Ocean Navigation Quotes

I used to love the ocean. Everything about her. Her coral reefs, her white caps, her roaring waves, the rocks they lap, her pirate legends and mermaid tails, Treasures lost and treasures held... And ALL Of her fish In the sea. Yes, I used to love the ocean, Everything about her. The way she would sing me to sleep as I lay in my bed then wake me with a force That I soon came to dread. Her fables, her lies, her misleading eyes, I'd drain her dry If I cared enough to. I used to love the ocean, Everything about her. Her coral reefs, her white caps, her roaring waves, the rocks they lap, her pirate legends and mermaid tails, treasures lost and treasures held. And ALL Of her fish In the sea. Well, if you've ever tried navigating your sailboat through her stormy seas, you would realize that her white caps are your enemies. If you've ever tried swimming ashore when your leg gets a cramp and you just had a huge meal of In-n-Out burgers that's weighing you down, and her roaring waves are knocking the wind out of you, filling your lungs with water as you flail your arms, trying to get someone's attention, but your friends just wave back at you? And if you've ever grown up with dreams in your head about life, and how one of these days you would pirate your own ship and have your own crew and that all of the mermaids would love only you? Well, you would realize... Like I eventually realized... That all the good things about her? All the beautiful? It's not real. It's fake. So you keep your ocean, I'll take the Lake.

I am a sailor, you're my first mate We signed on together, we coupled our fate Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail For the heart's treasure, together we set sail With no maps to guide us, we steered our own course Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope Working together, we learned how to cope. Life is an ocean and love it a boat In troubled waters it keeps us afloat When we started the voyage there was just me and you Now gathered round us we have our own crew Together we're in this relationship We built it with care to last the whole trip Our true destination's not marked on any chart We're navigating the shores of the heart

Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.

Maybe we can’t change the fundamental trajectory of our lives, but we can adjust the details along the way. It’s like navigating an ocean current. We can’t change its course, but we can choose which path to take as we flow along with it.

You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it'll still kill you, but if you're a good navigator, at least you'll know where you were when you died. (In "The Nautical Chart" by Arturo Perez-Reverte)

Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy itself is undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever changing, beautiful, destructive, and the source of life.

I feel like I’m navigating an endless ocean, just one storm away from sinking my own boat and drowning in the depths of my conflicting emotions.

The sky is but a looking glass into a pool of airless oceans, cast off into a dance of light and energy, leaving only a facet of guidance to navigate. Such an existence lays but within the mind man.

My mother is soil and rain, clay, ash, sand, sun and moonlight. My mother is a weeping willow— strong, daring, dripping. My mother is oceans so salty and wild she can consume whole cities— but, mostly, she chooses to be calm turquoise, washing softly over toes in sand. She is vast— some places un-navigated. She is offering, felt without words, sacred, and restful. She grows life. —mother/Mother Earth

The deepest and most profound wisdom that exists and moves through us is the intelligence of our own heart. It is a flowing sacredness. It can navigate you through anything. An intelligent ocean of life's experience.

[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

History teaches us many things. Most importantly, the things that made us who and what we are.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.

Salmon mysteriously return to their riverine birthplace after years of being away at sea. We are still learning how they do this, but scientists agree that smell is one of their navigation tools. What if we were born in a tidepool and our attraction to the sea is a coming home?

This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Land and sea. We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land. If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land. But the sea. The sea is something completely different. The sea is one. We may note the shifting moods of the sea. What the sea looks like when the wind is blowing, how the sea plays with the light, how it rises and falls. But still it is always the sea we are talking about. We have given different parts of the sea different names for navigation and identification, but if we are standing before the sea, there is only one whole. The Sea. If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us. To other gods we send our prayer: Protect us from the sea.

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.

Some days it was bearable; some days it burned. Grief was like the great Southern Ocean; it moved in ebbs and flows, often turbulent and rough, or peaceful and settled, and even over time when I could navigate the waters, the tide never stopped.

