I don't need to tell any of you how much I love James Taylor, right? Good, moving on. As much as I love the man, I can't explain why it was only just recently that I signed up for the fan club/newsletter/whathaveyou on his official website. Last week, I got my first newsletter from the site containing an essay JT wrote for the recent National Geographic publication, "My Favorite Place on Earth" written by Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr. Beyond James' music, my appreciation for him has always extended to my stranger's impression of him as a really nice, grounded, intelligent, interesting person. I really loved his essay and I felt like it definitely supported my image of him. Nice when that happens. I can definitely relate to many of the feelings he describes below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
"The Center of the Atlantic Ocean" By James Taylor
Once I made a passage up the center of the Atlantic, from the Caribbean to Martha's Vineyard, with a good sailor on a beautiful boat. It was an old wooden sailboat made of teak, strong and seaworthy. The masts were tall, and we operated the sails by hand. I was part of the crew.
Our captain, Nat Benjamin, who is a boat builder on Martha's Vineyard, is an expert at deep ocean sailing. We didn't have satellite navigation. He simply knew when weather was coming. We would shorten sail for a storm, the storm would hit, and we were ready for it. We went through one thrilling night with seas the size of huge houses passing under us. We just ran before the storm, feeling complete trust in our captain.
We had started our trip from the island of St. Martin and after about five days got to the Sargasso Sea. The surface was a floating mat of sargasso weed, which has a unique variety of flora and fauna within it, with eels breeding and other animals living there - a sort of ecosystem to itself.
The Sargasso Sea is in the Bermuda Triangle. We were becalmed there, as is often the case in the Doldrums, so we let down the sails, stopped the motor, and just sat on these oily, calm swells. And to while away the time, we went swimming in the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The depth of the water beneath us was something like three miles. To think that if you stood on the boat and flipped a quarter overboard, it would be falling and falling and falling for a day and a half before it hit bottom that gave me an amazing feeling.
On a boat, everyone takes turn standing watches around the clock. At night, you watch the polestar and see the entire cosmos revolve around it. It's a remarkable awareness you get of being on this planet in space. I know that as astronauts look back at Earth, they get a great sense of what it is. On our boat, I could feel myself on the surface of this water planet.
In a way, it was similar to two trips I've taken down the Grand Canyon in wooden dories. It takes 19 days to get through the canyon, and it really takes you away from ordinary experience and timetables. The fact that you're drifting with the river, and not motoring down or powering through it, also has an effect on you. You're in this great geological picture book, which goes back in time as you get deeper and deeper. It gives you a profound experience of the planet to be at the bottom of this great slice through time and into the depths of Earth. You pass a layer that was once the floor of a sea and eventually get down to the Vishnu Schist, which is two billion years old, some of the oldest rock on the planet. To see this stuff, to drift past it, to live with it, changes you - just like being in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
I was never taught a particular religion growing up. My father was a scientist, and I think, being from the South, he had an aversion to the available organized religious forms. So I was never given a strong religious connection. But I have a very strong spiritual need. And getting into nature is going to church for me. It's my way of surrendering to the bigger picture, to the whole.
I feel the skin of life on the planet as a sort of coevolved life form. It has a type of consciousness that we humans - with individuated consciousness and an ego-based world view - see as alien. But it's my own belief that it is alive, a single organism on this amazing, rare, and perhaps unique planet. I really need to feel that connection.
2 comments:
Did Val ever tell you that she sold a computer to James Taylor? She talked to him on the phone and he promised her concert tickets that never came through...dirty rotten liar.
Yes, that's why I have hung around this long. I still hold out hope that he'll come through with those tickets.
But seriously, I am sure that was the fault of an incompetent manager who has long since been fired.
Post a Comment