by Robert Waldvogel

Created on: March 11, 2011   Last Updated: March 12, 2011

Like pearls strung across the sea, the days of that ocean journey unfolded, each connected to the other by a common thread.

Amid a burst of light, which poured out of the dark cloud cover on that first day and transformed the collected cumulous into velvety violets, the dowager of a ship to serve as my floating “home” during the next seven days lumbered down the Hudson River and laboriously turned into the Port of New York, leaning on its right side, as if it were a stately, yet elderly lady whose youthful vigor had long burned out.

A brilliant closure to the otherwise cold autumn day appeared on the western horizon.  The yellow strata, momentarily rendering the water an orange sheet of beveled glass, yielded to darkness.

Plying the gray sea slate the following morning, which angrily spat white caps toward its corrugated surface, the ship maintained a southerly heading and a docile steam speed.

The ocean, merging with the sky at the thin reference point designated the “horizon,” appeared little more than a pencil line which marked the change in shade between the two surfaces, reducing the world to a single dimension.  My focus had often been just as narrow and the view now prompted an internal realignment: concerns, anxieties, and fears, consistently carried to the point of permanence, equally faded, leaving my soul in its purest form: blissful beingness.

The sky’s cloud sculptures, flood-like a pink hue, indicated the wane of yet another day-and, perhaps, opportunity-never to be regained. 

Concentric whirlpools fanning out toward the dock, products of the vessel’s initial movement, indicated lateral separation from its anchorage.  But night so thoroughly hammered its anvil of darkness into the sky that not a thread of light or color penetrated its black, draping veil.

On the following day, which marked the voyage’s halfway mark, faint thoughts, like tenuous threads to my past, resurfaced, in initial anticipation of return to my land-based life, which already seemed to lurk on the horizon.  Time at sea paradoxically seemed both suspended and accelerated: disconnected from the draining drive, life as I had known it had ceased, yet the miles, activities, people, thoughts, and discoveries encountered during the sea journey had somehow flooded by without comprehension, and I began to wonder how I could extract the maximum experience from the few remaining days so that I could take the most from

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