What would happen," Zeitoun asked the captain, "if you and I went below the deck, and just went to our bedrooms and went to sleep?" The captain gave him a quizzical look and answered that the ship would most certainly hit something -- would run aground or into a reef. In any event, disaster. "So without a captain, the ship cannot navigate." "Yes," the captain said, "What's your point?" Zeitoun smiled. "Look above you, at the stars and moon. How do the stars keep their place in the sky, how does the moon rotate around the earth, the earth around the sun? Who's navigating?" The captain smiled at Zeitoun. He'd been led into a trap. "Without someone guiding us," Zeitoun finished, "wouldn't the stars and moon fall to earth, wouldn't the oceans overrun the land? Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain, yes?" The captain was taken with the beauty of the metaphor, and let his silence imply surrender.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

I Have Walked Down Many Roads by Antonio Machado translated from the Spanish by Don Share I have walked down many roads and cleared many paths; I have navigated a hundred oceans and anchored off a hundred shores. All over, I have seen caravans of sadness, pompous and melancholy men drunk with black shadows, and defrocked pedants who stare, keep quiet, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the neighborhood bars. Bad people who go around polluting the earth . . . And all over, I have seen people who dance or play, when they can, and work their four handfuls of land. If they turn up someplace, they never ask where they are. When they travel, they ride on the backs of old mules, and don’t know how to hurry, not even on holidays. When there’s wine, they drink wine; when there’s no wine, they drink cool water. These are good people, who live, work, get by, and dream; and on a day like all the others they lie down under the earth.

I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.

Life is not supposed to overwhelm you at all times. Life isn’t meant to be merely survived—it’s meant to be lived. Seasons or instances will inevitably feel out of your control, but the moments when you feel like you’re drowning are supposed to be brief. They should not be the whole of your existence! The precious life you’ve been given is like a ship navigating its way across the ocean, and you’re meant to be the captain of the vessel.

Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in highland and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances.

Transcendent renunciation is developed by meditating on the preciousness of human life in terms of the ocean of evolutionary possibilities, the immediacy of death, the inexorability of evolutionary causality, and the sufferings of the ignorance-driven, involuntary life cycle. Renunciation automatically occurs when you come face-to-face with your real existential situation, and so develop a genuine sympathy for yourself, having given up pretending the prison of habitual emotions and confusions is just fine. Meditating on the teachings given on these themes in a systematic way enables you to generate quickly an ambition to gain full control of your body and mind in order at least to face death confidently, knowing you can navigate safely through the dangers of further journeys. Wasting time investing your life in purposes that “you cannot take with you” becomes ludicrous, and, when you radically shift your priorities, you feel a profound relief at unburdening yourself of a weight of worry over inconsequential things

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late

Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover new worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the great, the eternally splendid. Then there are those who spit terror from their gun-ports, who pillage, who grow rich and fat. Others go off in search of gold and silk under foreign skies. Still others catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I'll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

Isi is fast becoming my universe. We share the common denominator of completely understanding each other; and being able to feel the sincere perceptive acceptance of our individual composition. It is a connection I can’t believe I was willing to live without. But with the experience now well within my reach, I’m salivating to secure it with both hands and hold onto it; like an oxygen mask delivering me life saving breaths, while I navigate the cavernous depths of an ocean of emotion. ~Silas Tayte, Fake.~

I knew Early Auden could not hold back the ocean. But that strangest of boys saved me from being swept away.

Wisdom is the compass by which man is to steer across the trackless ocean of life. Without it he is an abandoned vessel, the sport of winds and waves.

An outsider may wonder how deep a specialist must dig his hole before he realizes that he has lost sight of the horizon...

Springtime blooms the starry tree Bearing fruit the mariners see. High by night and low by dawn The silver apple guides us home.

Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. —Gandhi

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

I'd learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

At three hundred feet, we are profoundly changed. The pressure at these depths is nine times that of the surface. The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than the rate of a person in a coma. Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state. At six hundred feet down, the ocean’s pressure—some eighteen times that of the surface—is too extreme for most human bodies to withstand. Few freedivers have ever attempted dives to this depth; fewer have survived. Where humans can’t go, other animals can. Sharks, which can dive below six hundred and fifty feet, and much deeper, rely on senses beyond the ones we know. Among them is magnetoreception, an attunement to the magnetic pulses of the Earth’s molten core. Research suggests that humans have this ability and likely used it to navigate across the oceans and trackless deserts for thousands of years. Eight hundred feet down appears to be the absolute limit of the human body.

