I'm on fire

Plymouth library--my new studio

I'm back now, and it feels like during the last month I slipped into an alternate dimension.  I used to have that same experience upon leaving from or returning to boarding school--this bewildering sense that one day a person can exist at one point on the planet, and, mysteriously, through an uncanny process called travel, can arrive at a completely different point 24 hours later, as if the other place never existed at all.  Of course it goes without saying that everything can change in a day.  Yet there is a real feeling of solipsism:  can this world have really existed unchanged while I was gone?  Can that other world really be existing without me?

You close your eyes and poof:  everything is transformed around you.  And yet nothing changes.  Here I am, back at the Plymouth library, my writing desk when I can get to it in Massachusetts--different and yet the same from my studio in Vermont.  Louder.  When did libraries abandon their prohibition against noise?

I listen to ambient drone to drown out the chatter:  but I did that in Vermont anyway.  I look out at snow instead of a snowy river.  I feel like my time away fed me in surfeit, a nourishing abundant meal of time, respect, creative energy, positivity.  The sheer numinous power of fifty artists independently working by following their least inner voice cannot be overstated.  Here I feel that lack.  The distraction of having to fend for myself when it comes to food and caffeine, the distraction of driving--the sensory overload in even having to walk past stacks and stacks of books in the library--all of these burdens were relieved from me in Johnson.  As Richard Wilbur said:  these things "Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet/ I would not walk a road without a scene."

The things I came back to again and again in my conversations with fellow residents are the two things I come back to again and again on these pages--my current ongoing obsessions:  climate change and Carl Jung.  I am afraid about climate change.  That inner voice of my subconscious, the voice that Carl Jung first named for me--that voice is a conscience that cannot be silenced.  It points me to ever more revolutionary, incendiary words.  The world must change or be destroyed.

And the only way for it to change is for artists to hold the mirror up to our exhausted consciousness, the tired materialist mind of our culture, and to say:  look.  This is what we are.  We are tired and we are depressed and we are sick.   We are beings made of both flesh and spirit, mind and soul, consciousness and unconsciousness.  Integration--health--for us as individuals and as a culture comes from facing that which we are most afraid of--our darkest demons, the other, the chaos of the uncontrollable unconscious, the failure of our civilization, the stark fact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--and absorbing this truth into ourselves.  And then awakening.  Becoming active.  Changing.

Phun Phin, Thailand

Queen Hotel

Things that are different about Thailand, after fifteen years away:

1. More expensive, often three times as much.
2. More Burmese immigrants. Often I speak to people, like the cleaning lady this morning, only to have them not understand me. At first I attributed this lack of understanding to my awful Thai, but as my Thai has improved, I realized it's because often these service people don't speak Thai themselves, at least not well. I confirmed this morning, after learning the Thai word for Burmese. Luckily I've begun practicing my Burmese, too—at least hello!
3. More farangs. And more Thai antipathy towards farangs. This I understand, though. It feels almost like an invasion.
4. Different motorcycles. Fewer of the little real bikes that could carry an entire family of five, and more 125cc mini-scooters, bikes we don't even have in the States. K. is entranced by all of them, especially the minibikes hooked up with race exhausts and chrome fittings and extended swing arms and shocks.
5. More normal-sized people. Thailand used to be a land of extremely thin people, despite everyone eating five meals a day, in which my 5'10” curvy frame was exotic to the point of embarrassing. My height still is, but my size less so. I attribute this less to changed eating habits and more to increased income. Thailand is now exactly at the median income when compared to the world. It's a truly middle-class country. Hence the importation of laborers and the ability of Thais to vacation and eat well themselves. So I can come here and my income is stretched farther (as opposed to living in the wealthiest country in the world), but I'm still not at the level of the wealthy Thais with designer clothes and Mercedes who stay at the resorts beyond the reach of most backpacking travelers. With their increased size (which I don't attributed to bad health—see this research) has come an obsession with thinness—an insane amount of advertising space devoted to food and exercise products to help people lose weight (see this ad). It's rather sad.
6. Smiles. K. said it to me early on: it certainly doesn't seem to be the Land of Smiles, which is what Thailand used to call itself. I protested angrily, but then I noticed he was right. People don't laugh and smile and hide their faces the way they used to. Although now I practice meeting people's eyes and smiling first, and they smile back. Much more frequently than the farangs, who refuse to make eye contact at all. It is hysterical to me: as if they refuse to acknowledge the presence of other westerners in their own personal Thai paradise.
7. Waiing. The traditional Thai gesture of greeting where hands are brought together as if in prayer. I have this feeling that people used to do it a lot more. But now when they do it, it seems to carry more meaning. People do it formally, bringing their hands together carefully and with deliberation, and do it in a context when they want to express true respect. I've taken to using the wai to honor those Thais that don't overcharge me.

Things that are the same:

1. Dogs. I had forgotten about the packs of mangy stray dogs roaming the streets at night. The dog fights you overhear, the way the dogs live and die naturally in a way that's disturbing to American sensibilities. We used to call them udder-belly dogs because of their distorted teats and that is exactly the same.
2. Quantity of motorbikes. The bikes may be different, but there still the primary method of transportation.
3. Plants and love for plants. Something I had completely forgotten. Every place we've stayed, no matter how decrepit, has had an extended and well-maintained garden of potted plants. It's amazing how familiar this feels now, and how completely I'd forgotten about it.
4. Outdoor life. Thais spend almost all of their time outside. Houses have their entire fronts open to the street. Restaurants don't discriminate between tables set up inside and those on the sidewalk. Thai old men sit out on the sidewalks in front of their business and shoot the breeze. This habit is one I had not forgotten about—in fact it's one I have longed for and will continue to long for while in the States.
5. Sanuk—the Thai word for enjoyment, fun, pleasure, happiness. It's more than that, though. It's an entire attitude towards life, that it exists to bring us joy. Eating food is something Thais do for fun, as is almost everything else they do. Maybe farangs are held apart from this joy a little bit more than they used to be, but it's just as present. It's what all of us are here for, hoping it rubs off a little bit.
6. Food, and food prices. The food, thank God, is exactly the same, and just as delicious as ever. Everything I've ordered, that I've longed for these many years, has tasted perfectly as it should. And food prices, for noodles and rice from sidewalk restaurants or street vendors, are exactly the same, if not lower compared to everything else.
7. Individualized businesses. Walmart has yet to invade Thailand. Everyone still has a business that is specifically designed for one thing, whatever that one thing may be: welding, pharmaceuticals, bicycle parts, plants, crazy clay pots, fish, priestly garments, flowers for spirit houses, etc. I'm still nervous about big box stores finding a foothold here, but K. thinks Thais couldn't accept it culturally, and I hope he's right. You go to the shoe store for shoes, the fish lady for fish, the curry vendor for curry. It also seems like a much healthier economic model: you figure out what you can sell and then you sell it and you and everyone in your family has a job and an income. We've relinquished this independence to Walmart.
8. Landscape. My sister said, when she got back from Thailand last year: “Thailand's been here, waiting for us.” I held onto that promise as I prepared for this trip, and I believed her, but still doubted. The beautiful attention to tiny detail covered in grime and surrounded by a sea of plastic trash. Casuarinas and banana trees and mangoes covered in fruit. Temples in the distance. The streets look the same. Thailand has been here, waiting. It's changed, but not so much as to be unrecognizable. In fact, more's the same than is different.

