This is my last week off work before I go back to the boat world for a few months. It’s crazy to be writing about boats in this very same blog that I once so long ago wrote about boats, the cycle of things and the connections everywhere are both so evident. Yesterday I was laying in the grass in front of my house with my beautiful son and my gorgeous wife. Bits of the magnolia tree had fallen and collected from it’s recent pruning and Salem sat before the most amazing photo I’ve ever seen of him. I began to think of other times I’ve felt so free and suddenly as if a giant wave had passed over me I was transported through the travels of my life.
Long ago I sent out to travel the world and I had never even dared to come up with a good reason why. “Why” would imply a question and I knew such self-interrogation would only come up unanswered. Maybe I was a coward, maybe too young, but the world scared the hell out of me. Life scared me. I wasn’t afraid of death but afraid of a life less lived. It seemed to me that our culture, at least the one I’m familiar with here in the Midwest, had been missing out on something. The young, punk-minded boy that I was wanted to feel something older, I knew there was wisdom in all things older, I had a feeling somehow. Maybe that’s why I used to watch documentaries about tribes in Africa and South America who had so little contact with the outside world. As a college kid who experimented in ways to chug beer and design illogical bongs out of aquarium parts, I had begun to feel the need to find something deeper in my freedoms. The balance between my understanding of living life to it’s fullest and my desire to understand more about the ways of the old world were something always called into consideration.
I long for a type of freedom as there are many freedoms. To me, freedom means being lost in nature where the Earth is your guide and her mountains are your teachers. That’s a heavy concept for the world of sights and sounds to understand as we so frequently and unceremoniously dedicate our lives to our careers and our pursuits of something greater. I respect the art of work, I plan to work as long as I can. In this brief experience here on Earth I’ve called many professions my job but nothing has ever brought me the satisfaction of being called a teacher.
I’m working on it. In recent posts I’ve felt choked up by uncertainty but I see clearly now what I must do. I’ll finish my degree this year and even before doing that I’ll be calling myself a teacher again. This time around I’m going to start remotely, living with my family wherever our passions and curiosities may take us. I want to wake up near the mountains, grateful for the lessons they have prepared for me that day.
Man, I’ve been working hard. Too hard. It cost me a trip to the emergency room and a replacement on my radial head of my right elbow. It could have cost me much more and I shudder to think about it. There is no denying now that this was clearly an act of fate and I need no more proof that there are forces in this world stronger than you or I can comprehend.
“The universe is conspiring in your favor.” Somebody once told me this and once in a while the truth of that statement surfaces itself. For now, I need four and a half months of washing boats. Washing boats. Washing boats. I remember writing those same words into this same blog (the mookfish version) so long ago when I was waiting to be sent to Samoa with the Peace Corps. That was the most amazing feeling being on the verge of something so great and today it’s even more amazing to be feeling that all over again. Believe in me, in us.