I thought about begging for my life, but fortunately my partner took even further pity and slowed down as she navigated the many winding curves of the road. I only thrice feared we’d fall into the ocean—rather better than I expected, with her behind the wheel.

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

There was another world below—this was the problem. Another world below that had volume but no form. By day the sea was blue surface and whitecaps, a realistic navigational challenge, and the problem could be overlooked. By night, though, the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under. Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.

You have a small sailboat…you fix a destination and you set out upon the immense ocean…You have a number of tools to pilot your boat and to navigate, and perhaps a crew to help you towards reaching the place you’ve decided to go. Perhaps you will reach your destination…however, there are factors which you don’t have any control over; the weather conditions, the wind, the currents… perhaps you will end up where you set out for, perhaps at a completely different place than you had imagined, perhaps even at the bottom of the ocean. This small sailboat is your life. Your free will is to choose your destination and to navigate towards that goal. Everything that is beyond your control is what decides your destiny. What is important is to decide on your goal and to launch your boat into the unknown, into the vast waters of the ocean. Failing to decide your goal and set out to reach it is to accept a destiny of not accomplishing anything in your life. You always have the possibility to change your course by way of your navigation, and you could be led to do this either out of choice or necessity. Often we find that the destination we set out for originally is finally not where we end up.

His sextant is a natural extension of any seaman navigator; virtually a part of him. Even today, in a maritime world of satellite precision fixing, the sextants are as much a necessity as they were aboard the Indiamen of old. No well-run merchantman will make an ocean passage without each and every one of her deck officers reporting to the bridge before midday, sextant in hand in preparation for ‘sights’.

The scientific principles that man employs to obtain the foreknowledge of an eclipse, or of anything else relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean, it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass, it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth, it is called land surveying. In fine, it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown.

Onshore, Cheap seemed doomed, unable to navigate past life’s unexpected shoals. Yet as he perched on the quarterdeck of a British man-of-war, cruising the vast oceans with a cocked hat and spyglass, he brimmed with confidence—even, some would say, a touch of haughtiness. The wooden world of a ship—a world bound by the Navy’s rigid regulations and the laws of the sea and, most of all, by the hardened fellowship of men—had provided him a refuge.

Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty.

Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.

[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.

The precious life you’ve been given is like a ship navigating its way across the ocean, and you’re meant to be the captain of the vessel. Certainly there are times when storms toss you around or cover the deck with water or break the mast clean in half—but that’s when you need to fight your way back, to throw all the water off the boat bucket by bucket. That’s when you battle to get yourself back to the helm. This is your life. You are meant to be the hero of your own story.

In the past two hundred years, human numbers grew to over seven billion, and our species began to transform the oceans, the land, and the air. Human-built roads, canals, and railways snaked across the continents, linking thousands of human-built cities with populations in the millions. Vast ships navigated the oceans, and planes ferried goods and people through the air and across the continents. Just a hundred years ago, in glowing filaments and patches, Earth started lighting up at night.

When specialization becomes so narrow that an archaeologist digging in tropic Ecuador is deemed incompetent on archaeology in tropic Mexico, then the reverse must be also the case, and it seems apparent that specialists are not the best people to draw broad conclusions. Unfortunately, too few universities are so far prepared to educate students to become specialists in horizontal research, i.e., train them to acquire an academic ability to piece together the fragments that vertical research brings forth from its deep trenches.

Life is not supposed to overwhelm you at all times. Life isn’t meant to be merely survived—it’s meant to be lived. Seasons or instances will inevitably feel out of your control, but the moments when you feel like you’re drowning are supposed to be brief. They should not be the whole of your existence! The precious life you’ve been given is like a ship navigating its way across the ocean, and you’re meant to be the captain of the vessel. Certainly there are times when storms toss you around or cover the deck with water or break the mast clean in half—but that’s when you need

After Eratosthenes’ discovery, many great voyages were attempted by brave and venturesome sailors. Their ships were tiny. They had only rudimentary navigational instruments. They used dead reckoning and followed coastlines as far as they could. In an unknown ocean they could determine their latitude, but not their longitude, by observing, night after night, the position of the constellations with respect to the horizon. The familiar constellations must have been reassuring in the midst of an unexplored ocean. The stars are the friends of explorers, then with seagoing ships on Earth and now with spacefaring ships in the sky.