Maybe not what you wanted today, a list. But I've been wanting to encapsulate my experience in this way. Tomorrow, at one AM, we head to Butterworth, Malaysia, by train to extend our visas. We can apply for sixty days from Georgetown, in Penang, so we're going to try. Then we can relax for K's last two months here, go to Eesan or find a good bungalow and settle in, instead of worrying about visas all the time. I'm nervous, though, too—finally I'm going to experience a culture and food and language that are as alien to me as they are to him.

We booked a second night at the Queen Hotel, in Phun Phin, on the outskirts of Surat Thani, even though we won't get to sleep here. This is the sleaziest joint that we've stayed at yet. Bloodstains on the wall, boogers on the mirror, smeared dust from the headboard on the sheets. And meticulous flowers outside. I don't understand. I'm sure, too, that the floors and sheets are bleached after every visitor, that certain parts of the room are habitually cleaned (because they're clean) but it never occurs to anyone to, say, clean the mirror, or scrub the blackened pipes in the bathroom.

The rose in front of our hotel (from behind the motorcycles in the previous photograph)

We take almost masochistic pride in the level of flea trap we're able to stay in (although we always check for actual fleas). The sleazier a place is, the more likely we are to book a second night. Maybe we should take more pride in finding a good place at a low price! But I think we also like the towns where the grotty hotels are located. Yesterday we walked up a hill and down a soi. We saw real people, hanging out together in front of their houses, chickens, dogs. One woman asked where we were going.

“Duan du,” I said—walking and looking.

“Ah!” she said. “Duan len.” Walking and playing.

Then we found a wat and walked in on priests wrapped in their orange evening garments, chests bare. Another woman said we couldn't go down another soi—I wasn't sure if it was because it didn't go anywhere or something more ominous. I had this feeling that even though we were a block from where the backpackers make their run from the bus to the train, farangs rarely made it up here. We walked back down the hill and didn't go back today. It's really not hard at all to get off the tourist track. It's just not where most tourists want to be. Including us, in many ways. I'd rather be at a beach. But if I had to sacrifice a beach to be in real Thailand, where I can learn new words from the girl at the Seven (Eleven), where we can try new street food every day (today: barbecued whole squid stuffed with its own eggs), and still get a room for $7.50—I guess I'd give up the beach.

The view towards the train station of Phun Phin, with the ubiquitous Seven

From Aroostook County, Maine, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and back again

I have awaited long the day when I could announce with a drumroll that I am again Casting Off, not merely metaphorically, but actually. I thought I'd be able to say that last month, when K. signed on the dotted line for our new boat, a 36' Mao Ta cutter, Spirit, Secret's successor. She's a blue-water cruiser, a double-ender, an ocean crosser. We are, or will be soon, at last Casting Off. Here she is:

Three feet longer than Secret, but wider, beamier, bigger in every dimension. Already I am in love. So this post was intended as triumphant, as with Caesar's armies returning from Sparta, or wherever—but instead I have chaos and disaster and loss to report—although also their underbelly, their paired twin: hope and light and freedom. Here's how it went.

It's our second day on the boat, August 1, and there's a grand festival going on in swanky Newburyport, our current hailing port. The Yankee Homecoming, of all things, featuring live music all week, dinghies piled up on dock, fireworks, fried dough and clam chowder in the streets. The whole nine yards. We come to town to buy a guidebook and charts and an Eldridge for tides plus to stock up on groceries and water. We drop $350 among West Marine and Home Depot and Market Basket. I send out my money-earning email at the library. Then we wait at a bench beside the dinghy dock as the RIBs motor drunkenly away, and the band cleans up, and the teenagers engage in elaborate mating rituals.

We await the turning tide so we can cruise gleefully back to the boat with nary an oar stroke. Two days before we'd been unable to row against the outgoing current on the Merrimac River. This time there's almost a full moon, and we use the oars more to steer than to row. We get back to Spirit briskly and tie up. K. hefts a few bags on deck but leaves more bags below to steady the dinghy while I clamber aboard.

Then the fatal flaw of hubris. We don't drop the teak ladder. I don't ask for it, and it isn't offered. Both of us think I can make it over the freeboard (far higher from the water than was Secret's) without assistance. After all, I did it more or less effortlessly two days before.

I don't. You can see what's coming, but I couldn't. It's just like when people talk about car accidents. All I remember are brief snapshots, everything happening at once. I remember having one foot on deck and the other back in the dinghy, and feeling spreadeagled, like I wasn't going to make it. I remember looking back at the dinghy and seeing water coming over the side. I remember floating away, with the blue-colored paper bag from West Marine floating away in front of me, and thinking: that's $100!

K. yelled after me to grab the next mooring ball. (Moorings, for the uninitiated, are like anchors permanently affixed to the bottom of the harbor, to protect the ecosystem and to aid the mariner.) I tried, but was unable to. It was then I realized what a fix I was in. The current was sweeping by at a rate of at least six knots. I realized I had to swim, and swim hard. The next mooring was the last before the open Atlantic. The water was cold. The tide had already swept off one of my shoes, and was threatening to carry away my flannel.

I swam hard. I caught the mooring ball. And then I realized I was in a deeper fix. Could he see me? Would he know I was safe and not swept out to sea? How long would it take for someone to find me? How long could I hold on? How long before hypothermia set in?

I didn't know then what I know now: that the dinghy had completely overturned. That everything in it was lost. That my partner in crime managed to hold on, barely, and pull himself on deck to immediately radio the Coast Guard. When I thought of my backpack, containing my computer and my camera and my purse—everything of value I'd brought with me onto the boat—I assumed K. would have rescued it first thing. I just worried about my computer getting wet.

