Inside the Full Circle

Dried mud on my feet, and a heaviness pulling me into where I am.  Sitting in vicarious anticipation, smiling on the inside along with these humans looking expectedly to be reunited with this someone they have missed so much.  Lives flash before my eyes as I get a front seat to these crisp moments when people are reminded of how much they love each other, and run into each others arms, a moment void of the pain between them, a moment when the veil of separation is pealed back and two souls reach out in the dark, loosing themselves in each other.  I think there is nothing more beautiful than what I'm seeing now, here at the anchorage airport where friends and family wait for arrivals.  

A woman and two curly hair kids look unwaveringly past the do-not-enter sign. I can feel the butterflies in their stomach, until at last, something wells up inside of them, leaping, almost unable to contain their joy. Eyes bright, the kids run. The father is already bent over and sweeping forward, reflecting their excitement.  They meet, a kid in each arm, the mother joins, and in this moment four lakes of built up ecstasy burst forth and run together. They become enveloped in something so pure and so magical that nothing else matters, nothing else exists.   

Two lovers see each other, already one, already wrapped up before their physical bodies touch, a smooth gaze that comes after years of love, eyes locked, lips lock, eyes closed in deep happiness.  

Is this moment the peak? I wonder what the rest of their lives together are like.  Will this level of joy fade? Even before they are out the door their eyes return to the way they were before. Why does this joy not sustain? If this is a glimpse of something, what is it a glimpse of? And why is it so rare?

Unlike these people all around me I'm not waiting for someone, I came to be reminded of the light and bask in it.

I just flew in from dillingham where I fished my third gill-net salmon season.  Upon arrival, my captain, fellow crew and I walked to earthquake park, 3 miles from the anchorage airport.  I took my sandals off, and ran and slid in the mud down the beach.  Then they continued to the lower states and I'm staying here to head north, into a land that feeds my soul, that nourishes me in a way I didn't know I needed.  

Yesterday I stood on the banks of bear bay in western Alaska, miles from any civilization, and watched the river turn red. Thousands of florescent fins propelling the salmon upstream, where the scent of home will guide them within forty feet of where they were born. Where they will lay their eggs and die, to provide the vital nourashment for their babies. The ultimate sacrifice.  This, after years of swimming the big Atlantic to Japan and back.  It was a sacred ground, I stood in awe. As I walked up the creek, alert for bears, I noticed that these salmon would form groups just before a shallow stretch. Hardly swimming, they would muster energy from their weak bodies to power forward, wriggling, half out of water, sending pulsing splashes into the air, until they reached the next pool where they would return to slow twisting back and forth. I rounded a corner where the river stretched straight for 200 yards, the entire extent penetrated by hundreds of fins, glowing red as if a light was shining from inside.  This scene only exists a few places on earth for only a few weeks out of the year. I will never forget that holiness.

I love meeting characters pushing the frontier of what it means to live.  In dillingham I met Martin, who just finished fishing and was getting ready to hike back to anchorage, 300 miles over tundra and glaciers.  This was a dream I had last year.  Here in the airport I met Andy Knight, a New Zealander, who has spent the last two years bicycling around the world.  He's done all of Europe and Asia, and today he starts the America's.  He will bike north to the Arctic Ocean, then south all the way to the tip of Argentina.

This airport is the same place where my great journey begun last year.  Where I entered life with no plans, and discovered freedom, and started to see the world.  I've come full circle with an amazing year behind me, and I have a lot to ponder.  There are so many things in my heart, there are things I need to look at.  Life is such a massive thing and we have this one life, with infinite possibilities.  I don't want to walk through life not stopping to consider how I'm living, and how I want to live. I'm looking forward to my first stop, a cabin in the woods close to Denali national park. I'll be helping a couple I became close to last summer, who homesteaded the land years ago. They have a bed and breakfast and have a hard time keeping up the 100 acres. I'll help them half of the days and walk into the forest the other half to be, to learn, to see, to consider who I am and how I want to live and what life is, and where we can go, and what freedom is and how I can most fully propagate it.

I wonder what life is like from your perspective, and I hope you are doing well.

In the heat of the season

July 7

The days are starting to blur together, I'm having a hard time telling if its morning or evening, we fish for eight hours then sleep for a few, fish for ten, sleep for a few, each day feel like two.  And the sky is only dark for a few hours.  The mighty salmon have been good to us this year, not killer good, just good enough, the seas have been calm, it's pulled my food out of me only once.  And it's put food in many times. Last night we filleted, breaded and fried another salmon, cooked up black African rice and green beans, had a priceless feast anchored there on the south line among 500 other boats filled with fishermen who miss women all over the states. I'm listening to Peter Paul and Mary, getting very nostalgic for the 60s and 70s, and for free people, and for receiving and giving complete love, and for pushing to one. 

I'm grateful for Casey, my fellow crew, talking about life and the universe and the course of the human race on the back deck as we push through the seas and lay our net and call to the fish to culminate their destiny giving to us. Pulling jokes on each other and laughing and dancing.  Creating ideas together that rival the best shows.

And now it's time to fish, and watch the Alaskan ocean, and a 360 sky filled with clouds like you've never seen before, depth, color, texture, and a horizon of boats, and rejoice over every splash in the net.

Teleport off the port

June 29
When the immediate light of our sun shoots from one end of the horizon over the valleys of a distant mountain range through the crests of the brown waves and crashes against the shoreline cliff, I forget for a moment that I have a life, the dirt-fronted, tundra-tufted cliff face blasted with sun so fiercely it is knocked out of its home in Alaska and into my head, where nothing exists except waves refracting light, this cliff and distant silhouetted mountains. Then the light hits my head, my skin, and my eyes directly. The waves of light fire my neurons which immediately shakes me from my other-dimensional hermit perch and like sparks from a flint I appear now as part of this scene that used to be apart of me. The drone of the Cats Paw's engine, this gill net fishing vessel, the hurdling of the waves that my body has already learned to counterbalance, the other boats fighting the current to find a calmer water to anchor for the three hours that the district is closed. It all starts to come in clear. I'm back, I'm an Alaskan fisherman, and I'm basking in the sleep-deprived glory of the wild land, the textured sky, the endless water and the mighty salmon.