Que de la mer

We are day 1 at sea on a cruise ship heading for Alaska from Vancouver. Last night I slept with the balcony door wide open and my eyes as well. There is a pervasive feeling that you don’t want to miss anything when you are in a faraway place. Sleep is for the spoiled. I watched as the rail of my balcony cut the horizon line of the mountains and then bobbed above and below. It seems impossible that such a large boat would rock us so like babies in a big cradle. The air races in; fresh and moist and cool.

At three in the morning the ship toots its horn insistently for over an hour as though something is in its way on a busy freeway. I see a cluster of lights at the base of a hill. So  in the midst of nothing there is civilization. How do people live there? What is their life like and how do they spend their days?

Far from home and so little resembling home, you remember how many different ways you can make a life. Very unlike my regular life, sea is all around me. “Que de la mer” a poet once wrote-‘nothing but sea”. Life gives boundaries as we live it. It is liberating to be at sea with nothing for the eye to hold.

Nothingness is hard to come by when you are moving with several hundred people on a floating mall.There are many places to go and things to do-some spots are so densely populated and some offer surprising solitude.

I was the only person at 7:30 this morning on the sky deck- morning mist and rain as I ran. “Drunken sailor” is what you look like when you try to run on a rocking boat.

Sitting now in the internet cafe – quaint with it’s library books and passengers whose passions are not just for food-it seems to me that there are only a few things we can stare at indefinitely and still dream. A crackling fire, a mountain range, a rolling meadow and the sea. Que de la mer. A time to dream and wonder.