Tubuai, Raivavae, Les Australes 31 May 2011, 8:00 a.m. Tahiti Time 23S20 149W29

We wrenched ourselves away from our Raivavae paradise a couple days ago, and had a slow start, but then beautiful overnight passage here to Tubuai. Whether it’s one day or 3 weeks of passagemaking, it seems to take about the same amount of time to recuperate – a day and a night. So night before last was our night, and yesterday was our day of replenishing our energy levels (remaining horizontal for 24 hours with eyes mostly closed works well).

The weather continues to favor us, although we are now in an anchorage that is somewhat exposed to North winds, and a front with north winds is predicted in 96 hours. Tubuai has a lagoon and protective reef all around, but it’s very shallow with lots of corral heads, so we won’t be able to run and hide very far on the other side. We expect some rolly nights later in the week. For now, we’re going to go take advantage of the remaining gorgeous weather days to explore. So far it looks like a much more populated place. We were able to buy baguettes at the store, not wait by the side of the road at 5 a.m. for the baker to drive by, like at Raivavae. So I’ll be baking less here than I did there. I’d like baking better if our oven would stay lit – or at least beep an alarm when its flame went out.

Frank just called me away to help move the boat farther from the pass, to what we think may be a calmer spot. There was not a puff of wind, the lagoon was glassy. Depths in our short hop were between 12 and 30 feet, yet from my bow lookout perspective, the bottom appeared to be 3 inches from the surface of the water. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking out for when it’s like that, every corral head looks like a sure hit. It was like riding in a glass bottom boat, I could even see the moorish idols, butterflies, and parrot fish darting away from our leviathan shadow. No need to get wet to see them, but later we may need to get wet to stay sane. It is going to be hot. We’re officially in the tropics. We crossed Tropic of Capricorn, roughly latitude 23 degrees 26.8 minutes). I just put swimming on the PE agenda for this afternoon. And I’m happy to be giving the oven a break.

xoxomo

No Comments »

Motu Piscine, Raivavae, Les Australes 26 May 2011, 8:00 a.m. Tahiti Time 23S53 147W37

We are still in Raivavae. This weather and this place are too perfect. We know many of the places ahead of us now, and Raivavae rivals them all – especially since the winds died down (over 2 weeks ago now). We’ve shared a stunning anchorage (near a motu across from the main island) with 4 other boats – 4 nationalities – ages ranging 6 months to 63 years – all really easygoing, neat people (an especially easy going baby with a great toothless smile which he uses often, like a new word discovered, he tries it out on us all). There’s a long sandy white beach in front of us, and at the point some decent snorkeling. We’re managing to keep on top of school, and get some hiking, diving, beachcombing, socializing, and sandcastle building in – all worthy activities, but not much writing, painting, or drawing, and only a little photographing, and reading. After all the projects in NZ, and the longer, tougher passage, it feels like we’re on vacation – but a very busy vacation – knowing that this weather will not last, this place will not last, every calm sunny hour feels like an hour we need to make count.

There was a thread of feminine nurturing terms in the writing I was reading before the sun came out for good. After “Journey is the midwife of thought,” from my last note, I read an article titled “Idleness the Mother of Possibility” by Sven Birkerts in the Lapham’s Quarterly (amongst a long list of articles I had downloaded to read offline). I’m probably not supposed to give away the final paragraph, but it’s an interesting summary to the article which touches on many historic literary takes on idleness. :

“Idleness is the mother of possibility, which is as much as necessity the mother of inventiveness. Now that our technologies so adeptly bridge the old divide between industriousness and relaxation, work and play, either through oscillation or else a kind of merging, everything being merely digits put to different uses, we ought to ask if we aren’t selling off the site of our greatest possible happiness. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau. In idleness, the corollary maxim might run, is the salvaging of the inner life.”

This all weaves in with my earlier ruminations on solitary time and journeying. When you stop the journey, or the movement, idleness becomes the catalyst for converting thought into action. This boat life has long periods of idle time, punctuated by intense periods of activity. Even when we are not underway, there are still blocks of idle time in a variety of forms. There’s the rainy day kind of idle, the windy day idle, the staring at the lagoon-blue idle, the waiting-for-a-weather-window idle, the waiting-for-the-kids-to-finish-school-so-we-can-all-go-play idle. All can lead to idle curiosity, which is definitely a birthplace of possibility. But idle time can feel like wasted time. A BPS Research Digest Blog article titled “We’re Happier When Busy but our Instinct is for Idleness” states “Unless we have a reason for being active, we choose to do nothing – an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.”

The balance between busy and idle is delicate. It’s not that there’s nothing to do out here: there’s school, there are 3 meals a day to plan, cook and clean around, there’s seeking out some physical activity to keep us all healthy, there are the eternal list of boat projects, there are social engagements when we’re near land, and on my more motivated days there is some creative pursuit. But the actions aren’t being lined up by others in an ever present email inbox. I no longer get that sense of productivity from deleting or filing an email that has been responded to. The actions are no longer scheduled in nice tidy blocks of time. Idleness is now my inbox. And Idle time does not exactly feel like productive time; it may be my new catalyst for actions, but that’s both an empowering and daunting concept. In my working life, there was some comfort in externally imposed tasks – if a particular action was not a worthy one, I had the fallback excuses of “just doing my job,” or “just being a team player.” Each action out here is of our own making or at least the result of our own choices, scheduled around a sometimes odd flow of a day dictated by weather and whim, and negotiated between the four of us. I’m now 100% accountable for my actions, and the impacts hit the most important people in my life.

