Armchair Escapes

...Aho and Ahoy, Matey!

I don’t know about you, snookemfrizzlefritz, but this month has felt like I got sucked into a turbine engine and spit back out again.

Nothing huge or worthy of writing and yet it’s all huge, in fact, it’s too much. And it’s all the little bits of debris that are oscillating in the air around us. We’re having to duck and/or catch the larger bits and do our part with disaster relief and clean-up.

And I don’t want to do either. I just want to escape. On the home front, that has looked like:

• watching rando snippets from shows like Life Off Grid on Prime, binging Castle Impossible on Max, and Google mapping the places in Italy and Spain where Bastard Son and his lovely wife visited these past weeks. (I was May 2025 years old when I learned that Gibraltar isn’t some rock island off the Iberian Peninsula but is a British territory at the southern tip of the mainland itself. Who knew?!)

• reading Rick Steves’ On The Hippie Trail.

• catching up with Bo and Sherpa’s latest port of call on their epic world cruise aboard the Seven Seas Mariner.

• writing and writing and more personal writing as a way to time travel to anywhere but here.

• vicariously sailing across the Pacific from Oregon to Hawaii with Oliver and his cat Phoenix.

So…yeah…this has been my sad but true life this past month while being mostly housebound, tending to three cats and picking scabs off my forearms from all the cat scratches. Sigh, I am living the heck out of this one life - Mary Oliver would be so proud.

If one cannot be elsewhere then maybe we must summon it in some other way. Books help. Some of the books I’ve read or have piled on the nightstand this month:

• The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad

• Aflame by Pico Iyer - about his perennial return to a silent retreat center near Big Sur

• Did I Ever Tell You? A Memoir by Genevieve Kingston

• House of Sticks: A Memoir by Ly Tran

• Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the Appalachian South by Margaret Renkl

• Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston

These books share commonalities - they either speak to the power of place, time-honored practices, or both.

And…these books are dropping hints that maybe I need to up the ante on living a more interesting life a bit more farther afield than my armchair, someone’s deathbed, or a graveside.

Life is beckoning.

Magellan

by Mary Oliver

Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, from anywhere
Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,
Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.
Let us be heroes, or, if that’s not in us,
Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?
And what is death but a refusal to grow?
Magellan had a dream he had to follow.
The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

And when the fever would not set him free,
To his thin crew, “Sail on, sail on!” he cried.
And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.
And thus Magellan lives, although he died.