Peeling memories

 

Skin peels like fish scales from my dry palms. Once water-soaked pruney, blistered and bloody they are disrobing their armor, pushing pink newness to the surface: a circus of circles where toughness once lay. 

Bits of torn skin catch on my clothing. 

There is the rub.

With time and without oars muscles once taut soften, recede, ebb. I am flooded with panic and want to re-seed my memory, want to hold onto to all the little motions and thoughts that have been left in the wake behind. I want to wrestle that feeling of Fuck Yeah back into my gut where it happily nested, made my heart chirp in appreciation and spring forward out of my (count the ribs) cage. 

The bird has fluttered and flown and I squint at the horizon searching for signs of feathers and sound.

My legs no longer wonder at the ground before them in weak anticipation of movement. It is I who am moving now, not the sole of the boat. There are no waves pushing plastic and vibrating through every fiber of my body, my soul. When I lie down there is no need to compensate to stay on the bunk. When I place a jar on the counter it stays exactly where I put it. 

This predictability makes me both relieved and unquestionably sad.

A few weeks ago I stood on a dock in Ketchikan in the middle of the night and I knew anything was possible. Not thought it. Knew it. As the days turn to weeks and now a month from leaving Victoria in a rush of horns and paddles, I am struggling not to grasp at memories and feelings of a three-week stretch of the unpredictable, of despair and magic. I find myself pulling at threads of images and trying to tuck them in around me like a Binkie. 

You know Binkie, that vomit-stained blanket you drooled on as a kid and wouldn’t leave home without. It was torn and faded and chewed. It smelled like pee and moldy broccoli with a hint of baby powder. It had seen you through the tough times of crawling and walking and sleeping on your very own for the first time in a dark room in a dark house with space space space all around. But with Binkie you knew all would be OK, that you were safe and courageous. So you held on and cried a lot (and died a little) when it was taken away. 

What now would remind you of your bravery?

My memories of adventures are like that: I don’t see the stains or smell the putridness as I wrap myself in the security of knowing I DID something. I survived. I can do anything. I want to hold on to all that made me come alive out there even if half the time I was out there I was distractedly thinking of back here. 

No matter, when I looked up from the spinning in my head I saw whales and porpoises and sunrises over glassy water. I saw mountains resting their heads on pillows of cloud. I saw double rainbows through whitecaps and stars through darkened shrouds. I felt salt and wind and somehow felt the sky, too. I heard the salmon jumping at sunset and humpbacks crashing ahead of us in the night. I was scared and electrified by joy. I was a spectrum of all I could be when I settled into the moment and enjoyed where I was.

The ocean was my blanket.

Now I see the sunflowers against a backdrop of pine and cedar. I hear the sparrows in the field and the chimes on my porch where I sit and type and breathe in evergreen. I feel the eternal wind that still blows around this earth, that took us from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and that I flew through home. 

As the muscles and memories from adventure fade, as the skin and images flake away, I remind myself that THIS is the adventure. Every minute of every day there is adventure if I can just stay present to it. Burn the Binkie! OK, maybe not burn but don’t be afraid to fold it neatly, place it on a shelf to occasionally pick up, shake out, breathe deeply into the weave but remind myself that I don’t necessarily need a trinket or image to remind me of who I am and what I can do. 

I am a composite of everything I have ever done and may not remember.

I wrap myself in the present moment, whale songs submerged (yet echoing) under the rustling of dry grass and fall asleep on solid shifting ground, safe and brave and sound.

Hit It

If the roughly hewn timber and rock breakwaters of Port Townsend and Ketchikan were parenthesis, our adventure would not be contained in an aside. This was an exclamatory excursion and it would burst through any sort of manmade containment without apology. Hence our slamming and swirling encounters on our exit from and entrance into “safe” harbors, the start and finish lines. 

