Garlic under the knife

I gently brace for the give of the garlic when the knife blade forces it to the board, stainless steel and variegated wood smeared with the lusty scent of dinner. The papery skin lodges under my fingernail as I peel it away from crushed pungent flesh.

I peel and sigh.  A creeping wave of content flows from plant to animal.

The onion is next to be undressed and divided, chopped and sorted. My hands work under me, my eyes shifting from cutting board to pan to sink where a bowl full of dandelion greens, kale, chard soak their green cells. My hips are moving to the music I have turned up on the stereo, my lungs expelling a weeks worth of breath, worry, grief. The onions are not making me cry, the week is not making me cry. I am (finally) smiling a small delicious smile, my fingers moving across living food I am blessing with my careful (yet still imprecise) knifestrokes. And wonder. Wonder! Always wonder at how vegetables grow, who grows them, how we nurture them and they nurture us, how this symbiotic relationship really came to be, how we forget that they are more of our keeper than we are theirs.

Slippery aliums are scooped up into bare hands and released into a sizzling bath of coconut oil and pepper flakes. I fish out my favorite wooden spoon from the jar next to the stove. I stir the chunks of garlic and rectangular slivers of onion until they are pliable and welcoming.
Ginger...
A knob breaks off in my hands. Scraping the brown off yellow the memory-smell of palm trees and squid boats on the horizon and clear aqua seas floods my brain. I chop the fibrous root into tiny fragments and drop them into the melee.
I stir.
My hands dive into cool water, greens dodging my grasp, slipping by dirty fingernails and calloused palms on the first pass. I swirl and grab, hold them tightly in a crunchy bunch, lift and shake, convey them over marbled countertops to the noisy pan. They pop and sizzle and steam. 

I stir.
With my hands and my heart, I stir.
The kale and the garlic, they stir me back.
In this kitchen, in this moment, alone (with this food), I am whole.

(I had forgotten how that happens. The vegetables sought to remind me.)

Fragile: Handle Like Eggs

Breakdown
Breakthrough
Breaking ground for new thoughts feelings adventures.

Tears well up and stream down my face on the freeway as I pass nonexistent trees and empty lots full of car corpses, the memories of paved-over neighborhoods, the scummy haze creeping over the horizon. I scream into the windshield and beat the steering wheel. I sob and open the windows and let my hair flail and tangle in my snot and spit. I laugh because I know in Southern California this behavior is (kinda) normal. We emote in our public privacy. We are enclosed in glass and metal and are alone if we ignore our rear view mirrors and just stare at the taillights ahead. We sing at the top of our lungs and yell obscenities at the off-ramps and weep into our consoles.

I have been driven back here. When the drumbeats cease and the horns are only echoes in my head I nod at my friends, run a sweaty hand over warm-from-dancing backs, slip out the door. I walk towards the water searching out the curve of hulls and the skyward stretching of masts. I listen for the seagulls and the hollow snap of fish breaking the surface to snack. The lights of downtown cascade nighttime shadows over the bay. The bay! I sailed out of here with bioluminescent dolphins at the bow ten years ago with dreams of never coming back.
We were done San Diego, you and I.
At times like these I measure my life in nautical miles and 30,000 clicks and many lifetimes later here I am again staring up at skyscrapers and hills and wondering why I'm back.
Why I keep coming back.
(But I already know the answer.)
The breaking of hearts.
The breaking of bread.
The breaking waves calling me to surf and sit and contemplate.
The breaking of expectations of what or where I will be in another ten years.
The break with the past.
Breakdown
Breakthrough

Open hands

Heart in the soles of my shoes stumbling over the cobblestones of Soho. I am smiling up at cherry blossoms and skyscrapers, into the faces (ecstatic sad blank) that pass by, into images of myself mirrored in shop windows and (plastic) blinded office buildings. I listen to the rush of steel and glass, yellow and black, deadly bumblebees buzzing by on asphalt flightpaths. I listen to private public conversations in five word snippets: a mish-mashed history of a city in featherlight personal fragments. I am rehashing the past and re-imagining the future and I am overjoyed and mournful and thankful and drained. I am here wandering the streets talking about the ghosts of what we were, what we (who?) are now. We (all) are always ghosts to one another, ephemeral and full of nostalgic snapshots, all sepia backgrounds and Kodachrome sunsets.

