The sky fell
In a wet spring
And the creek roared
With clear rainwater
Sluicing down the many ways
Dancing over the rocks
And the rain came on
Into May, when the heat first rose
On into June
And the creek still ran
Down in the canyon
Below the thundering cars
Clear rainwater
Filling the cracks and fissures
Priming the springs
People in kayaks and tubes
People just swimming and floating in the stream
Braving the rocky run
Tumbling over the waterfalls
Small but violent with strong waters
I saw one group of young men in tubes
Laughing and wild
Towing an ice chest
Surely full of beer
They tumbled over cherry falls
The last man, the one with the chest in tow
Capsized in a foaming explosion
At the base of the falls
But he came up laughing still
Righted his craft, secured the cargo
And floated on to join his fellows
July came, Texas heat searing the land
And the creek still flowed
Buoyed by rainy days, here and there
Finally, in the dead heat of August
The rain stopped, and the creek died
We walked by dwindling pools
The last water holes
And in every one
(Five we counted in a row)
A snake swam
After the fish and water creatures
Trapped in the drying pools
The long reptiles hunted
Carefully we skirted the edges of pools
Watching the snakes swim
Marveling at all of it
At last, the creek dried to nothing
White rocks like bones showing
Dead for a time
Yet full of the promise of life
In the mud and under the stones
Sleeping, surviving in the heat
Ready to live again
When the first cold fronts of fall
Bring rain to the canyon once more

To sleep
Descending softly
In floating footfalls
Drifting down
A green hill in spring
To a far valley
Visible as the quiet sum of wonder and desire
The outer world recedes
Clamoring war of urgent banality
Of imagined lack and ferocious scheduling
All fading, for a time
At first still audible
And real around the edges
But increasingly irrelevant
Against the siren pull
The seductive wondrous slide
As the body lets go
As the mind enfolds
Into the vale of sleep
Where a light breeze ruffles the sycamore leaves
With a sussurating static of soothing white noise
Where we never leave the womb
And the universe exhales
Transpiring the warm, wet stuff of dreams
Outer world now far behind
Darkness falling like a gray blanket
Over everything
Warm, soft, a shield and a comfort
And at last, in the quiet dark
Night now fallen across the vale
All withdrawn and seeming dead
The dark is punctuated by sudden sparks
Hardly remembered, the mind's trick
Each a galaxy in a sand grain
Dreams
What transpires in the vale at night?
Only a sudden waking can sometimes tell
And cobwebs of drenched emotion tear asunder
As we emerge
Radiant thorns piercing through to the waking world
Half-remembered, so quickly receding
Back to the vale
A mirror life
Of chaos beneath the soft blanket
Gone now, fading, ephemeral
Even those who quickly scribble a few lines
Can never recall the full power and scope
Of the infinite majesty, joy, danger, and fear
That we all carry on our daily rounds

Our lives are defined by apparitions
Of shared assumption
My name
Fortress to contain my self
Built of thin gossamer
Yet imbued with power
Without names (could we even imagine it?)
Would we run free in new pastures
Like infants, or wild beasts
Knowing the entire world, always
The gestalt of now, created each moment
No individuals, only the herd, and the world
The sky and grass and singing wind
Eternal, ommipresent, exultant
And what of minutes and hours
Days, weeks, months
Demarcations of time
Parceling each piece of life
Fabrications all, mental constructs
Tyrant ghosts with solidity and purpose
That we have given them
To these we abdicate our lives
Soon with no concious consideration
Running like background programs set long ago
Forgotten, yet underlying all
They command the days
Sun rising is marked and measured
Today is only a place to see tomorrow
Could we ever truly forsake these now
To live fully in each moment
Alert to what is happening now
Right now
We walk like ghosts
Past towering constructs
Shadows of our thoughts
They hulk on every horizon
Naming the universe

