The suitcase

The suitcase this morning felt so familiar as I packed it, and my little dog, Bronwen, dropped down into depression when she saw it happening. The security lines, taking out my laptop and cell phone and keys, taking off my jacket and shoes, pulling out the sandwich bag of cosmetics; then rushing to throw it all back together and head down some long walkway, linoleum and stainless steel handrails, and windows that look out onto tarmac. On the plane, buckle up, air on, lights out, pull the window shade, put on the head phones. Off the plane and into the ladies room, where I find myself swaying in front of the mirror. No, I am not fainting. I'm a sailor!

What fun, I am still a sailor, and I hope I keep a little sailor inside forever.

Full Speed Ahead!

Did I ever mention that the MV Explorer is the fastest little cruise ship in the world? No kidding, she is. We did 31 knots on our way to Miami that last day? I celebrated by getting on the elliptical machine and going as fast as I could while the big blue flashed past.

Good preparation I suppose for this...LA this weekend, DC next week, Kernville next weekend, Sacramento the next week, Chicago the next week. Then back to LA for ten blessed weeks of terra firma. Or such is my fantasy.

Alternate Realities

Today I used car keys, and a debit card, and I grocery shopped, and cooked for the first time in four months. I have been without cell phone, without credit cards and debit cards, without car keys, without any keys. I remembered that shopping and cooking are laborious and time-consuming, and also satisfying and delicious. As I built up my stew, adding layer upon layer of ingredients, Elizabeth sighed and said "The house smells so good; it hasn't smelled like this in so long."

I have yet to unpack the suitcases and begin the laundry. Yes, I recall this reality, and it moves me away from that reality, where I did not swear, or whine, or vent my spleen, where I never missed anything I was supposed to be for any reason. Even sick I showed up and said "I'm sick so you might not get my best performance, but I am here."

Wonder what I will learn about being here; wonder what I might be able to do differently for having been there, there on the ship, there in South Africa, and Cambodia, there in Guilin and there on Mt. Koyasan, there on the equator, there on the international date line, there where the Southern Cross rides the horizon, there where I was rocked to sleep, there where the dark at night was deep and the silence a great cocoon in which to rest at night.

Rock n Roll in Emerald City

I am on land in the USA! Key West, Florida. The first thing I noticed pulling in to Miami is what a rich place this! Odd because it is not as glamorous as Hong Kong. It is not the glitz, but the width of the streets and the fact of landscaped median strips, and the clean and high functioning equipment and the smooth organization of life. Wow. Emerald City.

I have acquired a funny new characteristic which I will no doubt soon lose, but for the moment I sway quite a bit, literally and physically. I am not yet off the ship, though I have this staggering sense of having just been around the world. It feels bigger having done it than it did in the process of doing it.

Meanwhile, I look like I have some strange neurological syndrome and, in fact, that is exactly what I do have.

Woman Alive

I am reminded at journey's end of the G.K. Chesterton novel, Man Alive, that I found so compelling when I was my students' age. Innocent Smith is the character who goes around the world in order to find the life at home....

And, in the words of the poet Rumi:

Either this deep desire of mine
will be found on this journey,
or when I get back home.

It may be that the satisfaction I need
depends on my going away, so that when I have gone
and come back, I'll find it at home.

I will search for the Friend with all my passion
and all my energy until I learn
that I don't need to search.

If I had known the real way it was
I would have stopped all the looking around.

But that knowing depends
on the time spent looking.

Flying Fish, Make a Wish

The flying fish have been our constant companions. At first I thought they were birds and wondered how the little things managed to get way out to the middle of the ocean. Okay, I was no sailor. But now I am. These little fish shoot out of the water and spread their dorsal fins, which look for all the world like wings and they soar along the surface of the water for great lengths. Often half a dozen or so take to the air at the same time. Flying fish.

I wish for world peace. I wish to make good decisions. I wish to die knowing for sure that I lived. And, of course, this adventure is on the "oh how I have lived side of the scale." Back to world peace. I don't want to just wish for it, but to imagine with clarity and focus, to hold it in my heart in spite of the vulnerability of such radical hope, to work for it with my words, with my hands. World peace. "Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." This was our closing song at convocation tonight.

Kay Widdows, who gave the faculty address, described a series of Faure songs that express the sentiments of a young man who lives in a port town and watches the tall ships and tries to convince himself he wants to live a safe and familiar life on shore. But in the last song he knows "that I have great departures inside of me." In the morning I arrive home, having circumnavigated the planet. But that arrival is a departure from this life, this ship, this journey. And Elizabeth and I have more great departures in the very near future. That, I suppose is how adventures start, with great departures.

What goes home with me?

For today and tomorrow the literal question is, what goes home with me? Those things which have given great pleasure to my daily life will likely go to Courtney, my French press and thermos and aromatherapy spray. The time for final sorting is here on the material plane. I have five large boxes packed and ready to go, a big duffel bag, a suitcase, and a backpack. And I have already sent off three boxes of teaching materials. That's a lot of stuff. Surprisingly, I don't have the sense that I really shopped too much, as I thought I might. And I don't have more than the US Customs limit either. Perhaps I will sing a different tune when I see the shipping tab!