I used my yoga breath. I took turns with my arms, holding on with one side, then the other. Even then, I realized how quickly I'd become tired. I thought about letting myself drift back, thinking that maybe I could hoist myself onto the stranger's boat and find a way to get warm and to radio my location. But then I stopped that line of thought: if I let go, there was almost no way I'd be able to grab onto anything again. My body was carried back in a straight line by the current, parallel to the boat's waterline.

Then I saw the Coast Guard light up its boat. I started to yell for help, worried that they'd go out to sea rather than see me at the mooring two boats down. They heard me, and minutes later I was wrapped in a blanket and safe. I can testify that the major emotion one feels on being rescued by the Coast Guard is embarrassment. I couldn't believe that I'd made such a fool of myself. If only I'd been skinnier, stronger, more limber, I could have made it over the freeboard. If only I'd been humble enough to ask for the ladder. If only I could be a responsible human being, for once in my life.

As I expressed my humiliation, my apology, they were resolutely affirmative: “It happens all the time. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's our job.”

Thank God for the US Coast Guard and George Washington who established them, lo those many years ago, at this very port, Newburyport on the Merrimac River, for exactly this reason—wicked tidal currents and related carnage.

After I was warm and safe and drinking hot tea, I began to worry about my computer. Had K. put it on deck? Of course he had. It would have been his first priority. It had to be safe.

But of course it wasn't. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde by way of Dave Eggers: to lose two computers is a tragedy. To lose three seems careless.

These are the things I've had to think about over the last three weeks, as I've begun to process not just the loss of $2500 worth of gear, but also a five-year-old Moleskin, almost full of story ideas, my dream journal, my everyday journal, my legal pad with assorted yoga notes and boat lists. I am attempting faux Buddhism about it: they are just things, after all. It's just money. The important ideas I'll remember.

And in another universe, if the abstract mathematicians are to be believed, I am dead. In another universe, the computer is salvaged and we are just pissed at each other. In yet another, we're still looking for the perfect boat. In another, we have never met.

In the last universe: I didn't lose my data when I bought a computer two years ago. I didn't institute a rigorous weekly backup process. I didn't recover everything despite myself, as a result of my own insane persistence. I'm not typing right now into a file recovered from my Aroostook backup, on a program recovered from the backup, listening to music recovered from the backup, using settings recovered from the backup.

All this to say: nothing was lost except some money, ephemeral ideas, and my pride. God has his reasons when we don't understand his reasons. If you'd told me that when I was beating my breast over my computer data loss two years ago, I'd probably have hit you. But you would have been right.

So maybe now, in my 35^th year, halfway to 70, I'm starting to learn some things. I'm learning that the life I've chosen is one of risk. I haven't lost three computers because I'm careless, but because I've chosen to risk valuable things in order to achieve a higher goal. To some sheer adventure as a cause celebre is insufficient—especially maybe to our families, our parents. But we've chosen this life because it's the one we want, even if it means losing things. Losing money. Losing health, whether by hypothermia or by shoulder bursitis from too much backpack-carrying. Losing dreams, and ideas, and the stories that may have been borne from them.

That's our tax on the life we've chosen. The life we continue to choose. So all hail Spirit, our new vehicle of destruction and rebirth. We live in Spirit while Spirit lives in us.

Come on girl

Inspiration for today:

Kelly McGonigal on the Neuroscience of Change

Some of this blows my mind.  Like the idea that compassion for yourself actually changes your brain chemistry, whereas self-criticism provokes addictive behaviors.

Some quotes:

...There was a recent set of studies that tracked people over time who had set specific goals. Some were trying to lose weight, some were trying to become better musicians, some were trying to finish an academic degree. So they followed these people over time, and they also tracked how self-critical they were. And there was a direct relationship between self-criticism and success over time. The people who were harder on themselves succeeded less—and not just by self-report. It’s not like they were saying, “Oh, I’m so hard on myself. I don’t feel like I did a good job.” It was objective outcomes, like pounds lost.

...There is abundant evidence from every type of challenge you can think about in the addiction literature with dealing with anxiety and depression that the harder you are on yourself for having the problem in the first place and for being unable to fix it immediately, the more likely you are to spiral back deeper into the problem. To turn back to a drink to kind of soothe your feelings for how guilty and ashamed you are about having to drink or to food when you’re feeling ashamed about overeating or being overweight.

...There are a lot of people who are swayed by evidence, sometimes just showing a picture of the brain—say, “This is what it looks like when you’re being self-critical and why it’s not helpful”—it’s not like we didn’t know it wasn’t helpful, but just to see it somehow can help us recognize that there isn’t something fundamentally broken with us, that all human beings have these experiences. I feel like that’s what the science adds for most people.

Maybe these are things that everyone else knows--Olympic athletes, for instance, who must have a firm belief in their own powers to accomplish what they do.  But not us depressives, who hulk in the Maine wilderness and chastise themselves for eating insufficient quantities of homegrown lettuce.  Maybe it's just the protestant work ethic that gets us all down, an inefficient ethic, as it turns out.  It's turned us into a nation of over-medicated over-fed addicts, always full of hatred for ourselves for our multiple failings.

I just keep thinking that this Buddhist, or perhaps scientific, understanding of self-compassion is what Jesus was talking about when he talked about grace.  It's grace He gives us.  Grace to forgive ourselves for our mistakes, grace that washes us as white as snow.  If only I could believe it.

Tears are in your eyes

I'm working right now in connection with AMG International, the organization my parents were missionaries with when I was a child, on a project driven partly from my desire to better the world, a desire born of my time spent in Bangkok and Manila. I remember driving past “Smokey Mountain,” the towering pile of garbage that housed thousands of families, on my way to the airport in Manila. That was when I was on my way home to Bangkok, home for Christmas or fall break, to spend two or three weeks with my family before coming back to boarding school. My earliest awareness was of being surrounded by constant poverty, fully aware of the presence of suffering in human life.

Clean water is clearly one of world's foremost development problems, and Vestergaard-Frandsen, the organization AMG is partnered with, operates under the principle of profit with a purpose. It's an interesting financial model, one I've worked on before, at Opportunity International, which when I was there was working on a project to open the first for-profit bank aimed at the poor, the Opportunity Microfinance Bank. These are beautiful financial models for those in favor of pure capitalism, that a profit motive doesn't have to be soulless.

It reminds me of this quote I heard (and quoted—it bears repeating) last month from Ana Martino, a New Zealand activist: “We have to reassess the fundamental structure of the modern market, rather than trying to fit all unpaid and informal labor into the existing market parameters. Now the process of reassessing those structures should seek to move the conversation away from classical economic examinations of selfishness, scarcity, competition, and efficiency, and towards examinations of necessity, surplus, consumption, and community.”

