This morning while reading “Return to Paradise” by James Michener, his writing about an atoll in the pacific took me back to Bora Bora. While Bora Bora is not purely an atoll, more of an island with a barrier type reef, Michener paints a minds eye tapestry for me. This is a photograph I took from the plane. He was concerned that in revisiting the Pacific it would lose it’s first impression, he writes in the introduction, “There was one final problem. Would this long journey prove to be merely another of those heartbreaking trips of disillusion into a past that cannot be recovered? I was apprehensive about this, for I knew that virgin impressions of great events can rarely be recaptured; but when our plane rose above the bridges of San Francisco and I saw below me this vast and mighty ocean, my heart expanded.” And as I read…

The world contains certain patterns of beauty that impress the mind forever…The list need not be long, but to be inclusive it must contain a coral atoll with its placid lagoon, the terrifyingly brilliant sands and the outer reef shooting great spires of spindrift a hundred feet into the air…This is the wonder of an atoll, you are safe within the lagoon while outside the tempest rages. The atoll becomes a symbol of all men seeking refuge, the security of home, the warmth of love. Lost in a wilderness of ocean, the atoll is a haven that captivates the mind and rests the human spirit.”

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