Scoured Clean

You gotta grow, you gotta learn by your mistakes
You gotta die a little everyday just to try to stay awake
When you believe there’s no mountain you can climb
And if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time.

                                                      ~Gerry Rafferty

Life has scoured us clean.

Eleven years of being on the road, we’ve hit some major milestones:

• Became debt-free
• Purged our belongings to fit in a small storage unit (sometimes a toothbrush and a change of clothes is enough.)
• Sold our house to pursue our dreams.
• Bought a boat and cruised the Puget Sound for parts of 2 years
• Changed to a plant-based diet; excluding meat and dairy (with the exception of an occasional fish)
• Enlarged our view of this world

And today… Even our souls are scrubbed clean and we stand exposed and gasping in the chill fall air.

Today, we sold our beloved Wings of the Morning.

Still In Love!

Last fall we decided it was time to move on. It was not an easy decision and even harder to carry through. To hand over the keys to a life long dream meant learning again the hard lesson that material things cannot be allowed to control us. To not being defined by what we own.

It almost didn’t happen.
Even up to the moment right before we made the call to accept the offer and follow through on a decision made last year. Memories of the pleasurable times aboard caused us to resurrect old ideas and invent new dreams of what we would do… IF we didn’t sell her.

New directions are always hard. Moving away from old friends; our old stuff doesn’t fit in our new plan; there is never enough money. Staying in the old rut is more comfortable so we try to wedge the new idea into our already crowded lives without really changing anything.

As the miles roll on behind us, littered with the baggage we have jettisoned along the way, we keep glimpsing a future where we are free. Free to collect people, places, experiences and memories. This is the reason we came here.

A future where we make decisions based on what is right and good, not simply what is best economically. It is a future counter to the culture we live in, so we struggle to keep it in focus. Directions we think might lead to that future turn out to be wrong and we have to turn around. But with less to tie us down, turning around is so much easier.

The boat for us was a wonderful sidetrack. We learned a lot and we made new friends. We enjoyed the sights and sounds and experiences, but it is time to move on and in the end our boat became an anchor, stuck fast in a part of our lives that is now disappearing into the rear view mirror like all the other things we’ve left behind.

Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow we will wake up in a world where we no longer own a boat. The gut wrenching decision and the gut wrenching follow through will be yesterdays problem and we can leave that along the dusty road as well.

We are homeless again, and that suits us for now. We have some plans for the near future and we can’t wait to share, but that’s another post.

Now we savor the feeling of being free, today, at this moment. Free to enjoy the sunlight and the scenery. Free to explore the future. Free!

The road is before us as always. We rest a little lighter in the drivers seat and the future we are chasing is a little clearer than before and that suits us too…

…for now.