I am the Captain of My Ship


…of My Small Ship




Snacking on a peanut butter ball and drinking coffee while cruising on a little flat-bottomed boat, the world was a distant reality. The lake was still, a new sun painted the landscape into a live Pierneef. In front of me, clouds skimmed the Waterberg Mountains, catching their slow reflections in the water. On the skeleton arm of a tree, long stranded in the lake, a cormorant curved a sharp beak to preen its feathers.
As we puttered past a reed bed, a hippo, alarmed by our presence, surged to the surface. It was there and then gone in a moment, leaving us startled and laughing in delight. I imagined it, invisible beneath the surface, gliding on pointe across the muddy bottom of the lake and away from our intrusion. 
I try to capture moments like these. Not just on camera but in the fabric of my soul. There was, however, a picture of me, standing at the front of the boat and laughing at the camera. I posted it on Facebook and, in my usual self-deprecatory manner, claimed that I was the captain of the ship. One of the comments posted under that photo has stayed with me. Not because it was unkind or ill-intentioned, it just niggled at my thoughts: ‘It’s a pretty small ship.’
It was a ‘small ship’ – not a ship at all – just a little craft on a lake. I felt safe on my ‘ship’, although, there was a little disquiet when we were told that the lake was full of pythons; the record spotting for one day was 24! 
Are we ever the captains of our individual ships? My adventure on the lake happened just as Covid-19 was coming closer and closer to us. Under the smooth surface of my life, the pythons were beginning to coil. The hippos were coming to the surface. On that perfect February morning, the ripple of the virus had not yet turned into the tsunami that it’s become. 
I am the captain of my very small ship, tossed now in the storm of disaster, but that doesn’t mean that I am rudderless or helpless. It’s hard to navigate when we don’t know where we’re going. We’ve never been here before, not in our lifetime. Plagues and epidemics are common in our past, but each one has changed the shape of the world. It’s hard not to spiral down towards the pythons of despair as markets crash and the death toll becomes unimaginable across the world.
What can I do, on my isolated ship, far from the safe shore of family and friends? I can only choose to navigate myself with care and purpose. Without hope and purpose, we give up. My purpose is to use the words with which I have been gifted to reach out. Let’s set the course together. What is your purpose? What gives you hope? Create a vision for it and do one thing each day that will bring clarity to the fog that is the future. Share your vision and help others onboard. Write songs or poems, paint, knit, bring something beautiful into the world. Or just be there in a phone call to someone dear. 
The old stars won’t help us now. We must navigate by the stars of love and kindness, on purpose and with hope.

Comments

  1. Phil Keye11 August 2021 at 17:01

    Hello Ruth, I wonder if you remember me from school days in 2004?
    I still remember your poem about how "poetry hangs your soul on a barbed wire fence."
    As well as our fake fight in class, which left the whole class in bewilderment ;)
    Hahaha!!

    Would be lovely to catch up sometime!

    Phil Keye

    ReplyDelete

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