Gurney: “It’s time for your daily lesson.”
Paul: “Not today, Gurney, I’m not in the mood.”
Gurney: “Moods are for cattle and loveplay, not for fighting!”
~ Dune by Frank Herbert
Me: "With all due respect, Gurney, I am still not in the mood. Well, I have certain priorities today, and writing my Monday blog post is not one of them. Fine, fine. I will write something, but don’t expect too much, or anything worthwhile. "
(For the record, I loved reading the book, all six times, and thoroughly enjoyed the TV miniseries.)
There is a scene in the movie Life of Pi, when we see the main character floating in his small boat on the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. It is night, the ocean is calm, he is alone. And that loneliness is accentuated by the intensity of a hundred thousand stars stretched across the sky. And it is magnified by a camera shot of him in the boat, drifting along, surrounded by the those countless points of starlight reflected in the serene abyss beneath him. (I may be misremembering some details of this scene).
I have a pool, and I find myself enjoying it mostly at dusk, when darkness gently begins to follow the fading sun, and the stars, one by one, take the stage. Living in suburbia in a northeastern part of the country, the night sky is never awash in starlight. The sounds of human life tick away randomly on the edges of my property and beyond. And the pool depth can easily be traversed by a quick dive. But the crowns of the surrounding tall trees create a sharp outline that condenses and focuses whatever points of stars penetrate the light pollution. Most of the time, sounds arrive muffled and faded, dull and soothing. And when there is the honk of sudden horns, or the rumble of an accelerating engine, it is distant enough that I quickly forget it. Finally, my wild and vivid imagination can easily conjure up an endless dark depth of ocean beneath my floating form.
Adrift in a pool, beneath a pale reflection of the vast Milky Way, just outside the bounds of a human world preparing for sleep, I savor the moment of solitude. Leisurely floating along the pools current, I quietly bob about the serene surface. Looking up at a handful of stars, basking in the glow of a crescent moon, and watching the gentle sway of nearby tree tops, I begin to lose myself in an encroaching dreams.
At some point I am reminded that “No man is an island” and I return to the real world. With a sigh, I paddle over to the pool steps, walk over to the patio table, and begin to dry off. For a brief moment, before the mosquito bites begin to take their toll, I glance across my yard, beyond the fence, toward a distant neighbor’s land, where their window light glows like a dim lantern.
And like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, coming upon a lamppost in a snowy wood, I sense an adventure lurking in that direction.
But the mosquitoes bite, the night chills, and tomorrow’s chores beckon.
I turn my back on the far off lantern, and head inside, tucking away that adventure for another time.
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