At first it is a passage of days, and you measure them in days from, your eyes and your heart reaching outward, and the familiar - perhaps the mundane - gently is displaced by the roll of the deck, the expanding horizon, the constancy of the wind, the salt on your lips. Run your tongue gently over the upper lip: it is the taste that lingers from a lover's skin, when you have left a kiss, it runs in small rivulets from your forehead to your cheek to the lip, it drips in small dewdrops from the tip of your nose, the mist shrouds everything that was your past, and clouds anything that may be your future, covers it all, covers it all in salt.

There is a beautiful freedom, there. Almost, it wears the simplicity of an ocean monastery, where the monastics curse and grumble, spit and drink, tell stories fit for ports but not for family rooms, smile broadly with gaps where teeth had been, fill great inner emptinesses with huge outer vastnesses, and pray to a god they will not (maybe can not) name. But the god accompanies them nonetheless - it is within every life, well-written or unwritten. It is the balance of a foot upon the deck, the rough leather of the working hands, the sleep which comes deep as 'trench currents when a day's long labor's done. And it is in the view of forever that a man or a woman gets, if they stand in the pulpit looking forward, their feet on an inch of plank, beneath them nothing, above them nothing, before them nothing, but the drone of the engines to carry one beating heart on a gull's flight over water.

How can you consider this hull a freedom? You've got a quarter-acre to walk, foreward and aft, a few levels of deck to explore, round and round. Round and round and round and round and round and round. The same rooms, the same faces, the same tasks, same sunrises and sunsets. The weather changes; but soon it begins to repeat itself. Your beard grows and you cut it back. It grows again. Your teeth are cleaned, again and again (or not). If you are a woman (or not), your legs need shaving (or not). The mundane that you lost is the mundane that finds you, wearing another face; the size of your world becomes as small as the sea around you has become huge.

Freedom is: your one remaining option is to be. I like that, being, for a while.

The arc of an ocean voyage like everything else: spark, fire, flight, smoke, coal, ash, crash, cool, dust. And so delight becomes common, where the heart comes to the test, struggles, and finding no superficial escape, comes to rest.

~

At first it is a passage of days, then weeks away, then months, until away refines its meaning, because there is no more home; away becomes home, becomes a state of being, a simple daily theater played out on an endless, rocking stage. Away, away. Away from what? There is only me. There is only We. A small, salty teardrop on the open sea. Gravity loses its grip when history begins to fade, and what used to pull your heart back with a gentle nostalgic tug pulls no longer. You float. Perfect. Rain falls. The swell rises like hills, then stretches like prairie. You ride the surface of an immeasurable abyss. The stars at night are brighter than anywhere on earth. Sometimes the sky fills with a shower of meteors, all bound for brightness and ash, for somewhere else. There are few fish here: only three elements exist: water, air and a mental mote the watches them.

The crew grows quiet. The passengers are silent; not sullen, but still. In a faded memory, the quality of time determined by the rules of earth, marked by terrestrial shapes and sounds, passed with some deliberation; now it flows and shifts like the waves flow and shift, and could be liquid, might be languid, may hurry you in the direction of the prow with a tail-whip of wind or wave, or may draw you heavily back the way that you came, arms holding you against your future in a way. Your hours are the sound of a train approaching, the sound of its passing, and the declining sound when it has passed, the speed of its call bending your trajectory.

~

The sailor is sighing into his tasks, has become part of wind and wave, a conduit of the incessant regular/irregular rocking of the deck. He is bent over the sheet, or over a mop; she is carrying some load belowdecks, or above; when suddenly -- there is the slight sweet scent of -- ! Sense of smell clothes the most memories. What was it? What is it? I have smelled something like that before... you reach back into a childhood catalogue of faces, places.

Sweet grass, hayfield, spring boughs, rose blossom... It's a wild rose! And in that moment, from asceticism stretched to one edge of the horizon and the other, the sea-monk raises head and hands, looks wildly around -- what grace there is in abandon -- and reaches his breath in the direction of the wind... there is it again! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! How could there be a rose without having run to ground already? The a cry of a gull, then sound of the surf, then houses and walkers with hands held, and pets bounding in and out of the sea; the spire of a town church like an arrow pointing to heaven; the light-specked shade of the village trees; the colors, oh, color again!

And with a few stumbling steps the weight of a man, of a woman, rests in the palm of the land. With a few stumbling steps the heat of the sand... glance around... where is the ship? Where have I been?

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