Where We Started

We haven't seen another boat or ship in days, and with the skies clear and the seas calm, we are ghosting along at 5 knots, our genaker filled by an eerily-steady 12 knot wind from dead astern. It's been like this for a few days, and the weather forecast suggests that identical conditions will prevail for the next 7 days. South African sailors had "warned" us it would be like this - blue skies, gentle and favorable winds, and following seas - but that's the sort of prediction you learn to suspect at a young age: "everything's going to be great, just you wait and see!" I don't know about you, but I've always tended to manage my expectations, to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, as they say. Happily for us on this leg of our circumnavigation, even though we prepared for the worst, we're enjoying the best as we head homeward, back to where we started this circumnavigation, northwest across the South Atlantic Ocean.

It's just after midnight; the moon has been waning since we've left Cape Town, rising later each night, its now bowl-like shape hidden at first by the eastern horizon's clouds before lifting into a speckled pin cushion sky. Sailing to St. Helena, on our way to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, we are tracking the length of the fuzzy swath of the Milky Way's edge, our bow and stern lined up with this nightly reminder that our little planet sits inside a swirling disk of billions of stars. It's dark enough to make out the nebulae in Orion's sword, and on nights like these, with no ship traffic, we can run dark, without running lights, the better to see the stars.

Sometimes turning the lights off improves your vision. For me, a quiet night watch lengthens my vision backward, toward the voyages and discoveries of my younger days, the time leading up to this journey's beginnings. Running downwind, across a rippling sea barely visible in the cloud-diffused light from the distant half moon, I'm in a reflective mood; nothing to distract my wandering thoughts, no running lights, no sail changes, no radio traffic, no navigational worries - just a blank mind canvas, gliding atop a big ocean under a sprawling sky.

During one of those younger periods, I tended to follow my nose in developing my musical and literary tastes; an artist would appear on one of my favorite group's albums, and I'd check him or her out, or a writer would acknowledge another in a foreword, and I'd go to the library and look up the new author. Once, in high school, while reading an exegesis of Bob Dylan's song, All Along the Watchtower, the critic highlighted the similarity of one of its couplets to a couplet in T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Who was this Eliot?

That reference led me to Eliot -- his poetry, plays, and criticisms, and, eventually, to a set of lines from The Little Giddings, lines that I've carried with me all these years. You and I have since seen it on various inspirational posters and cards, but at the time, as a high school kid looking to sail the oceans, it resonated deeply. It still does: "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Exploring -- the act of leaving home and then returning - the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell might call it - seems inevitably, in stories, poems and myths, to generate a deeper understanding of oneself and one's literal and figurative home. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's nothing inevitable about it. It takes a lot of hard work to avoid the sensation and result of "just passin' through," as the R. Crumb character of the 1960s might have put it. When we set out on our circumnavigation, I knew I wasn't interested in "just passin' through," but I imagined more the new places and people we'd meet, and less the inner journey. Tonight, a rising moon brings into focus the difficulties faced by a traveler open to extracting revelations of self-discovery, revelations promised by the poet to a reflective explorer.

I've always tended to be a go-it-alone kind of person, assuming I can solo navigate around shoals and shipwrecks, that I can steer to deeper waters, find new passages and hidden harbors. Now, I see more clearly that any journey of the body, mind, heart, or soul benefits greatly from a guide, someone to hold a mirror up, to point the way, to help one avoid the unseen dangers, hidden reefs, flawed assumptions. It's hard enough most days just putting one foot in front of another, without finding the motivation, energy, and wherewithal to take a step in a different direction, to continue the difficult process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and change. In the journey we call living, pursuing our day-to-day dreams, these guides - or navigators -- take many forms - friends, parents, siblings, colleagues, supervisors, mentors, clergy - and we are better people, parents, and spouses for their insights and prodding.

On our boat-bound sail around the world, outside guides are scarce. We've been on an exploration considerably more isolated and solitary than our prior land-based journeys. Here, we have only each other, for the most part, to serve as a navigator. On this circumnavigation, two of us on a boat, we face not only the physical, financial, and logistical challenges of setting sail around the world, but also the reality that personal growth and illumination depend almost solely on ourselves and each other.

We push and pull each other along, Jennifer and I, in circumstances that are at once ideal and trying. It's difficult sometimes to convey, much less to experience, the interpersonal intensity attendant to our extended isolation on a broad expanse of ocean, periodically ensconced in foreign lands and cultures. Intensity, in escapable doses, can be a wonderful thing; unrelenting intensity without relief presents its own challenges, and we're still calibrating ways to give each other space, silence, and support. For me, so much more easier said than done.

So perhaps the uncomfortable truth about the process of discovery, of returning home to know it for the first time, is that the mere act of journeying, while perhaps necessary, is hardly sufficient. Pushing through the molasses of ignorance, generating new insights against decades of preconceptions, re-adjusting behaviors and expectations seemingly hardwired into one's being - these processes of growth depend not only on the journey, but on one's ability to navigate the shoals of one's personal history, on one's proclivity for self-awareness or self-delusion, and on overcoming one's natural defense mechanisms and easy explanations. In this, we long for direction, a destination, and a guide, much as a sailor longs for a compass, charts, and a navigator's local knowledge. In the end, we work with what we have, harness the wind, weather the storms, trim the sails.

Our boat sails forth, headed northwest to St. Helena, pushed along by fair and following seas and winds, but we can only go so fast, limited by the laws of physics and the friction of the water against our hulls. No matter how fast the wind blows, no matter how much we want to change, no matter how quickly we seek to know, perhaps for the first time, the place where we started, we are limited by the ephemeral laws of our own natures. Boats arrive no sooner or later than the weather allows. Insight appears on its own schedule; wisdom emerges on its own timetable.

We set sail, leave our homes, undertake fantastic explorations of our world and ourselves, but in the end, learn that we cannot dictate or predict our pace of discovery, or when and how we might return to where we started, or even if, God willing, we might then know it for the first time. Under diaphanous skies, we journey onward, closing on home, or somewhere near it, hoping to arrive safely, among friends and family, a bit wiser than when we left.


Where We Started

What goes around comes around,
So the wind that passes across the deck
Seems destined to pass over us again,
Perhaps wondering why we've moved so little,
Taking so long to sail across these waters,
Maybe thinking it's not blowing steadily enough,
That by gusting more frequently, or stronger
We'd find ourselves closer to home.

But a wind can only push you so fast and so far
Against ocean currents that have their own design,
So we bide our time, trim our sails, wend our way
Through reluctant waters, making our way around,
Yearning for a landfall somewhere close to home.