My weather analysis was a bit off the mark, as I spent the night before last running away from a huge thundersquall, and yesterday morning really got poured on for hours on watch. All the foulies and wet clothes made living below a little rank, with the hatch closed and the companionway boards in against the rain from astern. At least the seas moderated slightly.

Yesterday afternoon there was a last rainstorm for Craig, and then the transformation occurred. As I started on watch at six, the end of the long cloud bank finally appeared on the western horizon, leaving a zone of clear sky into which the squintingly blinding orange disk slowly descended. I took my camera to the foredeck and snapped away as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon flooded out from the speakers. Behind me to the northeast, a generous rainbow made its appearance, no doubt enticed by all the aesthetic appreciation available from us down below. After dark, the infant crescent moon poked out briefly before scampering after the sun.

And then it was the stars’ turn, since they had waited so patiently for all this obscurity to move on. The Big Dipper was the boldest overhead, Cassiopeia rested just above the northwest horizon. Arcturus was close and orange, Spica scintillated sharp and cold white in the south. We sailed directly into the best of all the constellations that night, Scorpio, with red Antares burning at its center, but it was Jupiter who dominated the view ahead to windward, outshining the entire milky way, his creamy light coating the smooth surfaced waves below.

I couldn’t resist - I went down and turned off the masthead tricolor. Now only Jupiter and the stars were awake with me. It was true - I could see a broad pathway of shining on the wavelets stretching toward the planet - the sea by Jovelight. The boat’s wake bubbled on, unwinding the miles endlessly astern, turning them into months and years past, while the breeze pulled us toward the east, land of renewal.

Fifteen hundred miles out of Portsmouth, on our 16th night of this passage, it had all finally come together. Alone at night, wonderingly receiving these light quanta from across the universe, I feel the wind open me up. The purity of nothingness fills my heart, and, for this brief moment at least, I understand deeply that it just doesn’t matter.

Little Puffling rolls gently from side to side in long, slow undulations, rocked by those deep sea swells of profound indifference.

It is very quiet.

I hear the leaping of the baby waves on our windward side, and the constant hissing of the bubbles to leeward. I remember those trips to the beach as a child, lying face down eyes closed in the warm sun, the human voices far away, safely distant for a while. The soft low booming of the big waves offshore, the rushes of seawater sweeping up the sand, the same hissing sound close by as they retreat. And now I have had the good fortune to follow those waves home to the center of the Atlantic Ocean and I am truly and deeply grateful.

I think, freedom and loneliness, now and forever, one and inseparable.

*  *  *

And now it is morning. An hour has passed while I have been lost in writing and reverie. The water temperature has dropped to 66 and the wind is about 20 knots. It is quite cool. There are only a few patches of blue above, but I’m underneath one of them now, and I glory in the warmth as we glide along under poled out genoa and double reefed main.

Soon it will be time to awaken the boys and my environment will be very different with their conversation. I do like them both, but these mornings alone have been an unexpected treasure for me.

I hear the clock below chime seven bells. I get up to adjust the Monitor’s course to suit the increased wind. A sea turtle raises a flipper to port and eight dolphin leap out of the water to starboard. I tell myself - remember non-action, be open. Read, write, live and love freely - it will all somehow be O.K.