If life is a journey on water, with our conscious mind above the waterline and our deep unconscious beneath, and if all the people in the world are drifting, surfing, drowning and sailing on that surface, shouldn’t there be a person on a wooden chair in the sky above the beach watching over it all?

Shouldn’t there be a person?

And a beach?

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass

A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass

Reflects a standing gull

The land may vary more;

But wherever the truth may be—

The water comes ashore,

And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.

They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep?

– Robert Frost

“Calm yourself, Little One. There is always a person. There is always a beach.”

I had an idea for the story, which by the way has been in my head for about 20 years now, and all it was to begin with was an image of a boy in a wheelchair flying a kite on a beach. And that picture was just as clear in my mind as it could be. And it wanted to be a story, but it wasn’t a story, it was just a picture. As clear as clear as clear…

– Stephen King, May 29, 2013

The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 2005 and 2007, they took in more than half a billion dollars – the highest-grossing tour of all time. On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of ‘Street Fighting Man.’

– David Remnick, The New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2010

Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant…

– Adam Nicolson, Sea Room

On the edge of the water were a pair of waystones, their surfaces silver against the black of the sky; the black of the water. One stood upright, a finger pointing into the sky. The other lay flat, extending into the water like a short stone pier.

No breath of wind disturbed the surface of the water. So as we climbed out onto the fallen stone the stars reflected themselves in double fashion; as above, so below. It was as if we were sitting amid a sea of stars.

– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, p. 216

This is the land of Narnia, said the Faun, where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. And you—you have come from the wild woods of the west?

I—I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room, said Lucy.

– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Pennie and I have had the flu for more days than is supposed to be possible, and I have still not recovered my voice. There were days when I was not sure I dwelt in the land of the living.

“The rain to the wind said,

You push and I’ll pelt.’

They so smote the garden bed

That the flowers actually knelt,

And lay lodged–though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.”

― Robert Frost

Aroo,

Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY – Taking care of Pennie and Roy prohibited me from putting together a rabbit hole for you. Sorry. – Indy

Robert Kerbeck has had a long career as a highly paid corporate spy stealing private intelligence so detailed it would make the CIA proud. Business-on-business spying is a huge industry — full of deceit and lies — and this week Robert shares secrets of the dark art with roving reporter Rotbart. It’s always Monday morning at MondayMorningRadio.com

Episode 12: Liz O'Sullivan on risks and ethics of AI in warfare