Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
A line from one of my favorite poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In the poem we learn about the ill fate of the captain and his crew as a result from the captain killing the giant sea bird. The Albatross.
Superstitions and sea lore are intrinsic to one another. The Greeks and Romans believed that sirens would lure sailors to their deaths by their sweet, hypnotizing, serenades.
The popular phrase, red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in morning, sailors take warning, comes with either a delight or a demise.
Even whistling was considered bad luck, sailors believed that it could change the very wind the ship sailed on.
The Albatross, a mighty oceanic fowl with a 10 foot wingspan was an omen to sailors. Bad luck or good luck, it held terrible chaos in it's wings.
Why then, did the captain of the poem shoot the winged auspice?
Do all humans kill what we love? In the chambers of our secret heart, the Japanese refer to it as one's third face. This shadowy aspect of ourselves that we hide from everyone, is it there that we find our chilling truth?
A truth that what we love we kill. Self sabotage. Thinking that we aren't good enough. Imposters. Fake. We don't deserve unsolicited treasures and we must snuff it out.
Or is this icy revelation deeper than that? Entwined with our very centers a vine that clutches and then chokes. Whispering all the while in our hearts . . . lies.
I don't know why we sometimes self sabotage to the fate of our own happiness. The captain wore the dead bird around his neck. If we could only sport our equally damning mistakes. Would we learn?
Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, had one fatal flaw. His heel. The region of his mortality is more symbolic than his weak ankles. Dante highlighted the deathly arrow in his Inferno. Seen in Hell's second circle is Achilles. That circle is Lust.
Lust is a powerful force, but is it the marksman of the crossbow that shot the Albatross? Or better yet, is Lust the marksman that inevitably kills us . . . are we not our own Albatross?
'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
#Albatross #Omens #FabulousCandace #Killingyouralbatross #SelfSabotage 🤔
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