IslandsAndPlace

['Islands'] on http://www.indestructiblecycles.com:

Islands have always fascinated me. Something about this little piece of land surrounded by ocean, or lake, or even river. I love water. I love to be on it, surrounded by it, on its shores, to hear it, to breath its air, just not to be in it. An island has always captured me largely for this very reason, an oasis peaking up out of the water...

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[Mulubinba Moments] It is tempting to write on Australia, the island continent, but where do I begin? There are the coral islands in the Great Barrier Reef, there is Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island (where the Bounty mutineers finally settled). I must also not omit Tasmania, the Apple Isle. I am however not going to write about any of these - rather I am going to continue with my series on “Places of the Spirit”. Our journey to spiritual places will take us to my current home - Newcastle.

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[Notes from an Eclectic Mind] . . . It was a short voyage and a thoroughly pleasant one in spite of my jittery nerves. My friends got out and walked around a bit on deck but I'm given to motion sickness and thought it best to stay put and not to press my luck. I distinctly remember thinking I was about to set foot on an island for the first time. A West Texas childhood affords few opportunities for island hopping unless you count gravel bars in the middle of the river.

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[alembic] ...You could reinvent yourself on island, or so goes the siren call from the waves, and I tried that once, many years ago on Oahu, in Hawaii. Freshly out of one university, I flew to Honolulu to join my cousin who had been staying at The Ilikai for some time, herself having tried many other islands from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic to the Pacific before she alit on Oahu in her quest for a suitable, and endurable, identity.

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[Bowen...Bowen...Bon]...I live on an island that's about 20 miles square. I guess you could argue that everyone lives on an island, that we all live in places surrounded completely by water; we make arbitrary distinctions to define how far out an island goes. But practically speaking, islands are pretty obvious - small, island-like, socked in.

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[Feathers of Hope (Pica)]People generally tend to live near people like them. Michael Weiss calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.

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[London and the North] I guess we all live on islands. Some of them are just called continents..... Please suggest alternative names for the United Kingdom or Great Britain.....

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[P:Island/Connections] We are all islands, so it may be that we love them because we identify with them. (John Donne had it wrong, but he was trying to make a different point. Decide for yourself when you put yourself to sleep tonight) ...

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[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] Almost every day during my eight-year sojourn in Santa Barbara, I would glance seaward at Santa Cruz Island, about twenty miles off the coast.

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[Mulubinba Moments] The Isle of Avalon

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[Laughing~Knees] From a jet plane the Earth sits under the hard mirror of the sky. The Sun glares down, its one unblinking eye pitiless with power, seeing all, the vast film of water, air and rock. Indifference beats upon any harborer of precious fluids, hissing admonishments to turn tail and burrow into the nearest cleft. To a watcher in space the blue marble of the planet might at first seem stillborn, but if it watches carefully the swirling surface would give away the secret: like milk roiling in a cup of coffee clouds belie both a boiling heart and a mind fanning the idea of regeneration. The clouds themselves would give birth, like whales in an ocean of air.

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