I heard a similar idea from Gar Alperovitz, a political economist who wants a new economic paradigm. “There is an emerging 'new economy,'” he says, “which empowers communities and workers, not corporations.” Keep in mind that these communities and workers will still be making money, be for-profit enterprises, but they'll be making that money for themselves. In such models, management would make about five times the average worker's salary, instead of 343 times as much, as at the nation's largest companies, according to CNNMoney.

He speaks of new for-profit community models, where workers take over a specific industry, say, towel-washing for a large hospital, and themselves share the profits for an environmentally sound and locally sourced business model. I can see such things blooming, see rows of attached greenhouses connected to schools, see carpenter's shops and musician's guilds, see the whole medieval village of my dreams, but functional, with each part fitting into the next.

And Lifestraw could be part of that, if only in the largest possible sense, which is of bringing basic services to those whose biggest health concern is diarrhea. My favorite product is LifeStraw Family, which offers water cooler style water for easy access. And if we can fund clean water, using the best practices of capitalism, then why wouldn't we?

The good times are killing me

Where are the coyotes?

"Animals are changing, and I cannot tell you why."—Inusiq Nasalik, 88-year-old inuit elder, September 6, 2004

And then this article: The Violence of the Lambs.

Never mind that I was linked to it from an article talking about how facts are stupid—even just a cursory search reveals that he's not lying about the facts: dolphins are coming after us.

Here's the essential quote:

“A question that lately has been getting knocked around a lot in the better biology departments is this: As we intrude on, clear-cut, burn, pollute, occupy, cause to become too hot or too dry, or otherwise render unsuitable to wildlife a larger and larger percentage of the planet, what will be involved in terms of the inevitable increased human exposure to remnant populations of truly wild fauna? Not for us but for them. What sort of changes, adaptations, and responses might we look for in the animals themselves as the pressures of this global-biological endgame begin to make themselves felt at the level of the individual organism? We have in mind here not microevolutionary changes to existing species but stress-related behavior modification, so-called "phenotypic plasticity," the sort of thing we know numerous animal groups to be capable of, though it is rarely witnessed.”

And here's a quote from the Tampa Bay Times, after a stingray stabbed a second human through the heart:

“'It was a freak accident,' said Lighthouse Point acting fire Chief David Donzella. 'We still can't believe it.'
Serious stingray attacks like this one and the one that killed "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin last month are rare, marine experts say.”

Really. You don't say. And they're not the only animals acting weird. Dolphins are downing swimmers in Cancun, and sea lions are attacking Shakira. My favorite story from the article is the monkeys versus humans battle that was staged outside of four water tankers in central Africa. They're after us. They, and the whales have finally figured out that not only are we killing them, but we're killing everything else, too, and something must be done. Animals are shifting as we shift.

Another reference, my documentary of the day: The Cove.

No wonder they're after us. Everything is echoing itself—dolphins popping up in documentaries, dolphins and whales, both of the order cetacea, both marine mammals. Dolphins are just mini-whales, and all I've been reading about are the whales. Whales, whose tails Melville describes thus:

“The more I consider this mighty tail, the more I do deplore my inability to express it. At times, there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never will.”

So we're slaughtering them, the animals that possess a mystic language. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Can't we all just feel it? At a fundamental level? There's something wrong. We've lost our connection to the earth, to the sea, to each other. We can't stop puffing toxins into the air, and everything else breathing them in. There are too many of us. Unless we stop, and soon, there will be hell to pay, from someone, whether it's more wars for oil or, more karmically elegant, a planet of the apes.

Bridgewater, Maine

Echinacea and tire

Gifting is an odd phenomenon. I try to keep a list of gift ideas, things that occur to me over the year, so that when a birthday or Christmas pops up, I have the perfect thing to buy someone in my life. Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night (as I did the other day for my sister) with the perfect idea for Christmas, and by the morning it’ll dissolve into the ether along with my dreams. Other times I spend years knitting gifts, losing and finding errant projects, inventing new patterns after I’ve lost the old, until I’m finally left with something misshapen and out of style.

Not only is exchanging gifts a universal cultural phenomenon, but it’s also one of the languages of love, one of the ways that people communicate love to each other. I’ve been given some extraordinary gifts in my life—things that met me at exactly the right moment in time, when I desperately needed them. Yet the practice confounds me. I rebel against alleged materialism, or I’m merely ashamed at what my starving artist’s budget can afford. I hate to break it to you, if you’re one of the people expecting a gift from me this holiday season, but you may end up with canned turnip greens beneath the tree.

In case you’re worried, I’m not really obsessing about the holidays already. I’m more thinking about the various ways we love each other. I do my best when it comes to gifts, tracking the things that I think will bring people in my life joy. Long phone calls sometimes, or shared afternoons, or loaves of bread. I love cooking for people, and I’m beginning to arrive at a place here where I can invite guests into my kitchen to share food and wine.

One thing I’m concluding, in my ongoing quest to save the world, is that I can’t do it alone. The only way anything changes is through building community, and communities are built on love, and kindness, and ritual. In the idealistic utopian village of my dreams, the village that it takes, we have massive celebrations. We eat and drink and make art and play music together. We tell each other stories and dance around bonfires and pray for rain or sun. We cook and eat and give and receive gifts. We argue and fight and come to consensus. We celebrate the first harvest, and the full moon, and the summer solstice, and the New Year.

There are much more practical ways to save the world, but unless we can find a way to come together, to build actual community, in the sense of the commune, or communion, or communication, or even commerce, we’re never going to be able to find creative solutions to what ails us. I read a story about an anthropologist who traveled from island to island in the Pacific, where the chief of each tribe would give as an unmerited gift a bracelet made of shells to the chief of the next tribe. On and on it went, each chief giving and receiving bracelets that were treasured, but worthless, with no monetary value, even in the currency of the archipelago. It was a practice for which the anthropologist had no reference point.

I don’t get it either. As Mr. Spock would say, it isn’t logical. But I keep my list.

Lights are shut down

My parents in the 70s. Part of an ongoing series of familial photographs.

My cat may be dying. He’s not exactly my cat, but a cat that I’ve lived with, off and on, here in Maine, for almost eight years, so he feels like mine. I’m one of several humans whose lips he deigns to claw while I sleep. Not anymore, though. Now he curls up in various corners, beneath end tables, on door steps, in front of bathtubs, and doesn’t eat. I bought him the fanciest cat food I could find, and he exploded all over the house. He nibbled at steak chopped in little pieces, but eventually turned his nose up. This morning, he threw up raw tilapia.

