Curaçao-Black Elk Speaks

 Time spent in "ritual space", and getting in touch with your  inner Wild Man Avatar renews  mojo and a sense of life as a quest. Super Bowl Sunday--the high holy day of masculinity for AmeriCANS is one way to do it. So is cruising to exotic ports of call.

FADE IN: Enya's Caribbean Blue  is  a  new-age  speed bump  in a 405- Los- Angry-Cars(LA)  traffic jam. Sail Away, her other hit,  is  navel gazing concussion  in a  Lakota-style sweat lodge ceremony . Regular or extra crispy, take your pick.

"Everything you can imagine is real" ― Picasso

 My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel and the power of now. If I wanted to be a multinational soul, I couldn't do it in cities where I taught English like New York or Los Angeles, Paris or Tokyo alone-I needed to get consecrated by sailing on the oceans. It's a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know anyone; where, as Melville said,"God's one and only voice is Silence."

Chief Reif and Crazy Horse

I write my own rules for nautical success: continued enthusiasm despite failure after failure. 

Ship Happens-Success without fulfillment=failure

Living on a ship, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.

 After 11 ships, yes ELEVEN, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America. “It’s not about the money” is the lesser known, I don’t have a dream speech. Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said “Money is life’s report card. I've seen this kind of "success" as a drug of choice.More than that, success without fulfillment, is failure, yet, this kind of failure is going to get your best material.

As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can’t into cans and leveraged my dreams into serendipity a thousand unseen helping hands.

 Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia- the despairing refusal to be oneself.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you.

Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into slavery and the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism. It's a mask that eats up the face. It's also like winning the lottery, a currency, and I wanted to spend it well. Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions.

 If I wanted to serve my country, I had to betray it. What was the blue chip idea worth betraying? What was the lie I told myself? The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving. The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain ( culture shock) to make a boring life interesting and re framing (Home is a feeling not a place) travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.--- A 1 man National geographic on that everywhere trip. The good, the bad and the ugly American- Why be difficult when you can be impossible--Hell was about to be other people,other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way".

 I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come. Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity..The cure for my ennui and boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday".

There's nothing ethical about the work ethic on ships. I got paid in cash, visited nice places, had a hotel room and six all you can eat meals a day! If the passengers were behaving badly, there was always a new group every 7 or 14 days to keep my interest. Now that I didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the w2 world of 9 to 5. I was a time millionaire. It was going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.

 Let the Orinoco Flow

There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. It is a known fact that when it's rainy or snowy, you have to merely think of an island paradise, and you are transported to that" Happy Place". A day-dream is as rich and real as anything on Earth. Picasso was right. All you can dream about can become real. I have shoveled snow and now I am shoveling sunshine. i always wanted to be in warm places in winter, and now All I want for Christmas is a sun tan.

Sail Away... from the North to the South, Ebudæ into Khartoum, from the deep sea of Clouds to the island of the moon, carry me on the waves to the lands I've never been, carry me on the waves to the lands I've never seen.



“Long, long journey through the darkness Long, long way to go But what are miles across the ocean To the heart that's coming home?” ― Enya