I am still tumbling through the emotions of the sea, the water within trembling and salty. Land under my feet feels less grounded than the ocean under flexing limbs.
I have shifted, I am shifting, I will shift and its hard to tell if there is a moment without such movement. What is stability? What is the opposite of change? Stagnation does not appeal but the notion of forever flowing downstream, forks, branches, boulders challenging the way, is daunting. Where is my compass? Where are my oars in this corporal raft of mine? I know they are somewhere close by but the turbulence shakes them out of my grasp.
Then I realize:
my hands are clenched, unable to hold anything.

I relax, think on the perfection of the stars and the wind over white-horsed water, the intimacy of palm to palm and the heart fluttering capacity of sideways glances. I think on years remembered and savored with knowing souls (ghosts are real too) and lush green veins in perfect oak leaves.
My hands open, ready to hold it all.

We are love, we are change, we are flowing in the eternal.
We are the city and sea, we are the salt and wind.
We are.

Sensing land and sea

Magnolias.
No...dogwood?
Wet earth.
Green... the smell of green.
The velvety dampness wraps it's heavy tendrils around me, filling my lungs with the (re)memory of land. Each breath intense and pungent, I wonder how I lived without these smells.
Winding up through the Savannah River after five days at sea, five days without land, without the stability of roots and a fixed sky.
On board the briny air fades into normal, the stink of diesel from the stern or passing container ships or the savory promise of dinner cooked on the diagonal breaking the monotony. The stale, sticky environment below decks, hatches dogged and salty, keeping out waves breaking over the bow, sea mist filtering in through the companionway, the sound of sea birds and mumbled speech on deck.
Keeping in exhaled thoughts, memories of uninterrupted sleep on a horizontal bunk, stomachs twisted and sore.
Where the olfactory ebbs, the auditory flows into the abandoned crevices. Every flap of sail, every halyard whapping vibration down the mast, every strained pitch of the pounding engine becomes an extension of the sailor's body, another corporal system to monitor and alter. For weeks or months to come on land I will jump out of bed if I hear the wind pick up outside, if I hear a truck diesel backfire, if rain threatens to pour through non-existent open hatches. I am positively on edge, in tune with nature and machine.

Up the river, past explosively lit power plants and massive container ships (two bells cap'n), past dredges and tugs, past nuns and cans lit in Christmas colors on a dark n' stormy (goslings rum) sort of night. The city of Savannah lures us with its loom, with the promise of calm water and rest. The muscle memory of the recent battery of 15-foot waves and seafoam spreading wind screaming across our eardrums shakes off our brains and bodies with each bend in the channel. By the time we are tied up on the dock I have forgotten about breathing deep in the dogwood and earth, my eyes and ears distracted by the quiet yet electric stimulation of the sleeping city.

Land and sea, sight and sound, ebb and flow.
Awake and awakening.
The smell of green is now too a memory.

Wallowing

The Southern Cross hangs slightly crooked on the horizon. It will slowly shift itself to upright and then fall to the opposite side by morning light. I will be half asleep in my bunk then, midnight to two watch over, dreaming of washing machines and tornadoes as I'm jostled and smooshed against the
leecloth
hull
leecloth
hull
in this broad reaching wallow.

But it is 1am now and my hands hold salty wood and metal. I can't see the waves but I feel their constant tugging, feel them nudge and shove and slap this fiberglass playmate. The compass is dark, the lightbulb blown. I can't see the directions, numbers, course. I am ruled by a slowly rotating disc in turn dictated by a sliver of metal pointing to a wintery north I cannot imagine in this warm breeze. I shift my eyes to more current technology: a digital readout of our heading shifts by the moment
243
220
239
255
and is near impossible to steer by. I work against the waves as we slide over crests and deep into troughs, water rising above the height of the combing. The sea douses me with briny fingers and dumps foamy deluges into the cockpit. My hair is plastered against my face as I squint at the compasses old and new, trying to force a steady course as the following seas pick up the ass-end of the boat and push her (me) aside.

Another splash, another curse, my arms grow weary.
I give up on maintaining the strictest course.
I gaze past the shrouds at the stars.
The thoughts roll in: first light and variable and then bam, an unforecasted cold front. I am knocked down by the force of memories. I try to push them aside, think happy things, be love and all that but soon my mind circles back to thoughts darker than the spaces between stars.
All those things I wish I hadn't said or all those things I wish I had. All those houses I could've settled into to lead a 'normal' life. All those kids/businesses/books I could have birthed by now. Those very few but far too scary drunken nights doing stupid shit to avoid painful emotions when in reality what I really needed to do was cry into the sea. Or scream into the wind. Or open my heart up so much it risked breaking what already felt broken but was actually so tightly wound it was suffocating.

