Life in a pandemic world

I haven't written since February 29. How much the world has changed in a few weeks.

Coronavirus Cases:

2,850,853

view by country

Deaths:

198,116

Recovered:

812,474

Leap Day 2020

That title suggests a jumping-off point. But are we jumping off into something we look forward to or jumping off into an abyss? Feels more and more like the latter this year.

Somehow, even though it's only February, 2020 does not feel like it deserves an extra day. After all, fires ravaged Australia, named storms are hitting Europe every weekend, horridly destructive Democratic debates and corrupt and convicted Republicans on the loose in America, deadly coronavirus outbreak in Asia, atrocities in the Middle East, and locust plagues in Africa. Oh, and Antarctica hit a record 70F, Brexit looms, and global stock markets had their worst week since the economic collapse of 2008. But hey, it all bounced back last time, right? Perhaps we need a little inspiration this time around.

Here's a haiku from this week.

The US bungled

Coronavirus testing

Mistake or hush-up?

And one from a couple of weeks ago.

Today the wind howls

Creating uneasiness

Yesterday flat calm

Given the rarity of February 29 as a date, one can perhaps assume that energy vibrations would not be 'usual' on such a day. The vibrations of the date could help us to take that leap, perhaps a leap of faith. It may involve completing something you’ve been working on for a long time but you haven’t had the focus to realize it. Right now, when you have an extra day on hand, why not take advantage of it? An extra day is useful for getting things in order.

If you don't know where to begin, sit down and assess your current situation in life. What do you want in the coming days, months and years? When you’ve decided what you want, what you need, write it down, and send it out into the universe. 

Then, continue on to live in the present moment to achieve your goals within each day. There is only the here and now. Everything is just this moment of awareness, and your quest is to live in that awareness not to pursue it for eternity. The universe has no notion of time – no future, no past –  only eternity. The universe has always been and always will be, but we are fleeting. Make the best of every moment, and especially the extra day granted to us today. 

Live life proactively, don’t just let it happen. Then perhaps you can exert a vibrational impact on the space-time continuum of the universe, like the wings of a butterfly. You'll never know unless you try. 

Award-winning writing

Receiving the Award after the ICC AGM from Pat Adair

As a member of the Irish Cruising Club, I am now expected to contribute to the Annual and ICC Newsletter from time to time, which I have done. My first contribution to the Annual technically did not qualify for any awards because it was about sailing over to Ireland which was too long ago to qualify.

This year, I wrote about our return to Ireland from Galicia. I was totally taken aback to open the hefty tome of the Annual when it arrived and to see my article as the first in the book and labelled as having won the Wild Goose Cup. The award is not for a cruise per se but for the literary merit of the story that was written. The adjudicator thought mine was the best-written log in the book!

Happy Daria!

Coming from the Irish, who hold literary ability most sacred, I have never felt more honoured. The Awards were presented on Friday evening after the AGM. To hear the adjudicator's reasons for selecting my work almost brought tears, followed by joy and gratitude.

The silver cup is a hefty one and very shiny. It stays with me for a year of bragging rights, then is returned for the next year's awards. I am the first female recipient and several women members pointed that out and congratulated me wholeheartedly. Perhaps it will encourage more of them to pick up the pen or start 'pshticking' the keyboard as my mom used to say. Yes, I think she'd be proud.

The next day, Winkie Nixon wrote up the AGM and awards in Afloat magazine, which made it even more poignant. I was chuffed yet again to get praise from Winkie, an amazing Irish journalist who I admire greatly.

The story I wrote was about our trip across the Bay of Biscay this past summer when we lost our engine to a disintegrated flexible coupling. There is nothing better than adversity to provide the basis of a good story. Everyone loves to read how people deal with problems - or not. As one magazine publisher likes to say, "Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure." On this voyage, we had some of both.

Now, I can say that I am an award-winning author. Tomorrow I will write about the conscious attempt to write for the purpose of winning an award.

Clarity in writing

And now for a poignant example of brilliant creativity that is judged incorrectly by the teachers whose questions were not clearly phrased.  These kids answers were brilliant. I wouldn't fail them. I'd spend time nurturing them, and go back to fix my questions. Click on the link and enjoy.

Poetry as a stimulus for scientists

This headline grabbed me today:

"Feeling stuck? Close your laptop, stop your field measurements and write a poem
Sam Illingworth explains how poetry can help to communicate and celebrate your science."

