life onboard

simplicity in the flow merit badge

This is what my merit badge looks like. Over the last seven years onboard I have made friends with allowing, releasing old blockages and going with the flow.  Allowing on the most extreme levels....I can now sleep side by side with what had been my arch nemesis: SAND. I can tolerate my children wearing the same t-shirt for 4 days straight. I have acquired a taste for coffee sludge as I pick coffee grounds out of my teeth even after the sun appears four finger widths above the horizon.

It is a time when all earth bound hurdles fall gently to the ground and I no longer need to jump. Vegetables are optional. Candy is a necessity. Ten and seven year old computavores settle quietly in the recesses of darkness. Laundry does not exist. Simple pleasures of a pinwheel seem to delight the senses. The close physical proximity of the four of us reveal interplay of thought and emotion that could never encapsulate itself in the vast landscape of life on land.

Onboard is where there is no time, where Terns perched on the bow rail and juicy cannonballs off the stern can co-exist, where the supply and demand and supply of dry towels are in syncopated circulation, where salt water baths and fresh water rinses suffice for days and days on end.

It is onboard where we all seem to reach the cosmos individually...where the rhythmic evening breaths and gentle waves against the hull beg one to walk the tightrope of awareness and sleep as the beat of our hearts deepen. It is a place when I set the anchor it grabs the first time without any thoughts of skittering across the bottom...it stays...held fast and secure.

I have come to love our 20 year old boat. In years past I would cast envious gazes upon the 70' navy hulled sloopes. Now, boats such as these summon an acknowlegement of beauty...and work. My soul rests easy with this sense of partitioning... just happy to enjoy the here and now without the need to fly at cruising altitude with the Jones'.  Living more from the heart and less from the Ego has enabled a sense of alacrity for life without feeling as if expensive possessions qualified me to live within higher ranks of privilege and worthiness. Less is more...more joy, more freedom, more love.