Towards adventure
August 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
Yes, we did happen upon this boat at the Egg Harbor Marina only moments after I had made up my mind to own a sailboat someday.
Isn’t she gorgeous? The red is so striking. The lines are so clean and pretty. The boat props up that “For Sale” sign like an invitation towards adventure. But the timing! The timing is not right.
I feel about this boat very much like I felt about a gray Percheron I met at a horse auction I went to while I was still a college student. The horse was positioned near the door so as I went in and out I kept walking past him, and I kept stopping to say hello, and even though I was more interested in a riding horse something about this boy made me feel like the universe wanted me to have him. Then someone came and told me the horse was being sold because his partner had died, and I wanted him more than ever. It was like everything around me was pressing in and trying to say, without saying it, This ought to be.
The horse did not come home with me, but I have remembered that moment even after all this time, always with a bit of sadness, and a bit of a sense of loss. But why? I have seen many a horse I couldn’t have. This felt different from simply wanting.
I have to wonder: are such moments times when one’s fate is at a crossroads? When you get to play a hand in shaping your destiny? Is the universe trying to help you know which path leads towards your best bliss? Or is it simply imagination, fanciful desires of what might be? I want to believe it to be something beyond my own self, but then, if I ever conclude that it is, and if I ever take the seemingly unreasonable and impulsive risk, do I have the courage to ride out the consequences, unpredictable as they may be?
Door County, Wisconsin
August 9, 2012 § 12 Comments
I am drawn by the water. It stretches far away and it is fresh.
Suddenly having a boat seems the most desirable thing in the world. I imagine living on one. I imagine loving it. I remember the book A Severe Mercy and the boat The Gray Goose, and consider what a wonderful thing it sounds, a life of sailing everywhere and reading out in the open water and knowing the wind and many shorelines.
On the Door County peninsula, between the little towns full of quaint shops and local artists, we find the beaches. This is where we most want to be.
It’s about the blues of the sky, the pale sand, the smooth gray stones, the green of mosses. It’s about swimming and hiking and scrambling.
It’s about sleeping on the sand, and scattering sand particles in your tent as you change into dry clothes. It’s about smelling like the lake, and the campfire. It’s about s’mores and late night coffee.
It’s about all these things, and then, it’s about us.
Family.
Kinds of Honey 