What else, though? What else will I take home from going around the world? A sense of the aloneness, the essential 'I-ness' of life, the way birth and death are "I" events, at least from the self perspective. Because going around the world in a ship is hard to articulate, much less to 'get' as a listener. Yet I question this interpretation even as I write it, because we are not born alone but born to a minimum of a mother and a world. And so, though I am enculturated to think of indescribable experience as belonging in a lonely way to me, it is actually all held together by the communal nature of reality, the web of existing in relationships. And that is probably what I will take home, an enriched self who, to the extent that she gives it away, will share the enrichment in rather subtle ways.

A not so subtle reality for me is that I have done something I really wanted to do in life; I have taken time from what I must do in order to do something I want to do. And I feel very energized by that....

"If the world is to be healed by human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being, and who can rest in the vitality of that larger body." (Joanna Macy)

After Costa Rica

When we headed south along the western coast of Costa Rica, I headed homeward in my psyche. I got up Monday morning to write business letters, to complete my faculty evaluation of the journey, to write to my tax attorney. You get the gist here, all business of the homeward bound type.

There are wonderful people on this ship, but I don't know who will come forward with me into life and who will be a good memory and who will fade from memory. And this is not just about whom I would choose as companions; it's about where they live and what they do for a living and the kinds of things that decide whether our paths will cross again.

I heard yesterday of a young couple who went to the jeweler to have their wedding rings made and asked for a wave-pattern. The jeweler, not surprisingly, thought it an odd choice for a wedding ring and inquired as to its significance. Yes, you guessed it; they met on Semester at Sea. Among the students are some of the most privileged, self-assured, and over-confident of their value young people I have ever met. But I have also had the most beautiful, adventurous, caring, energetic and creative students, and their light is so full of light that it is hard to see anything else when you share space with them. And maybe that says something about being a human life, that the potential for light is much more important than highly rewarded mediocrity.

I have not had in my many years of teaching the sense of really turning over the world to a new generation as I have on this voyage. Maybe it is that I am older now, maybe it is that they are different from 'us,' my generation. (This experience gives me an understanding that the generation up from me sees mine as different, too.) Many of these students have been extremely well cared for, probably unlike any other generation before them, and it shows, though they are not at all aware of it. And this probably sets them up for some rough and tumble loss of innocence experiences. But I like these young people, and I might even trust them with the world if I had a choice!

The Mother Ship

This is something I share with every person on this ship, but not with any of you who have not been here: what it is like to come home to the MV Explorer after being out as a stranger in a strange land. The ship is home; it is a thing that is like a person in its familiarity, its safety, its containment. You arrive tired and dirty, having been on hyper-alert as to your safety, and hyperactive in the mental effort it takes to figure everything out for the first time, and tired from carrying all your stuff while walking from place to place. And you see this blue and white ship, with its familiar seven decks (plus one added this voyage!), its sea of faces around you, its sea of oceans beneath you, its familiar rocking, its nooks and crannies; your heart jumps as you yearn for its comforts.

In three more days, we won't see this ship anymore, and we will lose a mother, odd though that may sound. And, in three days, we won't see each other anymore, the 1000 people who have been our town, our church, our wellness program, our social club, and our penance for the last four months. In three days, we will all return to an overwhelming amount of consumer and personal choices, and we will be strangers to it. In three days, we lose this pace, where you sometimes have to sit and stare at oceans and skies because you are mesmerized, and we go back to that pace where you don't even know there are oceans and skies.

In three more days, I begin to realize, we face a long psychological exercise in integrating within ourselves life experiences that don't mix, something like the proverbial oil and water, I imagine. But I really can't imagine, I can only plan to face it when it happens.

Icons for the journey

As I pack up my cabin, I see things anew: I had photos of Molly Brown and Elizabeth held by magnets to the cabin side of my bathroom door, where I can see them easily from my bed.
And over these, a birthday card in the shape of a dragonfly, and opened to the inscription, sent to me by my sister Mary four years ago, three months before she died, inscribed this way, "Life is one long colorful trip! Love, Mary."

Then I have done well to treat it as such these past four months! I do really believe Mary would cheer for me; and I hope she really does. As for Molly, we are inextricably together. As for Elizabeth, I will see her in a few days!

P.S. As for my Parrot, who has yet to tell me her name, I have some photos of her which will soon be posted to the blog.

My Magic Moments

I had a lovely day in Costa Rica, where the people are sweet, the scenery is beautiful, the fruits and flowers and coffee fill your nostrils with happiness, and the pleasure of Pura Vida rides on the breeze... and I got to practice my Spanish, something the warm Ticos are happy to indulge.

