Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

On feeling my way back home.

In the first instance travel demands surrender. Means, give up the comforts of home, the usual, the way things are done, for some others home, usual, way things are done. Without surrender travel cuts and slices at every moment. Well, I never! We’d not see that at home! Why did he do that?

In the second instance travel requires curiosity. Who knew cacao beans had such a pleasant tasting pulp? How did Panama make the shift from indigenous people to Spaniards to Colombia to the US and then to their own democracy? How do limenos celebrate the New Year? What do the Chilean fjords look like anyhow? Without curiosity there are no new experiences, only the repetition of old ones in different locales.

In the third instance travel invites hope. This visit to the Chan Chan Citadel will be worth the effort and expense. This trip as a whole will repay the cost of it in money with the more useful coin of new experience and changed ideas.

There is, too, wonder. At the arrogance and audacity of the Spanish conquistadors. At the earthquake defying architectural skills of the Inka. At the splendid isolation of Ushuaia. At the glaciers still crashing and booming their way through the Darwin Cordillera. At sitting, finally, at the southernmost point in the Americas.

Perhaps, when we were at our best, there is, as well, love. It will not always come, but here the acceptance, the embrace of the other can loop to the acceptance and the embrace of the other within, that stranger in your own soul who still feels foreign, alien to your Self.

This love recognizes the sad and searing truth that we press down the parts of ourselves we fear, reducing them to fragments of memory, shards of dark feeling and says, wait. There’s more. Whole cultures built on what you reject. Art forms erected from the very things you fear. Places where the dance tune includes even your most minor key melodies. And does a gavotte, or a jig, or the two-step to them.

So then, surrender, curiosity, hope, wonder and love. Travel’s comrades, partners along the way. And welcome.

This is by way of saying that feeling my back home is not home sickness or nostalgia, it is a desire to return to my place altered, made more, fuller, richer. Not too soon though. Just in time.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

55 degrees 57 minutes S 67 degrees 9 minutes W heading 272 degrees speed 12 knots

Cape Horn. The fabled Cape Horn. One of the roughest passages on the world ocean. The seas throw up spin drift and an albatross sails the winds, heading west with us.

The Veendam has slowed some and will soon make a turn around the most remote of the islands in the Cape Horn cluster, Cabo De Hornos, Cape Horn.

We are down now to 1.1 knots, almost stopped. The captain just gave a long soliloquy on the Cape, but the speaker here combined with my single hearing ear left most of it garbled. He did point out that the southern tip of Tasmania and parts of South Africa are south of our current position. (Kate heard that much.)

Antarctica lies due south about 1000 kilometers.

The day is clear, the sun shining and just a few clouds in the sky. So this is what it looks like beyond the edge of the Americas. Winds here are 11 at the Beaufort Scale, 60 mph. We will not go around the Cape because the Captain feels the seas would be too upsetting for the passengers.

Oh, well.

Birds do not seem frightened. There are terns and sea gull like birds out here, soaring high and low searching for fish and scraps.

So, as mariners have often done in the history of seafaring around Cape Horn, we have chosen to follow the Drake Passage to the east and leave the Cape to another trip.