Letting Go.
Easier said than done, letting go describes the concept of acceptance and even forgiveness. After one lets go, one is set free.
With all the freedom that sailing brings, we still bring with us ourselves and all our baggage everywhere we go. So true for me. My past experiences are still present in my thoughts; disappointments haven’t lost their sting. I sleep more on the boat than ever on land. My dreams are vivid and colorful. I am fighting the past dragons and enduring skeletons. After a night session like that, I awake beat, ready to go on sleeping.
While looking onto the horizon, although mostly meditative, thoughts come up about the life I left behind. Like tentacles of a fabled deep ocean creature, my past life is taunting me to examine it. Situations from high school, university, college, working as a photographer and finally a landscape designer, past lovers, relationships and lost friends are often and vividly in my thoughts. Places I lived in like Hamburg, Lausanne, Bologna, Vienna, Los Angeles, Bucharest, Berlin and lastly San Diego, pop up in my mind. Places I traveled to and people I met are still clear as day. It was easy to make new friends in the new cities I moved to, but few acquaintances turned into true friendships and endured the distance I put between us.
Trading an already not so conventional life for an even less conventional one, left me with even fewer friends. Most people I know find my choices of constant change tiresome and don’t care to know much detail. I suspect a bit of jealously, but mostly, most just don’t want to engage with a lifestyle so different to their own. Most conversations go around their encounters with the sea, seasickness and maybe sailing. I get the feeling that they prefer to talk about their civilization problems rather than hearing about my adventures. Or, they read it all on the blog. I can’t tell.
Fresh out of high school, I spent the summer in Lausanne to learn French and met my friend Patricia, who studied in Bologna. It was on a visit to Bologna, when I wrote a very short, very teenagerish poem:
La lune passe,
les gents passent,
mais l’amour reste dans le dark.
(The moon goes by,
the people come and go.
but love stays in the dark.)
We were listening a lot to Billie Holliday, Tom Waits and The Cure in those days and were a bit lost in rather somber worldview common amongst nineteen year olds. Still, these lines sum up my life well and were somewhat prophetic. Few people stayed in my life, they came and went, although, I fondly remember many.
Over the years, I found, that there truly is a place, where all love goes to stay. Love is so utterly complex, encompasses every feeling from joy and pain to despair. Love stays in our body, in our fibers, our nerves and muscles. I feel, that love never really goes away, stays in a place way deep in the depth of my heart.