Swaying Sailor: the staggering truth about the somatic compass

I am curious about the ordinary. Not the laudable, the predictable, the sensational. I am energized by the daily moments, unable to suppress an inappropriate excitement at teasing the somatic arcana flogged by words falling suddenly, pressing and clamoring, tripping over one another. Language remains wild at the edges, bridging over the bridge of saying. If I miss a step, will it crumble? When the honey lips stop smiling, when your eyes look past me, into the ordinary, the fleeting? Duration brought me here in a constellation of temporal, temporary breaths. To begin here, where the history of the moment is already showing signs of wear, is a narrative that in its writing fills my present moment and together with you receiving it, we are a morsel of truth, William Blake’s grain of sand.

I have an affinity for the nomadic. I reference myself in motion. And I feel this presencing in movement most profoundly when I sail my boat. Learning to sail these past few years, I have gratefully received lessons of presence and taut attentiveness to the moment. At the first hint of the fresh sea air as I descend the plank to the dock I can taste the chunks of time, flung by salty chance.

Why not open my mouth?

Through her torso and limbs (the hull, the tiller, the sails, sheets and shrouds) I enter a conversation using all my senses, alert, interpreting. I negotiate, moment to moment, a relationship with the moving ocean bellow and around me. As I respond to the boat, attentive to the tides, to the breeze and coolness of moisture droplets now and then freckling my windswept face, I feel the moment pass through me, I become it, tousled with duration. I am, within and without, a pelagic nomad. Some new awakenings emerge, still in unrest, from the pores, living, contracting as they breathe. My hand on a tiller, I feel the resonance of response. The boat becomes an extension of my body. I’m never really sure what the next moment will bring, yet the contact, procured deftly in the flow as it shifts with the gust of wind, swell of wave or the deep moment of the incoming tide, places me at the fluid proscenium, a threshold of alert interpretation and a surrender to the next moment. I discharge the love I feel, in imperceptible bursts, elongated pauses, I let it drift along the fringes of the somatic moment, in articulated movement that belies the suppleness of my intentions to surrender, open wide. And I yearn for another and yet another seizing, my fingers closed firmly over the end of a quivering tiller. I feel the boat, the tide’s swelling, the tug at my very core. The sea gives a benevolent nod and the connecting tissue of the world gathers like a muscle around my heart.

Sometimes I lose balance. When the movement of the elements around me insist on impermanence and lack of solidity, my body skips a beat and staggers, there is an almost imperceptible moment in time, a slight feeling of not knowing anything, not having a reference in time or space; a feeling of utter incompetence. And even as the body tries to compensate through proprioceptive action, there is that moment in between, a slight gap between the loss of balance and corrective action, where I am in limbo. A syncope.

If you share my fondness for the Pirates of the Caribbean, you know Captain Jack Sparrow is in possession of a compass of an unusual quality. This compass does not point north. Instead it points to what the heart wants the most in the whole world. And for me, it is that moment of pelagic syncope. In that moment of knowing nothing, I know everything, everything that is beyond language. And I think I understand why sailors stagger on the firm ground. It is not rum. Or, not JUST rum. It is their heart calling back to the sea, their body still in vital contact with the swell and surf of that connection to all made present.

And as this small narrative, a mere thread of words, without a beginning or an end, a soft tentacle, the first explorer, makes its way out of my mouth, her billowing body, hips swaying, opens a buoyant heart to shelter me, regardless of goodbyes, in spite of the ordinary.