The Elixir · A Calendar of Hindsight

The Summit Is the Half Way Point

Reaching the top is only the turn. The harder work is descent, return, and converting distance into a story worth carrying home.

Field Note

Coming down is the hardest thing.

Fuji taught the lesson physically: the summit is not completion. Around the world, the same rule kept returning. Arrival is spectacle; integration is the work.

Seven seas and repeated circumnavigations turned escape into a reality of its own. The annual archive below is the wake—the evidence left when motion becomes memory.

The Asymmetric EquationAscent + Return + Reflection = Elixir

Happy Last Year

Five years. Five turning points.

Select a year to open its field report, equation, and direct link to the original annual story.

JanuaryWorld Cruise 2011365 Days × 8, 7 Seas, 1 StoryThe long way around became the founding archive.Open Year JanuaryWrite? Right! 2012Happy Last YearThe voyage became a written world.Open Year JanuaryPassage 2013The Map Became the StoryPanama, Alaska, Arabia and the accidental sailor.Open Year JanuaryMirror 2014The Map Became a MirrorThe destinations began returning the traveler’s gaze.Open Year JanuaryThe Wake 2015The World Became a WakeNinety-plus days at sea and a year that refused to stop.Open Year

The Founding Archive

Escape to Reality

The original photographs, captions, links, and narrative are preserved below.

10/14

It took 4 hours to climb to the top of Fuji San and 14 hours to defend.
Going downhill takes longer!
08/91

The opening track on Into The Great Wide Open, the eighth studio album by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, 'Learning To Fly' goes like this...

Well, I started out down a dirty road / Started out all alone / And the sun went down as I crossed the hill / And the town lit up, the world got still / I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings / Coming down is the hardest thing.

This song is about achieving a huge goal. The learning to fly without wings means learning to do something you\'ve never done before and you\'re not sure if you\'re even prepared to do

It reminds me of traveling around the world 7 times!--My Escape TO my Reality:"Coming down is the hardest thing". I got my pilots license-Now what, Land? I am sure I will sail again....because...

You know, addiction isn't the problem - it's the solution-

When all you care about is here, this is a good

place to be

On Devil's Island

How come you ended up in a place like this?
Favoritism.

Reprint 2011 WC-Welcome to the penal colony at Devil's Island, whose prisoners you are, and from which there is no escape." This was the greeting that awaited prisoners to the penal colonies. Now Devil's Island IS the escape.

I always talk in Bumper Stickers-Instant gratification takes too long

Tender Boating

Escape to Reality

Ile des Pins, New Caledonia-Papillon

“Addicted to traveling” or for that matter “Addicted to all-non working activities” shouldn’t be a new reason for self-hatred or a diagnosis, rather a pursuit like the arts and entertainment, that permit self-exploration and satisfy your psycho-social needs. You see, in general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are labeled with the Dr Phil-Drew-Oprah Psycho Babble rhetoric of “addict.” Opera and Symphony aficionados, on the other hand are “passionate” and "driven".

Loading the cultural dice in favor of “reality” over fantasy, we get the sense of adventure beaten out of us when we ask ourselves the most irritating of the question words, “Why?” Why do I have to live in the New York suburbs,where the weather sucks and the people are rude, and there is nothing to do? Then we just tune in turn on the TV, and drop out, watching one of the 1000 channels in a shared hallucination called the superstition of materialism, and fall asleep.

Then you get "The Call" and if you wake up and answer it, and you begin the Hero's Journey that Joseph Cambell talks about in The Power Of Myth, with Bill Moyers, that PBS video series that's a must for all seekers, and you follow your bliss-in most cases your bliss follows you.

I started to travel, as a pastime, on a shoe-string budget, labeled as a drifter, a bum, held in contempt by the uninformed, and over educated who find themselves sinking into the everydayness of their lives. And I didn’t care. I just did it anyway. The Calvinists say work is prayer, so is permanent traveling.

In the old days, habits of cultural consumption like listening to jazz music all day and night were considered passions, or forever going to the movies or “The Theatre”, allowing us to create new personalities and use them to fulfill unmet psychological needs. Come to think of it, I think I have an internet addiction too! Awesome.

Seagull Management

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” Anais Nin

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive.~ The Power of Myth - Joe Campbell

Reprint from 2012-
There are three types of people-those alive, those dead and those @sea--cruising around the world has been one of the most rewarding forms of introspection. It is one stage of my “re-entry” in Hotel @nyware, continuing my extended break from Normal Life again to travel the world on board another cruise ship. I’m living my dream of PT-Permanent Travel, also known as "Mini Retirements". I haven’t been everywhere, but it is no longer on my list. I "get it" now., this travel thing. On 12/12/12, Blogging is literature in a hurry-Write? Right! The quicker I go, the longer it takes, so it looks like I will be writing a few more posts on the subject.

As I document this adventure, this around-the-world travelogue, I say to myself "Roam Sweet Roam". Home is not where my heart is but where my computer is- I remain a digital nomad, where Anywhere becomes @nyware, location neutral, as there is no such thing as a bad piece of real estate when you use technology and social media. As I make my way in the Caribbean (again!), in the middle of nowhere, but the center of everything, thanks to a reliable high speed Internet connection. I am doing pretty much everything I would do in the USA, only with the economies of scale, at a less greater cost.

Consequently, I call home a feeling not a place-I’ve never confused a street address for where I actually lived. My destinations have never been places , but new way of seeing things: the journeys themselves have been the destinations.

It has never been about resources, but more about resourcefulness.We're never too poor to buy our freedom.In fact, we are all “time millionaires ”and when we who choose to use this commodity, the less we put a cash value on travel, and the less we think that money is what we need to have an adventure and live, and the less we associate money with life in general.
My 12 Best Days:
▼ December (9)