the gifts of deprivation

Steven Callahan, lost at sea in The Rubber Ducky 3

"In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple of hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed - food, shelter, clothing, and companionship - yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn't get everything I wanted, when people didn't meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn't aquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind.I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out of the raft, I see God's face in the smooth waves. His grace in the dorado's swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from the sky. I see that all creation is made in His image. Yet despite His constant company, I need more. I need more than food or drink. I need to feel the company of other human spirits. I need to find more than a moment of tranquility, faith, and love. A ship. Yes, I still need a ship.

Unknown

The sea has flattened. All is still. Inside of me I feel a symphony of excitement growing, like music that begins very low, almost inaudible, then grows stonger and stronger until the entire audience is swept up in it in a single synchronized, thumping heartbeat. I rise to scan the horizon. Blowing up from astern are gigantic clumps of cumulonimbus clouds. Rain bursts from their flat, black bottoms, above which thick, snowy fleece billows up to great heights, until it is blown off in anvil heads of feathery ice crystals. The clouds push bright blue sky ahead of their walls of gray rain streaking to earth. An invisible paintbrush suddenly splashes a full rainbow of sharply defined color from one horizon to the other. The top of its arc comes directly overhead, lost in turbulent white ten thousand feet up. The breeze caresses my face; the canopy of the raft snaps. The smooth, slate sea is broken with white tumbling cracks. The sun suddenly pops out between billowing sky sculptures far to the west and balances on the horizon. It sends warmth tracking to the east upon its path, heats my back, and sets the bright orange canopy aglow. Another invisible brush stroke paints another perfect rainbow inside and behind the first. Between their belts of color are walls of deep gray. The smaller rainbow is a cavernous mouth well lit on the rim, leading inward to a deeper, electric blue. I feel as if I am passing down the corridor of a heavenly vault of irreducible grandeur and color. The dorados leap in very high arcs as if they are trying to reach the clouds, catching the setting sun on their sparkling skins. I stand comfortably, back to the sun, as cool rain splashes on my face, fills my cup, and washes me clean. Far away to the north and south the ends of the rainbows touch the sea. Four rainbow ends and no pots of gold, but the treasure is one nonetheless. Perhaps until now I have always looked for the wrong kind of coin.


Steven Callahan
Adrift: Seventy-six days lost at sea



"The wrong kind of coin." The wrong kind of coin! I remember reading once a list of all the 'free" things we don't think of but which, if we had to pay for, are beyond price. Air, sunsets, the scent of flowers, shade of a tree, taste of water, the sounds of waves on the shore...




 And then Mr. Callahan, lost at sea, covered with wounds, by turns on the verge of starvation or dying of thirst, tells us there are benefits to deprivation! What are these?! What indeed are the benefits of starvation? Of captivity? Of being lost? Being in pain? Of clinging to life?



  Is it, as Callahan seems to say, that we awaken to what was always there, to what was poured out on the earth? To a unity, an underlying concordance of all Being and beings?
 And what is wealth? If money cannot keep you safe, cannot heal, cannot give your life value - is it wealth at all?  What is safe? What is healing? What is meaningful? And where do we find the"right kind of coin"?