Eastern Meditations

There be one primal fixed and irremovable law in the way of the parent: it is easier to count all the pomegranate seeds in all the pomegranates in the seven kingdoms than it is to make a child sleep who hath not sleep in him.  Thou must remember this fact at 4 in the blessed morning, when thy child hath already been awake for an hour, on a trans-pacific voyage when the clocks moveth back an hour every night for three nights.  It is not thy child’s fault that three used to be six.

Walking Noah around in the evening trying to keep him up so as to sleep longer

The second primal fixed and irremovable law is that said child will be lonely and will not tolerate your trying to sleep while said child “plays quietly alone.”  To the extent that thou endeavorest to get some more shut-eye, thy child will likely beat thy person about the head with his feet or with pillows to make thee “play with me, daddy!”  

A hair-raising stretch

The third primal fixed and irremovable law is that thy child, like all children, is a child of the daylight and loveth the sun and hath yet to grow into the more subtle love and respect for the time of darkness which age bringeth and thus thy child will invariably desire to have on all the lights in the damn cabin.

This is the darkest hour in the way of the parent.  Thou wilt rend thy garments and tear out thy hair in frustration, and thy child will but laugh in glee the whole time.  It is now that thou must remember the sacred commitment thou hast made to safeguard thy child’s person from harm, especially harm that thou thyself longest to inflict.  

It is not permissible to beat thy child, no more now than at any other time, no matter how much joy thou mightst acquire in doing so.  Recall thy basic aim of lulling thy child toward slumber, which thou wouldst defeat by pummeling him.  Remember the ancient koan: a hungry tiger, the sea in storm, a beaten child: none of these will get a wink tonight, and neither will the villagers.

It is not permissible to suggest a walk on the deck “to see how high the railings go.”

It is not permissible to employ soporific pharmaceuticals in any way except as directed by a physician.  Yes, children’s benadryl doth taste of candy, but candy it is not.  

Duct tape is right out.

It is permissible in these circumstances to have recourse to screen time.

It is permissible to awaken thy spouse after a suitable interval of doing thy duty and before thou completely losest it entirely.

Remember, Grasshopper, in this dark, dark hour that thou art blessed: thy child is happy and healthy, and thou canst sleep when thou art dead.

Noah's Ark

From a GoPro hanging from a kite flown by Professor Ernst

“Sometimes your dream comes true and you come inside the story, you go inside the book.”  So said Noah about ten minutes ago, up here in the Piano Bar, where I am trying heroically to post a blog entry.  (Heroic because the internet is such a challenge on the MV Explorer).  

Couldn’t resist the title (which lots of people have suggested in any case).  Noah really has made the MV Explorer his ship, making friends, finding his way around, endearing himself, struggling through the tougher moments and the tougher days, of which there have been a few.  Mostly he’s been having the adventure he and we came for.  Here are some moments, for the sake of grandmas and such who want a more intimate view of Noah having his adventures.  

Noah has many, many friends of all ages.  In the photo above, he's having dinner with his best buddies Suki and Amari and their moms Amber and Britt.  The food on the ship is, for daddy, pretty amazingly good.  For Noah, it's more of a challenge.  He eats a lot of gluten-free bread and jam.

My colleague, Professor Howard Ernst, a political scientist, I believe, acquired permission to fly a kite from the stern of the MV Explorer for the purpose of taking photos with his GoPro of the ocean surrounding our vessel.  (I think he was interested in observing the cleanliness or lack thereof of the sea.)  Noah was of course fascinated and got to hold the kite reel.  

Playtime has Noah doing all kinds of things.  Lately he's been outside a lot playing running games with buddies near the basketball court on the seventh (top) deck.    The bigger games shoot hoops.  Below he's caught in a moment of freeze tag, I believe here channeling Adam as portrayed by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel.

Sometimes games with yoga mats are invented.  Sometimes the games involve burying daddy in yoga mats.

Noah's friend Randi adores him and comes running over to hold him and pick him up at any opportunity.

The weather has been mostly great and has been entirely free of the big storms that historically have tossed the MV Explorer around pretty rough.  But it has rained.  Here Noah is catching drops falling from the awning on the seventh deck near the pool.

Sometimes too cool Noah gets exasperated at mommy and daddy's exuberance.

All this fun is set against the backdrop of the most amazing sights in the most amazing world imaginable.

