Dear Reader,
I miss you. I miss me. It has been several months since my last confession. (Haha. Can you tell I spent eight years in Catholic school and went to Confession every Friday?)
And yet it feels like I have been indeed away from the confessional. Away from sharing my thoughts and feelings…with someone (you) who, ha, I can’t even see (I bet you never thought of yourself as a priest/ess did you?); away from something sacred, from something that leaves me feeling whole. Yes, I’ve been away too long now from this sharing of my soul.
I’ll admit that when I first quit writing my daily blogs at the end of our Florida Circumnavigational Paddling trip back in April that I was ready for a break. A break from thinking every day, for 53 days mind you, about what I would write and what pictures I’d take, followed every night by writing and editing, both photos and words, for two hours before I could hit “Publish” on my phone and, snuggling deep into my sleeping bag, curl up next to a very deeply snoring John and fall asleep.
Oh yes, it was wonderful and invigorating to contemplate my paddle, my trip and my very days thru your loving eyes. The sheer responsibility of it was an additional layer of structure and purpose on an already very structured and purposeful paddling endeavor. But doing so allowed me to create stories. To create meaning. To create a way to reach out beyond the minuscule dot of a paddler that I was, gliding within the immensity of the sea and silent within my head for hours and days on end, and to magically touch you, my reader, my witness, across time and space and individual reality. To, against all probability, touch, like an electrical current. What, truly, can be more magical than that?
And yet, just as my muscles were worn from the relentlessness of daily paddling, pulling the boats up on shore and setting up camp, my spirit was worn from blogging.
Sometimes the unexamined (and undocumented) life can be just fine.
But other times. Well.
Other times, like now, just demand to be examined and photographed and written about and shared.
So I’m back. I’m here doing this.
I am not back to sea kayaking right now though, so I must qualify what I am asking you to witness.
That part of my life’s adventure and of John’s (the sea kayaking part) will have to wait until this coming winter when John and I return to Florida and pick up the trail where we last left off in Homosassa along the southern edge of Florida’s Big Bend, and where we’ll head south, God willing, towards Tampa, the Everglades and the Keys.
Accordingly, Miss Pink is not with us now. Nor is Baby Blue. They’re back in Florida, tucked away (or, more truthfully: precariously perched upon our truck so the garage door could close) in my sister’s garage patiently awaiting our return.
John, thank God, IS still with me. (My world would not be complete without him and I dread the day that would ever change.) And our grand adventure continues.
Just this time the setting is Nicaragua. Central America. Monsoon Season. Pacific Coast with rocky headlands and breaking surf. Deep green jungle. Howler Monkeys. Parrots. Scorpions. Spiders. Beautiful flowering Bougainvillea. And a perfect horseshoe bay with a fishing village turned adventure-surfing-international tourist mecca named San Juan del Sur. Yes, tourist mecca but without the tourists right now since there’s been three months of civil unrest in the country and most tourists have vanished and some restaurants and hotels are all but boarded up.
Why, you may ask, are we here? It’s our home. And a very wild home it is. As you will see.
We are alive.
We are healthy.
We are adventurers.
Cheers!
Susana
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