Category Archives: Oceanic

30-SEP

Swimming

Smile!

An important & popular fact it is, that things are not always what they seem.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars, and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.

But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish by Douglas Adams (1999)

22-SEP

Archaeology

You and I have memories
Longer than the road
That stretches out ahead”

Two of Us by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970)

385 million years from now the world will be vastly different again as well, while the universe, during the same time period, will have changed insignificantly (in comparison to its totality, of course).

The point is: you don’t have to move all that far from where you are now to experience expanded consciousness. Merely step outside. Go to the beach if possible.

06-SEP

Dihydrogen Oxide

Triple Point

The triple point of pure water is at the temperature just above freezing (0.01° C) and at the pressure (0.006 atm) at which it can exist in equilibrium in all three states: liquid, solid, and gaseous.

Yes, water can freeze & boil at the same time!

The triple point is used to calibrate thermometers.

18-JUL

Shadows

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

09-JUL

Jumping

no underwear
pumpkin pie
eating life
giant leap
get some air
cool

Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

Nothing exists in itself.

If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.

For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.

Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Chapter 11, Nightgown – Moby Dick by Herman Melville


* Thank you Will Henry for Wallace-the-Brave

16-JUN

Going

As the bird flies a Great Circle

Non-stop flight from London to San Francisco shows up as a curve on a Mercator Projection map of the Northern Hemisphere. The trip takes 11 hours at 36,000 feet altitude in the cramped fuselage of the Boing 777 jet airliner traveling up to 590 mph.

Nowhere to Land

Return flight over Greenland across Hudson Bay into Manitoba, exposed scenes of boundless, deathly, frozen landscape.