We Make This Journey Together

 

A lot has changed since I started this blog two and a half years ago.  My original motivation for writing about our cruising life was simple: reassure the grandparents.  And I wasn’t always successful.  It never really occurred to me that anyone I wasn’t related to would ever be interested in our broken fingers and broken masts, our sealion bites and four-legged pests, or riding around in a Colombian police van.  Twice.

But new people came, and new people stayed.  The blog grew, SAILfeed invited me to join their site, and here I am.  And here you are.  And we are sharing this now.

Musician Amanda Palmer recently gave a wonderful speech over at TED Talks, wherein she talked about making a human connection through her art.  And while, unlike the fearless Amanda, I don’t think I’m ready to sleep on your couch, I do understand what she means.  In the early days of my blog, I was personally acquainted with everyone who was reading it.  We had that connection.  And I would like to get some of that back.

In days gone by, this blog would have been a newspaper column.  You would have read about me trying to bake birthday cakes on a desert island as you drank your morning coffee, and hopefully your sticky-child-decorated kitchen would have felt a little more comfortable to you.  But there would have been a distance between us - I would have been writing at you.  Now, because this is a blog, we have the opportunity to talk to each other.  Every post, both on the original site and on SAILfeed, has a comments section, and I hereby invite you, dear reader, to use it.  This isn’t me alone – you are all out there, too.

I know because I get lovely emails.  From people who dream of cruising.  From people who just plain love boats.  From people who wouldn’t leave land if you paid them, but like funny stories about harried moms.  You write to me, and I delight in responding to each note.  We hold eye contact for those brief moments.  But you should meet each other, too.  And I want to hear more.

What are you interested in?  What brought you by?  Did you also marry a man who waited for you to leave the house one day, then shut off the water and disconnected all of the pipes in the bathroom without a word of warning?  Tell me I’m not the only one.

What?

This is not to say I want the compliments to stop; someday I may have to collect those emails into a folder and try to pay my bills in love instead of cash.  But we have the chance to be a community, and I think we should take it.  You will never mistake this column for a place of grave introspection and serious analysis.  This is a place where kids fly over the boom like Wonder Woman, where husbands commandeer the cockpit for fibreglass work, and where we laugh about it all.  Because cruising is fun, and funny, and I love it.

Consider this your formal welcome to the world of Sailing Papillon.  Don’t leave me hanging here, people.  Please, join in.

We're all friends here.