No man is an island we say to reflect the interconnection of human beings. As my family and I ply the waters between the San Juan Islands, we send rippling messages from ferry bow to scenic harbors.
We see the surface waters scattered with concoctions of energy and thought among these beauties of contradiction: independence and connection. Our curiosity and delight form a hovering consciousness over the Salish Sea and the scattered archipelago–jewels of individuality, tufted with yachts and endemic plants, and yet mysteries of conjuncture also. These islands reform the quip. No island is ever truly alone. Ultimately still looped together by ferry routes, cell phone towers, conversations of travelers, birds that don’t discriminate between pooping on any one of the 419 islands protruding from the Puget Sound.
Immersed in the same waters that lick each one smaller through geologic time, they huddle on their joint real estate: the giant Pacific Plate. They are patrolled by the same whales and mantled in the same fog. They share many connections, these leftovers of late Jurassic tectonic quarrels.
These little fragments of land lie in deep water, hiding as does the unconscious, a world of swirling, buried, swimming, drifting, emerging, lurking creatures and carriers of creatures. They provide the opportunity to think on many levels. Most of the time I skim the surface. Sometimes I am fortunate to dangle between the surface and some portion underneath. And once in awhile something carries me to a great depth. I don’t think I have ever gotten there alone. Nor would I want to. Instead I have been swirled there by those around me, or a dream, or a disease, music, a thoughtful poem or the movements of a great behemoth of some sort.
Whatever the transports, I am grateful that I get to transverse many levels of existence. And I look for them. I am greedy for them. I prey upon those who can take me to them. And the universe sends them to me.
The thing about islands is not that they demonstrate isolation, but that both above and below they offer a unique perspective on connection.
