transitions – On the Horizon Line

Parenting, Reflections on Life

Living Luxuriously in the Creases

“I had plenty of time

when my daughter was a baby,”

my friend tells me.

“It was just lost in the transitions.”

She means the transitions

between eating and sleeping

between dishes and laundry

between what was and what is.

Motherhood means dwelling within these transitions.

Residing in the space between one necessity and the next

nodding to the time that slips away

and surrendering all expectation.

Inefficiency is the name of the game

a game that moves at its own speed, just as

yellow leaves fall slowly, inexorably into the creek

and the creek flows slowly, inexorably into the sea.

I wallow in the throes of inefficient adoration

the crinkle of a brow

the grasp of a hand

the gurgle in a breath.

I used to minimize the transitions

to live more fully in the spaces before and after.

Now I linger luxuriously in the creases and joints that

link what I used to call ‘real life.’

The time that is lost while I linger in the transitions

is simply an exhale of breath

an internal rotation toward accepting

the beauty of the present moment.

On the Horizon Line Blog - Brianna Randall and Rob Roberts

Reflections on Life, Traveling

Transitions Suck

Yesterday we sent our lack of responsibility up in flames. After almost a month back in Missoula, we awoke too early yet again with our brains swimming in a sea of “should haves” and “need tos”. We seem to be constantly spinning these days, whether its from trying to find a job, trying to move into a new house, trying to figure out how to have a kid, or trying to remember why we left the tropics and returned to a truckload of responsibility.

Transitions suck. They just do. There’s no getting around the fact that changing your life completely is going to be stressful. Or the fact that you’re bound to question the decisions that led you into that stressful situation. Sure, change is exciting, stimulating, and a critical component for personal growth. But it’s also a cause for anxiety, uncertainty and losing sleep.

We’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, starting blindly into the dark, too wired to sleep. Our minds are full to bursting, circling through the hundreds of details required to re-assimilate into the life we left. The days fly by in a rush of searching for used cars, researching how to install vents for the bathroom fan, building a business website, calling old contacts, looking for possessions buried in storage, and on and boringly on. It’s exhausting. It feels like we’re hamsters in a wheel.

The grass is always greener. That’s one of the takeaways from our transition. When we were in Tonga, we thought we wanted the cultural stimulation of Southeast Asia. When we were in Thailand, we craved quiet mountains and remote rivers. When we were constantly on the move, we longed for a place to unpack our bags. Now that we can unpack, we are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we own. Now that we’re back in the mountains, we miss the sea. It’s confusing, since we’re usually pretty decisive about what we want and why.

It’s just human nature to feel confused after so much change, we tell ourselves. This transition stress was inevitable, we console each other. But it still sucks.

At 6:30am on a snowy Sunday morning (yes, snowing in May in Montana), Rob brought our tea to the couch – the only furniture in our seemingly-vast new living room – and said, “Let’s have a ceremony. We need to break this cycle.”

We talked for an hour about how to summarize and memorialize the last year of our lives. About how to officially let that year go. About how to find a center point after so much mental spinning. About the why behind our transition anxiety. Rob hit the nail on the head: this particular transition is a mourning period for our lack of responsibility.

We’ve been clinging to our glorious, selfish, unfettered, unbounded year of shirking all duty. We’ve been trying to cram that carefree model into “real life” here in Missoula, a place where “should haves” and “need tos” are central tenets of the life we used to live.

So, we burned that selfish and glorious lack of responsibility in the cold, wet Montana morning. And we began redefining the term responsibility as a frame for holding together all that we hold dear: each other, family, friends, creativity, autonomy, flexibility, adventure, a home.

As I started writing this post, it felt like deja vu. I remembered writing about similar transition-angst just before we left. I wrote about the “pinch point” where it feels like too much life is trying to rush through too small a space. That’s how we feel again, 18 months later. We’ll come through it, hopefully soon. This pinch point too shall pass. Thanks to all of the friends and family who have listened to our anxieties and soothed our stress during the transition. With your help – and a little fire ceremony – we will slowly start to center again.

Rob takes in the sunset on a dinghy ride back to the 40 foot sloop, Wizard, owned by John and Sue out of California.

Fishing, Reflections on Life

From Sailor to Stunned

Two months ago I woke up every morning to the sound of large fish splashing against the hull of a sailboat, took morning swims in the nude and read books against the backdrop of coconut trees and sandy shores. For some reason, I decided I didn’t like that any more. It seemed too boring. Not challenging enough.

Ironically enough, I had similar reasons for leaving Missoula in the first place. Although I had a well-paid job and worked for a cause I believed in… Although I had the comfortable existence that comes with a salary, health insurance, and a routine that included annual paid vacations to interesting places… And although I had good friends, fun toys, caring neighbors, and a trunkful of costumes for impromptu dance parties… We left.

Two weeks into our return home and sometimes I want that all back. I don’t want to be looking for income, searching for a decent car, or a place to live. I want a child and am glad that we will have one, but it doesn’t make things any easier. Any one of these life events, these tasks or milestones, can be stressful for some people. We decided to twist them together and swallow the damn bundle whole.

“Decided,” right? We sat on the deck of a boat, bathed in tropical heat, and sun made the conscious decision to leave. We were jaded by slow days, easy meals of fish and fruit, and the peacefulness that comes from living on water. I know what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t have pity for us either. Because I will never forget how fortunate we were and how fortunate we are. To have the opportunity to leave in the first place, to meet amazing people along the way, to swim with sharks more times than I can count, walk barren flats of white sand, form a band at a beachside bar, laugh, stretch, breathe.