Save whirlpools and overfalls, hitting stationary objects (breakwaters, islands, docks) or being hit by other moving objects (containerships, massive logs, tugboats) was my greatest fear on boats. Losing an engine was high up on that list, too, as it would only contribute to such jarring opportunities for puncturing the hull. I suppose it wasn’t so much the hitting as the sinking that worried me. And not so much the sinking but the drowning part, gulps of salty sea and plankton through baleen-less jaws, a diving deep without a spyhop to follow.

I am in love with the sea, I am a mermaid, a shapeshifting flying fish, but the imagination of my heart can only go so far, breathe so deep under the edge of water.

Entering a race where the rules forbid even having an engine on board, where sailing and rowing and paddling (or peddling on some boats) are the only means of propulsion, where turbulent tidal rips and currents and whirlpools let you know that you are definitely not the one in control, well, it seemed a little nuts. Because hitting shit was inevitable. And hit shit we would. I pretended like I was OK with that reality but in fact I was terrified and I knew this was the very best reason for me to enter the race.

Even with tens of thousands of miles of sailing experience I felt pretty vulnerable and anxious as I boarded the ferry to Port Townsend where the Race to Alaska would begin. Walking down the street with a dry-bag heavy with emergency equipment over my shoulder, I watched the truck trailers sporting modified plastic kayaks and mini mono-hulls crawl towards the waterfront. When I leaned out over the rail overlooking the docks full of trimarans and hobie cats and tiny coffin-like boats, I cried.

Not out of fear but excitement and relief. These were my people! Nuts, every single one, some even more so than me! We were all coming together to push our limits, to challenge what was considered safe, to use our skills and stamina in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. I was soothed by the camaraderie, like a snug school of sardines finning past the gaping jaws of a shark.

Last minute preparations, repairs, modifications dialed up the frenetic energy on the docks. In less than 36 hours (and two beer-soaked parties later), we would all be squeezing through the narrow harbor entrance and pointing our bows towards Alaska. Well, those who could actually point more than 45 degrees into the wind would be doing so. As part of Team Onism on a 24-foot homebuilt trimaran with 25-year-old sails (and trampoline and hull), we would be pointing a lot of places along the way but rarely in the exact direction we wanted to go. Of course we didn’t know this when we started. We were very aware we didn’t know a lot of things about the boat. We went anyway.

We hit the breakwater in Port Townsend battling 20-knot winds on the nose with oars and paddles. (The oars and paddles were in the water, not in the turbulent air smacking that laughing wind on the snout, but sometimes our propulsion implements felt like they might as well have been skyward the progress was so painfully slow.) It was 5am, we hadn’t eaten breakfast or slept a wink as the halyards clanged and docklines creaked all night. To make the 6am start the 60+ boats started clawing their way out of the harbor before sunrise. Or perhaps the sun had already risen but was obscured by the angry black clouds overhead.

Before we had a chance to think about it (or have coffee. Damn!) the trimaran in front of us pushed off into the fairway. That meant it was our turn and god I wasn’t ready lets just take our time but now we’re being pulled forward by boyfriend and husband and father and now fuck we are in the fairway and now I am paddling and now my lungs are burning and I realize that paddling in a drysuit sucks and my muscles are now burning and suddenly I am yelling “Let’s do this ladies” like a gym coach on steroids because I am afraid if I don’t yell I am going to stop and cry but I keep paddling and Emily keeps rowing and Katy keeps steering and yells “Don’t stop!” and we don’t. There is a crowd cheering us on from the railing above but I can’t hear them with the blood rushing in my ears and we round the corner

we can see open water

we can see the other boats

we are almost there

but the wind still takes our bow a second before we can get the jammed staysail to unfurl and we drift more like slide more like plow towards the timber wall to port. Contact! That sounds so gentle but it is more of a crunch and we are sliding against the splintering wood and we think we will spin and end up on the beach where there is another fucking happy group of people cheering us on (DON’T YOU SEE WE ARE GOING TO CRASH?)

But the fluttering of a white wing saves us and pulls us into the wind. We are flying towards the rest of the (floating, sailing, safe) boats and we can breathe again. Yell with joy. We have not even officially started the race but we have started the journey.

