IS IT NOBLE OR FOOLISH - OR BOTH?

by Ray Jason

Thank you for your brilliance Norman Rockwell

The wind arrived swiftly.  The waves built more slowly - but also more dangerously.  Suddenly AVENTURA was no longer gently tugging at her anchor.  She was lunging and jerking perilously.  I let out more chain to calm her, but the seas kept pounding us.  The gorgeous little island with its massive coral formations had protected me from the prevailing winds for the last two days.  But now that we had swung around 180 degrees, those reefs were a million-machete menace.

 I had snorkeled them that afternoon and their beauty had dazzled me.  However, their contours had worried me.  In many places the water depth would drop from 15 feet to 2 feet in only a few yards.  Dashed against them, my fiberglass boat could quickly be punctured, filled with seawater and destroyed.  I would lose my home, my magic carpet, my companion.

TEMPORARY SANITY

by Ray Jason

I was awoken this morning by a tropical alarm clock – the joyous sound of wild parrots flying above my anchored boat.  Their airborne chirping reminded me that the last thing that I heard as I dozed off the night before was also from the non-human world.  It was the raucous barking of a troop of howler monkeys.

            Perhaps it was because my sleep had been book-ended by these emissaries from the realm of Nature - but I felt radiantly refreshed.  Lying in my bunk, I noticed that an amber shaft of equatorial sunlight was resting on my chart table.  And there, sitting in the middle of it was a little gecko sunning itself. 

A feeling of cleansing jubilation swept over me.  It felt like something momentous had transformed the planet as I slept during the night.  It was as though the long-rumored pole shift had occurred.  But it was not a geographical reversal, it was a philosophical upheaval.

                                   *******

Suddenly, the ordinary people of the world had awoken to the fact that war was not about spreading democracy and ousting hideous tyrants.  It was a fraud imposed on the regular people by the irregular people – who are awash in money and power and who benefit obscenely from war.