Sovereign Nations

I’m a sailor and a storyteller, and nothing provides new stories like sailing.

I’ve been at sea for eleven years on three boats.  I’ve lived at over twenty marinas and explored many bodies of water.  The particular nature of each situation has begun to gain dimension – each new thing is both like and unlike my previous experiences.  I have gained tools and knowledge that have allowed good instincts to develop into skill.

Long-winded way of saying I have experience.

In 1998, James and I started looking at boats with the intention of living aboard and sailing around the world.  Relying on one another, learning and growing together, we have developed a way of being in and moving around our world that is in line with our beliefs, desires, and needs.  We have learned about comfortable and uncomfortable compromises.  We keep getting closer and closer to our ideal selves and lives.

I am proud of my accomplishments and enjoy crafting the happenings of my life into stories for specific situations, audiences, reactions.  In conversation, I might tell two very different stories about the same storm that chased James and I into the Saratoga Passage.  That’s because my experience of sailing is multi-dimensional and storytelling is linear.  A single near-broach taught me: the feel of a boat nearly out of control; the interaction of sail, wind, hull, and rudder in regaining control;  my ability to step out of my body’s way and allow it to respond with natural understanding; that a seasick cat is a hazard aboard; and not least that I could be hurt or killed by my own action or inaction.  Integrating all those lessons into a single story is more than most cocktail party crowds want from their sea tales.

More important than my history and what it has shown of my character, I am aiming at improvement.  To truly know me is to know what I want to do and who I want to be.  It is to understand that I delight in my love for James because it brings me closer to my ideal.  It is to understand that compromises others find easy won’t work for me.  I can’t work and pay into a retirement plan and start traveling when I have my future taken care of.

This blog is all of these things, I hope.  Exhibitions of my accomplishments, stories drawn from my experiences, and reflections on the ways I am closer or farther from my ideal and what is affecting that distance.

Here’s me, getting closer.

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