But to be honest I wasn’t prepared for this. Bills, meetings, insurance, loans, jobs, schedules. Just swimming through this muddled mass of minor tasks and major decisions. Like a little minnow hiding underneath the hull of a sailboat. A big ocean all around. The tuna attack in formation, stunning their prey through the blunt force of tooth, body and splash. Then they circle back around and pick through the spoils.

I tell myself that I’m not a little fish. I tell myself that this was a conscious decision, to challenge ourselves, reinvent, and open the way to new ideas and revelations. Sometimes it helps. But I’ve certainly found the challenge I was looking for.

February full moon in Whitianga, New Zealand. On the Horizon Line with Brianna Randall on the beach.

Reflections on Life

A Blood Red March Moon

The moon is my journal and my scrapbook, the keeper of my secrets. She silently, serenely observes the moments of my life, a sentinel and supporter during the passage of time. It gives me comfort and a feeling of rightness each month to look up and find her. To mark my benchmarks in her rotations. To exclaim in surprise when she’s round and luscious yet again.

Each full moon, I try to take a mental snapshot of where I was, what I was doing, how I was feeling. That way I can flip back through the months to remind myself of who I’ve been. I spend a few moments gazing at the moon’s pocked, glowing face, putting myself back in the space of her fullness 28 days before. Sometimes I go back further, as many moons as I can picture, to trace the recent journeys of my head and heart. Often, I try to remember the full moon one year before to compare the me of then with the me of now.

Take this recent full March moon, for instance. It rose over the crowded Sunday night market on Chiang Mai’s main street. She was blood red from the smoky Thai skies, complementing the riot of bright colors and sounds pulsing around us. A foreign, exotic moon, just like the country we were standing in. I took the snapshot to pull out later on.

I remembered back, as well. February: standing on the brisk southern beach of Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula, the golden moon rising out of the cold Pacific to light my solitary journey through New Zealand’s North Island. January: wading into a bathwater-warm sea to our dinghy off Fetoko, bioluminescence shooting from my feet as the crisp moon shone above. December: eating dinner with my sister aboard the sailboat, talking about the brand-new life in my womb as the moon and Orion competed for first place in a celestial beauty contest. One year ago: a full moon on the day we left our home, our friends, life as we knew it. The start of our journey west toward Pacific Islands, Polynesian cultures, sailing adventures, and expanding mental horizons.

I’ve been lucky, these past 12 moons. Privledged and proud to be exploring. But this blood red March moon reminded me to feel humble in the face of the unknown. Southeast Asia has been a tough transition for us. We moved rather abruptly from slow Pacific sailboats to fast-paced motorcycles in the world’s biggest cities. The last few weeks was an immersion back into “real life,” with its constant decisions, everyday struggles, and glaring realities. We certainly are not on a boat out at sea anymore, for better and for worse. It’s a transition that has been important, necessary and revealing. But it hasn’t been easy. This particular full moon was hard-earned, and it will stand out in my lunar life journal.

Click here to see more pictures from New Zealand (better late than never!)

Post by On the Horizon Line – Bri and Rob’s Sailing Adventure.

rainbow sailboat marquesas tropical island on the horizon line blog

Sailing, Traveling

Check out our new digs.

We have a new address here in French Polynesia. Instead of telling people to find us “on the light green ketch called Llyr,” we now give directions to the “dark blue sloop named Kayanos.”

Last night we schlepped our shit over to Ben and Sarah’s 42-foot sailboat. Somehow our belongings managed to undergo mitosis aboard Llyr and doubled in size. We transported one backpack each to one pack + 3 bags + 2 sacks of fruit each via dinghy in the wet, dark Marquesan night. Good thing we only went about 200 yards.

Why move, you ask? Because transitions are part of our adventure. Because Llyr is on a tight schedule for getting to Tahiti and we’d like to spend as long as possible exploring the underwater world in the Tuamotus, a series of coral atoll islands that circle world-class lagoons. Because Ben and Sarah offered us space, and we thought it’d be fun to go with folks younger than us.

Rob and I learned a ton about electronics, provisioning, and how to care for steel boats during our time aboard Llyr. We had a blast with the Steele-McCutchen clan, and look forward to seeing them in many bays and ports along the way.

How’d we find our new digs? By chatting with folks in the small town of Taiohae and “knocking on hatches” as we scooted around the bay in a dinghy. In this case, we made friends with John and Sue aboard Wizard, who pointed us toward Kayanos. It’s a fairly small community of sailboats hopping Pacific islands, and we’ve already made friends with boats we keep seeing in different ports.

Ben and Sarah are both in their mid-20s, and grew up outside of Anchorage, Alaska. Ben bought Kayanos with his buddy in San Diego, and spent a year fixing her up in preparation for the voyage across the Pacific. He’s a climber and a surfer and an excellent sailor. Kayanos is a 1970s racing boat, about as opposite a vessel from Llyr as you can get. Instead of radar, roller furlers and SSB, we have hanked-on sails, a solar panel and paper charts. She speeds along at 7-8 knots easily, and rarely requires a motor.

We’re looking forward to learning more about Kayanos and her crew for the next few weeks. The plan: head to the northeast corner of Nuku Hiva to check out the secluded Anaho Bay, and then set off Monday or Tuesday for the ~4 day passage to the Tuamotu archipelago. We hope to visit 3-4 atolls in the Tuamotus over the following 2 weeks, where we’ll snorkel and dive with sharks, rays, and a huge diversity of fish. It’s gonna be awesome.