on board the MS Gabriella, just left Stockholm, imagining that there will be an open window of time while en route. plane flight from Iceland, the usual 0415 wake-up to catch the 0730 flight, east to Europe. waking and sleeping are the same state. car, bus, plane, bus, bus, boat, taxi. will be the cumulative way. and little thought. except for the cycling of separation from Loki. my boy. we decided at bed time last night that I should wake him for a hug and kiss before I went out the door this morning. after exactly three months together all the time, traveling so many kilometers, now yet again, leaving. no less easy than five years ago when I did it the first time.
wandering around. Stockholm, the airport, the bus terminal, the ship, here, there.
using the model of energy — life energies, quantum energy fields, chi — life looks different, but still the gap of praxis is massive. like there is a chance there, a minuscule crack in a plate-metal covering. for the Lightness to slip through. for meaning to replace the vacuum of materiality. (how can this be? that I conclude material presence is a vacuum? presence is an absence? what is absence? maybe impression, the leftovers of presence are the traces of the energy that has been transmitted to the surroundings (to the Other) in the time of presence. take care of the conditions of presence, or else absence can be devastating. we all spend all life in both conditions simultaneously. (boat listing rhythmically, we are in the open Baltic, though it is only as deep maybe as the ship is long. a sea, no ocean. it would be different sailing over the Marianas Trench, it would feel different. like on my second visit to Iceland. Stefan’s family has a summerhouse in one of the most revered national locations in all Iceland, Thingvellir. it is the location of the original outdoor parliament site, literally astride the mid-Atlantic Ridge in an area that technically is a classic spreading center — a fault-graben structure characterized by long north-by-northeast-south-by-southwest trending faults, frequent seismic and volcanic activity, and constant subsidence. we go out there on a short weekend trip in late summer. there is a rowboat that we take out on the enormous spring-fed lake. for the only time I ever go fresh-water fishing in Iceland, the first cast and there is an enormous hit on the line, and I bring in a very large lake trout. a farmer on the shore is watching us suspiciously. the slow sun-going makes the lake pass through millions of form and color permutations. we drift. Stef then says he has to show me something and begins rowing north along the coast past the summer house. there are some small linear islands a meter or two across and maybe 20 long. he rows between two of them. there is the sensation not of sinking, but of being drawn downward, body amorphous, without a center of gravity. the water which is absolutely clear, even with the bottom 10 meters down, turns black, there is no bottom.