Towards Cambridge

Thursday, October 17th 2007
Pride of Baltimore II
Baltimore, Maryland

Today we leave for Cambridge. We're not filled with the fluttery , wild imaginations of upcoming adventures for Cambridge is not a very long voyage, not particularly exotic. What is solid and good is to be sailing again. Sure, we brag up how great it will be to get into a town, to meet new people, to drink beers and sleep a whole night through. All that is great but it's not what we're here for. Miserable, tired and stretched to our capacities, we are yet brilliantly alive when sailing as we do. Maybe the crew of a boat serve merely as human cogs in the mechanisms of transportation, but there is satisfaction in being mind-numbingly immersed in the act of 'being' a cog. I think this is what is entrancing about watching people walk along the brickways here in Baltimore: I see only a cameo of their lives but in that moment do they so fill themselves exactly as they are with no added pretentionss or ego. If you try to go beyond that first brief impression of a person, they are found to be complicated and full of air pockets, which is to say that they are not full at all, but blown up with ego. I am the worst of all sometimes but when we sail, it blows all that away and I become simple and purely a sailor sailing, a cook cooking, a worshiper in the act of worship. All this babble is just trying to embroider and thicken a small, slippery thought that is hard to hold onto, namely the mindful and wholehearted immersion in the act of being. So, we will set out in a bit and leave Baltimore, bound for the Eastern Shore. We will grumble and gripe and feel tired and overworked but singing through our veins will be the simple joy of being as we do what we are here to do.