I took a razor blade
To cut away the strangling root
I thought was snaking up around my family tree
It was hard
I don’t like cutting
But I steeled myself
I was afraid: afraid to act, afraid not to act
It was not done thoughtlessly
But it was desperate
I cut the root
And the bleeding started
The blood flowed out
Pain and anguish and sullen grief
There was so much
I could not see, until later
It was not a root
It was an artery
I had cut the tie that binds

The house of my spirit has many rooms
I can move through all of them
Some neat and spare
Some cluttered with delicate art
In some the psychic detritus of latent dreams
Courage is needed
To venture into the labyrinthine dark
Of nether spaces
Haunted by echoes of lament
Of fear
Of failure remembered, over and over
Of self-doubt, and self-hate, and self-persecution
Descending in slime and dark to places where hope dies
Yet other ways call to me
With brilliant power
The lofty rooms
Citadels of love
To walk like giants
To be as gods
To grasp and hold
No, to channel and feel
The living song of the universe
Of what it means to be alive
To replace the whispers of defeat
With affirmations of achievement
To choose joy, yet to own and understand the suffering
To be complete, as much as possible
It is all affirmation
It is the power of the word
It is the will for deeds to follow
It is understanding the power to choose
The house of my spirit has many rooms
Infinite numbers of ways
To seek them all
Is the road I long to choose

Thursday, August 28, 2008 – Romulo and Ixcel!

We thought we had seen beautiful, clear sea water in Grand Cayman, and of course we had. But when we arrived at Cozumel, we were astonished by the turquoise water, and the gradations of color, from deep cerulean blue to light aquamarine.

Cozumel has been a cruise ship port for 20 years, and there’s a major concentration of tourist shops at Punta Langosta where we docked. After toodling about for a quick hour, we caught our excursion bus to Chankanaab National Park, about 15 minutes away.

At Chankanaab, the 100 or so of us who had signed on for the dolphin excursion were broken into small groups of 12. Each group donned life vests and filed out on the docks that formed a square enclosure, cordoning off a 2,000 x 3,000 yard portion of the azure water with underwater hurricane fences. We could see the dolphins sticking their heads up, leaping and swimming around groups of tourists already in the water.

Our group assembled in the water, standing on a platform about 4 feet deep. One at a time, we did various activities with Romulo, a 15-year-old male dolphin with scars on his forehead, from skirmishes with other males fighting over the females we were told. We kissed and hugged Romulo. We got rides holding onto his dorsal fins while he swam upside down. We held onto a boogie board while Romulo pushed us from behind, positioning his round snout right on the sole of one of our feet—trust me, you can get going plenty fast this way.

At the end, we moved over for our “free time,” our “tiempo libre,” with two female dolphins, including one named Ixcel (sp?). They swam down the line of people, letting us run our hands along their sleek sides. They leaped high in the air. They splashed us with water.

Finally, it was over and we were led in our dripping suits into small TV viewing rooms where we watched video presentations of our group’s experience, miraculously edited in record time so that we could view it immediately, complete with slow motion sequences of our dolphin rides.
Finally, it was time to return to Conquest, and we joined the great throng walking out on the piers to the two ships. Inspiration was docked alongside Conquest. The Royal Caribbean ship Liberty of the Seas had also come to Cozumel, but was at a separate dock five miles away. No tender boats this time. The embarkation staff inserted our sea and sail ID cards one at a time as we boarded, each one making a loud “ding,” indicating one more passenger had returned to the floating city. Was anyone ever left behind? It happens infrequently, we were told—those who fail to reboard in time are aided by Carnival staff on land, and typically fly back to their port of origin, after paying a significant fine.

Aug. 27, 2008 – Reef and Rays!

At dawn Tom awoke and found we were sliding into our first port stop, Grand Cayman. To our surprise and awe, another great cruise ship pulled up alongside us, then another, until there were three floating hotels anchored in the azure waters a mile or two offshore. To our left was Liberty of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean liner, and to our right was Inspiration, the little sister of Conquest, about two thirds our size.

