Curaçao-Black Elk Speaks
The Elixir · Ocean Navigator
Caribbean Blue Journey
Eleven ships, exotic ports, ritual space, and the decision to exchange material success for time, resourcefulness, and a life that felt real.
Time spent in ritual space—and getting in touch with your inner Wild Man Avatar—renews mojo and restores a sense of life as a quest.
Ritual Space
Fade In: Caribbean Blue
Super Bowl Sunday—the high holy day of masculinity for AmeriCANS—is one way to enter ritual space. Cruising to exotic ports of call is another.
Everything you can imagine is real. Picasso
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Keep off the Grass
Some rules mark boundaries. Others reveal the urge to cross them.
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Chief Reif and Crazy Horse
My universe is made of stories, not atoms.
Consecrated by the Oceans
A Multinational Soul
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 could not do it in the cities where I taught English—New York, Los Angeles, Paris, or Tokyo—alone. I needed to be consecrated by sailing on the oceans.
It is a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and go someplace where you do not know anyone; where, as Melville said, “God’s one and only voice is Silence.”
I write my own rules for nautical success: continued enthusiasm despite failure after failure.
Ship Happens
Success Without Fulfillment Is Failure
Living on a ship might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It is not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind every day in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.
After eleven ships—yes, eleven—I no longer wanted to cast doubt on perfection: America. “It’s not about the money” is the lesser-known “I don’t have a dream” speech. Money can become life’s report card. I had seen that kind of success used as a drug of choice.
Success without fulfillment is failure. Yet this kind of failure gives you some of your best material.
As an Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can’ts into cans and leveraged my dreams into serendipity—a thousand unseen helping hands.
Money is not the root of all evil. Boredom is the root of all evil: a spiritual anorexia, the despairing refusal to be oneself.
The report card matters less than the life it is measuring.
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Both Oars
Direction takes more than enthusiasm. It takes alignment.
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Stingray Kissing · Grand Cayman
Culture shock is sometimes the price of a life that stays interesting.
The American Mask
The Life Planned and the Life Waiting
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned so you can accept the one waiting for you.
Being born in America can feel like being kidnapped into the shared hallucination of consumption and materialism. It is a mask that eats the face. It is also like winning the lottery—a currency—and I wanted to spend it well. Yet we value material things and 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 much of the developing world is starving. The lack of simplicity—and the yearning for complexity—was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.
Tourist to Traveler
Resourcefulness, Not Resources
Risking Pain to Escape Boredom
The total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain—culture shock—to make a boring life interesting, reframing “Home is a feeling, not a place” and travel as a verb, not a noun. You have to do it.
I became a one-man National Geographic on an 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, cultures, and languages, and the national anthem of Hell was Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.”
The Leap of Faith
I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler and adapt. Otherwise the journey would become karaoke travel—a cheap imitation of the best yet to come.
Without risk, faith is impossible. My leap of faith—giving up material things—was curiosity. The cure for ennui and boredom was: “Any place but here” and “I want to be surprised every day.”
There Is Nothing Ethical About the Work Ethic on Ships
I got paid in cash, visited beautiful places, had a hotel room, and six all-you-can-eat meals a day. If the passengers behaved badly, a new group arrived every seven or fourteen days.
Now that I no longer needed PowerPoint to explain my job, how much was I worth outside the W-2 world of nine to five? I was a time millionaire. It was going to be about resourcefulness, not resources.
The currency was no longer salary. It was freedom of movement.
Let the Orinoco Flow
Shoveling Sunshine
There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. When it is rainy or snowy, think of an island paradise and you are transported to that happy place. A daydream can be as rich and real as anything on Earth.
Picasso was right. Everything 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.
Now all I want for Christmas is a suntan.
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
The Elixir
Experience + Distance + Reflection = A Life That Comes HomeThe voyage was never only about leaving. It was about returning with proof that boredom was optional, time was wealth, and the life waiting for you could be larger than the one you planned.