Reality exists at different levels and each of them gives you different but valuable perspectives. It’s important to keep all of them in mind as you synthesize and make decisions, and to know how to navigate between them. Let’s say you’re looking at your hometown on Google Maps. Zoom in close enough to see the buildings and you won’t be able to see the region surrounding your town, which can tell you important things. Maybe your town sits next to a body of water. Zoom in too close and you won’t be able to tell if the shoreline is along a river, a lake, or an ocean. You need to know which level is appropriate to your decision.

Two possible reasons for this might be that, like politics, all navigation is local, and that what is true in one geographical region is not necessarily true in another. The night sky in New Zealand is not the same as the night sky in Papua New Guinea, which is not the same as the night sky in Hawai‘i. The winds and currents in the Solomons are not the same as those around Rapa Nui or in the Marquesas. A second consideration might be that in many Oceanic societies, navigational knowledge is believed to have been privileged and known to only a few, which may mean that it was especially easy to lose once it was no longer central to a society’s survival.

Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

The way a star compass works is this: You begin by envisioning the horizon as a circle marking the meeting point of the earth and the sky—which, of course, is exactly how it looks from a boat on the ocean or the high point of a small island. In the mind of an experienced navigator, this circle is dotted with points marking the rising and setting positions of particular stars. When the navigator imagines himself at the center of this circle and his destination as a point on the horizon, the star compass becomes a plotting diagram, giving the bearing of his target island in terms of the rising and setting points of particular stars. A “star path” is a course defined by the series of stars that rise over the course of a night in a particular direction.

What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’ Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection: ‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

Ptolemy's massive compendium of mathematical and astronomical calculations had been rediscovered in 1410, after centuries of neglect. The revival of classical learning pushed aside medieval notions of the world based on a literal--yet magical--interpretation of the Bible, but even though Ptolemy's rigorous approach to mathematics was more sophisticated than monkish fantasies of the cosmos, his depiction of the globe contained significant gaps and errors. Following Ptolemy's example, European cosmologists disregarded the Pacific Ocean, which covers a third of the world's surface, from their maps, and they presented incomplete renditions of the American continent based on reports and rumors rather than direct observations. Ptolemy's omissions inadvertently encouraged exploration because he made the world seem smaller and more navigable than it really was. If he had correctly estimated the size of the world, the Age of Discovery might have never ocurred.

The first experimental determination that the speed of light was not infinite was made by the seventeenth-century Danish astronomer, Ole Romer. In 1676, Romer was attempting to solve one of the great scientific and engineering challenges of the age; telling the time at sea. Finding an accurate clock was essential to enable sailors to navigate safely across the oceans, but mechanical clocks based on pendulums or springs were not good at being bounced around on the ocean waves and soon drifted out of sync. In order to pinpoint your position on Earth you need the latitude and longitude. Latitude is easy; in the Northern Hemisphere, the angle of the North Star (Polaris) above the horizon is your latitude. In the Southern Hemisphere, things are more complicated because there is no star directly over the South Pole, but it is still possible with a little astronomical know-how and trigonometry to determine your latitude with sufficient accuracy for safe navigation.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode. But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

The octopus, although an invertebrate—with no thalamus or cortex to speak of—behaves in ways that utterly belie its primitive label. It has around 500 million neurons, not too far from the numbers in a cat. But the octopus brain is decidedly unusual, with an exceptionally parallel architecture—almost always a positive quality when you are talking about brains. The majority of octopus neurons are to be found not in its brain, but in its arms. In effect, if you include the neuronal bundles in its limbs, the octopus has nine semi-independent brains, making it unique in the animal kingdom. The octopus is also a genius among ocean creatures. It has highly developed memory and attentional systems. In nature, this allows these invertebrates to take on a wide range of shapes to mimic other animals, rocks, or even plants. In the lab, octopuses can distinguish shapes and colors, navigate through a maze, open a jar with a screw-on lid, and even learn by observing the behavior of another octopus—an ability thought previously only to exist in highly social animals.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital. Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964. Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafés, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relationships, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel. Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it’s what he said to him, or didn’t say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the bastard up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the passageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes shining like digital wristwatches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!