As a former scientist and a current writer struggling to find my voice, I found this thought intriguing.  To tap into the creativity of the right brain to answer questions of scientific intrigue and rigor rattling around in the left brain has always been of interest to me. But the thought of writing a poem to hone in on your scientific solutions was brilliant. 

Science is all about logic and fact and data --- loads of data. Poetry is about emotion, and painting pictures, and simplicity -- massive simplicity.

I love this! So I immediately wrote a Haiku. 

When science gets tough 

Strive to see the universe 

Uniquely in verse.

Did you get the double meaning? And I don't even have to name my poem. Now to find the answers to my scientific problems. What to do with all the plastic that sailors collect on beaches around the world. I need creative solutions and this may be the way. 

Reflections on the year and the decade…

Hello All, Family & Friends,

The year - 2019

We are sorry, but Alex and I just didn’t feel the Christmas spirit this year. We sent no cards, bought few gifts, and spread little cheer. As the year and the decade come to a close, I was prompted to think about where the time has gone and what significant things we’ve accomplished, if any, in that time.

As to the past year, we released the 3^rd Edition of our book Happy Hooking – The Art of Anchoring and conducted several webinars helping sailors learn about anchoring gear and proper techniques for anchoring in remote places. The book is selling well, and we get many thanks from sailors who now are able to get a good night’s sleep aboard their boats.

I have been updating my blogs (Aleria’s Adventures, Viticulture in Ireland, What it means to be Ukrainian) which has made me slightly schizophrenic. (Yes, we’ve started a vineyard – more about that later.) I began anew to write a book based on my mother’s memoirs but as a historical fiction novel this time. I only got a few chapters in before being interrupted by life. I will get back to it in January.

I was also elected Vice Commodore of the Ocean Cruising Club, which keeps me busy. I am editor of their website and handle all their PR work, as well as being a member of the Board. Alex is Regional Rear Commodore of the OCC for Ireland and is responsible for organising events.  He is also the editor of the Irish Cruising Club Newsletter, which he produces beautifully.

Alex is about halfway through his third novel. He’s also written several magazine articles, and he teaches a wonderful course on self-publishing in which aspiring authors actually complete the course with their own printed book in their hands. A local bookshop has a mini printing press. The life altering stories that have emerged out of Alex’s experience here have been heart-wrenching.

We spent our third summer aboard Aleria in Spain and then brought her home to Ireland, offloaded 15 years of acquired gear, and put her up for sale. It’s time to trade down to a smaller boat. Halfway across the Bay of Biscay, our engine failed when we had a calm spell. Drifting in the ocean for days without wind left much time for reflection. I wrote an article about it for which I won an award for literary merit from the Irish Cruising Club, the first time it has been awarded to a woman. I am very honoured.

Alex’s mother Meike is now 86 and quite frail, but still living on her own, with a good deal of support from Alex and Kirstin. Kirstin opened a new sustainable living shop in Westport called Pax which has been doing gangbusters. Her partner, Michael, fell just before Christmas and broke several ribs and punctured a lung but is mending well. Cormac, our nephew, has a new job and a new girlfriend, Louise, a neuropharmacologist. They travelled to Sri Lanka and had a wonderful year overall.

Our five cats are driving us mad, the birds are coexisting nicely, and a pine martin has moved into the neighbourhood. We both suffered back injuries in November and ended up in tandem physiotherapy.

It’s very nice to be getting our social security and retirement fund checks like clockwork every month, and I’m looking forward to free travel passes next year. I get to name a companion who gets free passes too, so we’ll be seeing more of the country in coming years. Although this year, we did manage to get around a bit – Kinsale twice, Cork, Dublin, Derry, North Wales, and more. We’re celebrating the New Year at home with some bubbly and a half-price turkey. Not too bad overall.

The decade – 2009-2019

It was an interesting decade for us. We made a lifestyle choice by leaving our killer jobs and crossing an ocean to live in a new country in 2008. That was a transition year – we built a house, restored some boats, established new friendships. The financial crisis was upon us and times were tense.

In 2009-2010, we left and spent a year sailing a Caribbean circuit – Spain, Portugal, the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean and the Azores – before returning to Ireland. It was an experience that forever altered our outlook on life and what’s worth pursuing.

We returned home and started a business which took us in several directions. One got us some funding to develop a system of online health education. Alex patented the system, we wrote a business plan and were prepared to conduct studies for proof of concept when our local authority failed to file our application for EU Funding on time, missing the deadline. We elected then to fold that part of the business and concentrate on writing.