He’s an old cat, an old tom, and he’s had a fair share of adventures, and is almost into his third decade. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to watch his bones jut out at every step, to feel his scapulae distinct beneath his dense white fur. He weighs barely three pounds now.

It’s a peril we take, loving things, people, animals. Danger lurks all around. I remember the muriatic acid we kept on the boat, for what purpose now escapes me, but I felt morbid terror when I cushioned that gallon of toxic chemical against our hull. What if it leaked? What if it corroded a hole in the hull while I slept?

But every moment we live, we cradle muriatic acid against the hull of our hearts. Every being we love can hurt us, can sink us. Buddha spoke of desire causing suffering, a philosophy that I’ve struggled with for years. It’s patently true—every thing I want can cause me pain. But to absent myself from that risk, the risk of pain, feels inhuman. In loving, in desiring good for other beings, I risk suffering.

I want Schafe, the cat, to live forever. It’s a desire that will not be fulfilled.

Why pretend

Art by Cora. A self-portrait, maybe?

My thoughts lately have been consumed by old photographs and the existences they account for. Spending so much time in Michigan with my grandparents’ photographs has made me contemplate the importance of the historical record. Someone could discover my old journals 100 years from now, and they could be important to them, or more than important. A record of how life was now.

My logbook from Secret is the same way. Even now I look at my nautical log and I’m able to inhabit the space I was in then, understand the weather, the challenges, the sail. I think of this site as a literal web log, a logbook in the truest sense, a record of my thoughts, my movement. I’m tracing my path and recording it in words, words that I hope will be important to someone, even if it’s only my own seventy-year-old self.

I love nostalgia. It’s a feeling no one can quite put in words, an ache that can possess me, overcome me, turn me into another person. It comes on suddenly, when I see backlit photographs, or remember a perfect, incandescent moment from my childhood, or just think of a moment from my past that will never come again. So much of the grief I felt during my grandparents’ funerals was actually nostalgia, a grief for a past forever lost.

I have so much difficulty with the passage of time, accepting that each moment is only here once and then gone forever. Maybe the reason I need to put words on paper, or onto an electronic server, is because it makes me feel like I’m freezing time, that I’m calcifying it at a single moment, like one of those Matrix shots where the camera swoops around the characters as they hover in stillness. Because otherwise we just blink and it’s gone.

California-style, I found myself singin'

Little house at the edge of the woods

I wanted to post these Lessons from 10 Days of Self-Help. When I was in Chicago with my sister, we gave each other a yoga retreat, right in the apartment, while the girls were napping. We’d talk about life, where we were, and we came to the conclusions below.

I finally feel like I’m anchored here, like I can remember what happiness feels like. I don’t think you ever really know when you’re happy, but you know afterward. Every day I wake up, and think: was I happy yesterday? And I answer: yes.

It’s mainly because I’ve been following the path my sister and I talked about.

1. If you can't do it from a place of love, don't do it.
2. There are only ever really two options: do the dishes or don't them. (See below.)
3. Let it go.
4. No regrets.
5. Tell people how you really feel. Don't try to small talk if you can't.
6. If you don't have anything to say, just ask how others are doing and really listen.
7. Nobody is bad at yoga. Just like nobody is bad at anything else in life. Someone just may not have practiced a pose enough yet.
8. Practice makes perfect, or however that famous Buddhist guy says it. [“Practice, and all is coming.” Sri Pattabhi Jois]
9. Get rid of useless stuff that just drags you down in life. Each thing you own is one more thing to worry about.
10. Take care of yourself. Treat yourself kindly. Do not harm yourself.
11. Don't be scared to try the next difficult step, in yoga, and in life. You can't fail.
12. Quiet your thoughts. Let them drift by.
13. Don't try to do a million things at once and fit as many activities and achievements into a period of time (be it five minutes or a lifetime) as possible. Meditating, even amid the chaos, is just as important as getting stuff done. Often it is more important, because it allows you to know what must be done.
14. Peel off the band-aid. Admit you have a mouse problem. Or a rat problem. Or a lice problem. Or an alcohol problem.
15. Procrastination is fear.
16. Don't agonize about loading the dishwasher, doing the laundry, sweeping the floor. Do it or don't do it. Then you can do yoga.

Here’s the “do the dishes or don’t do the dishes” story, courtesy of festivus.net. (Click for the original post.)

I read another story that I’ve been trying to keep in mind when I get crazy angry about all the unfair things. The story was about a woman whose husband no longer drank, but was still what they call a “dry drunk” — still exhibiting all the symptoms of alcoholism, just no longer drunk while doing it. And she began to exhibit the symptoms of a dry drunk’s wife, still trying to control him, make him behave the way she wanted, believing it was his behavior that caused their unhappiness, and if she could change it, everything would be better.

She decided that things would be better if he took more responsibility for household chores, so informed him that he would now be doing the dishes from now on (this is called: setting yourself up for disappointment). The first night he was supposed to do the dishes, he just got up and left the house after dinner. She called an Al-Anon friend in a rage, explained the situation. “And so now if I do the dishes, he’ll think he doesn’t have to!” she said. “So don’t do the dishes,” her friend said. “But then the dishes won’t be done!” “So do the dishes,” her friend said. “But then he won’t!” “So don’t do the dishes.” “But they have to get done!” “So do them!”

Eventually she realized that these were truly her only two options. Should they be the only two options? Were they fair options? Those questions don’t really matter, because they don’t change the fact that those are the only two options. The third option, “Fix my husband,” doesn’t actually exist, but putting all your energy into it provides a great distraction from reality, and a great scapegoat for your problems. “If only he would do the dishes,” instead of, “If only I would stop trying to force him to change in order to fix my unhappiness.”

I think about that story a lot, whenever I get into a rage. I try to simplify my options. My co-worker, for example. Goddamn, I hate her. I hate that she asks me questions. I hate that she does her job wrong. I hate that I have to clean up after her… hey, wait a second. I don’t have to clean up after her. But if I don’t, then the work won’t get done! Then clean up after her. But if I do clean up after her, then she just keeps getting away with it. Then don’t clean up after her.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

When I arrived in Ann Arbor yesterday, I thought that the rejection letter I had received from the University of Michigan graduate school was already behind me. After all, I knew from the definitive MFA blog that people who were accepted received their letters on February 22. I knew that only 22 out of 1000 applicants were accepted last year, and only half of those in fiction. Generally, 70 percent of applications are for fiction rather than poetry. Those are long odds—11 out of 700. “Don't take it personally,” my professor from Tennessee said. It seemed good advice. I thought I had made my peace.

