Unchained melody

In 1998 I took a week-long photography class in Port Townsend, and I remember taking pictures of this same little dinghy, sitting in the grass beside the path to the beach.

It moves me still, and must move others as well, because it still sits chained here in the same spot. And though it's a little more beat up now than when I photographed it before, there doesn't seem to be any of the graffiti here that plagues other parts of the park.

So what is it that draws us about this boat, and what is it that has compelled the rampant graffiti gangs to refrain from displaying their art on its lapstraked sides?

Any answer I give would only be projection, so I'll just speak for myself. There are certainly cliches that come to mind -- "a fish out of water" is the first: something in me mourns that it is trapped here in the grass when water is where it belongs.

"So near and yet so far" is the second; the fact that the water is just over the rise but still invisible and inaccessible to the boat; as if in struggling to reach its home it gave up the ghost only a few yards away, never to see the stuff of its dreams. That one makes me ache; it has echoes of that tragic scene at the end of Dr. Zhivago when he sees Lara on the street from his window, after so many years' separation, tries to run after her, and has a heart attack as she turns the corner and walks away, oblivious.

It's separation from love that is symbolized here, I think, and though we naturally see that in terms of human love -- Dr. Zhivago never reuniting with his Lara, or Sophie giving up her child in Sophie's Choice -- I think the root emotion is the longing for that Divine connection, and the loneliness we humans feel when we get out of touch with that which conceived and created us and continues to live on within us and around us.

All of which for some reason reminds me of that old Righteous Brothers tune, Unchained Melody, playing behind that moving dance scene from the movie Ghost:

Oh, my love, my darling,
I've hungered for your touch
a long, lonely time.

Time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much.
Are you still mine?

I need your love,
I need your love,
God speed your love to me.

Lonely rivers flow
to the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea.

Lonely rivers sigh,
'Wait for me, wait for me'
'I'll be coming home,
wait for me!'

Oh, my love, my darling,
I've hungered for your touch
a long, lonely time.

Time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much.
Are you still mine?

I need your love,
I need your love,
God speed your love to me.

And it may be that all this is resonating for me this morning because I just couldn't seem to sit still long enough to meditate. Yes, I do have days like that. And I'm thinking -- since I woke at 4:30 and couldn't get back to sleep -- that the solution may be just to crawl back into bed; perhaps -- just for now -- I need sleep more than I need meditation.