We also set about planting a garden on land that had been bulldozed flat and hard. After ten years, and hundreds of trees and shrubs, we now have a forest, a beautifully landscaped hillside, an orchard, a vegetable garden with lots of berries and fields that lay fallow to enable re-wilding. Some of the fields are summer home to our neighbour’s donkeys – 9 of them. They are the sweetest, most interesting creatures we’ve ever gotten to know. We love where we live. Stunning scenery, pristine waters, always changing light. Nature at its best and, at times, its fiercest.

For the next few years, we wrote all winter, gardened in the spring, then sailed all summer. Scotland, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. We turned around rather than heading for the Med when the temperatures reached the 40˚Cs. Too bloody hot! We wrote about it all in magazines, blogs and books.

And because it’s been getting warmer, I came up with a crazy idea that we should plant some grapevines to see if we could establish a vineyard like they have in Galicia. Their maritime climate is the same as ours except 2 degrees warmer. We started with 5 vines as a test and now have about 135. It takes 5 years to get a grape harvest so this year will be the test year. We had a few grapes this year, but the birds ate them all. My blog tells the story. It turns out, I’m no so crazy.

Our weather has been very mild so far this year, as it was last year and the year before. The weather has definitely been changing. In 2011 was the last year we had any snow, and it was mostly freezing rain that year. We’ve had more severe storms, which, as an island in the Atlantic, are taking their toll on erosion and destruction of the ecological systems. The fish populations have changed and we’re now getting migratory populations that were never seen here before. The cod are gone, and tuna have returned. More whale species are being seen in Irish waters. Our bees – we had a hive -- collapsed one very damp winter. That year, 50% of the hives collapsed in Ireland. In our inlet, we now have a resident population of snowy egrets that co-exist with the herons.

Moreover, two hurricanes, two years apart, formed off the coast of Africa and came straight up the Atlantic to Ireland without veering toward America first. It had never happened before. Ophelia caused widespread damage when she made landfall in Cork. Lorenzo in 2019 made landfall here in Clew Bay as a tropical storm, fortunately without major damage. We sheltered several British sailors at our home who were stranded by the hurricane as they headed north to Scotland.

I became a citizen of Ireland after living here continuously for five years. They have an extraordinary ceremony in which 1000 people from more than 100 countries take part on the same day. The woman next to me from Zimbabwe kept hugging me and crying, “We made it. We made it.” I felt unworthy to be asking for something when so many were desperate for asylum. But I was proud to be part of this great small nation. The first to legislate for gay marriage in a referendum. Things have changed so much in this country in the last decade. The Catholic Church no longer has a stranglehold on the country or its people.

We woke up one morning to hear that Trump was elected President of the USA. I lived in NY during his heydays there. I knew what we were in for.  A couple of weeks later, we woke up to the news of the Brexit vote. A few months later, a comedian who played a President on TV was elected President of Ukraine. Who knew that those bizarre events would all end up interconnected?  Now, children like Greta Thunberg are suffering from anxiety and depression in staggering numbers. It became clear the world was changing dramatically and the polarised landscape was not ever going to be the same.

Moreover, this decade has seen us lose some very good people. Drake Sparkman and Mike Bruno, friends in America, gone way too young. My cousin, Bohdan, after a very full life. But saddest of all was our nephew, Cillian, who took his own life. Living with severe bipolar disorder was too painful for him. We miss him most.

The coming decade – 2020-2019

What do we wish for in the coming decade?  We wish for these madmen to stop feeding their own egos and do some good for the world. We wish for a world leader who can see past skin colour and bank accounts and pull everyone together to work for the health of our planet and its lifeforms, all of them. Can it happen? Perhaps the youth rising up today as we did in the 1970s will change the institutions that are so rooted in their myopic ways. I have hope.

For myself, I’ll retire from office (OCC) in two years and rewire again. I’d like to find a cause to support. Perhaps I’ll finally write the great American novel. Most likely, I’ll just write away in obscurity comforted by the knowledge that most great creative successes were only recognised posthumously.

We’d like to sail north to Scandinavia over the next few years, and I must finally get to Ukraine.

The only thing we truly hope for is good health. We have love.

From us to you the wish for a happy, peaceful, and successful new year

Daria and Alex

Advice about copyright

The Alliance for Independent Authors (ALLi) has excellent resources for self-published authors online. Published November 15, 2019, a new report on copyright infringement outlines common mistakes made by indie authors, especially when citing the work of others. Many of us have no clue that if you reproduce others' work, even a paragraph or lines of a poem or song, even when citing it properly, can result in fines of up to $250,000.

It pays to know.