and then set it free after I had soaked up their oohs and ahhs to my content. I went inside and proudly boasted to the teacher who was, to my surprise, cross and told me to immediately wash my hands because the poor thing must've been diseased. Of course it was, right? Beautiful things like that just don't happen, right?

[tentative]

We all ooh and ahhh at everyone else's highlight reel - and there isn't anything wrong with that. But it is the small insignificant moments that fill our memories. I don't believe in magic, but then I'm not sure that magic doesn't believe in me because it shows itself to me not often enough. But if there is magic, it is on the water.

Is there anything more comforting than finding a patch of kelp in a small bight, dropping the pick, crawling into a bunk and being rocked to sleep in the gentle swells?

[Mowk]

And on an entirely different muse.

Life, beginnings and endings. birth/death, alpha/omega.

I am the beginning and the end.

That is damn odd. A whole universe contained within I am. A child that dies before birth, living a beginning and end? A person goes into coma, and seven years later comes out of it. An end and a beginning and an end and a beginning.... It could go "on" like this for a very long time without having taken any time at all.

I wonder if our linear nature isn't fucking with us just a bit.

Perhaps it is inappropriate to speak of after-life or prior-life, if "I Am" is what it claims.

Concurrent lives? Each a beginning and each an end. Maybe the same beginning and the same end. Chronology problems, not with standing, but perhaps it is merely linearity rearing its head.

A lot of possibility.

And there is one that boggles the mind. You is just me on another path, same beginning same end. It gets to a point where you just can't kill your self and you can't kill yourself either.

Hello Me. Peace?

[Mowk]

I have questions regarding philanthropy; prompted by viewing an interview between Charlie Rose and Bill Gates.

"My money"



No matter what direction I sail, while I may be "a" captain, it's still the wind that gets me there.

"My" wind.



Yeah!

Bloody right.

[Mowk]

What is mine?

I seem to have some trouble with that. And perhaps how easily some claim ownership is where I find angst, or some such emotional irritation.

[Mowk]

This is likely yet another dumb thing to do.

I am not satisfied with the answers.

I have the feeling my father is dying. My brother and I have been alternately sitting with him 24/7 for a couple weeks now. Bedridden.

WTF is of "sound mind"? I am loosing it right along with him.

It is impossible to sleep as humanity moans particularly when it strikes so close to the heart and how..., I have hated my father.

Dad is resting quietly now and I should be too.

[Mr Reasonable]

My granddad is getting buried in the morning.

But on a positive note, yet another friend has purchased a kayak, (which is hardly comparable to a sailboat), and that's one more person that I can get to go kayaking this summer.