But my favorite moment was when I walked into the backyard behind a souvenir shop and found a large black toucan with a yellow beak and lime green eyes, and two green parrots in large bare cages. The parrots especially were depressed, but I know that they like singing, and I simply long to evoke their liveliness, their interest, their parroty joie de vivre... so, first I said "hi" with a parrot accent. Ooops. I tried again, "hola." Nada. Then I sang "Some enchanted evening" from South Pacific. I squeaked along very badly, but parrots seem to like that song, and after a couple of verses the smaller parrot stretched her neck and squeaked back. Then I tried humming the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven's 9th. She liked that one; she sang along towards the end of the second round, coming in right on the note, as if to show me she knew the tune, and she did!

At that point the toucan who had begun his rather high and harsh barking in a descending cadence also began to dance; clearly, he wanted some attention, so I did my best to mimic his utterance and we played together for a moment -- oh, those lime green eyes, what a charmer! And now my parrot was a bit jealous -- ah, relationship complexities. Back to the parrot and desperately searching for parroty tunes. She liked the Welsh hymn, Let All Things Now Living, well enough. Then I remembered -- thank you, Barbara Castillo! -- that I know a song in Spanish, and, with great delight, sang "Despierta, mi bien, despierta. Mira, que amanecio...." She got quite excited and engaged me in a duet for a couple of rounds of the whole song. I told her in Spanish that she was the bird of my heart and said good-bye. It was hard for me to wake up her liveliness and engage her heart, just to leave. But this is what I know, that a real moment of love understood between two beings can warm a very cold and dark night of body, soul, or both. I know that I left a spark of my love with her; the other parrot never received it, but watched the two of us fairly impassively. This communion across species is a joy of joys for me; that green parrot who found the heart to be roused left a spark of her love, too, and I shall be warmed. I shall be warmed.

Sea Life

It was immediately apparent that I had somewhere back in history, recorded no doubt in my genes, put a skin bag around a personal portion of salt water and went off to make a more private kind of life on land. That’s how my first days at sea were, such heightened awareness of the sea within, while in a not-at-all new relationship to the big sea out there. Here inside this body the fluids slosh with the tides, and it is only this fragile freckled membrane that prevents a total reunion.

I have been surprised by the big empty, the lack of life out in the big ocean, but I learned today that it is the equivalent of a desert out there; perhaps we should have seen some whales, but they would have been only passing through the great waters on their way to something else. Yesterday and today we are sailing through the something else, coastal waters, where life should be abundant.

Yesterday I saw four juvenile sea turtles, green turtles, but no adults, and today I saw a larger juvenile with a great scar on his head. The adults, I am told, are virtually gone and it takes a long time for them to mature, so there is a vastly diminished pool of breeding turtles. This brings to mind a cultural theater event I saw in Guilin, which took as its theme the mating and marrying rituals of the ethnic minorities in the ‘autonomous region,’ (not a formal Chinese province, as a nod of respect towards these non-Chinese peoples). There were gorgeous traditional dances and costumes, and one very elaborate community dance that is begun when someone shouts, “Hooray, these two are getting married, human life will go on for another generation, hooray!” I was so struck by the possibility that people would even consider it might be otherwise, but, when I consider it from the point of view of others, like sea turtles and tunas, who take a long time to grow up, well…I would love to hear them shout ‘hooray, these two are mating, and our life will be carried on!” And today, Sidsel and I pondered the recent findings that, at one point -- about 70 thousand years ago -- the human population was down to about two thousand individuals. Most people don’t know how close we came to never speaking -- much less writing, or making music, or herding, or farming, all things that happened well after that moment of coming so close to no ‘hooray!’

Today I saw a huge pod of spinner dolphins, having first noticed a sudden general commotion above the water, brown boobies and yellow-billed boobies flying in excited circles, and flying fish skimming low across the water. I noticed when a happy booby intercepted a shimmering fish-flight. Then I saw the dolphins as the ship plowed straight towards them and they peeled off, port and starboard, cavorting in the ship’s wake, jumping and spinning, at least a hundred spinner dolphins, and I watched for about five minutes as we passed each other. I was so happy to see even an island of abundant life.

The waters are thin on fish, and it is not just a romantic notion, they are fished out. You can see these clumps of murky wash just below the surface of the ocean, kind of floating islands that are made of shore trash that is submerged. I asked one of our biologists what the turtles eat. “Jellyfish.” And I had been seeing jellyfish. “Oh good!” I said. “Not so good,” replied Tatjana “because they think all the plastic bags are jellyfish….”

Evelyn is writing a very funny blog about what you learn about people when they are grouped together, eating Chinese food from a lazy Susan table. I was at table with her and I am one of the people, and it is funny as hell. Why don’t I write about that?

Well, hear this: the news about Canada Geese, gotten in conversation with our other biologist, Vic, is good. Canada Geese are fine, their population is hardy, if substantially rerouted in annual migration. I recently wrote a poem about the diminished number of them flying over southern California in the fall, ending with a rhetorical reflection that they may have found a new south, or a new way south. In fact, they have found both. How is that for good news? And I am so glad that I anticipated the possibility so I don’t have to trash the poem!