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.