key principle of their navigation, Bruno had explained, was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations. This concept of seafaring was called etak, Bruno had instructed, or “moving island”—in which a sailor in a canoe traveling the open ocean, whether standing with his legs apart feeling wave-swell, or seated and rowing, or seated and not rowing, this sailor was himself stationary, while waves and the occasional landmass flowed past his boat. These sailors weren’t stupid, Bruno had said. They knew they were not actually standing still. They were employing a special form of cognition, a skill that was crucial to getting somewhere. You and I, Bruno had said, don’t live in their world. Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time. With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything. We often proceed as if we know things without a sense of what knowledge even is, Bruno had said. The earth is turning, for instance: sure, we know that because we’ve memorized it. But our knowledge of the earth’s turn is false, it is knowledge without context, disconnected from the rest of the universe. When the sun rises, we think it’s rising. When it sets, we think it’s setting.

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and lim­itations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds. "Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find them­selves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial stand­ing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automat­ically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors. "Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially uni­fied, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach. "Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away. "In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, mak­ing them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors. "It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do: · The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of is­lands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid. · Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield. · The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an exter­nal security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence. · Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy. · New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day? "But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island fea­tures of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite lit­erally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.

I realized that I'd never thought passed the moment when I stood face to face with him again. I was a skilled sailor. I'd crossed the great oceans, but when it came to this, I felt like a newcomer to the world - not because I didn't know its busy, overcrowded ports, its palm-fringed coasts and wind-lashed rocks, but because I understood so little of my own soul. I could navigate from a chart; I could determine my position using a sextant. I was in an unknown place in the Pacific on a ship with no captain and I could still find my way. But I had no way of mapping my own mind or the course of my life.

This is the key to Wordlessness, according to wayfinders from all times and places—and it’s not just metaphorical. To navigate the wild world, you need to move your basic perceptual and analytical thinking out of your head and into the whole inner space of the body. This is how you begin to find your way through a terrible loss, a fulfilling career, a complicated relationship, or a broken heart, as well as through the ocean or the African bush.

Finite Navigation by Stewart Stafford Happiness is but a harbour in a storm; Greater tempests lash far-off docks, Gauntlets to run to the last port of call, Never a permanent plateau of nirvana. Life's weather patterns pivot and feint, Everything beyond our fingertip reach, If we go off course with coins on our eyes, The rocks of avarice pace in ocean spray. We set sail or get driven from our sanctuary, Shelter granted at the behest of strangers, Captains of our ship, La Mirage, wave dancing, Mates and blood as crew, fish and fowl companions. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

To enjoy the ocean, we have to learn how to ride the waves, not control them. Similarly, to navigate life, we need to learn to ride life's waves, not control them.

The great lie about a college education in the infancy of the twenty-first century is that it guarantees a job that will allow you to live the lifestyle portrayed in all the beer commercials and car advertisements you see on TV. The reality is that you have a lifetime of student loans to pay back while you send out résumés and serve pizzas and wonder when your proverbial ship is going to pull into port to help you navigate your ocean of debt.

We want to be right in the center of what God is doing until the day he calls us home. This may mean you invest faithfully in the town you live in now for forty more years. It may mean you cross oceans to be a part of what God is doing in a far-off place. But marriages on mission know that death is the finish line for those in the service of God.

After oceans, rivers top the list of “perfect landscapes for brain restoration,” according to Wallace Nichols in his book Blue Mind. Each to our own—for me, following a river is my absolute favorite walk, whether it’s a short stroll at night or a long-distance hike. River walks require minimal navigation and map reading, making them ideal for either a solo hike or a social saunter where the priority is conversation. This doesn’t mean we can switch off altogether. Rivers test our cognitive abilities in unexpected ways (navigating all those meanders, shifting banks, and low-hanging willows), making a river walk equally beneficial for our brains.

When I call the Navigators a Guild, I use the term loosely. Navigators are the only sailors who can cross the deadly, shifting ocean at the heart of our Empire: the Aion Sea. We therefore rely on them for communication, trade, exploration, and transport between the eastern continent of Aurelia and the western continent, Izyria. It’s too bad that they’re the most shifty and unreliable collection of pirates, confidence artists, mercenaries, and outright criminals the Empire has ever seen.

