'Still your eyes are on the ground'

Dante wrote “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.” I have pondered over this for the past few days and it has had an impact.  It is so easy nowadays to get bogged down with all that is around us.

 

We have:

 

24 Hour news that in reality has about 15 minutes of news which it repeats 96 times over the course of a 24 hour period.

 

The majority of programmes on TV are reality TV with no plot and tend to be voyeurism at its worse showing us people that are generally rude, ignorant and have probably never done a good days work in their life, in other words they have scrounged of the state and us tax payers have supported them.

 

Computer games, internet etc are taking away peoples ability to interact with each other.

 

I won’t even go on about Global Terrorism, War, Famine, Fossil fuels running out and Economic power centres shifting etc

 

All in all what have little Beth and William got to look forward to as they grow up.

 

However back to where I started, “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.” As I say it is so easy to get bogged down without realising it and as Dante implies we just need to look up once in a while.

 

Standing out on the bridge wing just now I forced myself to take a step back and look up.  It is a gorgeous evening, mild with wonderful clear skies.  The full moon has left a silver road across the velvety darkness of the sea, leading to the horizon.  The stars are shining and although the sound of the water passing the ships hull is noisy it is still peaceful. It is amazing how five minutes of tranquillity makes the world seem an altogether different place.  I think that there are many of us in the western world that easily forget how lucky we are. We don’t have to deal with famine, floods, war, disease, as people in Africa, Asia and the Middle East do. I think we should be thankful for what we have and always seek to improve the lives of those around us, whilst appreciating what is all around us, a wonderful if sorely abused world.

 

Anyway that is enough of my rant for the time being and now a little dit on what has happened since I last wrote. I think the last Blog entry was just after Debbie and the two little ones came onboard. As always things have been busy and I have been crap at keeping my Blog up to date so here goes.  After a few more days on the south coast we headed up to the waters around Scotland again for some trials, during which I ended up doing watches for a few days.  It wasn’t too bad and I soon got back into the swing of things remembering all the old routines after all it is a few years since I last did a watch. Anyway it wasn’t to bad bobbing in around the Islands as at least it helped us shelter from the 60kt winds.

 

I did manage to get ashore once while we were up there and had a wonderful bike ride along the side of a Loch. After the initial hills the road ran nice and level right along the waters edge which was wonderful and peaceful.  It was just ashame I didn’t get ashore until gone 5 as there wasn’t much daylight left and I had no light fitted.

 

Anyway we are now back down south and I am looking forward to Friday as I am actually going to have a proper 72 this trip, makes a change, so I will get to go home and spend the weekend with Debbie and the little ones.