This was our only port stop where we were to travel to the shore by “tender,” meaning there was no deep water pier sufficient to dock the vast cruise ships and they anchored offshore, with smaller boats shuttling groups of cruisers to and fro all day.

On shore we waited for a while and then caught our bus to our chosen shore excursion. We were surprised when the bus turned into a residential area, but pleased that it showed us a bit of daily life, at least for those who could afford vacation homes in Grand Cayman. The bus route mystery was solved when we pulled up to a dock between two big houses on a canal which served the wealthy vacation homers, allowing them to launch their boats from their back yards.

The snorkeling boat crew immediately engaged us with high spirited banter, particularly the ring leader Rob, a Brit who was funny, articulate, informative, a great guide and host. All three crew members were sunburned white guys, the youngest seemingly in his 20s. Their boat Emerald Eyes was a flat bottomed, motorized, double decker catamaran.

We motored down the canal and Tom was stunned to see dozens of 2-3 foot long Honduran iguanas lounging in the backyard grass and docks of the wealthy homes. It was like instead of dogs or cats there were these cat sized lizards with incredibly back fringes and long droopy chin wattles.

In half an hour we neared our first stop, the coral reef that lined the mouth of the islands North Sound for many miles. The white lines of breaking surf clearly showed the location of the shallow reef. After brief instruction, the 50 or so tourists on board donned masks and snorkels and fins and slid into the incredible, swimming-pool clear turquoise water. Visibility must have been close to 100 feet. The reef was 3-8 feet below us, and we floated over it, hovering, occasionally flipping with feet or stroking with arms, pulled back and forth over the coral below by the waves.

The boat had laminated sheets of color images identifying about 60 species of reef fish, and Tom swam back once to look at it before coming back to find Lauren. We saw “Dorie” from Finding Nemo, a blue tang. We saw two different types of wrasse, fish that are one color in front and different colors in back, with a vertical stripe in the middle of their bodies demarcating the color break. Sea fans waved in the clear current, wafting gently back and forth. Millions of little fish of all kinds and colors ducked in and out of sheltering holes in the brain coral and stalk coral. We saw something called a trunkfish, who had a body like a triangular puffer fish and used its long snout to blow a little clear space in the white sand and root for food. One fish had a dark blue-black body pocked with iridescent dots all over its back, like electric blue stars against a black night sky. There were parrot fish and tiny iridescent blue guys with forked tales called blue chromiss. Finally, after all to short a time (about 40 minutes), the boat’s air horn signaled it was time to motor over a half mile or so to our next stop, the famed Stingray City.

In various books and web sites that reference snorkeling in the Caribbean, the Stingray City sand bar on Grand Cayman invariably is cited as one of the top snorkeling experiences in the region. As we pulled up, Rob explained that for many decades, island fishermen had been fishing in the deeper water beyond the reef, then they’d come into calmer waters inside the reef to clean the fish and chuck the guts and heads overboard. Over the years, stingrays learned to associate this area with a free meal.

The fishing boats may be gone, but the tourist boats now come in such numbers that Cayman wildlife authorities have forbidden tourists to feed the rays—only guides can now do so. All of us reentered the water, this time over 8-10 foot deep white sand several hundred yards inside the reef. Rob and his mate Nick proceeded to feed the rays squid while the rest of us swarmed like schooling fish. Lauren had a close encounter where the entire underside of a ray and brushed along her thigh. Tom stroked the undersides of several rays, which ranged in size from big dinner plates to big guys 3-4 feet in diameter. As Rob said, touching a ray did indeed feel like stroking a soft mushroom.

Finally, the tour boat brought us back to the dock, where we tendered back out to the ship. Tomorrow, swimming with dolphins at Cozumel…

P.S. It is now Saturday morning, Aug. 30 (my blog posts are several days behind!), and Hurricane Gustav is now northwest of Grand Cayman, expected to hit Texas on Monday or Tuesday. Weather is typical around Conquest--sunny with a light breeze. It appears almost certain we will outrun Gustav and make port in Galveston a day or two ahead of the storm.