center of effort

Have you ever been sailing? Or spent anytime just feeling the wind as it hits your body? Living in the islands wind is a constant, it blows day and night and when it doesn't blow things feel down right odd.

Wind typically comes from all directions, but here, it mostly blows out of the east. It cools, sends in the cleansing rains, helps birds on their migrations and massages our senses even while we may be standing still. In a boat it propels us forward and in a storm it conjures up all sorts of melee.

Boat builders and sailors use the term center of effort as the thing that quantifies the point on a sail where all the prevailing driving forces of the wind appear to act to move the boat forward.

Swimmers know this spot as the place where they are perfectly buoyant. Where they are at their best in relation to the water and themselves. Sailors find it by tweaking the sails and paying attention. Others have a spot that they refer to as the core of their being, they work on that spot all the time, becoming one with whatever suits them.

i was out birding yesterday morning and kept hearing a sound that reminded me of a rattlesnake. We don't have snakes on this island so i was mystified. It wouldn't go away and i heard it a lot. The wind would blow a little rustling things up but i never could locate the source or identify who was making the rattlesnake sound. It kept intruding on the bird calls asking to be noticed.

i also found a broken birds egg and photographed it for another blog i'm working on. i've seen loads of broken bird eggs on my travels, this is the first time i've ever actually stopped to photograph one.

Searching for information about center of effort i stumbled upon the Emily Dickinson slant rhyme.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

And thought how interesting. Here it is again, i was looking for Hope yesterday, couldn't find her, but found the poem while looking for wind.

Wind....on Thursday i'm telling a story to a fifth grade class about Aeolus(Keeper of the Winds) who gives Odysseus a bag containing the north, east and south winds so he can sail home to Ithaca safely on the west wind...He almost makes it, he can see Ithaca, and falls asleep, leaving the bag unprotected. While sleeping his sailors cut into the bag thinking Odysseus has been hoarding riches, instead they release the winds and are blown back to where they started..........i decided to look up wind gods and ran across references to a feathered serpent that is found in Aztec, Maya and Hopi religious traditions.

Aha thinks i, didn't i hear a rattlesnake yesterday morning? The search is on.

Quetzalcoatl was one who was revered by the Aztecs and Maya. He was a feathered serpent and was known as a bringer of knowledge and peace. He was also associated with a god of the wind(Ehecatl), to Venus, to the dawn, to merchants, and to arts, crafts and knowledge. He was against human sacrifice and was said to have created the calendar.

i read the whole description, remembering that in my travels through Mexico Quetzalcoatl had fascinated me. For Quetzalcoatl was imbued with a similar return story as that of Jesus. In fact Spanish historians, not Aztecs, had attributed the Aztecs demise to the confusion of thinking Cortes was Quetzalcoatl returned. According to anthropologists this was a fantasy of Cortes and the Spanish, not Moctezuma, who was the Aztec ruler Cortes encountered. Moctezuma never thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl.

Reading on i came to an entry about the Fifth World and clicked on it to learn more. Its amazing the travels i take trying to research something as simple as wind.

The coming Fifth World (where our present World is presented as the Fourth) is said to arrive following a cycle in nature affecting our entire Solar System, where our Earth births an egg (Mystery Egg, Hidden Egg) and then moves "up" within our system to reach its crowning place. All of the Earth's life is then said to be "raised" to its perfected-eternal form. Some tribes refer to this period of change as "Purification Time." During this period of purification, time is said to change where we must choose between the natural Time we have now upon our Earth (meant for us) and an unnatural time structure which removes us from nature and our opportunity to reach the Fifth World. It is told that everyone will have to choose between the two time frames—one leading to the Fifth World with our Earth, and the other (which will be very alluring, deceiving many) which will remove us from our Earth, taking us to oblivion....Wikipedia

For the Hopi, the end of the fourth world is marked by the arrival of Pahana, or the lost "White Brother." For the Axtecs and Maya Quetzacoatl, for Christians it is the return of Jesus.

For me, my center of effort is to try to exert my time refocusing ourselves away from selfish individualism. To stop waiting for some final redemption or savior. To hammer home that cooperation and non-violence reaps greater rewards for all of us, today, no matter what venue you are practicing it in.

To keep working on this world, the one we live in, the one we can create change in.
Getting blown back to the beginning can happen to all of us. We find our center of effort. Odysseus men made a mistake, it took them longer to get home but they finally made it. We all make mistakes, the key is to re-center, don't panic and take a deep breath. Calming yourself before you act, trying to find that center of effort, may make the difference between further calamity and a successful resolution of the problem. The worlds problems and your problems are here today...they need work today...not tomorrow.

And so i came full circle. A kind of rambling romp. The wind, the rattler, Hope, the poem, the feathered serpent, and the egg.


Break an egg and use the nourishment to help you work on today.