Blue World

 

Quest?

Seeking, Sought

Navarro Beach:

February 15, 2016

Flowers

Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens.

My mother and father happily visited these gardens many times.

Fun Reading: Malazan!

This is the third book in a ten-book series.
Steven Erikson's Memories of Ice.
Erikson's heroic fantasy is real literature, invoking and breaking the stale cliches of the genre, enlivening character and plot with insight, wit, humor, and compassion, pulling and pushing his readers to the brink of expectation and trauma, again and again.

Very fine writing.





Whiskeyjack, man.  Really?

Mendocino

As she filled my travel cup, the Mendocino waitress slipped and shifted through a double-handful of funky dance moves and then, after collecting my cash, closed the till with an eloquent twitch of her hips.  All for her own obvious delight in the music coming out of the speakers.  I wish I’d paid some attention to the tune.

Longing for a Road-Trip

Thistle Me This

Salt Longing

Looking back: 8/8/16

Salt Joy: Or, Paddling

The first drop?

Note that JP has three crab traps on that kayak.

A man and the bay.

Paddle-time: heading into the future.

Yule-Tide Greetings

May your yuletide be cheery, be bright, and be salty.
-----


Heed the reefs not yet charted
Seek that green isle beyond design

-from "Oh Malachi Malarkey"

Here's that whole poem:


OH MALACHI MALARKEY

When the ropes of reason slacken
When the veils of prudence thin
Then intuition harkens
Then souls fit skin to skin

Hope can be so brittle
Clay not fired to the core
Well-thrown bowls roughly handled
Scattered shells along the shore

Now there's a measure in the offing
Now the surges swell with pride
Say, is this canny craft a coffin?
Say, may your reach not fall too shy

Oh, Malachi Malarkey
Oh, Sophia Sophrosyne
Heed the reefs not yet charted
Seek that green isle beyond design

--MD

Goddess

Yearning

Signal Phrase

On Loch Lomond.

TBT: Water / Damage

A 2008 shot, from Hawaii, and the water got into that disposable camera, but that's okay.

I'll never be that young again--and, hey, eight years ago is younger--but I yearn and aim to be in as good a shape as I was that year.  I swam and swam and swam that year.

Aiming to make the rest of 2016 a water-year.

Whiskey Friday

Or, The Devil Is In The Details

Body English:
sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.
20-minute exercise.

The Winding and Unwinding

THE WINDING AND UNWINDING

The shape of your thought
Entices me
Quite as much as
The thought of your shape.

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water:
I swim towards you.

I reach for you
Again and again and again
In thought, in force,
Not withholding aught
Save what wyrd demands
From each of us.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide,
Again releasing,
Again embracing,
Tasting and chasing,
Like river-otters sliding
Down the sloped bank.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide:
The rounded lift and heft,
The nipple’s assertion,
The twinned-blood rising
Like the swift pull
Of the river’s pulse
And penetration --
Flowing,
Falling,
Following –-

That shared current
Streaming just past the shore,
Stranding us between
Just enough
And quite enough.
___

Coda:
Laughing lips sip --
Swallow -- another draft.
Glasses, glances,
Clash and chime,
Toasting the new year.

Harken to the hearty
Admonition:
Draft, not drift.

--Matthew Duckworth

Longing

Old shot, renewed yearning.
Mendocino water-garden and caves.

I Have A Kelp Tattoo

Or, I Love Kelp

My Uncle's Question:  Have you ever gotten tangled up in kelp while snorkeling or SCUBAing?

My Answer: Not in any way that mattered. I'm very patient in kelp--my formative diving years were spent in free diving for abalone up north. Plenty of kelp practice. That said, I hate kelp-crawling (moving across the surface on the kelp); I had a dive partner once who decided we were too low on air and insisted that we had to kelp-crawl to stay on the surface and not use the tanks . . . . I'd been trained to slip under, whenever possible, and been trained to accept a lower pressure level in the tanks. Since he didn't hear me, I had to stick by him (he was my partner, after all), but that was a not quite necessary hardship). This was at Pt. Lobos a few years back, and I will say that my compass navigation did stick us in the middle of that thick kelp forest. Still, I would have switched to snorkels, even, and harbor-sealed under and up . . . .

Graves: "Heroes of the Nursery"

THE BEACH

Louder than gulls the little children scream 
Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam; 
But others fearlessly rush in, breast high, 
Laughing the salty water from their mouthes-- 
Heroes of the nursery. 

The horny boatman, who has seen whales 
And flying fishes, who has sailed as far 
As Demerara and the Ivory Coast, 
Will warn them, when they crowd to hear his tales, 
That every ocean smells of tar. 

--Robert Graves