Ahura Mazda

Way back right before Susan and I got married, I embarked on a vision quest with my men’s group.  We spent a week or so in sage-and-pine country south of Mono Lake—half the time as a whole group and half the time alone and fasting, questing after visions.  Our leader / bodhisatva, Larry Robinson, taught us to begin each day with a chant to the sun god.  The moment Helios crested the mountains, we stood facing him, spread our arms, and sang, “A-a-a-hura M-a-a-a-zda.”  Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god of creation, was a welcome sight: it was c-c-cold those October nights in the high scrubland.

Each morning on the MV Explorer, a crowd of congregants gathers at the stern of the ship.  Most people have cameras: point-and-shoots, GoPros on the ends of selfie sticks, high-end SLRs with long lenses, iPhones.  We’re all quiet—sleepy or reverent or just concentrating.

We wait, we watch, we feel more than see the light change around us.

Eventually the sun pricks his way over the waves or, more commonly, peeks redly through the clouds.  A light trail blazes across the miles to the ship, igniting the wavetips.  Then the cameras really come out and chatter begins.

Noah has been enjoying the beauty around him—to some extent.  Most mornings I have succeeded in getting him up on deck for the sunrise ritual, and he enjoys it, although I think he enjoys the daddy time more than the show (he’s irritated, for instance, when I  get up off the deck chair to take a picture).  Yesterday he pointed out an orange sunset peeking in the dining hall windows.  

Noah preferring Nannie's iPad over the sunrise

Being such a hound of beauty myself, I have wondered, all the time that Noah has been with us, when and how his apprehension of beauty will truly awaken.  I have distinct memories of being young and hearing my dad, who is very sensitive to beauty in all forms, wax eloquent about a mountain vista or a Mahler symphony.  I would look or listen and say, “cool,” and turn away mostly unmoved.  Only rarely as a child did I find myself caught by a view or a melody.  The Episcopal Church liturgy definitely moved me; I remember liking a few songs; I remember enjoying the sunsets in Hawai’i when we visited during my fourth grade year.  It was adolescence that woke me up.  Only then did music and books and the night sky really go in and go deep.  It’s the same for all of us, am I right?  It’s adolescence that plugs us in and turns us on and makes it clear to us that everything matters and everything passes and so we had better love this world while we can—in full knowledge that our hearts will inevitably be broken.  That’s what happens, actually: adolescence breaks open our hearts.  It’s no wonder that we then clam up and shut down for five or eight years.

I do think it’s then that we truly begin to become spiritual—intentionally so, I mean.  Though I still think of myself as a Christian, I have over the years loosened myself from predigested answers to many of the big questions.  The result is that I now see spiritual work going on everywhere I look.  I do think we supplicants at the stern rail each morning are taking part in a religious service.  I see communion happening at each meal, as students make more room at a crammed table to let a stranger join them for lunch.  I see baptisms happening as Noah and the other kids play around the pool.  And I see God “happening” everywhere.  Although a member of a religious community (Unitarian Universalist), I am weary of years of thinking that religion only happens in church and in an approved way.

Here on the ship, in the middle of the Pacific, there is breathtaking beauty everywhere I look.  I think I could float forever just watching the ever-changing sea and the ever-changing sky, the white blaze of the Explorer’s deck framing the deep, deep blue of the open ocean.  And the people.  Noah and the other children and my colleagues and the cheerful, smart, hardworking students and the saintly crew.  We all secretly love each other and revel in each other, rocking and rolling from swell to swell as the sun gets up and chases us toward Japan.

New Friends

Noah is a hit.  

He has many, many new friends: caregivers and mentors among the parents, students, staff members, and older kids, and buddies among the younger crowd.  He has been enfolded in many loving arms.  Today the chief hotelier, an older Englishman named John, presented Noah with a Semester at Sea T-shirt.  Yesterday Noah watched The Lego Movie sitting in the lap of May, a new best buddy who’s nine.  Many students have approached spontaneously and asked to babysit—today he’ll hang with a new friend named Jessie.  The bussers at meals and our cabin steward, Rene, all rush over to say hi when they see him.  Residential Directors proudly exclaim that they got “my Noah time today.”  No blessing of this adventure has been greater than seeing the love blossom between Noah and his 800 or 900 co-voyagers.

Watching The Lego Movie

None of this is surprising to Susan and me, of course.  Noah has always been charismatic, and a lot of that must have to do with his beauty.  Even as a newborn, he was well formed (despite the usual bullet head) and had the distinctive cupid’s-bow mouth that he still sports.  His wide dark eyes and beaming smile—straight white teeth flashing amid his cocoa face—endear him to everybody.  When we walk in malls or down the street, people will whip around in double takes.   I always say that one of the privileges of being an adoptive daddy is that, anytime anybody says “Noah is so cute!,” I get to just reply, “isn’t he though?”