I feel like our family happiness stakes are high, and I need to make each action or activity count, to set the best example, to keep life inspiring and challenging – when really I’d just like to set the mother in me aside, “conserve energy,” watch the sunset with a mai-tai in hand, and forget about “possibility” for awhile. Ah hell, who am I to fight the vestiges of evolution? Cheers!

xoxomo

More idle reading from my idle reading list:

An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

In the Lapham’s Quarterly article “The Mother of Possibility” (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-mother-of-possibility.php?page=all) he mentions: “Japanese Buddhist priest Yoshida Kenk whose Essays in Idleness, dating from the early fourteenth century, reflect on the immersed intensity of life lived apart from public agitations: “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.””

Also from the Lapham’s Quarterly article: “Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1580), that cataract of shrewd humane psychologizing and now the source text for a vast, fertile genre, could be said to have taken its origin in this selfsame condition. Montaigne, who liked to see things not only both ways, but all ways, in his small early essay “Of Idleness,” first deplores it, writing of the mind that, “If it be not occupied with a certain subject that will keep it in check and under restraint, will cast itself aimlessly hither and thither into the vague field of imaginations.” But then, a few sentences later, reflecting on his decision to retire from the endeavors of the world, he reverses, says, “It seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favor than to allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself.” He goes on to say how, in that freedom, mind “brings forth so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, the one on top of the other, that in order to contemplate at my leisure their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to set them down in writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of them.” And so from one man’s idleness is begotten one of the treasures of world literature.”

2 Comments »

Raivavae, Les Australes 7 May 2011, 18:00 p.m. Tahiti Time 23S52 147W41

I’ve been thinking a lot about what is in a dog watch for me. Besides taking time to read, and listen to music, I often become contemplative, and I often write too much. I came across a passage in Alan De Botton’s “The Art of Travel” which provides a relevant perspective.:

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks – charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness, and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.”

Now the challenge for me is how to “think properly” when not journeying. How could I bring that thinking state more consistently into my landfall life. I know some people get there with a daily run, or a morning meditation. My mom seeks it out through frequent travel, my dad through long walks in the woods, my brother has built it into his career shuttling folks across Kachemak Bay in Blue Too. So I have lots of good role models, experts on integrating that space into daily life but somewhere along the line between toddlers-to-teens, and breadwinning, I never properly nurtured it as a habit. And it’s hard for me to ignore the distractions without an externally mandated zone like a dog watch.

From a recent Boston Globe article on “The Power of Lonely” : “People tend to engage quite automatically with thinking about the minds of other people…We’re multitasking when we’re with other people in a way that we’re not when we just have an experience by ourselves”

I think one of my own greatest strengths (and weaknesses), is “thinking about the minds of others.” Pleasing others, mirroring others listening intently to others – all come easily to me, but it’s not all of who I am. Disengaging in that “collaborative thinking” (a.k.a. group think in it’s darker guise) when I’m around people is really hard for me, and my own voice can become faint in the din.

The article goes on to say: “Teenagers, especially whose personalities have not yet fully formed, have been shown to benefit from time spent apart from others, in part because it allows for a kind of introspection and freedom from self-consciousness that strengthens their sense of identity.”

I would say teenagers are not the only souls whose sense of identity deserves to be bolstered by some solitary time. And it is easier than you may think to find isolation in 45 feet of space, my own teens are experts at it. Add movement to that healthy isolation, and you have a potent catalyst for thought. Did I have to abandon a stable career, shed most personal possessions, say a long goodbye to dear friends, and drag my family 10,000 miles across the Pacific to find this zone? Maybe. Has it been worth it? If that were the only benefit maybe/maybe not; but a sense of identity is not the only thing that’s been strengthened out here. On the whole it’s definitely been worth it so far.

xoxomo

No Comments »

Raivavae, Les Australes 4 May 2011, 10:00 a.m. Tahiti Time 23S52 147W41

We arrived safely yesterday, under bright blue windy skies. That blue next to the lagoon blues and greens were a spectacular welcome. It’s great to be back in the land of the lagoons. We took two of the Mahimahi ashore as gifts for the first lucky passersby, we felt like Santa Claus. Polynesians are incredibly generous with food, especially fruits from their gardens, and we have often been the beneficiaries of their generosity. Ocean fish are not easy for them to come by (they require bigger boats with bigger motors). Since the lagoon fish are increasingly carriers of ciguatera, our mahimahi gifts were much appreciated. Paying it forward. If our fridge were bigger, we’d do it more often. As it is, we have to have caught the fish close to our arrival so they are fresh.

Last year, we were mostly boat-bound due to stormy weather. We said we’d come back to explore another time. It’s windy now but the sun is out, so we’re off to see the sights.

xoxomo

No Comments »

Rapa to Raivavae, Les Australes 3 May 2011, 1:00 a.m. Tahiti Time 24S39 146W40

Our visit to Rapa was beautiful but short. After resting up, cleaning up, attempting a few minor repairs and a few minor hikes, we left Sunday early afternoon, ever willing to jump into an attractive weather window. Two boats we met there had been anchored at Rapa for over 2 weeks, their stays extended by a lack of good weather windows for northbound departures. We would have liked to stay a couple more days, but not a couple more weeks. As we found this season last year, the Australes do experience their own version of the southern hemisphere’s autumn. We’re not officially in the tropics yet.

This is a short two=day hop for us. We should be arriving in ten hours. Today’s excitement – four mahimahi caught. The fridge is working overtime keeping them cool. We will not arrive at Raivavae empty handed.

I still owe you Frank’s Rapa lobster tale. It is an epic tale involving the hubris of youth, and a clash of cultures. We were warmly welcomed in Rapa, probably because they could not quite place where they’d seen his face before. We’d like to return one day, so I may take his side of the story offline – especially if I let him tell it.

xoxomo

No Comments »