Tonight, though, as my friend Sonia and I wandered the streets and coffee shops of downtown Ann Arbor, it began to irk me. We sipped lattes and Thai iced tea, and I eyed the bespectacled and bescarfed students that surrounded me. Which of them were already MFA students? Which were professors? Had any seen my work? Had they roughed up my precious manuscript? Read three lines and scoffed?

Sonia and I also went to our first Bikram yoga class today, the original hot yoga. First impression: a carpeted room, heated to 105 degrees, filled with close-packed bodies sweating for 90-minute classes, six times a day, is extremely stinky. The first goal of a Bikram practice is just to acclimatize, to condition oneself to actually spend 90 minutes without leaving the room. It’s one of those limitations that can end up bringing freedom—I had to let go and just experience the heat, experience the feeling of being present in those conditions. Let it go, I kept telling myself. Let it go. Let your expectations for your body (and olfactory organs) go.

Which is what I need to do for graduate school, too. Let it go. I’ve put off applying for so long because I was afraid of this exact scenario. If they said no, what would that mean to me? Would it mean I’m not good enough? Would it mean I should give up? Of course now I know it doesn’t. It just means that it’s not the path for me now, at this time. It means I’m not ready yet, or that there’s a different opportunity around the corner. I need to let this program at this time go, to throw it like a stone into the river and let the water to flow by. “We step and do not step into the same river,” Heraclitus said. “We are and are not."

Everything flows, he also said. Nothing remains still. Let it go. Practice, as Patthabi Jois said, and all is coming.

Don’t you want to feel your skin on my skin?

I feel alone right now, and broken. I walked away from my Chattanooga life a week ago and already I feel like I have made a bad choice. I walked away from my life there, and for what? For faith and a vague promise of redemption?

God said: all things work together for good for them that love Him and are called according to his purpose. He said: worship in Spirit and in truth. But I feel lost. I’m letting go of things, and it’s almost as if I’m letting go of too many things and now I’m left alone, driftless. I have cast off, and now I am being cast off myself.

How can I go through life alone? I see my sister’s life, her challenges and the things she has given up, the compromises she has been forced to make, but at least she has a life partner that she can count on, children who receive her love willingly. What do I have? Only the language and not the kiss.

“The fear I've known, that I might reap the praise of strangers, and end up on my own.”

It’s this constant fear that somehow there’s something wrong with me, that I came out wrong. I have to be in some way twisted, if I’m forced to drive away everyone who ever loved me, to pursue some high-minded ideal that isn’t real the way people are real. I feel abandoned, even though I’m the one changing, shifting my life, my boundaries, my space. Conflict about my life choices, from people in my life whom I love, makes me question Christ’s plan for my life. How can I believe that God loves me if the people He brings into my life don’t treat me with love?

I guess it’s a matter of letting go of the people who don’t treat me with love and drawing close to my heart those who do. God brings people into my life who care about me, but sometimes it’s difficult to pay attention to those people, to let go of those whose approval I desperately crave, whose approval I will never get. I have to have faith in Christ, that He is bringing change into my life for a reason, even if I have to journey alone. I also have to have faith that the things that happened in the past happened for a reason.

Clearly, I had an intense experience of surrender at my sister’s church this morning. I’m trying desperately to hold my life with an open hand, to hold it open to God’s will, but I keep wanting to close my fists.

It just hurts so bad. Change is brutal. Painful. Like I’m shedding another layer of skin.

Like a rolling stone

A not-so-sheltered childhood

My iTunes on shuffle played me that song today. I was a latecomer to American popular music, and each wave of the musical revolution swept me away as I encountered it throughout my adolescence. Elvis, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan—each hit me with that same shock of discovery that the country felt during the twentieth century. One of the joys of a sheltered childhood overseas.

No less so than with “Like a Rolling Stone.” I didn’t grow up hearing it, so when I encountered it for the first time, on a best-of CD, it struck with the same intensity as it must have in the sixties. The organ, the hate-filled raspy voice, “how does it feee-eee-eeel…” Each element seemed profoundly true, profoundly sacred. It’s no wonder that Rolling Stone magazine (natch) named it greatest song of all time.

I knew exactly what he was singing about. I knew exactly how it felt to be without a home, like a rolling stone. I knew that Dylan did, too. I knew what he was singing about.

Over the years, as I listened to the lyrics more closely, I found them more and more disturbing. He’s not singing about himself. He’s singing about some rich chick who’s lost everything by being phony. He’s gloating at someone else’s downfall, about human ugliness and nothing else. The song becomes a diatribe against a person who created a fake, idealized version of reality, a person who loses everything.

The song stopped seeming universal to me and started feeling artificial. I stopped understanding why it was so celebrated, such a big deal. It seemed a cynical song about unhappiness, with nothing redemptive inside of it. Nothing holy.

But I couldn't get away from that feeling. When Dylan croons, “how does it feel?” I knew that he knew how it felt. I knew he was singing about himself, and about me, no matter what the lyrics said. He knew how it felt to stare into the the mystery tramp’s eyes, to be forced to compromise against his own will. I did, too. We all do. We all know how it feels to stare into the heart of darkness.

Biographers and documentarians (including Martin Scorsese) consistently named their books and films “No Direction Home” tacitly stating that Dylan was talking about himself. As did Dylan. After his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."

So many of Dylan’s song perform this same balancing act—an attempt to point the finger out that ends up circling back around to himself. His songs seem to have an inner self-referential circle, a rotation around a repeated truth. My favorite example is “Shelter from the Storm.” The narrator loses the archetypal woman filled with grace who provides him shelter, but despite that loss, he returns to the hope of renewal, again and again, in the chorus. He’s lost her, at the same moment that she continues to accept him unconditionally.

It’s a paradox, an assertion and yet a belief in its contradiction, anekantavada.

So many of Dylan’s songs end up being contemporary zen koans, in the truest sense. “How many roads must a man walk down?” is a question that has no answer. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?” Questions that can’t be answered by rational thinking but only by intuition.

I also circle back around. The song ends up again being about me and about him. What Dylan sings about is loss. The anger and fear and darkness and loneliness we get from losing something, from losing everything, from becoming detached from community and from culture, from becoming wanderers. I am the rolling stone. I am the one without a home.

And how does it feel? Not always so good.

Whatever you wish to keep

Originally uploaded by jc_strick

Yoga in Chattanooga

Boat kids are a lot like missionary kids. All of us are crazy gypsies for the rest of our lives. Some academics even came up with a name for us: third-culture kids. Because the culture we create is in between the two that we grew up conscious of. That’s one of the things we grow up with a continual awareness of: culture.