Noah and a favorite new friend, Suki

I wonder if any readers are put off by my talking about Noah’s beauty so blatantly.  Beauty in humans is such a fraught thing.  We seldom get to appreciate it as an uncomplicated blessing.  We intone solemnly that everyone is beautiful and we reject lookism; but we’re so self-conscious about our own appearances and so cautious, justifiably so, no doubt, about sharing our own preferences or delight in others’ faces and forms.  I am a painter who focuses much time and energy on people: portraits and figures.  On my own or in life drawing classes, I have painted or drawn the gamut of the human animal, from old guys who look like Gandalf to pudgy middle-aged women to gorgeous girls and children.  I have painted Noah and Susan several times each.  I understand, at a deep level, what people mean when they say that everyone is beautiful.  I can tell you, objectively, that it’s true: every human being has, as a birthright, the same claim on hue, light, shadow, form, all the rich vocabulary that makes up the poetry of visual delight.  And everyone knows the experience of seeing someone as beautiful who, at first glance, seemed nondescript, or contrarily, of seeing ugliness in someone who initially turned one’s head.  Beauty is very much not the simple, one-note thing that media enterprises make it out to be.

But it would be foolish too to insist that there is no such thing as a special blessing of beauty—akin to the special blessing, I suppose, of a good singing voice.  Whatever it is, Noah has it.  “It” puts his parents into endless tricky situations, wanting him not to get big-headed, wanting him to feel and know this gift for the gift that it is—an entrusted gift, “his” only in the sense that he possesses it, not in the sense that he made it out of effort and will.  This blessing is no unmitigated, simple gift.  I watch the consequences of it unfold on board the Explorer, especially around the pool: the lovely young women and handsome young men, bearing the marks of a great privilege: the slender grace, the clear skin, the perfect smile, big eyes, tousled hair, and also the whiteness and the wardrobe.  Beauty is a kind of capital, both as a generator and as a reflector.  I used to think that the most important game going on around the pool was a sexual game: the females of the species displaying their reproductive assets, etc.  Now I think the most important game is a class game, which of course enfolds race.  The most beautiful girls and the most beautiful boys find one another and hang out, bearing themselves with the insouciance and possessing-the-world mien of princesses and princes.  When they find one another—their own people—I wonder what they are thinking and feeling.  Is it, “whew!  Here’s someone on my level with whom I may rise above this rabble.”  Or is it, “thank God: here’s another person who understands the labor of upholding this burden of beauty and who shares with me the terrible knowledge that, someday, it will be gone.”  I’ve long thought that, in the same way that the luckiest person in high school was not an athletic star or cheerleader but rather a band geek, the luckiest face and figure in the world is probably, oh, a six or a seven.  With little to uphold and little to fear, such a one can relax and enjoy life.  

Noah needing a little help

As the nerdy, skinny someone who has always only watched the beauty game from the sidelines, I think I can see the gift of beauty for the mixed blessing and challenge that it is, and I feel both admiration and compassion for Noah as he navigates the waters into which his beauty brings him and will bring him (who knows where genetics will take him as he grows?).  For now, it’s enough to feel grateful as he so easily endears himself to everyone and so easily makes friends.  No doubt his warm, people-loving, extrovert personality has a great deal to do with his popularity, a popularity we’ve come to accept as a matter of course and to take delight in with him.  It’s still a joy that, wherever he goes, he’s followed by an endless repeated chorus: “He is SO adorable!”  

Bad Dad

“Our first rolling seas”—that’s what we got yesterday.  I sat most of the morning in the Glazer Lounge, which is the big room at the top front of the ship (the forecastle?) with 180-degree glass facing forward, and watched and felt the swells grow.  This ship rocks.  Last night or early this morning, the swells rolled me around in bed, and it felt like being six years old and under a blanket in the back of the station wagon, some night when mom and dad were taking us on a long drive somewhere.  Everybody’s been feeling good, even Susan, thanks, I suppose, to the patches.  I think I felt a bit queazier than she did.  Some students and other faculty are not faring quite so well.  All I can say is, this crew is truly skilled at the art of cleaning up and deodorizing messes.  Thank God.

