The Inbound Urge

Leaves of Grass
“From Montauk Point”
By Walt Whitman

I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,
Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing,
(nothing but sea and sky,)
The tossing waves, the foam,
the ships in the distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps --
that inbound urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shores forever.




Even before I began this sea journey, I gave myself up to the currents and prevailing winds, to the present tense and the moment.  I made my plans but if they changed, I changed with them.  I wasn't always this way.  I fought my fate, fought life's urgings towards the new and different with a dogged determination to have my way and no other.  And even when I leaped at last toward a different future I still fought myself, only giving in to the urges of life after a struggle.  It took me a while, but learned at last that listening to the small still voice of Self and Soul was not as hard as I had made it out to be all these years.  For me, at least, there was a peace when I was on the right path and so I closed my eyes and walked that peace step by step, like a toddler, faltering at first then stronger and steadier, more graceful.


So during that last jump offshore, when Susurru covered too much distance too quickly and we found ourselves looking at arriving in Fort Lauderdale around 2 AM as opposed to the 9AM we had planned, we needed to find a place to wait.  Bryan had done a lot of reading about the Bahamas and the weather was cooperative, the seas relatively flat.  This lighthouse was our waypoint before we crossed the Gulf Stream and the guides said it offered mild protection if you anchored there, but only on a day of good weather, slight winds, small swells all of which we had.  


Isaac Light is striking, the structure built for the 1840 Expo in London and then shipped to the Bahamas to act as a beacon.  It's stark and lonely, the iron a bit unforgiving despite its austere beauty.  There used to be lighthouse keepers stationed here, but not anymore.  Now the light is digital, without the blinding sweep of the traditional lighthouses of my childhood, but steady and sure, bright enough to be seen for 23 miles.  There is a lesson in that kind of shining, the simple determination to be yourself, do what is yours to do, and to burn bright, your bright, your glorious, non one else's.


It's a rare opportunity in a busy world to spend so much time in one place with so few distractions, to watch its changes over a span of time, to give our complete attention to something (or someone).  A few weeks together on a sailboat changes your rhythms, especially if you are like me, bound to appointment books and the work day rush from one place to another.  I'm not sure I've ever been so under my own command, driven by my own currents and weather.  It's strange and wonderful gift I've been given at fifty-three, a world not stopped but slowed so profoundly I can at last catch my breath and get my bearings, finding who I truly am without the culture of distractions that seems to make up modern life.  Of course the real trick will be if I can sustain this sense of peace and mastery once I enter back into the work force.  Time will tell this as it seems to tell all things, another lesson of sailing, patient vigilance and considered action.


Once the anchor was set, we ate lunch and then each found our own ways to pass the time.  It still astonishes me the solitude you can find with another person in the small space of a sailboat.  I think it's the first time I came to understand a bit Rilke's urging in his Letters to a Young Poet: I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other’s solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness . . .  
I am coming to peace with my own solitude, seeing it as just a part of me, something unifying me with others as opposed to the isolation I always believed it to be.  I still have my moments.  It takes a while to change a lifetime of being and feeling.  I understand more and more on a visceral level how the therapeutic relationship gives us a place over time to experience life in a more positive way which we can then bring into the other relationships in our life


Much of my time was spent sitting in the cockpit, watching the subtle changes of Isaac Light throughout the day and documenting it with my camera and working it into my body too, a nearly holographic memory of sight and sound and smell and feel, not just the beauty of the lighthouse, but the sound of the ever-present wind, even on this 'mild' day, rushing past the ears, setting the lines to singing and wafting the birdsong from the island, a symphony of calls and cries.  As you can see, I was captivated and greatly moved by my time at Isaac Light and yet I couldn't tell you really what specially I learned.  No, this was a lesson of the body, of states of Self, of senses and sensibilities.  It was for me the perfect Zen state, what every meditation from this point forward seeks to achieve.  This was my Nirvana, my heaven, this still, waterborne moment, alone and not alone, the way we are in this world I think.  It reminds me of another quote by Rilke: To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is nothing we can choose or avoid. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if this were not so. That is all we can do. How much better to realize from the start that that is what we are, and to proceed from there. It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far.

Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

Isaac Light taught me many things but this was chief among its gifts: to understand myself and to proceed from there.

As Though I Had Wings

....I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart

pumping hard.  I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

~ Mary Oliver ~

     We are back in the U.S. for now.  There is another trip planned to Trinidad at the end of July, weather willing, and maybe some short sails to the Bahamas, although nothing like what we've done.  The plan is to save and get the boat ready for a year sailing, or maybe more.  As present tense I have become these days, here in Fort Lauderdale, it is hard to imagine a year spent on the water traveling by whim and wind and water, discovering new places and familiar ones.  I hope I can write myself into that story of a year away from work, a year on the water, maybe more than one year, maybe two. three, four ....


     It is strange to be back, both joyous and full of regret too, bittersweet as life seems to be for me.  I'm glad to be able to talk to my daughter more regularly.  And I like the comfort of familiarity, of the world I know.  I miss though, the water.  I miss too the not knowing where we were headed beyond the next stop.  I miss the rhythms of life offshore that demand much of you at certain times, and so little at others.  And I miss the quiet that settles between you, the deceptive stillness that hides your own inner journeys.  