A wave splashes over the bow, reminding me where who how I am now.
Sirius catches my eye and sparkling forgiveness shines down on me.
I breathe in deep, hold on tightly to the wheel, feel the salt on my skin. A wave passes over me but this time instead of a soaking spray of seawater it is a diaphanous sheet of relief. The squall has passed! A smile breaks over my wet face and I laugh up to Orion, his sword held high and bright in the darkness. EVERY choice, good or bad, whether I thought I was in control or not, has led me to THIS very moment. And this moment is pretty fucking cool so there are no mistakes, there can be no regrets as there is only the one path that is made with choice after choice.

I am on course. When I drifted off, staring soft up at the stars instead of the compass, my body felt where the boat (we) needed to go. All those little adjustments were made without my busy mind getting involved. I am steering by the stars, or rather, they are steering through me when I ease up and let the universe guide me home.

Swallows

They appeared at dusk halfway between Jamaica and Cuba. Darting through the lifelines, fluttering their minuscule wings to keep up with our 11 knots under main and jib, then letting the wind propel them backwards in an improvised game of aerial leap frog.
Five tiny feathered bodies crossing a large swath of Caribbean Sea. Where did they come from? Where were they going? Will they all make it?
They swooped in towards the boom then careened backwards past the backstay. We clapped at their maneuvers. We gasped as they deftly averted collisions with the rigging. We cheered them on and laughed at their pure play. They were the like the dolphins that had visited us earlier that day, darting past the bow and tossing themselves into the air off our beam. Creatures above and below enjoying our company and vice versa.

Bundles of feathers and tiny beating hearts became bold. They went for the lines, for the mast spreaders, onto the aft rail, clinging with their claws for seconds before losing their balance and being jettisoned back into the cool night air. One managed to hang onto the lifelines for a minute or so before getting bored and taking flight. I imagined they were daring one another to see how close to the humans they could get or how long they could claw the big fiberglass beast before it swatted them off with halyard lines and jib sheets (gibberish to them too).

The darkness settled and it was hard to see our fellow travelers. They appeared for minutes, settle on the lifelines with a newly mastered good grip, then glide over the water and away. We thought they were gone for good when one, then two, landed on the aft deck. Huddled behind the cockpit combing they realized they were out of the breeze, they didn't have to flap furiously or fear falling into the sea. (if that was even a fear. do birds fear?)
A respite between islands! Did their internal GPSs go haywire with this new information? Did they try to reason it out why the ancestral memory didn't include this little tidbit of information about a potential pitstop? Or did they just huddle together and tweet to one another how fucking lucky they were to find this sweet ass bonus? (I like to think the swallows have dirty sailor mouths too)

Because even when you don't necessarily have to rest, when you know in your bones that your body can make it, when everyone else in the group is pushing on unassisted, sometimes its not a bad idea to take a load off and enjoy the free ride while you can.

(And I swear I heard the smaller one tweet: "I'm on a motherfucking boat!")

C to the U to the B to the A

The thumping diesel engines of hulking ferro-cement fishing boats billowing exhaust in the channels between reefs. Fishing pangas with triangular sails drifting through mangrove covered cayos, the fisherman sailors smiling and waving as we pass. Mountains towering over six-centuries-old Trinidad, tendrils of smoke rising up across the glassy calm bay. Pelicans gliding feet above the blues, browns, greens.

My first images of Cuba were from the water. I wasn't sure what to expect on land. Communists in drab uniforms, bread lines down the block, starving and angry youth dreaming of stealing away on a boat to America?

An old fort stood guard at the mouth of the bay to Cienfuegos, our port of entry. A crumbling sea wall next to it proclaimed "Bienvenidos Socialista!" Small houses with fishing boats tied up to rickety docks lined the waterway. A woman stood on her dock watching us go past, hand on a hip, apron fluttering. Laundry mimicked our sails streaming out from clotheslines in the breeze.