The Explorer listing to starboard

The rolling swell is actually beautiful to see and feel.  This big (600-foot) ship glides across the sea with the greatest of grace.  The bow dips and rises, a slow-motion roller coaster, through the ultramarine blue of the deep Pacific.  I’m glad that the ship is not larger, like the massive Carnival lines cruiser we berthed next to in Ensenada, nor smaller, like the incongruous, tiny fishing vessel that passed on our starboard side some 800 nautical miles at sea yesterday.  I think the MV Explorer is just right.  Apparently she and her sister ship are the two fastest cruisers on the planet.  Hilo is ahead of us, along with cerulean skies and dappled clouds.  

Two Noah meltdowns this morning, triggered by everyone’s exhaustion and overwhelm and daddy’s being a bad dad.  I love being a dad, and I think everyone who watches me parent knows that usually I’m OK at it, but I have one massive achilles heel: I’m too self-absorbed and too jealous of my time and energy.  Apropos of an earlier entry, I have a hard time letting go and letting be—letting Noah have Noah time and space, or rather just being in that time and space with him.  If you’ve seen me play Tickle Monster or Thomas trains with him, you know I can go there, but often I have a hard time letting him set the agenda.  I felt this acutely when we were in Cayman last year.  There’s almost nothing I love to do more in the world than snorkel in clear, warm ocean water, which Noah can’t of course do, poor guy, so many moments spent not at the beach but rather reading or watching a show or just hanging out felt torturous.  Again I was a rotten travel companion, to myself as well as to Susan and Noah.  

Here on the ship, not only do I have lots of things I want to do to feed myself or take pleasure (watch the sun rise, paint, nap, do yoga), but I also have many things I need to do.  Semester at Sea works its faculty hard.  The meeting schedule was intense the first three or four days.  Add to that the problem that internet is very spotty and weak.  This morning I felt a pressure to deal with email at exactly the same time that Noah was in my face, wanting me to switch to Noah speed, Noah time, Noah space.  I don’t switch suddenly very well at the best of times.  The result, as I said, was two meltdowns before 0800.  (Oh, and Noah had a few too.)

Becoming a dad at midlife has been wonderful in so many ways, but poor Noah landed in the middle of a crisis—my midlife crisis.  I keep thinking that it’s winding down, but it persists.  The keenest edge of it lately has been my growing awareness of the steadily descending pendulum of time.  I understand why some guys go for the sports car and some women go for the botox.  They feel their energies waning and know that there will be an end to the number of good days.  For me it works out in the certainty that there will only be so many more paintings to paint, so many more fish to swim with.  I feel frantic a lot of the time as I feel the days surging and subsiding past, my ship being one ship on one journey toward a closing port.  Noah didn’t want to go up to the deck and watch the sun rise this morning.  I love being with Noah, but there will only be so many more sunrises.  That’s midlife: a time when even the most spectacular of life’s blessings have to duke it out in a shrinking ring.

One day, sooner than I can imagine, I’ll wake up, and Noah will not want to hang out.  The relief will be great, and the loss will be excruciating.  Sometimes I wish I didn’t love so much.

We ride a deep, deep, deeeeeep blue sea here.  We’re well.  I’m well, Susan’s well, Noah is the best of us.  Hundreds of lovely young women and handsome men have fallen in love with him.  He keeps whispering in my ear: “Daddy, everyone thinks I’m cute.”

On the Open Ocean

Noah is at sea!  We boarded around noon on Monday the 5th, amid a mess of drama I'll explain below, and then sailed away from San Diego on the evening of the 6th, after Noah had gone to bed.  In the middle of the night he awoke and came into our cabin, looked out the port, and said, “we’re moving!”  This morning he and I got up and watched the sun rise out of a red streaky sky astern and start chasing us toward Hawai’i.  Thus far the sea is glassy and blue; the ship rolls lightly, giving me at least, last night, the best night of sleep I’ve had all trip.  Tomorrow things are supposed to get rocking a little more.

Boarding was horribly stressful due to the fact that I (Scott) had—grrrr—left Noah’s passport back at Nannie’s house on the copy machine.  Thank God, thank Ganesha, thank my guardian angels (upon whom I’ve learned to trust), thank the wisdom of foresighted humanity, thank capitalism, thank everyone—for FedEx.  Noah was largely unfazed by the drama and instead was very excited to dance his way through the ship: Our Ship, as he calls her.  The wonderful and caring staff of Semester at Sea were so welcoming and understanding.

I, Daddy, have been in meetings, meetings, meetings.  My worry has decreased and my excitement has risen as I’ve gotten into the community here.  What an amazing and wonderful group of faculty and staff.  The core of this Semester at Sea thing—teaching relevant curriculum in the experiential learning opportunity afforded by a voyage around the world—is hardly to be believed in its wonderfulness.  Think of studying world literature country by country.  Think of studying the global economy from people who understand global culture in an intimate way.  I know that the students are going to have a life-changing experience; I know that Noah and his parents are in the midst of a highlight of all of our lives.