Intellect can make you brilliant, yet in the face of death or near-death, what matters is how much you have lived; true wisdom emerges from a well-lived life. The age-old jest of the boatsman, 'Your life is half over if you can't swim,' holds profound truth in confronting grim realities. How mindfully you've navigated life's currents is essential. Beyond life's boundaries, it is only the art of meditation that keeps you afloat in the vast ocean of unconsciousness.

No, especially if you’re in command. You never stop working and you’re on-call twenty-four hours a day. Just running the ship properly can fill up all your time. You’re responsible for its safe navigation, its readiness for combat, its propulsion, hotel systems, damage control, crew morale, personnel, training, diplomacy ashore, and a hundred other things. Just changes to the goddamned software are enough to drive you crazy. I delegate that to the kids, who live and breathe it. We go through continual training evolutions and drills, absorb new systems, implement new directives. There’s so much paperwork and so many things to study that you just don’t have the time to read at leisure, certainly not if you’re the captain.

The Cryptic Sea by Stewart Stafford Walk free through Jailer's Gate, Sail to where corporeal forms fade, No longer seen as a common cutpurse, Now in a navigational cut-and-thrust. Note how the ocean heaves and boils, Swirling into towering vortex coils, With hideous creatures at every base, Bearing the haunting Kraken's face. Great ghost ships groan from the mist, And balls of light form fast betwixt, The horizon and the sea spray foam, Save us all and set sail for home. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves. Navigating possibility space is tricky. Like any skill, practice helps, but only to a point. Moving a vehicle through this medium is, when you get down to it, something that none of us is ever going to master. There are too many factors, too many variables. Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we’re up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there’s a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn’t even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

Life is not supposed to overwhelm you at all times. Life isn’t meant to be merely survived—it’s meant to be lived. Seasons or instances will inevitably feel out of your control, but the moments when you feel like you’re drowning are supposed to be brief. They should not be the whole of your existence! The precious life you’ve been given is like a ship navigating its way across the ocean, and you’re meant to be the captain of the vessel. Certainly there are times when storms toss you around or cover the deck with water or break the mast clean in half—but that’s when you need to fight your way back, to throw all the water off the boat bucket by bucket. That’s when you battle to get yourself back to the helm. This is your life. You are meant to be the hero of your own story.

Language is only the first of echolocation’s uses. Muscles in the sperm whale’s nose clap together to make a shock wave that bounces off the back of the whale’s skull, fires through layers of fat, and lasers into the ocean. Anything the shock wave hits reflects back to the whale, translated into navigational data.

said, “First of all, in order to use the sunstone you must place a small spot of pine tar on top of the stone, on the side which faces towards the sky. When you are using the crystal for the first time, place a small wooden pointer along either one of the longest sides. This will be a guide for which side to point toward the brightest part of the sky. Then you must hold the stone overhead and view the stone from underneath. Notice the double image of the black dot? Now, line up the pointer towards the brightest part of the sky. When you rotate the stone slightly back and forth, holding it flat, you will see that one spot fades and the other becomes darker. When the two images appear to be equal in value, note the position of the stone and the direction of the pointer. This is the true bearing to the sun. The stone is very accurate.

The thicker the crystal the better the separation of the black mark. One more thing, the bearings are best at sunrise and sunset, when the sun is slightly below the horizon.

Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death. VAL UCHENDU

I like things clear. That’s why I like sailing. What the ocean wants, the ocean gets. And if you feel the need to be absolutely right about something, you can polish your navigation. You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it’ll still kill you; but if you’re a good navigator, at least you’ll know where you were when you died.

One story Plato used to teach about the limitations of democracy was about a ship in the middle of the ocean. On this ship was a gruff, burly captain who was rather shortsighted and slightly deaf. He and his crew followed the principles of majority rule on decisions about navigational direction. They had a very skilled navigator who knew how to read the stars on voyages, but the navigator was not very popular and was rather introverted. In the panic of being lost, the captain and crew made a decision to follow the most charismatic, eloquent, and persuasive of the crew members. They ignored and ridiculed the navigator’s suggestions, remained lost, and ultimately starved to death at sea. One

The satellite navigator may have been a brick, but, despite its dependence on batteries, this GPS is worth its weight in…chocolate. (Gold has no value to a woman alone in a rowboat on the ocean.)