We have hit shit. We are OK. We are more than OK. We are laughing.

We are on our way to Victoria and then Alaska. Alaska!

I am on my way to discovering who I am when the boat hits the breakwall, when exhaustion and steep waves and adverse currents will mix with bubbling shame, when the sight of fins and flippers will connect me to my briny blood.

When in the last moments of the race we are spun in circles inches away from hungry sharp rocks and we are able to laugh again and accept our pirouette of a finish as we guzzle beers and ring the brass bell and hug fellow racers when we finally make it to the dock in Ketchikan. 

I will finish with a smile on my face, arms strong, hands blistered, heart full.

We hit shit and we made it. 

Spun, rain-soaked, sun-drenched spirits
bursting out of whale bone cages to meet the yellow dawn

and the next

 )not-to-be-contained(

ADVENTURE.

Ready or Not

I barely remember the early morning over 13 years ago when J and I untied our little boat and set off into the darkness. We had shoved all the extra gear into whatever cubbies and lockers we could at midnight. We’d stashed the last few cans of tuna under bunks and topped off the 40-gallon water tank at one a.m. Our single side band radio was nestled in blankets under the settee next to a lifeless bubble-wrapped solar panel. The rigging wasn’t quite tuned, the outboard rarely started on the 1^st or 20^th try, we didn’t have charts for our entire trip and we sure didn’t know the waters. We’d only sailed on our boat Gitane a few times before embarking on a six-thousand-mile journey from Ensenada, Mexico to New York City.

We weren’t ready to untie those lines, we had dozens of more projects to complete, San Diego was on fire, family told us not to go. We could have used a plethora of excuses to sensibly wait one more day, but somewhere around 3am we slipped off those lines anyway and sailed off that dock.

As I get ready for a little ole race to Alaska on a boat I’ve only sailed a few times, Being Ready is on my mind. As is knowing deep down that Being Ready is not a Real Thing. It doesn’t matter how many energy bars we have stowed or how many rowing workouts I’ve done or how comfortable I am pulling up the jib on the tiny bow of this trimaran, I won’t be ready. 

And yet I am.

Ready is less a list of to-dos than it is allowance of forward motion. Instead of saying ready, maybe I should say willing. I am open to challenge. I am confident that we can handle what comes our way. And by handle I do not mean fight or defeat or stay alive, I mean that if I am willing (ready) to stay present in the moment (which the sea is extraordinarily wonderful at cultivating, that presence), I can trust that I can be in the flow of whatever happens.

Hoping that flow is not a whirlpool.
Yet that too. 

Not going, as has been suggested by dear caring souls with more arguably more sense than I, will not teach me these lessons of trust. Doing something that is wholly unknown (other than that sailing ocean birds sunset bioluminescence whales un-fucking-believeable beauty part- I know that) is a way to remind myself that every day we throw off the docklines and get out of bed. Or at least most days. We sail into the unknown with every conversation on the street or at the breakfast table and during every acceleration in the car catapulting us into the next moment, the next interaction. Nothing is fully planned and executed exactly. Planning is inherently ephemeral. Our dreams and expectations never quite line up with our reality.

We are penciled self-portraits blurred by the hands that draw them.

The bigger the decisions or the more outlandish the adventure, I’d venture to say that the chasm between expectation and reality widens more significantly, obviously, acutely.

Is that what I fear? Falling into that chasm of the unknown, swooping swallows and flying fish circling and slashing?

I realize that this is commitment. Commitment to getting out of bed in the morning and being in relationship with others and going on a crazy fucking boat trip for no point other than to do it. This is trust and love and life. Living. Untying what holds us back and sailing out of the harbor each and every day into the unknown and feeling every wave and wash of terror and gratitude. It can look like this trip or like marriage and kids and staying in one place for more than a year.

Adventure is relative.
It is trust.

Ready? Sure.
For blurred lines and whales breath and swooping swallows and presence.  
Willing to welcome commitment and contentment.
Open to the challenge of the unknown (so everything). Ready.

