I am taking a one-year professional certification in Maritime Sciences and will be shipping out with my friend spring of 2016! Please look at our website! :-)
Rainbow over the West Mooring Basin. Astoria, Oregon on the Columbia River.
I am taking a one-year professional certification in Maritime Sciences and will be shipping out with my friend spring of 2016! Please look at our website! :-)
Rainbow over the West Mooring Basin. Astoria, Oregon on the Columbia River.
Black History 365, (a slight break from the norm) – Maria Victor.
It’s possible that if no one decides to do a speed trip before I get back to Oregon around 2017… I could be the first African American woman to circumnavigate the globe! The mind, it boggles. O_o
Please feel free to see if there is anything that my Google searching missed. If I had realized this back in 2012 when I was first invited to go along, I think I would have done the last half of that year MUCH differently and we would be already underway by now! Ah well. Hindsight is truly 20/20.
Focusing on this project right now. Once I feel somewhat settled, I will go back to my poetry posts at least twice weekly. In the meantime check out the preparations for the sailing trip around the world! :-)
Above is a link to the video page on the website for the sailing trip around the world I am going on. It will soon have updates and links to new videos of the road trip to Oregon to fix up the boat for living and world sailing! :-D
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About The Emuna Endeavor (the sailing trip)… I may be blissfully optimistic in all things… but I am not an idiot… I am quite aware that this will be HARD… the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life both physically and mentally… I am not oblivious to the perils of storm and sea creatures… both the meat eaters that could take us and those that are as big as the vessel my friend and I will be in… I am not unaware that a lot of countries don’t like Americans… in every country there are those who barely tolerate Black people (if not outright hate us like here in the USA)… there are whole countries that are violently anti-Jew (especially the obvious Jew-ness of orthodoxy)… I know that living with another human being will be a challenge to learn to work together and to get along and not work each others nerves… to respect each others space as much as can be done in such tight quarters… Don’t think for a second that the thought of violent storms doesn’t make me nervous if not outright scare… but… all of these things ARE not reasons to abandon the idea of this trip… if anything they sturdy my resolve to DO THIS and build myself as a human being… I find it interesting (and a little sad) that people seem to FIRST mention all the perils (as though I hadn’t considered it)… very few have just embraced the fact that I KNOW IT WILL BE HARD AND I AM DOING IT ANYWAY… very few have just said “WOW! That is amazing!” and congratulated me on having something so grand to accomplish in my life… I understand why the worriers worry (worriers gon worry like haters gon hate I guess)… I don’t choose to let all of those things crush me… I just choose to eat this elephant one bite at a time and move towards the most fantastic adventure of my life so far!
FYI… we have a goal of 1000 online crew members (“likes”)… please like our facebook page and pas it on. :-)
https://www.facebook.com/TheEmunaEndeavor
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Lately I have been feeling a tad frazzled with trying to keep track of preparations for the big sailing trip next year (https://www.facebook.com/TheEmunaEndeavor) which for now includes narrowing down my physical belongings, looking up port cities to see where we want to stop, getting a (free) camera to start doing the fundraising video, seeing if any of our current friends know friends in other countries who can connect us to coastal folk that we can befriend and visit (since the whole draw of the trip is to create global community). I am looking into corporate sponsorship to basically be a floating billboard and youtube ad slot for any company who wants to stand for unifying the world by our commonality instead of dividing us by our differences. I will also be approaching local businesses here in Phoenix as well as in Astoria where Dovid lives and even the port cities we will be visiting here in the USA and abroad. It’s a lot of work and I really hope I can get most of it done BEFORE leaving Phoenix in mid January. I have also been monitoring the twitter and tumblr accounts for the trip and even to a small degree the Google+ and Blogger accounts. Twitter isn’t so bad because the facebook and tumblr auto cross post to there, but I do still log on to see if there are new followers or @mentions or direct messages. Now that I just typed all that out… WHEW that is a LOT of stuff I am doing!
Since I know I am leaving I am cherishing every moment I can with all the people in my life here locally. I am going to as many events as I possibly can. I meet up with people just to connect or even if it is for some other purpose like selling my art, I still spend some moments with the person to connect. I am so super fortunate to have so many wonderfully bright shining lights of kindness and community and people actively doing their dream. Even the new people I am meeting are in line with this energy! So much inspiration around me!
I’m also still working on my poetry… I write all the time. I can’t seem to help myself most days. Thoughts come into my head and I type them out and post them on my poetry facebook in the status. If I really like a poem I have written, I will put it in my notes on that page. I also have been queuing my National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) poems to my poetry tumblr. At one poem posted per day once I get all my poems from April 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 that is almost SIX MONTHS of poetry posts! And like with the trip, I also have a poetry twitter account and a poetry Blogger account. Same deal with the poetry twitter, I just log on to check for new follower and @mentions since the tumblr and facebook both cross post there.
Speaking of followers… I am also trying to write each new follower a poem. Which if I had written the poems right away as they came in, no problem… but… I didn’t do that so now I have 35 twitter followers and 50 followers on tumblr… D’OH! So I really want to find the time to write those poems too. OH! and I have a banker’s box FILLED with poems that if they are hand written I need to see if they are already in soft copy somewhere in my files or online (I send poems to myself via email even if I don’t post them anywhere) and even the printed ones I need to make sure I actually still have the soft copy that I printed them from (some I didn’t). SO… again… a LOT of stuff I am doing!
Of course there is life outside of preparation, poetry and people… I am a live-in nanny for my friend in exchange for room and board (I may ask for $30/mo to keep my PayGo phone on too). It’s fine most of the time but it can interfere with my social life and my trying to sell my art at events because my friend and her husband are in a band so their gigs are almost always on the nights that things are going on. It’s cool when they have a gig that the kids can come to so that I can go with them and watch the kids there, but they mostly play bars so the kids can’t go. Which is fine. I am so grateful to have a place to live while I figure out the next phase of my life with this huge trip.
Funny thing about writing this entry… I have had a thought that I am feeling frazzled for no reason, but now that I look at my life all neatly typed out like this, I am seeing that my life is REALLY full. I do take maybe 5-10 minutes in the morning to just be and center before I start my day.. maybe I need to take 15-20 to just sit in grateful mindfulness of my life and all that is in it. <3
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As I get ready for the upcoming sailing trip next May, I have a feeling that a book bag filled with Ziploc bagged notebooks will end up being my most prized possession. This will be what I use for my journaling. Plain old spiral notebooks written in my smallest possible handwriting to chronicle the six months to two years I will be on the coastal seas.
These humble books would (if they weren’t in a book bag) most likely be ignored by thieves, but they will be the most irreplaceable of items. Sure, I’ll probably bring my netbook and some USB drives but to conserve power, I will do my writing the old-fashioned way: on paper.
I’m looking forward to the adventure!
Well, we didn’t leave in 2013. My friend Dovid had to deal with some legal issues that he knew would take time. May 2014 we went to Oregon where the boat was. The boat was not quite big enough for two of us so in July 2014 Dovid got a bigger boat. I was in school in 2015 learning maritime studies and got a basic certification in seamanship (but not a license). I ended school in April this year and since then we have been getting the gear we need piece by piece. We have a new sail date of June 2017. Things are coming together! If you would like to follow our preparations and travels once we get going, this is our website: https://emunaendeavor.org/
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niccoleamnance.com 