Refugia and relatedness: the search

The existence of the green flash has caused great controversy among sailors and other sky-oriented folk. They say that just as the sun bends behind the curve of what we cannot see, for just a moment, and only for those who take the time to look, it flashes a green, phosphorescent realization.

The green flash means the moment. It is our opportunity to wake up.

The climate crisis occupies our present moment. It reminds us that I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and once we realize that we are already what we ought to be, we will realize no individual being was awakened.

The climate crisis is like humanity’s spiritual boss battle, and the boss is the fear that we are truly alone in a world that has given up on us. But I am building a boat for the world that still seeks our relationship to it. I went diving and I know: the world has not given up on us yet. Try it: the reef will name itself and use you to do it.

In conservation ecology, there is great interest in the idea of refugia. These are sacred, island-like spaces that are linked to climatic stability and high endemism. Even as the flood comes, the ocean warms, and the lava flows, life and biological wisdom may continue here. Over long periods of time, due to their isolation and persistence, they may even act as “species pumps.”1

Can we apply these lessons from evolutionary adaptation to the urgent need for cultural adaptation? Where are the refugia for the spirit? Where do we go to feel less alone? Can we wake up through our relatedness?

In nature, nothing exists alone.2 The sands of the Gobi Desert and the oceanic phytoplankton and the oxygen of your inhale are all woven together into one story.3 It is a story far more beautiful than anything you and I could write, and we get to be part of it by just breathing!

On ships, you are not alone. You are close and inter-connected and don’t even try to forget it. Please pass the jam, could you clean the bathroom, thank you for washing my dish, all hands to douse the jib even though it is so late that it is neither morning nor evening. Boats are not made of planks of wood laid end to end, but of planks shaped into metaphors for what is best and truest of humanity.4 Sailboats are classrooms for the new world.

While reading, you are not alone. Go and try to feel what Proust felt. This too is a path. Books are not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences shaped into worlds that you can wander and actualize. Thus, the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own.5 They are nothing short of the seed crystals of revolutions.

Books and boats continue each other, run into each other, and hold so much striving within them. They are manifestations of our desire to transcend our proclivities towards fear and narrow-mindedness; they are true power embodied. They are mechanisms of connection across time and space.

A writer writes for readers she does not know and may never know. A boatbuilder builds for sailors he does not know and will never know, except in the deep intimacy through which he accompanies you in your windswept vigil at the doorstep of the Unknown.

On the realm of our lived experience, there is a mead hall to protect, Grendel to fight, and a home land to return to.6 There is the biosphere to protect, and fear to overcome, and a sense of belonging to return to.

However, beyond and beneath this, there is no going and no returning.

The Universe may temporarily create a world in which you, driven to sea by the confusion of land, turn and, for one moment, see the color of the sun becoming you.

But don’t forget this as you do the looking.