THE EYE OF THE DOLPHIN

We should make Bundaburg in the morning. Freddy is sound asleep. I am on late watch and Moira is sailing peacefully along on a broad reach. The moon is nearly full and it is a magnificent, wondrous, magical night. We caught a little mackerel this afternoon and ate it for dinner. A perfect sailing day, a perfect night. This is what sailing is all about. I can see the lights of Gladstone over the horizon to the west.

Lights of the city illuminate Sea's haze, the glowing midnight Sun of Man. I have studied the charts well and combine the vision with the chart to gain perspective of Gladstone from a little higher. I project my mind up into the starry, moonlit night and see the Australian coastline with the city sprawled out along the river estuary. The light radiates out into space like remembered sunshine, reminding the stars Man is here, calling out into the vastness of space, "Man is here, recreating light from stored sunshine (fossil fuels) to illuminate the dark side of the planet."

The language of the people who live there, on that shore, create the luminous aura. People talking and reading and writing, making plans, moving materials, building the power plant and stringing wires and buying lamps and bulbs - always talking to each other. "Turn on the light, dear," and there in the darkness is the light.

I see the aura of the language mind of the people of Gladstone. The mind of Man radiating its light into space.

"The lume in Sea's misty breath is the light Man speaks together. Man, cast me the light from your shore." I murmur out loud.

I leave the cockpit and walk forward to the bow to see the whole panorama of Moira unfolding Sea. My mind invades Moira and feels her caress Sea and Air. Night air cool, wind pressuring on her port beam 15 knots, sky clear, moon behind me as I scan west towards the Mind of Man.

My hand slides onto the headsail, extending my thoughts into the fibers of dacron as the fabric trembles with the wind, its pulse alive and strong. Moira is a living creature. My consciousness threads into the weave of the sail and throughout the many layered tissues of Moira's body. Within Moira I perceive thousands of voices speaking, through millennia, words of many languages, and these human sounds shape Moira's sails and her hull and her very concept. The Moira is a living manifestation of the Language Mind of Man flowing over this magic sea.

My senses awash in Moira, my eyes locked to the glow of Gladstone, I build an awareness of unity with the planet. It grows in me, a sexual fusion, reaching towards a climax. I lust for the contact. I long to be one, again, with Sol/Earth. I savor the moment, grow warm with the foreplay, knowing nothing will disturb us, Moira and I and the Sol/Earth being. I feel the planet's naked texture, aware of sensations growing sharper, fuller, reaching outward, pushing, plunging, wanting, needing, knowing it is coming, "Oh YES, YES, YES" I gasp at the sudden rush of overpowering emotions and as I gasp,

Sea explodes in a fountain of phosphorescent spray and there, suspended against the Midnight Sun of Man, glistening in the moonlight just off Moira's bow, is a dolphin.

Moon glints in the eye of the dolphin, a sacred jewel set in the dark outline of its body suspended above the phosphorescent comet tail of spray backlit with the lume of Man. The eye-glint knifes into the darkness in the center of my eyes, blasts me high into the sky where I see Moira plunging in the mighty arms of Sea between the Great Barrier Reef and the coast of Australia. I soar up and out to see the lights of man scattered in the darkness of Earth's majestic, spherical shadow.

OH Moira! Incredibly beautiful, fantastically wonderful, magnificent white wings backlit by the moon, soaring into the night sky, a man-shell, a sailing vessel with a human standing on the sweeping smooth bow haloed by Moon. A silhouette in sunlight bounced from the Moon sailing south inside the Great Barrier Reef.

I can see the human in its smallest detail, down to the individual silken hairs rippling in the wind.

"Oh God!" the dolphin and I hover at the crest of his leap - mind frozen. "I know you!"

I am man and dolphin and more. I am aware of dolphin/man as one small facet, a glittering gem of awareness in the eyes of a living planet. Together we duct through the instant to forever, from one mind to a collective being. We are Earth, we are Sea, we are the awareness of light remembering 4 billion years of dreaming.

I hear the whisk-splash-whisk of the hull in Sea and the rigging thrumming, sails vibrating in the moist sea air...I hear words whispered long ago building white wings of Man to fly through the night. I hear English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Melanesian words flowing in the warp and woof of the looms weaving the dacron from oil and sewing the sails into life. I hear cadence and rhythm, harmony and strife, emotions and laughter flowing through the night.

And I am again alone on Moira's bow, the dolphin gone as rapidly as it appeared, leaving not even a comet trail of phosphorescence behind.

I return to the cockpit and write the ending of the story of the dolphin. It is not fantasy or a constructed metaphor, but life's experience.

It is not coincidence, Man meeting dolphin here tonight. The book had no ending when this day began. Now it does.

I am weak. As if I had actual sex with the planet. And I am afraid. A mighty power has seized me, crushed me in its jaws, and let me go. I have a flash-back to the Solomon Islands and the moment when I was seized by the mind of the whales. The feeling was the same tonight. My eyes linger on the softly moonlit page and the word Solomon.