Cruise To Norway... a romance of 30 years...

Stephen & I woke quite early together deciding to make a little private adventure of the morning as we cruised into & up the fjord into the home port of the Viking line... & of our ship named Saturn...

We went up to the top deck to the Explorer's Lounge...

  

 

 

The glassed space soaring into panoramic views all 'round.  

Yet offering intimate space for us... 

 

He photographed me...

I  photographed him... 

 

 Our moods contained bits of a secret: we had become 'engaged' just a week before we flew off to London at the beginning of this trip; that is, we'd obtained the marriage license from Pierce County... but we'd not found time to get married! This "no big deal" had taken on at least a bit of the deal we'd wished to circumvent! 

 

Long ago, during the years when I was making wedding rings... I would be amused by the couple's statements of keeping their plans simple, while my experience could predict complications.

  

That is why I can legitimately tell stories about wedding rings becoming operas!    

 

Ultimately, our story became more a sort of a good rehearsal... another valuable teach/learning inside our loving. Still we began to note certain changes of surprisingly subtle nuance... little by yet smaller.  Approaching the fine level of becoming Sacramental, perhaps...

 

Reckoning after the travel, we realized the license had a deadline... our days were numbered.  

 

Stephen has a friend, Bill Hulseman, whose vocation is to help develop & design ritual for such occasions. I appreciated meeting him to further think about the event. Since our friends, another gay couple, for whose wedding we were the witnesses, were unavailable to attend & complete some reciprocal symmetry, we chose two other deep friends: Taylor, our dear Vashon Island neighbor & co-confidant; as well as GRB Bells' upcoming proprietor & best friend, Monica Street, joined our rather spontaneous process... at the exact hour of the autumnal equinox... balancing the celebration on our balcony, with its backdrop of Commencement Bay & our Mother Mountain Tahoma... witness to our vows. (The state requires two witnesses.) As the ink dried on the documents, we toasted with champagne... plus a cake which Bill had made for us... we can certainly wholeheartedly recommend his skills in his vocational choice! 

 We are gaily legitimately married as a gay couple! 

  

Now... the conundrum of the limited kinks of English. My feminist fairly bristles in anticipation of the ambiguities of current permutations... Radical Faeries have long played inventively with campy genderfuck verbiage... that's also long been gay bar-talk. My pragmatist curtsies while asking my inner dyke to dance. 

We are initially trying on being husbands. [My chance, as a proud sissy, to be butch?]
More will evolve, I trust... 

 

 

But I began this post on that upper deck cruising into a Norwegian fjord... 

My first time to this country. 

I am declaring my love for who I call... my sweetman.

Full of visions we can share into beyond...

We fit. So I share one of my appreciations of another, more mundane piece of infrastructure on our ship... craftsmanship in a lattice of local wood, fitted to seafaring geometry... satisfaction!

Viking British Isles Cruise - Stones, Carvings, Tapestry, history...

The British Isles have such deep history... as evidenced by the The Ring Of Brodgar on Orkney Island, about which I made shots of the signage as a way to take notes for this far bit of 'later', when I won't & don't remember such details like that the word 'henge' means a 'circular enclosure'. So here in four images of the signage is a fair bit of such history... should you wish to explore further along with me. (apologies for the fuzzy photo... trying to remedy...)

 

 If not, pass on by... 

 

 

 

Alice, John & Mark enjoyed this walk with Stephen & me... even as I was lagging getting back on the bus. I was busy enjoying the flexible rubber matting laid down to encourage sod to replace the inevitable wear of many feet in the soil. As a gardener I'm always fascinated by such infrastructure, & I'd never seen any construct quite like this...

(if I showed you this before, that was a teaser... here is context...as are photos below) 

 

In contrast to the wide expanse open air of Brodbar's ancient sacred stone site, St Patrick's Cathedral in Kirkwall was a rather somber Romanesque structure -- shadowy, with few windows to add light or color. One can further see that sensibility in the very sturdy seating -- handsome, if lacking much suggestion of comfort.

Some floor level-stone mullions hint at old openings toward light, now bricked-in & offering only vertical space in those memories for yet another carved stone memorial slab.

Of which there were several in similar style

I found the lettering on this stone carving in Saint Patrick's Cathedral to be "familiar" --  it being quite similar to my own style of calligraphy... my This Is It bell design from the website grbbells.com

  is an example.

There were several such memorial slabs, each of which had "scull & crossbones" images at their bases which sometimes gave me a smile...

 

 But none has a smile quite like Bro-Mark! 

 While I have long believed the Barnett name to be German, I saw it in several contexts on this trip...

As we exited a side door I realized there was a more lyrical  period in the church's decorative history in addition to the severe interior...  

I watched from our stateroom's deck as we set sail again while passing a stately manor of some kind... giving me a quiet glimpse into yet another past.  

Plus a utilitarian bookend in the form of a lighthouse. A sweet parade as we headed out to sea 

  

  

Our ship had elevators, which were often busy... so we often used the handsome stairway, with its leather wrapped hand railing... handy for rough seas I suppose, but happily we never experienced that. 

 

I continue to be entranced by the large, extremely high resolution photographs of details from the Bayeaux Tapestry which spans the large walls of the ship's stairway. The landings were big enough to host the cruise's resident historian as she lead a group of us who were interested to go along on her 'progressive lecture' while walking us down the four or five flights while she explained the various stories of the ancient fabric which is obviously not a tapestry but is embroidery of wool tread on a hundreds of yards of linen canvas... sewn only a few years after the the battle of 1066 known as the Norman Invasion, probably by nuns at Canterbury, but commissioned by the French Cathedral then being built at Bayeaux.

 

Since returning home I've researched deeper this story, which is a thousand-year-long saga in itself! Current news stories, published during the last two decades of nation-to-nation negotiations tell that  permission has been granted to allow the piece to be moved from France, where it has lived for much of its life rolled up in a churchy chest. Thus it needs a great deal of curatorial attention. The plan is that it will return to England for that restoration & a temporary period of display before being returned to its permanent display being built in Bayeaux. That our ship's designer used these images so aesthetically & effectively is another example of Viking's creative finesse at education through art. 

 

One could study the stitchery of this fragile piece of textile as it would look if I were seeing it through my jewelry studio lens's magnification.

 

 

Another connection can be appreciated by these two photos:

The ship's interior & exterior 

 

But this photo I made from our deck of the boat's wake has the true flavor of the ship's best gift to me...