Captain's Log, April 30, 2014 from the Rebel Heart Blog

[Prairie Chicken]

I picked this up on Twitter this morning. For those who don't follow Twitter, here is the text:



captain's log, april 30, 2014

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 at 10:13
If you're writing cathartically or just to document, you don't really need a cohesive point. But whether or not there's an answer to "what is the author trying to say?" can be the difference between good writing and rambling rhetoric.

I've struggled a lot trying to make sense of the loss of our dream, our home, and our way of life. Short of a press statement issued in the throws of a media circus, I honestly haven't known what I wanted to say and in large part I still don't.

I know there are people, many people, who have suffered far worse fates than my own family has. Roughly $20,000 dollars was unsolicitedly raised for us. To put that in context, more than 40% of American workers make less than that amount annually.

My parents used to remind me of the old saying, "I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met the man who had no feet." Not trying to equivocate on it, but where does that logic end? "I felt sorry for myself because I had no feet until I met the man who had no legs?" Maybe no one in a bad breakup should feel sad because hey, they could have gotten their legs chopped off too, so turn that frown upside down.

It's helpful to put our loss into perspective, but I'm trying to stop short of engaging in Oppression Olympics where we're only allowed to feel bad if we have the trophy awarded for Greatest Loss Suffered Ever.

One of the hardest things for me personally is that we've been out of mainstream American culture for roughly two years now, living in an adventure. Everything we did was generally difficult but incredibly rewarding. Our adventurous sailing friends are literally going wherever the wind blows at this very moment, and I'm sitting on my laptop imagining our home of eight years sitting 6,000 feet under the water.

My child's Buzz Lightyear doll, if it floats, is probably banging against the overhead in the cabin, forever unable to escape and there it will remain for hundreds or thousands of years, gently bobbing in the near current-less waters of the deep Pacific basin. These images, and others too painful to bring to the forefront of my mind, will be racing around my head for some time I imagine. I actually try to slowly remember more and more of the ordeal, and of our home sitting on the bottom of the sea, as a way of revisiting the memory and making it less traumatic.

I of course was the one who cut the hoses myself, sinking Rebel Heart, so metaphorically and literally, I sank our dream, watching water lap over the floor boards as I said my final goodbyes to a ship that had protected us, taken care of us, and allowed us to see thousands of miles of ocean and coastlines.

Moreover, Rebel Heart allowed us to see ourselves for who we were. We learned what we really could accomplish. We learned that chasing down dreams and doing the impossible is actually quite possible, and not just for other people. We learned that we could be so much more than we thought.

So to Rebel Heart, our beloved boat resting, I hope peacefully, at the bottom of the sea, I want you to know that you will always be a member of our family and that we continue to draw lessons from you. Your impact on our lives and the time we had with you has forged bonds that the years will never be able to undo.

Even now you allow us to see the generosity and decency of people, who from all over the globe have offered us support and kindness in whatever shapes they can.

Thank you, Rebel Heart.