Created for Outdoor Habitats

As I've been watching our kids run around outside and explore the world beneath the waves, I've also been thinking about this last quote.

Masson reports that he has "never spoken to a father of grown children who did not wish he had spent more time with his children when they were young. If he could change one thing, it would be that one." It is in our evolution to care for and feed our partners and children, to love and protect them and to stay with them and not abandon them. "Children need from us warmth (the human body), comfort (touch, the sound of soothing speech), protection (from other animals or humans who mean them harm), food, cleaning, shelter, clothing, education, and medical attentions. This is not so daunting if you think that we evolved to be this way." We also evolved to "be in the natural environment, in an outdoor habitat. ... No wonder children get bored when they are confined indoors. They have an innate preference for the trees and hills and grasses of the savanna. ... Research has shown that babies are happiest when they are carried while the parents are walking at a speed of three to four miles per hour."

Fox. Hidden Spirituality of Men. 196

Bringing Shadows With Us ...

Matthew Fox speaking of fathers ...

Scott Sanders comments on the American consumer ethos this way: "Our economy rewards competition rather than cooperation; aggression rather than compassion, greed rather than generosity, haste rather than care. ... When a corporate CEO is paid a hundred times as much as a schoolteacher or a factory worker, and when the richest one percent of Americans earn as much as the poorest forty percent, how does one teach a child to believe in equity and justice? When success is measured only by quarterly reports, how does one teach patience?"

Another struggle fathers wage for their children is a struggle to find hope even in times of despair - especially in times of despair. What inspired Sanders's book Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys was a challenge his teenage son put to him on a camping trip when he said to him, "You're so worried about the fate of the earth you can't enjoy anything. We come to these mountains and you bring the shadows with you. You've got me seeing nothing but darkness." Sanders recalls: "Stunned by the force of his words, I could not speak. If my gloom case a shadow over Creation for my son, then I had failed him. What remedy could there be for such a betrayal?" Sanders, who is a professor, recognizes that his son is like many other young people today. Indeed, "an epidemic of depression is sweeping through their generation. It is the earth they brood about, the outlook for life. ... The young people who put their disturbing questions to me have had an ecological education, and a political one as well. They know we are in trouble. Everywhere they look they see ruined landscapes and ravaged communities and broken people. So they are asking me if I believe we have the resource for healing the wounds, for mending the breaks. They are asking me if I live in hope."

The Hidden Spirituality of Men. 194.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' "Father Earth"

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with Wolves, offers this poem on Father Earth:

Father Earth

There's a two-million year old man

No one knows.

They cut into his rivers

Peeled wide pieces of hide

From his legs

Left scorch marks

On his buttocks.

He did not cry out.

No matter what they did, he held firm.

Now he raises his stabbed hands

and whispers that we can heal him yet.

We begin with bandages,

The rolls of gauze,

The unguents, the gut,

The needle, the grafts.

We slowly, carefully turn his body

Face up,

And under him,

His lifelong lover, the old woman,

Is perfect and unmarked

He has laid upon

His two-million year old woman

All this time, protecting her

With his old back, his old scarred back.

And the soil beneath her

Is black with her tears.

*Found in Matthew Fox. The Hidden Spirituality of Men. 182

I believe our purpose ... is to participate in creating the world.

Bernard Moitessier. Tamata and the Alliance. 203-4.

I believe our purpose in life is to participate in creating the world. Each of us according to our sail surface, our draft, our tonnage, our ability to point up, to heave-to, to bear the weight of breaking waves while running before the wind. And I believe in the depths of my being that no one can break that law without cutting himself off from the human race. I became aware of that during those ten months spent in the company of the waves,* decoding the faint messages carried by the wind, which had received from the skies. Those voices-turned-intuition had cleared my path, causing me to turn my back on the stable where mounds of delicious hay were waiting, set out by the Dragon.

To participate in creating the world ...

* Moitessier is referring to the ten months spent alone at sea as he participated in the Golden Globe race, and after sailing around the world via the three great capes, continued on to Tahiti "to save my soul." In total, 1 1/2 times around the world, non-stop.

Apprenticeship

In a conversation this morning, I was reminded that we learn something new each time we venture forth upon the sea. We learn to read the weather, the water, the currents and tides. Each time out upon the water is different, with different conditions. One of our 80-90 year old friends have a boat called Air Apprentice because even after 60 plus years on the water, they are always learning something new.

What then follows are some quotes I've been pondering this summer.

Fair winds & May you experience God's grace!

Joel