We find ourselves moving through the wilderness totally present in its cycle of respiration, drawing from its energy, in existence and flow with it. The pain has not left us, oh no. The legs are lead ballast, the heart may begin beating hard and the breath drawn short and erratic, the stomach rejecting calories and nauseous, and you can witness your energy source like a lamp in the night slowly fading, but this is nature too, and you are consciously aware of it without attachment to it, you are existing with it without controlling it. They are problems to be solved, but they are not the outcome. The outcome is much greater than that.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…

All the while the vessel rode on, rising and falling, and I could feel the tension of her rigging in the hull through my seat, the strain of the rudder through the helm into my hands, and it felt as though the sheets and shrouds and sails were extensions of my nerves, as though I were attached to them by strings, and they pulled at my being as the hull and rig bent to each gust.

It was in this moment when I was a top of a wave and riding back down into the trough that I saw the whale. It’s massive bulk was surfing down the face of the approaching swell, illuminated by the light of the full moon, the phosphorescents silhouetted its massive body, and left a glowing trail behind it as it sounded down into the deep. And in the next moment I was riding up swell where it had been.

It happened in a moment, like a still frame photo, taken, and catalogued away, so fleeting and surreal that it is hard to know if it ever even existed, or if my mind had conjured the image up.with an idea.

Evil becomes embodied in a single ego, whose ambition is power for powers sake, rooted in greed and self worship. The ego comes to power by playing to the vices of those around him, by stoking the fear of the mob, and angering them into action. The ego is the victim, as are his followers, victims of some great injustice.