Whatever

Everyone thinks they live atop the best point on earth. A difference in them and me is they think and I know: I know I do. OK, deduct ten points for the hurricanes. Two years ago I thought something about our geography protected us, shaded us from the worst of them, but I was proved wrong when a gardenia category 5 hurricane swept through here. It has proved quite costly, and we're still recovering physically, mentally, emotionally. Financially. The emotional cost may be the worst of it, including finding out that it doesn't help to be enraged at Father Nature's infidelity, if one holds on to it and won't let it go. A cost of infidelity is trust, one never trusts again. Actually, the cost is not trust but innocence, naïveté, realizing one's foolishness. So, it isn't a cost at all, but a benefit: wisdom.

This is an amble, see. And that's the moon and Venus an hour and a half ago this morning.

The morning is still. Something about living up here on level 7 is looking down on most of the birds that fly past 7H porch. At this writing moment I'm looking down on an osprey who's gliding above the Bay below me, hunting for breakfast. Gliding, circling, hunting, well, he's fishing: he's a fish-hawk, isn't he, and he's as old as Father Nature himself, as old as the ages. A fish-hawk, as in William Alexander Percy's poem that makes a hymn we don't sing often enough:

His Peace

I love to think of them at dawn
Beneath the frail pink sky,
Casting their nets in Galilee
And fish-hawks circling by.

Casting their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown
Such happy, simple fisherfolk
Before the Lord came down.

Contented, peaceful fishermen,
Before they ever knew
The peace of God that filled their hearts
Brimful and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail
Homeless in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife sowed in the sod.
Yet brothers pray for but one thing --
The marvelous peace of God!

Says one version, more to the point especially as one gets to this age, "The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife closed in the sod". That God's reality for human life is strife, struggle that doesn't end until the last shovel of dirt is tossed on one's grave. Struggle, as with Jacob who struggles with God, proves himself capable of handling even God as an adversary, and is recognized by having his name changed from Jacob to Israel. So ישראל Yisra-El, who can do anything, even wrestle with God and prevail.

Maybe we are all, each of us, ישראל IDK. I do not believe that God has a plan, a plan for my life. For one thing, that would rob my freewill (which some theologians doubt anyway), and I do not accept that. But I might accept that God has a dream for my life and that I've struggled with God for eight and a half decades about who will have the last laugh. I mean, for example, from ten to nineteen I felt, knew, even declared that I was going to be an Episcopal priest. At nineteen I changed all that, set my own course, exercised my own freewill and decided once and for all that I would NOT do that, NOT be that. Then when I was age 25, something spectacular happened for me and I decided to be an admiral! 

IDK, I don't know. I made a fairly decent parish priest those years. And school chaplain: some days I felt they loved me almost as much as I loved them.

This is one of those blogposts where, on starting up, I had no idea whatsoever what the little fingers might tippy-tap. I have noticed that it's quite a busy day for the Port already:

Oldendorff 593x98 leaving with wood pellets for the power station at Studstrup, Denmark.

Progreso 326x55 arriving with cargo from Progreso, Mexico.

Oslo Bulk 355x60 arriving from Limon to load Kraft liner for Colon.

Oh, I did mean to mention a sadness: the death of the second, final and only osprey chick in the nest I watch at Boulder County Fairgrounds, Longmont, Colorado. So, of five eggs laid, three froze in the late snowstorm, two hatched, of which the first one died, and recently the second one died. The local experts think it was some sort of respiratory malfunction.

RSF&PTL

T