My Reality

 

A plume of salt and spent air and force crystallize the sky.

Inhalation. 

Focus on the curly edges of the kale leaves, I told myself (over and over) when she said, “You keep bringing emotion into this. Just stop. This is reality!” She listed off all the ways in which I was CLEARLY not within the realm of which she spoke. The leaves blurred into the wooded horizon as my anger and resentment welled up and overflowed in a tirade of words. 

 

This was not my intention.  

Teeth clenched, fins in motion.

I wanted to be calm, non-reactive, mature, but in the heat of the moment the thirteen-year-old in me leaped into (re-)action. The thirteen-year-old that was grounded for unfounded reasons and spent weeks writing dark poetry in her room. The girl that was told she was a spoiled brat for being independent and doing what she wanted. That was full of vitality and creativity and wide-scoped dreams and was (is) mocked for “being dramatic." 

Deep buried resentments spy-hopped at the surface. An ocean of relationship rippled and shook.

Instead of breathing into the pain, doing my shadow work and all that woo (goodness), I yelled back, teeth bared. I accused, I cried. I’m not proud of this, but it happened. My head spun with all that I wanted to say, how I wanted to be understood. But how can you be heard if the other doesn’t want to listen? How can I keep my heart open to others who have closed theirs so tightly, especially when my throat is tight and my hands are clenched and I'm yelling and I really really really don't want to be but I can't seem to help it? 

And what the fuck is reality? 

I am breathing, feeling, living every day and every day is real. My dreams, thoughts, and emotions are real. Even my fanciful imagination is real. So when I am told that I am not living in reality, I am confused. This confusion has been happening my whole life. From theater school to traveling around the world to living and working on boats to living on an island and growing my own food, I haven’t lived a particularly mainstream life, but this has no bearing on whether or not it is real. 

I am real therefore my life is real. Reality.

Flukes in the air, diving deep into the dark, thoughts swim and circle around reason. 

After the pain and sadness slowly receded alongside the anger (not disappeared, but ebbed enough to breathe), I have been able to see this flood of emotions as a call to contemplation: what do I believe about myself and my world? I know that what anyone else says or thinks about me is none of my business, that accusations strike a nerve in this way only when there is doubt within myself about my skills, intelligence, about how I live my life. 

What a gift to have this brought to light, I say through gritting teeth and tears.

So. What do I believe? What is real to me?

Here is the reality (in this moment) that I create:

People are good. I don’t want to believe that everyone is out there to fuck me over. If that what is supposed to make me a good business person, then I don’t want to participate in that kind of business. I’ve built my businesses on love, connection, and beauty. There is no need to be nasty, just honest. If we could all just be honest about what we need a lot of the nastiness would be avoided. This is what is real to me.

I live in a place where I can grow a lot of my own food and buy/trade for the rest from neighbors. This is not an idealistic or a hippie lifestyle. I’m not sure what being a hippie actually is. I do wear dresses in the garden and have potlucks and craft nights on occasion. Does that make me a hippie? If growing your own food is hippie, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is other than co-dependent capitalistic matrimony (in which I am woefully still engaged to a degree). Growing one’s own food and buying locally is much more practical and sustainable than relying on the industrial food system for far less nutritious food. It is also far more “traditional” than how the majority of Americans live presently shopping at Target and Costco and buying strawberries in January. Growing food is not a luxury. It takes hard work and planning and effort. The callouses on my hands are real. The kale and garlic on my dinner plate are deliciously real.

I enjoy my work. Whether it is sailing or cooking for other people, I like how I spend my waking hours. Not 100% of the time, but much more often than not. I have worked hard and created this way of life for myself instability (flexibility) and all. Sometimes it feels like I just fell into these passions. I believe that is what happens when you say Yes to what you love. And it is not that simple and easy and the bumps along the way are reminders of this, but those bumps are meant for refinement and growth. I want to spend my time doing something I feel strongly about in the way that positively affects the world. For me, cooking with food from my garden and from smaller farms in my area is revolutionary. I start and join in conversations about nutrition, local economies, self-sufficiency through my job. And I eat well, too.