On Tuesday evening, Noah had his first lifeboat drill (he had another the very next day), which he was fascinated by, and then he went to bed.  In the morning, we were at the dock in Ensenada.  There, daddy was supposed to stay on the ship all day and greet students, but the buses trickled in, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to hang around, so we all got off the ship with some new friends to do a little shopping and find some lunch.  Yummy tacos were found.  All the while, Noah was seeming very tired, which was not any sort of surprise given how hard we’ve all been going, going, going, and at the restaurant, Noah put his head in my lap and fell asleep.  By the time lunch was over, he clearly was hot with fever.  I carried him back to the ship, and he slept the rest of the day away.  Mommy joined him for much of it.

Today Noah awoke much improved (too early for poor Susan, who has been carrying a heavy Noah-caring burden over the past few days).  As I said, he and I made our way up to the deck to watch the sun bleed its way up the sky.

Racing to Meet the MV Explorer

Noah is in San Diego.  Whoo hoo!

He got here in a silver rented Ford SUV packed to the vinyl ceiling with six or seven huge canvas duffels, each of which was easily twice as heavy as any suitcase the family has ever packed.  The issue is consumables: think of everything you need for four months of regular living: how much shampoo you go through, how many snacks will see you through, what you’d need in the way of toys and activities to minimally keep you engaged and learning for four months if you’re four years old.  How many bags would that take, and how big would they be?  Poor guy, Noah had a little nook in the backseat where his car seat squeezed in.

Noah’s journey was epically beautiful.  Central California this year, following the big rains of December, is brilliantly green, and the light was clear in the pale blue winter sky.  We made a brief farewell stop at Nannie’s house so Noah could say a loving, laughter-filled goodbye to her and his Uncle Raj and his Aunt JinJin.  Then we stopped the first night in San Luis Obispo and then, yesterday, powered through LA to arrive at our hotel around 8 pm.  I loathe driving on sclerotic LA freeways, but by some miracle (and there have been so many miracles since I signed on to Semester at Sea back in September) we found exactly the right time to make the drive, so here’s Noah’s first traveler’s tip: Sunday afternoon and evening—that’s when to do the 405.  To me, though, even when the cars cruise, the drive still seems endless.  I always drop into a funk of ennui blasting past suburb after identical suburb.

A yummy breakfast in BelloMundo Cafe in San Luis Obispo

Yum! 

Speaking of ennui, here’s a secret: I (Scott) am a lousy traveler.  Ask Susan, poor thing.  When we were in France and Spain in 2009, Susan met (instead of the saintly, fun, loving guy she thought she’d married) an anxious dervish, far too attached to Seeing Everything, completely unable to listen to his inner state (like when it might be nice to sit down and have a snack), and spectacularly pathetic at the arts of Being There, Chillaxation, and Letting Go and Letting Be.  I do not chill very well.  In fact, I opposite-chill.  I’d say that I burn up under stress and lack of control, but it doesn’t feel warm, especially to my beloved travel companions.  As I said, ask Susan.

 On the beach in Santa Barbara

The process of preparing to embark upon Semester at Sea has proven to me that I have not improved in these areas one little bit.  Far from excited (I can hardly even conceptualize or imagine the trip as a whole, being on the boat, seeing amazing ports of call), I am anxious, worried, suffering terribly from lack of sleep and from heavy overwhelm.  I have a partner who is very much not these things; she has the nerve to ask questions like, “what’s the rush?  How is your worrying going to get us there any faster?”  I mean seriously: who asks these kinds of questions?

I have so many voices in my life telling me that it’s time—past time—to learn the wisdom of being in the moment.  I know that I have the skill.  In yoga, in painting, in playing with Noah, I easily find myself and find the world again.  It’s very clear that I can’t keep living the way I’ve been living: reacting, taking things too personally, doubting myself, clinging to vague outcomes all the more powerful for their vagueness.  This adventure will be a gift to me personally to the extent that it helps me move along this path toward caring for myself, accepting the adventure that comes, and—simply—having my life.  Thus will I be tolerable to myself and tolerable to my loved ones—and paradoxically so much better at caring for all those under my care, professionally and personally.

It’s often said that life is a journey.  OK, well, what if it’s a sea voyage?  If so, our ship is in.