Simply Red Boats

A peaceful time spent at the Boat Landing in the Jones River Watershed provided me a opportunity to watch these four red rowboats dancing in the tide.

As always, clicking on an image will display a larger version.

An excerpt from Nine Horses by Billy Collins.

We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

An excerpt from The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson.

What it liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you
mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction
is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a
boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we
mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how
perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her
sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and
stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how
instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once
more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and
human activities and human energies.

An excerpt from First you have to row a little boat by Richard Bode.

I sat in the center of the dinghy, facing the stern, my destination somewhere behind me, a landfall I couldn’t see. I had to judge where I was headed from where I had been, an acquired perception which has served me well --- for the goals of my life, and especially my work, haven’t always been visible points of light on a shore that looms in front of me. They are fixed in my imagination, shrouded and indistinct, and I detect them best when my eyes are closed. All too often I am forced to move toward them backward, like a boy in a rowboat, guiding myself by a cultivated inner sense of direction which tells me I’m on course, tending toward the place I want to be.

Simply Red Boats

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