I am not in the camp that JOB must equal SUFFERING. This is my reality.

I love what and whom I love. I might not get society’s approval but I cannot follow what this society implies I should love. Or whom. Age, gender, profession, appearance…my heart chooses and I am learning to follow, to let the judgments fall away and keep my heart open to the infinite possibilities of love. Why impose restrictions when the world is infinitely generous? This is realistic.

My reality is based on love and emotion. This is what makes us real, just like we learned in the Velveteen Rabbit. This is what children inherently know. I don’t want to shut my heart off in order to be “successful” because in my eyes that is a very empty success. And unnecessary. I wouldn’t be able to write or connect with people or cook beautiful food without this love, without this openness for emotions. This is my reality.

I’m sailing to Alaska in a month and, I admit it, am scared about dying. About my life changing. Of leaving a comfortable farmhouse for rough seas- what's the point? This is what is bringing me alive in this moment. I am immersed deeply in the contemplation of my life, realizing what is most important to me, accepting who brings me alive and who drains my vitality and how I can release the latter. I could die, this is the reality, but this is also the reality every single (safer?) day of my life. Or your life. My question is: can I die with an open heart, whenever and wherever that may be? Death is real.

I surface again, nicked fins, broken teeth, full belly flopping into oncoming waves. 

I am in love with my magical, fantastical life. It hurts sometimes, too. But I choose to believe in the full range of feelings and possibilities, that we are here to create and love and play and swim through it all. This is my reality. 

What’s yours?

On Fear

I have been reading about fear. I have been absorbing the notion that what we fear most is not necessarily the harm that could befall us, but more so the bodily reaction to fear, that anxiety and sense of losing of control. I have read that we need to accept the actual feeling of fear because the circumstance doesn’t really matter much. You cannot stop potentially painful things from happening (car crashes, violence, falling off a cliff) just because of your fear of those things happening.  I mean, sure, you can lock yourself up at home, but what if there is an earthquake that takes down the house or a brown recluse hiding under your pillow? You are still full of fear, even hiding under the covers. 

We are a fragile fabric of skin held up by breakable bones and powered by a mechanical system programmed to eventually fail. So why did this finite system program fear into the mix? For our safety? Or so that we can learn how we move through the world?

And in this book I am reading it also says that we have basically the same physical symptoms with fear and falling in love. Fluttering heart, lack of breath, time stops. They are the same. It is simply the perception that differs.

I think of sailing. How I push myself every time I step onto a boat. How the loss of absolute control has become a standard in my life. Perhaps I compensate in other areas on land for this lack of control when I am at sea. The ridiculous thing is that I am no more in control on land but it is not so immediately obvious among the houses and cars and perfectly ordered cans of beans on grocery store shelves. The straight lines and speed limits lead me to believe there is order, that we have covered Nature over with smooth dominance and therefore we can function in predictable ways. 

There are no straight lines at sea. The horizon is curved, flying fish arc above and below the surface, even becalmed water holds circular movement. Fear is transformed into alertness as every moment changes the course. Out there it is visible. Out there, I have been scared, for sure, but the ocean doesn’t allow for the what-ifs to accumulate for very long. The blank canvas of the sea makes anything possible and so those what-ifs spill over and color the sunsets with their oranges and reds. In a place that may seem more dangerous, fear is replaced with a horizon-less love.

Then I think of living on land and all the complications that arrive with this choice. Taking care of a house and animals. Having a job to pay for such things. Making time to do the things I love (like writing and cooking and sailing). And the fear creeps in. How can I be more scared of this ‘stable’ life than a squall at sea? Is this why I need my dose of sailing, to remind me of that fearlessness? Is this why I am so adamant about sailing to Alaska, something that truly scares the shit out of me? Or will this simply be another adventure in a long line of adventures, a way for me to feel alive, special, but no more the wiser or stable? I sit and stare and worry, brain spinning, hands still.

