Belly of the Whale

((This was originally a private entry - oh, well.)

The Last Samurai

The Seven Values of the Samurai:
Duty and Loyalty
Justice and Morality
Complete Sincerity
Courtesy
Compassion
Heroic Courage
Honor


Are these not my own?
Of course, I like to trim them down, compact them. Loyalty and courtesy stem from compassion, honor and morality out of sincerity, and sincerity out of love and honesty.

It does my heart good to see such a pure reflection of what I feel in my heart displayed so clearly in a movie. Death was but an act of life, to be feared but not despised. Life was art, grace, attention. What a beautiful world!

I want to live in Japan now, but I know it is not what it was. But to have such a simple, intense worldview be as prolific as it seems to have been there is amazing to me. Perhaps the Native Americans were little different.

But not with such grace. The N.A were unbridled in the way the Japanese were meticulous and disciplined.

They also represent what I am not: They strive toward perfection and practice patience, slowly moving toward what they seek. I explode, accelerate toward my destination and tire, become disinterested, and then lose focus. I turn my attention elsewhere before completing my original task as astutely as I otherwise could.

My fiberglass work is teaching me what I can accomplish with time and focus. “Just a little farther.” I think of the artist, how the more he works, the longer he stares the more he finesses, the purer the work he creates. I think of Narziss, working at his statue of St. John for over a year, working in fits and starts—but never quitting or changing course. ("Narziss and Goldmund", a novel by Hermann Hesse)

What ever happened to my naval reading?
I haven’t read seriously in months. Brian has read through half of Calder’s tome. I need to learn engines and such. Where is my discipline?
Granted, Brian doesn’t even have a boat yet. I could say, to each his own path, but the point is to improve and intensify my own.

How can I be stronger? How can I be more myself, purer, more purely me? What the hell does that mean?
That seems to insinuate that I wish to bring something out of myself that is innate, not socially constructed. I am trying to unlearn social mores and find my unfettered self.

I don’t care what this me is or where it comes from—so long as I am me. I believe being ME is the best life I can live. That’s what I want. I believe that the closer I am to self-realization, the more I can give, the more beautiful my life will become, the more important, the more powerful, the more vital my life will be. I don’t have a clue what that means.
Will I die a perpetual sailor and hedonist? Or will I lead a new health and spiritual healing movement? (Ha!)
Will I become President of the United States? Will my legacy be only a child, and through him all my loves and desires will manifest more perfectly than I could hope for?

I want Blonny to be proud. I want everyone to be proud of me. I am ashamed of how much the respect of my peers means to me. I use Blonny so much as my inspiration, my light to help me through sufferings and trials. I want to serve, that is my deepest wish, that my life will somehow mean something.

It is ironic, because I feel like I am the happiest person I know. My life seems to serve itself. I am the wealthy hedonist on the perpetual vacation. Often it feels that way too. I can’t believe how lucky I am. I am thankful every single day. Life is a miracle.

So how do I reconcile this?
Sometimes I don’t. I can be awfully critical of myself. I doubt, I criticize. But I try to remember what this is all about. This is my path of self-discovery. Being happy is not a sin, perhaps it is a sign of success. It would, and is, ridiculous to criticize yourself for your own happiness.

Yet, I cannot forget my goal. It isn’t happiness; it is realization. I am an artist. I am sculping a life, a life as beautiful as I can make it. Out of beauty comes utility. My life will find its function out of its clear and fine delineations and suppleness.

I don’t need, nor expect, to ever know what my success was, if I ever reached it. Honestly, I find a deal of satisfaction from making people smile. Perhaps that is the best I can do.
Not such a bad life is that.
Being happy and making others smile. If that is my life and my truest calling I accept it happily. Of course, I sort of doubt it.
I’ve always prepared myself for a gruesome sort of life, always dreaming of prisons and violent deaths. But the older I become the more accepting I become of what I have: happiness.
Why fight it.

Only last night did I come to a realization concerning my preoccupation with suffering: I don’t. The grass is always greener. We crave what we don’t have. I yearn to suffer because I don’t suffer.

I like to think I suffer, but my sufferings are so superficial, so physical in nature. What is a little cold and discomfort?—nothing. Nothing compared to the existential confusion of being lost, having no path, no passion, no lovers, no loved ones, no god, no self-love.
That is real suffering,
Suffering I haven’t known. I am very lucky indeed.


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However.......since writing this piece, I am again confronted with glimpses of destiny: I call myself Jonah, the single most cursed sailor's name, the worst omen. A "Jonah" is someone who brings misfortune onto a boat by his presence.
I've been calling my boat, "The Grim", a reference to death, the Grim Reaper, to the dark side, the feminine, the Yin.
What's more, as I just remembered, my email address is Bellyofthewhale--this is the mythological hell, the place where all heroes must venture on there path.

I am totally infatuated with the inferno. I WANT to experience it. I know that is terrible somehow. But everything I have suffered has made all else in my life the more vivid and beautiful.
I love being able to truly appreciate water because I have experienced extreme thirst, or the taste of simple foods because I've been hungry.
Suffering adds so much to the ordinary experience of simple things.

Of course, it is debilitating. In some ways, you are never the same, you never recover, you are reforged for better and worse.
I know this. And yet I can't help feeling it is my destiny somehow, though I am aware that I am consciously making it my destiny by my preoccupation with it.

What a world.