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I knew there would be days like this,
I just wish someone would have told me how many! |
Dutch Harbor Gear DHG rough and ready. No such thing as good weather here only good clothing! I find myself in the perpetual company of people who love the rain and love to laugh about it. This may be my definition of true happiness.It's the locals,some emos, who just get wet,others, poets, who go dancing in the rain, hoping to be struck by lightning. The song remains the same in this infinite playlist called the rainforest. Charlie Chaplin liked to walk in the rain because nobody could see his tears. I don't cry, like the Little Tramp because it's over. I smile, like the Big Kahuna because it happened.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Marcel ProustTo be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere.
How I do time, is how I create and re-create myself. On a ship, one lives in the grand manner of writers. We basically do nothing all day. At sea, I could do my mind no greater service than remain in my default mode of idleness.
Here, on land, in the Alaskan wilderness, is the preservation of the
outter world. The sturdy distinctions between blue collar work and leisure, have been broken down by mother nature which is beautiful but will kill you if you are not prepared. (Think Deadliest Catch Meets Ice Road Truckers) So you squirrel away money for a rainy day- which is everyday here!
On a ship, it is basically traveling for people who really can't be bothered doing it. (Think Love Boat Meets Fantasy and Gilligan's Island ). The battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low- nothing happens next.
Yet it has been a salvaging of my
inner life, the "right kind" of nothing, and a way to recover my whole life, a lived vocation, a principle.It wasn't the 6 or 8 hours visiting these exotic and far away places that made the experience, but my recollection of it: It was the day after day at sea, and of getting there. The endurance. The idleness that was the mother of possibility.
My idle hands, living like the idle rich, a slap in the face to blue chip ambition. Time is money, money is time, and the opposite of having is doing nothing at all. After all, the goal of ambition is sublime leisure.---where, with my 2PM power naps, I remained a well-rested being who had only to dream with my eyes wide open and behold.
If a little idleness is dangerous, the cure for it is not to be less idle but to be more idle, to be idle all the time.
I used to make things up. full of magic, innocence,
feeling, and vision, I would "embelish" on the truth, to make a better story. I was actually affirming what I wanted-state it and create it. Now as Time passes, little by little everything that I had spoken in falsehood became true. All the lies have been washed away by these last few years at sea. It's nothing but the truth.
