A busy week

Every day has been packed to the brim so that I get up before 6.00am, keep moving and get home late. Some is work, some is family – like the citizenship ceremony last night that saw us sitting through a small-town affirmation of a large life decision.

The Ancient Mariner verses I have learnt today are –

The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.

An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.

I love the unadulterated melodrama in this poem. It seems to fit the 'life or death' magnitude of the subject.

In these last days I have felt a resonance between this poem and the novel The Life of Pi that made a big impression on me when I read it a few years ago. In both works, the main story is a about survival at sea. And both seem to touch on eternal elements of human and animal nature.

Here is one of the pictures I took on a walk in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. On this short walk at dusk, we found ourselves in the midst of grazing kangaroos. We were so at ease with each other. This seemed elemental – like the Ancient Mariner, or Pi on his lifeboat.