The street seen backwards was like an invasion by the sea on the night of a flood. What I saw resembled an inside-out glove, the negative of a street. I was walking over the ocean bed, creeping along the walls, the corroded gateways, the mossy leprosy of cars, octopus-infested gardens, pines encrusted with vampire shells (sap drained, suppliant branches forming reefs); to navigate anywhere beyond this housing estate you'd have needed to be familiar with the shadows of the labyrinth, hearing the helm scraping the rooftops, the keel grating against the gutter rails. But my step was light, steady and brisk.

Cut off from the Mediterranean by the desert which he had no means of crossing, and bounded elsewhere by oceans which he had no skill in navigating, the black man vegetated in savage obscurity, his habitat being well named the “Dark Continent.” Until

Eighty years ago on July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappeared while attempting to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10- Electra. Her expedition, sponsored by Purdue University, a public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, was brought to an end when this daring woman aviator and her navigator and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared near Howland Island in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. Since that time it was generally assumed that she had crashed at sea and simply disappeared beneath the waves of an unforgiving ocean. All the speculation ended on Sunday July 9, 2017 when Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director for the FBI, brought world attention on the “History Channel” to a photograph that apparently shows Earhart and Noona on the dock of Jaluit Atoll, overlooking the SS Kaoshu towing a barge, with what looks like the Electra they had been flying. The intensive research and analysis that Shawn Henry and his team conducted presents compelling evidence and leaves no doubt but that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had survived the crash. The team’s research also presents evidence that Amelia Earhart was held as a prisoner of war on the island of Saipan by the Japanese and died while in their custody.

There is evidence to support claims that 962 years prior to Columbus setting foot in the Bahamas, Saint Brendan, an Irish monastic priest known as “Saint Brendan the Navigator,” looked for the “Isle of the Blessed.” What island he found has been lost to history and is still unknown; however, legend names it “Saint Brendan’s Island.” Many believe that in his journeys across the Atlantic Ocean he actually landed in America in 1150, or 342 years prior to Columbus’ discovery.” Note: Saint Patrick ’s Day was the day of my parent’s anniversary.

It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of “writings on stones from before the flood,” turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt. Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]’s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”--and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster--a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...]-- overtook this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to “wander” the world. [...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled “channel” surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones--a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as “Poseidon,” was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection. Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timaeus, as a prelude to his account of the lost civilization and its demise, he reports that the Egyptian priests from whom Solon received the story began by speaking of a celestial cataclysm: “There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them being by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own [i.e. the Greeks’] story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burned up things on earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth.

Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.

We are critical of the priests who burned the paper books of the Aztecs because contemporary Europe looked down upon the non-Christian Americans and wanted to destroy their heathen beliefs. But we ourselves have so little esteem for these same beliefs that although the most important ones were recorded by the early Spaniards, we reject them as the fables of primitive nations.

It becomes one who is called to be a soldier, and to go a warfare, to endeavor to excel in the art of war. It becomes one who is called to be a mariner, and to spend his life in sailing the ocean, to endeavor to excel in the art of navigation. It becomes one who professes to be a physician, and devotes himself to that work, to endeavor to excel in the knowledge of those things which pertain to the art of physic. So it becomes all such as profess to be Christians, and to devote themselves to the practice of Christianity, to endeavor to excel in the knowledge of divinity.

The VOC was interested in Sri Lanka because of its cinnamon production and strategic location, since control of Sri Lanka implied an improved ability to check navigation between the western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. In

I can’t control the waves of the ocean, but I can learn how to navigate my ship.

Medieval Spaniards were tossed by the Muslim conquest into an ocean of clashing religious cultures and were utterly ill-equipped by modern standards to navigate such uncharted waters. Most Americans understand that there are many religions in the world, have considered the virtues of religious tolerance, and have been exposed to the principle of church separated from state. Such notions were as alien to the medieval mind as Einstein’s theory of relativity. Yet, at their best, these medieval Spaniards somehow accommodated each other’s beliefs and lifestyles in ways that humanity’s later (and supposedly more enlightened) generations have often been hard-pressed to match, much less surpass. Medieval