Most children, especially those growing up in the United States, aren’t even aware that such a thing exists. As far as they’re concerned there’s only one. Theirs. They are fish growing up not aware of the ocean. How can they be, when they’ve never seen anything else? But we missionary kids are aware, from the moment we cross that invisible boundary between the worlds, that culture is all there is.

Maybe that’s what keeps us endlessly questing among cultures. I look at people who manage to be stationary, attached to one place, with envy. Such an odd thing, to know stories about the grandparents of the people you run into at the grocery store. Such an odd thing, to meet someone and realize you went to kindergarten with her. So strange, to never be a stranger.

I see cultures, and I want to taste them. I want to experience them, and then move on to another one. The Germans have the best word for this feeling, as usual. Wanderlust. I can’t stay in one place, because I lust after new places, after new experiences, after new journeys. Wanderlust haunts me like a spectre.

So I’m planning another trip. I had intended to do a long hike this year, and I’m realizing that the year is drawing to an end. I’ve taken time off of both my jobs, and I’m heading south, to the Alabama Pinhoti Trail. This blog was designed as a travel blog, after all. Something I’ve fallen away from in the last two years of staying still. But traveling is when my heart beats fastest.

Shine on you crazy diamond

California horse trough

My choices have come back to haunt me. What was it that Jean-Paul Sartre said about the hardest part of life not being that we have too few choices, but that we have too many? It’s crazy. At my job, one of the things I do is make people new id cards. I always ask them one simple question—if they want a lanyard or not.

Nine times out of ten, people can’t even make that simple choice, and I never let them off the hook. I make them choose. It just seems so clear to me, as they hem and haw, that most of the time people don’t have any idea what they want. They don’t know how to make a decision even when they’re forced to.

The existentialists believe that our choices are literally infinite. That we can do anything we want to, anything in the universe, at any moment. What makes our lives so brutish is that we’re consistently the ones who limit ourselves. We constrain our lives with structure and routine so that we’re not forced to see that we could re-carpet our entire house on a whim, or drive down to a bar tonight and drink liquor until we fall over, or change our locks and kick our roommate to the curb.

We can do anything we want, whenever we want. It’s just too hard to deal with.

So my choices. This summer has been about doing the things that I want, but these decisions have consequences. For instance: my body now festering with poison oak blisters. I chose to hike, I chose to wander around parts of the National Seashore that were overgrown and wild, and now I’m dealing with the results of that choice.

For instance: my choice to live in Chattanooga instead of Marion. It’s hard now that I’m back up here, and I realize all of the time that has passed, the children that have grown up without me in their lives, the relationships that have been left drifting, like threads in the wind.

The thing is that our choices are all we have. At the end of my life, all I’ll have is the choices that I made. I have a really hard time believing in change, that change is possible for me, for anyone in my life, for anyone at all, really. But change is just small choices, adding up over time—small, daily choices to do something different. Something big, or something small.

“I can change, I swear,” Dylan said. His saddest line, in my opinion. How often do we believe our lovers can change? How often do we believe we can change?

Overblown ramblings of someone itching within an inch of her life. I don’t regret my choice to hike, or to wander. But it was a choice. And now I have to spend the rest of the month dealing with it.

Oh, they tell me of a home

Inchworm

I bought a new pair of shoes, Vasque Mindbenders, trail running shoes. Vasque evidently sponsors a 100-mile ultra-marathoner, so if they’re good enough for her, they’re good enough for me. Joke nalang--I don’t really buy things based on who sponsors them, but it does give me confidence. The real reason was that they were on sale at the outfitter in my size, and my AT hiking companion wore Vasque Velocities for 1000 miles. So I know they’ll stand up for the duration. It’s the first new pair of hiking shoes I’ve bought in six years. I even wore my second-half AT pair of New Balances for my full 900 miles of the PCT in 2005.

That’s exactly why I want to do a solo hike this year. I feel like I’m waking up all those old joints, all those old feelings of anxiety, adrenaline, excitement. I love hiking, and I also hate it. I went and reread my trail journals from June of 2005, and remembered how much of hiking is sheer pain. That’s okay, right? Maybe not at the time I’m hiking.

Anyway. I’m trying not to make my expectations too high. I know it’s a high-snow year in the Sierra, and I know (from a friend) that there’s still snow at 7000 feet. Evidently Donner Pass, where I begin, had a freak snowstorm last week that dropped twelve inches. And it’s been in the twenties at night all week. Yikes.

I’m also trying to remind myself that I’m fairly comfortable in the snow, that I have the equipment I need, that I’ve done this before, and I’m much more experienced with snowshoes and crampons than I was five years ago. And I’m trying to remember that I can always cry uncle. Maybe the best thing for me would be to get a quarter-mile down the trail, realize I can’t hack it, pitch my one-person tent, and hang out for three weeks. By myself. In the woods. How cool does that sound? It blows my mind that I’ve even given myself permission to do that sort of thing.

Maybe I’ll bring a copy of Dharma Bums, just to give myself an air of authenticity.

Back to my new Vasques. I half-thought about dropping a line to Vasque and asking if they wanted to sponsor me, but this little tiny hike isn’t nearly epic enough. Corporate sponsors are fascinating to me. They remind me of the medieval Medicis, that corrupt Italian family that kept artists as pets. And in the best possible way, although that sounds awful. I love the idea of medieval patronage, especially because it reminds me that artists (and adventurers, in this case, although I know I’m stretching the metaphor) have always needed patrons. They’ve always been forced to participate in the marketplace, and a lot of times the way they’ve had to do that is by finding people who believe in what they do and accepting their financial support.

So, does anyone want to be my patron? I think I’ve asked this before. But now I’m being specific: Prana (tank tops that lasted 3000+ miles), Vasque, Salomon (best AT shoes), New Balance (second best), Duofold (tee-shirt that lasted 3000+miles), Smartwool, REI (tent and hiking shorts), EMS (best long underwear), North Face (fantastic fifteen-degree sleeping bag), etc...

Is that in bad taste? I don’t know. If I had the funding, I’d jet off to South America in a heartbeat. I’d wander around Mongolia and write about it. Maybe I’d spend six months a year here on my five acres, but I’d go as far as I needed to go. Maybe what I’m saying is that I’m not as distrustful as the corporate impulse as most hippies are. I believe in old-fashioned capitalism: good people selling a good product that they believe in and that does a good job, what it says it does. What I don’t belive in are government-sponsored Medici/Walmart-style monopolies. I do realize that artists and adventurers have to find ways to sell their work, their stories. That’s the work they do. Maybe, some day, my art will fund my new shoe purchases.