So I go into my kitchen and cook. I go to my laptop and write. I go work on the boat or go for a swim. Instead of standing on the cliff and fearing the fall, sometimes I actually jump. Not all the time, but I am learning to jump, fall, release and let the love rush in.

When we face our fears, be it a rogue wave or a husband waving me home, we face death and we face life. We are always alive…until we aren’t. And no amount of fear will ever change that reality. So jump. Live.

Turning back

Red and numb, my fingers work the blue nylon into loops and knots, rain drizzling on to the deck, the furled sails, the smile on my face. I am wet and cold and I can't feel my fingers but we are moving towards the ocean. The outgoing tide ushers us towards the openness and I can feel it tugging at my chest: the salty nests of seaweed sliding past our bow, the breaching of whales punctuating commas on the horizon, the swallows who will appear and rest on deck before reassessing their course.

The clouds cease their crying as we stow lines and fenders, as we yip and hurrah and wind our way east. I free the main halyard and clamber up the mast where the head of the sail waits for me to adorn her with means of skyward propulsion. A twist of (red, numb) fingers secures the halyard and we are ready to raise that wind brushed fabric, ready to point the bow southeast across the swells, ready to hunker down for a night full of dark clouds and strengthening breeze.

I haul and crank and spur the sail into the air. The slight tipping, the hungry belly of the main satiated with wind, the land thinning to pale sand and green gray scrub as the buoys fall behind the stern: I am reaching towards home.

Another Home, where the soil is mixed with salt and water in slippery proportions, where the growth is fluid and the roots hold fast to time worn stones, where the tending is in the form of swirling thoughts and turbulent dreams. A vast farm of wildness unearthing before me.

Then.
Slack.
Rig.

Unsupported.
Mast.

Big.
Fucking.
Problem.

We curse and swing 180 to port. Furl sails, unbury fenders, cleat off lines with bitter ends in bowlines ready to catch the dock. The hurrahs stowed away, we motor towards repairs, towards another day or week of waiting. I (begrudgingly) give gratitude for failure early in the voyage, for the chance to turn back when there is turning back, for the taste of my salty heart fluttering in the wind and swimming in the waves and working through the line in my hands.

I shove red and numb fingers into damp pockets and know this voyage will come to me when I need it. That the waiting is part of the allurement, of the work. That my heart is still unfurling even (especially) in the disappointment. Home cannot abandon me, as I will not abandon it.

Wind, waves, sea, and soil. The love and the longing. The alchemy of my soul.

The comfort of confused seas

I step from the hills and divots of dry sand to damp. My footprints follow me to the edge of this side of the world. I stand and wait for her to come to me, frothing and licking at my ankles, tying seaweed around my tight tendons and curling toes.
I am pulled in by the lights on the horizon. Fishing boats gleam in the gloomy dusk. That speck of white elicits a sense of excitement of an impending adventure even if none are on my charts at the moment. I face the beach, the land, the US and acknowledge the life I live here. There.
And I turn back around.

Calves submerged, the goosebumps on my thighs soon underwater. There are surfers right and left. I am boardless, wetsuitless. I wade deeper into an area of turbulence. The seas are coming from different directions, crashing into one another in irregular patterns.
One would say Confused.
I feel like a boat being tumbled and fought over by those confused, world-worn waves. I close my eyes and dream of being in the middle of the Atlantic, sails up, saltwater deluging the cockpit as the random waves hit us from behind and slide us off our course. I am that boat, drenched with surprises, pulled and pushed into conceding to deviations from my carefully plotted rhumb-line.
The waves talk to me through the wood and epoxy and say that even if they appear chaotic, each wave has it's own path and purpose. There is no confusion until their is resistance. Yet through that tension the wave is transformed or complimented or the energy is passed on so another wave can make it to Nova Scotia or Portugal or Brazil.
Or once again be sidetracked, absorbed, reinforced.
The energy never disappears.

I dive into the next breaking wave.
Fully immersed. 
Fully alive.
Fully clear on the beauty of confusion.