Reflection: Love Floats Your Boat
by Eric Meece, Feb.19, 2023
for First UU Church of San Jose service
In our Band of Writers Meeting this month, I offered this prompt or subject matter that came to me, "what floats your boat", based on the popular saying, sort of a dismissing retort, that says "well, whatever floats your boat." Wiktionary defines this as "whatever makes you happy or stimulates you" "Stimulates" could also point toward a mission or purpose for your life. The welcome script that has been written for us says "we seek new awakenings that show us how truly to live out the mission of this congregation, to Make Love Visible in all we say and do." This is my subject today, although it is really more about MY boat of awakening, but it’s also about OUR boat, since as another saying goes, we are all in the same boat.
Within seconds of conceiving this prompt I knew what I would write about: the Awakening that still floats my boat and all our boats today. I have spoken of this before, and I don’t claim that my awakening is any more profound than anyone else’s. It also fits M. Scott Peck’s title "the road less traveled", and I am prompted by last’s week’s service too. Peck defined love as "The will to extend one's self to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth." He says this Will is desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action. This reminds me of my previous talk about the alchemical marriage in which assertive action and receptive stimulation become the same thing. I’m also saying our courage to take this road less traveled also comes from the love we are fed from others but also from a higher source within and beyond ourselves.
As a young teenager I had problems, as Peck describes. I often felt alienated and alone. But even more than this, curiosity led me on in 1966. My previous beliefs did not explain the beauty I cherished. On June 26 I felt lightness in my step after watching a movie my parents had recommended I go see, The Russians Are Coming. I didn’t know yet what a profound effect it had on me. That night I stayed in the backyard clubhouse my Dad and brother Gordon had built, and brought my radio. Since the Beatles came along I had expanded on my classical music background and followed sixties pop music. I kept a list of favorites, but was concerned that my next #1 had not shown up yet. But it did, that very night. Petula Clark’s new song I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love was the grandest thing I had heard since Mozart and Beethoven. I was so happy about this. And there was another new song I was considering, 5D Fifth Dimension by The Byrds. Jimmy McGuinn’s lyrics were "I opened my heart to the whole universe, and I found it was loving". I didn’t understand them at the time but I loved the sound, which I later learned included those of a Bach organist. I blissed out, and I opened up. Love rained and shined down on me, and within a few days the answer to my question came: Beauty is Love.
I never expected the level of beauty I felt in the ensuing months. I was so much more sensitive than before. The vibrant and frantic imagery of the movie The Russians Are Coming and its location stuck with me for years, too. It was filmed in our family’s favorite little town by the sea,
Mendocino (by Jef Poskanzer A Russian submarine got stuck on a rock on an American island, so the sailors boldly and recklessly stole a motorboat to pull it off so they could go home. But they had to dodge the crazy Americans after Muriel Everett called the sheriff and said "The Russians have landed". The sub got free and the sailors got lost. So the captain, thinking his men got captured, went to the harbor and threatened the town, and the sheriff angrily arrested him for stealing the boat. But one of the Russians who wanted peace and love rescued a boy who got stuck on a building there, and the situation was resolved. See the movie here, free with ads.
From all this my love boat was launched, and the most amazing thing about it was that I felt many others were feeling this awakening too. I said to myself, "There’s something in the air," and I even felt that I helped make it happen. Right about then The Beatles created the song Tomorrow Never Knows. John Lennon said about it, and this is an exact quote, "We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, and we were part of it, and we WENT somewhere." It had sounds never heard before that awakened us, and the lyrics said "love is all and love is everyone." From then on I tried to express it too in painting, writing, and teaching myself to play Bach on the organ here at this church. And promoting others’ visions too. And on the same album the Beatles sang "We all live in a Yellow Submarine." The same symbol as in the movie. And so we do.
My family decided to visit Mendocino and act out some scenes from the movie. I don’t know if they had the movie’s boat trips in mind, but we also went to Clear Lake and took a ride. I was feeling bravado, and told my brother Ted that I’d like to jump out for a swim. Instead I went out to the motel’s pier that night and untied a rowboat and went out by myself. I saw lovers on the next pier too. It was so calm and peaceful, and I felt so connected, but my Dad was very angry that I had done such a foolish and dangerous thing.
The movie, the town, the music and the trip stayed with me and floated my boat. My world view and whole direction of my life changed on a dime. I was acting out the music and the movie. And still-more Awakening movies and music came along, with more boats! Later a troubled guy named Forrest Gump connected with the songs and events of the sixties, as if they were part of his own life. A feather represented both fulfilling a destiny and happenings of chance at once, sort of like Peck’s idea, and a fishing boat launched his new career. The Who created a rock opera set in the Summer of 1965 about Jimmy, a troubled youth who got so angry at his alienation that he stole a motorboat and went out by himself in stormy seas to a rock, saying others would talk behind his back because he was now so boldly off the beaten track. As the Quadrophenia story goes,
on the boat he heard music from heaven, the music which made it my favorite album and the apex of rock music, and then on The Rock he asked
Love to reign over him and rain down on him. The Who expressed my vision for me.
Our culture has foisted upon us an image of competent masculinity as aggression, an ideal that no longer serves us. Our symbols are not boats, but rockets and bulldozers. Our drive has been to conquer, not to let love rain in upon us. As Alan Watts said, "sensitivity isn’t the pitch" to us. But sensitivity is MY pitch. Beauty is Love, and its feelings and its synchronicity of symbols connects and feeds us, and this can float your boat, in your own direction, as it does mine, and as it still does ours, from the sixties onward and forever.
What Floats My Boat, my essay for SanJose UU Band of Writers on which this Reflection talk is based. And more. Lots more to say and see, lots more music to hear! It might float your boat.
PBS documentary Soundbreaking: Painting with Sound
More on The Who’s masterpiece Quadrophenia