One for the roadies

Over the last couple of days, I helped deliver part of a training course for people planning to work overseas on super yachts and other commercial vessels. An interesting group. Seemed to me that they needed a line in the sand - a base line - the lowest common denominator - an ' it gets better from here on' experience so I brought Berri around to the pontoon next to the 3rd Mosman Bay Scout Hall where we were holding the course. The photo is a rather foggy camera pic of Jade, one of our students, who actually appreciated Berri for what she is. And understood my jokes - good luck out there Jade! And all the rest of you, of course!

Some more rather profound words

Another of yez all out there, one who, like most of you, I've never met but feel I know, sent us this and, with Chris, put her finger on something that I've been trying to get a handle on more or less since all this nonsense started:

What your friend Chris said...  I was wondering why your blog, with completely unfamiliar people and subject matter, was so meaningful (and emotional! I too went through about every emotion in the book). How well he said it.

Just ran across this passage about telling one's story:

"My friend Stan Brakhage claims that in creating the films for which he became famous, he was always guided by the conviction that "the most personal is the most universal."  This insight, it seems to me, goes beyond the obvious observation that the types of human situations and possible reactions to them are limited, that in telling of ourselves we are bound to strike a common chord with at least SOME persons.  Beyond this, I think that to watch others in their solitude grappling with what comes to them, making it into themselves, and giving back to the world something which was not there before is to see the very image of what each of us is."

(from an autobiography "The Story I Tell Myself" by Hazel E. Barnes,  former Professor at the University of Colorado).

I feel apologetic for not really comprehending what you did in the physical sense, it being so out of my realm (hopefully I will someday).  But the grappling, making it into yourselves and giving back to the world, and helping the rest of us get more in touch with ourselves---sublime.

For which perceptive and complimentary words - Thanks Jane.