     This picture was taking our last day offshore, anchored off of Isaac Light in the Bahamas.   Susurru travels 150 miles a day with motor sailing, more than we anticipated.  She is a boat built to move sure and fast through the water.  She loves to sail, loves the dance of wind and water and man's hand and eye lightly guiding her.  She expects you to trust her, and because she is completely honest and deserving of that trust, you do.  There are so metaphors about life and living and love in the acts of sailing, it startles me and frankly, I wonder how I will take to land.


     These final lines of a Mary Oliver poem seem to capture best how I felt on the water and how I hope to find my to feeling no matter where I find myself.  Out on the water between there and here I felt improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing for the first time in my life. May I hold that in my heart and soul, find in myself a way to be that, even on land.  That would be quite a gift for my 54th year.  May it be so.

Beginnings are Easy?

“Beginning is easy - continuing hard” Japanese Proverb

Okay, well maybe beginnings aren’t always easy, I’ll give you that.  There are some beginnings we rush to with joy and find our way through so easily it feels as if it was all of it meant to be, as if the gods had a hand in it.  I’ve had a few of those in my time.  And then there are those beginnings we have to be forced to, kicking and screaming.  Every damn bit of them is hard and you don’t know until you’re will past them and can look back, that these too were meant to be.  Mostly I find my beginnings bittersweet, joyous and painful, which suits something that always holds in it, endings as well as fresh starts.  (And okay you could argue that after that first start out of the birth canal there aren’t any truly fresh starts, and I would probably agree, but we like our myths of clean slates and chances to start over and who am I to deny us that, deny myself that?)

There seems to be in the early stages of new beginnings, these points where you could go back to what you were, where you were, and while not the same, never the same, you could pretend or perhaps find close enough.  Maybe it would be better, that going back.  Maybe it wouldn’t.  Maybe your staying would be better, or maybe not.  You’re at a crossroads, that powerful place ruled by the dark goddess Hecate, she who knows but doesn’t always tell, she who is eternal but choses to spend that eternity as older, wiser.  It takes a special god to eschew Olympus for decision points, for places where past and futures and present meet.

Since I’m on the “road” so to speak, with just my traveling shoes and a swim suit and without the benefits of wifi and internet, I’m going to have to let go of research and sources and write from the heart, from my own memory, from what I digested over all these years of the gods and their dominions.  Hecate is the least well known of the goddesses, a major part of some important myths, including the Demeter and Persephone myth that was the basis of the Elysian Mysteries, but secretive as would befit a goddess of night and magic and places where choices are made.  Some have called her the witch’s goddess, although she has always seemed to me too primal for such a narrow realm.  Hecate was never part of Zeus’ brother’s and sisters; she’s older, maybe a Titan, maybe older still, like Hesiod’s Eros, an original being, there at the beginnings of man’s creation.

No matter what her beginnings, Hecate definitely made choices and let them mark her.  There is nothing Janus-faced about her.

Several times in this beginning I’ve considered going back, although, to be honest, there may going somewhere else but there’s no real going back to what I was, to what I had.  These moments came, predictably, when the reality of all I didn’t know about sailing hit me and I wasn’t sure I could learn it all fast enough not to do something foolish and hurt myself or the boat or Bryan.  They also came at those points where Bryan and I are trying to find our way of being together.  There was the reality of anticipation and distance and this new reality of together that we both have to find our way of doing and being.  And a few times, I just found myself missing my daughter, my dogs, my friends, the predictability of that old life which I don’t have in this one, and probably never will.

Which brings me back to the Japanese proverb about the hard path of continuing with the beginning, seeing it through.  Sailing continues to startle me with its metaphorical applications to living and life.  You make your plans, prepare to the best of your ability, and maybe it will happen just that way.  Or maybe things will change some, the day of departure, the destination.  You must find a peace in not getting what you want, or what you think you want, but always getting exactly what you need.  We were going to go to San Salvador Island but because we needed to be guided out of the marina in Turtle Cove, we had to leave earlier than originally planned.  When we did the calculations of our average distance traveled, we realized we would find ourselves at San Salvador at 2 am, no time to head in to find an anchoring.  So we looked at the cruising guides and the charts and came up with a new destination, Cat Island, and plotted our course accordingly.  When we arrived, there was no place to anchor at our first destination, so we found a customs point of entry and went there and then, sailed to a different place to anchor, off of New Bight.  Originally we were going to stay in San Salvador Island just overnight, but we chose to spend a second day at Cat Island for a chance at better weather was we crossed to Spanish Wells.  All through this trip there have been changes – chosen spots replaced by new ones, timetables abandoned due to sickness or bad backs, what seemed our rhythm replaces by another and another -- and a dawning understanding that it all is perfect just as it is.  I was a plotter and a planner and part of the hard road of my continuing is letting these parts of me go, realizing they may not be intrinsic parts of me at all, or that perhaps at this stage of life, they just don’t serve me and so should be let go of, not always easy as those of you who are plotters and planners yourselves know. 

So this is where I am in my Odyssey, continuing.  Before I started, I knew this trip would alter me in many ways.  I have chosen at last to be a traveler and not a tourist in my life, to let the journey and the places mold me, to become what life want me to become as opposed to what I think I am or what others want me to be.  And I don’t know where it’s going to lead which is why under the light of full moon, I offered up prayers to the goddess of the crossroads, not for a set conclusion, not even for safe travels, but for a good journey, for my journey, to become what I am meant to become.

As for the rest, we’ll see/sea, which is my new mantra these days.