Those of you who have visited here and have had to clamber down the rocks to get to the dock will appreciate this. After seven or eight summers here we finally got our act together and made a platform and ramp to get to the dock. Besides helping you not break your neck, it offers a new variety of sittin & starin positions. To hinge the ramp to the platform we used some big eye hooks and a half inch pipe. Xena, Warrior Kitty, likes it a lot. Xena was born in a courtyard at Slidell High at Mardi Gras. Think of the Warrior Princess as played by Miss Piggy instead of Lucy Lawless and you'll understand her personality. On my Yakima Rackima I brought home a Kayackima, a Old Town 11 foot Loon to be exact. Old Town is a town near where I work and it's the home of Old Town Canoe factory, whose outlet store I've been haunting waiting for a second or third in a one seater kayack to appear. Friday was the day. The kayack is a lot like the Honda; you sit low and it responds very quickly. Paddling it is like bicycling with your shoulders; you get a good upper body workout. It's easy for one person to get it in and out of the water. This morning I paddled up to a quiet cove where the osprey has its nest and just looked at water lilies and rocks and trees; my mind just cleared right out.

I'm reading Annie Dillard's new book, For The Time Being. As usual she's looking intently at the only two things that interest her: the horrific and the transcendent. I mentioned to someone at Unity College that it would be cool to get her as a commencement speaker. Then I thought if she used some visual aids, what would they be. A film clip of a mystic in rags with his eyes fixed on a sunlit sycamore tree as he is being flayed alive by a policeman and in one hand he holds a large bug which is devouring itself and in the other hand a newborn child. I only read a chapter of her a day partly because the book is so good I want to make it last a while, and partly because it's all I can take. She looks at spiritual heroes with the eye of an entomologist; Teilhard de Chardin, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Isaac Luria. They seem like brilliant insects driven by bizarre instincts. In Lacombe we had a log man named Jake Batiste who replaced rotting logs in our house. He didn't read or write; he was always searching for "sharp sand" to mix in the mortar. In Dillard's book, which includes a natural history of sand, I finally learned why he had to go dig it from streams.