I just need twenty dollars.

Sky above Trenton

I have been wanting to do an environmental post for a while, but I don't think I have enough energy tonight. I'm sure there's a great pun in there about energy efficiency or something, but I can't make the effort to find it, either. Tonight is the fourth night in a row I've broken the one o'clock barrier, and I still feel like I'm not getting half of the things done that I need to. I have to be completely ready for California and the next month of my life, including a death-defying snow hike, in four days. Four friggin' days. I don't know how I'm going to do it.

But I'm posting! Maybe this goal is important only to me. I don't know. I can't figure that out. I still get this weirdness around blogs, that it just doesn't seem very important, even though I know that when I do it consistently, I stay happier. Isn't that perverse? Does that just show what a creature of the electronic age I am? Or what an egoist I am?

I'm going to try to stay on a consistent posting schedule as I travel west, mainly for myself, but it should lend itself to some interesting photographs and some interesting posts. I'm looking forward to seeing friends and family, and just being on the road again. I'm never happier than when I'm moving. Moving and writing. Moving and writing and doing yoga. That's the hard part. Maybe I will achieve true enlightenment when I can whip out my mat at a rest area and do yoga in the rain. That would probably make anyone achieve true enlightenment.

In the meantime, I'm just wicked stressed out. I'm going to bed at 1:30, but unable to sleep until well past two, because I keep waking up and making to-do lists. I have about eight to-do lists now, and I spend most of my time reorganizing them. When in doubt, restructure.

When will she see that to gain is only to lose?

Walnut Street Bridge

One thing about living in the South is the wound of slavery forever on the landscape. It's so hard to talk about. It's almost impossible to have an honest discussion about race in this country, which makes our problem with it even greater. Nationally, we're always ready to condemn other nations for their failings, but not ourselves. It's that famous verse writ large: "Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

Of course, all other nations are the same. When I lived in France, they were forever having conferences about "the American race problem," or "racisme Americaine," as they called it. All the while they were kicking Arabs out of their bars and restaurants, completely legally and without recourse. The French were unable to acknowledge that they had a race problem themselves, just because happened to have not kept slaves. At least not on their own soil.

Our race problem, admittedly, is deeper and darker and longer and bloodier. I just learned from the Chattanooga paper that two black men were lynched from the Walnut Street Bridge. During the twentieth century. The bridge is now a pedestrian footbridge, the heart of Chattanooga's scenic downtown. I'll never be able to look at it the same way. I knew these things happened, but it's another thing to know they happened here, on this dirt.

I keep thinking about the Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit." It blows my mind that an African-American woman, a mythic and powerful singer, was able to create art out of such horror. As it was happening. Especially when we can barely breath a word about it now. We're so afraid of telling the truth--about both our own past and our own present.

Here's the truth: racism is alive and well in Chattanooga. Maybe that's not a newsflash, but after years in the north, it shocked me. I work in a service industry, and the blatant disregard my bosses have for racial equality disgusts me. We hold to the letter of the law when it comes to African-American teenagers, and give rich white men enough wiggle room to do anything they want. I try to enforce our policies equitably, but I feel myself accepting and participating in that discrimination, as much as I try to fight it.

Here's another truth that makes me squirm: almost all of the problems I've had at work have been with those same black teenage boys. What does that mean? Can my statement even be trusted? Isn't my anecdotal evidence corrupted by the cultural lens through which I see the world, the racism I've been taught since I was a baby? Maybe those tendencies are rooted so subconsciously that they can't be changed.

But that's crap. I believe in change. I adore Tupac's song "Changes," too--an interesting counterpoint to Billie Holiday's song. Here's his line: "although it seems heaven sent, we ain't ready to see a black president..." It isn't true anymore. We have a black president, and that song is only twelve years old.

I'm not sure it helps the African-American kids that come to my desk, though. They're swimming against a strong tide. I just hope they keep swimming, and I hope the tide is changing. I'm going to swim and join them.

In land news, I found a beautiful five-acre piece on Monday, emailed the realtor immediately, visited the property yesterday, and was on my way to make an offer when she called back. It had sold. The contract was on her desk. So another one bites the dust. In blog news, I continue to be unhappy with my redesign. So more changes may be coming. I believe in change, after all.

La prophete

Hand-drawn map of crossing from Bimini to Nassau

So I redesigned the blog today. Does it look awful? I kind of think it looks awful. But that's mainly because I have an aggressive love-hate relationship with change.

Hmm. If you have any thoughts, or colors you'd prefer, or, heck, if you happen to be a web designer with some time on your hands, please let me know. I'm happy to be finally giving credit to all the blogs I read, and also letting all of you know what I do with my time that I'm supposed to be spending writing. Maybe eventually I'll add all of the fancy elements that all of my favorite blogs have.

Maybe I spent all of this time doing this because I found out yesterday that one of the pieces of land I was prepared to make an offer on has already sold. Merde. It's making me more sad than I thought it would. I always knew that this would happen, that as soon as I decided on a piece it would be gone, but still. It's one thing to believe it will happen, it's another to actually have it happen.

Now it's back to the drawing board. At least I can draw beautiful diagrams, as indicated above. I can also make cheesy sunset blog headers.

Tropical charms

Another interior shot of beautiful sunlit Secret

Tonight’s my last night on the boat. Maybe ever. I certainly hope not, but I’ve decided I’m putting Secret back on the market, as she is, as soon as I have internet access. So if anyone’s looking for a fully equipped cruising boat that only needs a little bit of installation, I have the boat for you. I’ll gladly assist as crew (or captain, if you’ll have me) on a delivery anywhere in the world.

It feels like the end of an era. It is. Another stage of my life as a professional adventurer is over. When I get back to the land of internet access, I’ll have to change my headline photo and “about me” section. I’m officially no longer a sailor. It feels so final, so sad.

Then again, maybe not... Maybe Karl will change his mind. Maybe she won’t sell. Maybe my dad will be able to come with me in August and we’ll sail off to Georgia...

Or this may be the last time I lay scribbling in my berth, my headlamp on, the trades howling in the rigging, the dinghy slapping the water, the creaks of teak and fiberglass my lullaby. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss every moment of it, even the stinky head and heeling over on our ear while at sea and the lazy jacks keeping me awake, slapping the mast for all they’re worth.

I love you, dear old boat. I hope, I pray, you can find someone who’ll love you as much as I do, who’ll take better care of you than I can. Finding that person I have to leave in the hands of God (and Craig’s List). Tomorrow it’s on to new and even scarier things: a house, maybe. Land. Plants. Winter. It’s all adventure, right?