Day One
03 September 2013 | Sailing Southern California
Terri Potts-Chattaway
September 2, 2013
In the late seventeenth century, David Potts came from Wales to America. His soon to be wife, Alice Croasdale, left England with her family and crossed the sea with William Penn on the ship Welcome. What must it have been like to step off the land and onto a ship to sail across an ocean to a place far away and unknown? Exciting and frightening, I suspect. Not unlike the emotions that are running through my veins this very moment.
Okay, I’m not crossing an ocean (not yet, anyway). And I am only traveling to Catalina at the moment. But the thought of taking our boat to unknown ports along the coast of Mexico is both exciting and scary. Yet I feel alive and connected to the sea and the earth and…
Sometimes, when I am at a loss for words, I look to our favorite poet, Pablo Neruda. No one says it better than Pablo.
LOVE, WE’RE GOING HOME NOW
Love, we’re going home now.
Where the vines clamber over the trellis:
Even before you, the summer will arrive,
On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.
Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:
Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:
Ceylon, green dove: and the Yangtze with its old
Old patience, dividing the day from the night.
And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea
Like two blind birds to their wall,
To their nest in a distant spring:
Because love cannot always fly without resting,
Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:
Our kisses head back home where they belong.