CRACK. Sails snap in the wind and taut ropes try to maintain order. Creaking boards can be heard flexing with the motion of the sea beneath. The ship speeds down steep waves, only to rise up again at the next crest. Yet, this is like no vessel recorded in any anthology, travelogue, or memoir—it is a ship of consciousness, and it voyages on the wave-like probabilities of as-yet-realised thoughts. Doubt, anxiety, fear—conceived as real as any trade wind—fill the sails, urging the ship on; to somewhere, to nowhere in particular, for nothing haunts us quite like stagnation in the doldrums of inaction. Behest by perspectives, expectation, assumptions, and dogma, we continue to chart courses forward. If only we would pause—for the pause is crucial—and look up; for what we seek lies above—a peace, a mercurial bliss, forms a firmament, a refuge beyond concepts, beyond the self-constructed self-delusion of the thinking mind.