We steamed into the enormous harbor towards the city. Container ships and power plant stacks dominated the horizon but as we drew closer I could see church spires and old warehouses, intricately decorated wooden houses next to monolithic cement hotels. The marina and anchorage were packed with charter catamarans, cruising monohulls, and (wtf?) a sunken pirate ship. Then I started laughing as the whistles and yells reverberated over the water: a fleet of kids in Optimists weaved through their course as their sailing instructor barked commands. We could have been in Nantucket (except that the instructor was yelling in spanish).
Welcome to Cuba! Seriously, what was I expecting? Dug out canoes and thatched huts?

***

The young inspector picked up the package of Oreos and examined them. He looked at me briefly (I nodded and smiled) before ripping them open and depositing a cookie into his mouth. He cocked his head in that universal 'not bad' gesture. He offered them around to the other guys in their drab government-issued uniforms but they laughed and refused as if he were offering pot to a D.A.R.E club. Then he went for the tortilla chips. Another young officer in a blue jumpsuit (he was in charge of the two cocker spaniels on board) succumbed and tentatively reached his hand into the bag. He pulled out a blue chip and hesitantly placed it into his mouth. Another 'not bad' shrug. Really? Has he never had a chip before? Maybe just not a blue one. And Oreos? I felt like an asshole for such thoughts. We were probably 150 miles from the USA but oh so far.

He and the other customs and immigration officials signed and stamped papers, let the drug dogs run through the boat sniffing around. They opened cupboards and lockers, wanted to know how old I was and if I had kids. I struggled in my very bad spanish and cursed the fact that I hadn't listened to my language learning podcasts on the delivery down. After two hours of inspections and a round of beers, the kicking and yelping dogs were handed down into the dinghy, big black boots were put back on, handshakes and smiles exchanged.

We were welcomed to Cuba, socialists or not.

The one day I had to explore town both reinforced and shattered assumptions. The classic American cars (I've always wanted a '57 Chevy Bel Air!) next to horse drawn carriages and pedicabs, the crumbling grand buildings, the rum and coffee guzzled in profusion- stuff I'd seen in photographs and in documentaries. But the friendliness, the (seemingly) non-issue of racial diversity, the pride in Cuba... it was as palpable and sweet as the huge ruby papaya I bought for 25 cents at the farmers market.

I'm sure there's a measure of unrest and discontent lurking behind smiles like scurrying cockroaches underneath bags of rationed rice. There are long lines for a very limited variety of foodstuffs at the "supermarkets." A jar of peanut butter costs six converted pesos which is about six bucks which is expensive even in American terms and simply outrageous considering a huge head of lettuce or a loaf of bread costs 10 cents. Boxes of cookies (no Oreos) were kept behind the counter.

Working meaningless jobs (or not being able to find one), widespread lack of access to diverse and affordable food choices, frustration at the current state of government... our countries seem to have a lot in common. (At least Cubans have good health care, right?)

Sure I met Cubans who want to leave the country to at least see more of the world if not emigrate. Sure the lack of funds to repair dangerously neglected homes is a massive problem. I didn't get to talk real politics so I don't know how the "man on the street" feels about all this or if they can even talk about how they feel without fear of government reprisal.
All I know is that I loved the feeling there. And, dare I say as one with almost limitless choices in comparison, does the lack of choice in foodstuffs make the Cubans healthier? Are Oreos and chips necessary for happiness? More food is needed, yes, but do the processed ones need to be available?

On land, I saw the uniforms and literal bread lines and kids hanging out on street corners. On and in the water I saw, or rather didn't see, the wildlife as perhaps much of it has been caught to feed hungry bellies.
Yet there is something about Cuba (or at least Cienfuegos) that makes it one of the most vibrant and beautiful and (hands down) friendliest places I've visited in the Caribbean. As my friend Paul from Jamaica described the social spirit, "You give a Cuban a tin of Vienna sausages and he will open it up and dole them out evenly. He doesn't even think of keeping them all for himself. Sharing is so deeply engrained in their culture."

I'm not sure if I'd keep Vienna sausages all for myself either but I got what he was saying, and I felt it when I was there. The question of course is whether the sharing is innate or indoctrinated and enforced by fear. Tell me your secrets Cuba!

Another reason to return, to hoist that single starred flag into the rigging, to explore and talk and discover all the things governments (theirs and ours) want to keep secret.

Hasta luego Socialista! Espero pronto.
(Si, mi espanol is muy malo. Claro.)