Blog

The beauty of life is that everything is always up in the air and with the shape of your lips and thoughts you can change its direction. It’s as if life was the wind and our bodies were boats and our words were sails. So, what is the shape of...

Back in 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were abducted from their car in the woods of the White Mountains. Two hours vanished. They awoke- clothes ripped. Dirty. Caked in a mysterious dust. Their heads were foggy.  Their reality undone. Their night an incomplete story. They remembered being chased by a...

At 9 am, on the morning of the super moon, I got high with a sea turtle.  I did not care for the submarines or the shipwrecks or the smoke water rings, I only had eyes for that turtle. We were eyeball to eyeball, but I was the one upside...

I splashed Juniper back in the water. She’s sitting pretty and sailing smoothly with her new facelift. She has been sanded and waxed and painted. Her blisters, bandaged. Her thirsty wood, fed a stiff drink of teak oil. Her broken, rusty fridge, replaced. The holes in her fiberglass, patched. Her...

I’m working on Juniper from sun up to sun down. Running myself to the gritty, gritty ground. My dogs are barking. My eyelids are sunburned. I’ve got band-aids and paint everywhere. I’ve lost five pounds and half of a fingernail. And worst of all, the stitches from my surgery popped...

I love being on lockdown in Hawaii. It’s an excuse to repair Juniper all day and ignore everything else. I also suppose that lockdown doesn’t feel so severe because my home moves. I moved Juniper today. Sailed her straight over to a shipyard. It’s like a boat hospital. Here, new...

I am back on Juniper now, and paradise is empty. I like the stillness of it. I noticed today how similar the word pandemic is to panic. Take the “dem” out of pandemic and you have panic. I have not panicked about this pandemic and I keep wondering if the...

Without the sea, I’m a total mess. Eight years ago I made this Caribbean-style dress. It’s forest green with fringe and neon beads. At the time, I was living on a 26 ft. sailboat in Jamaica Bay. The boat didn’t belong to me. I don’t even remember her name. I...

I sometimes wonder if scientists are sitting in laboratories mixing up diseases, just so they have something new to discover. I love to discover. To explore. To escape. Who doesn’t? We are all restless without novelty. Restlessness feeds everything, even secrets. People always want to know and be the first...

January 30, 2020 Its 6:00 am. in Venice beach on a Thursday. Ten days after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, yes.  I open my eyes and I’m thinking about space and sex and aliens. I Shit, shower, shave, then walk to the coffee shop. I pass the butcher’s daughter, three wise men, and an...

This Is Far From Over While I was crossing the Pacific, I received a satellite email from my friend Will Oldham aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. He sent me lyrics to the song “This Is Far From Over” and asked if I could create a music video for it. I wasn’t...

I was just sailing down in the British Virgin Islands along with all the pirates of the Caribbean. At one point there was threat of mutiny, but I won’t get into that just yet. It was the week of New Years and the world was a blur of fireworks and...

On the ranch, I communicate with the animals. I coral the horses from one field to the next. The horses- like everyone else on this planet- don’t understand my Spanish either, so I run behind them, clap my hands and yell “go go go!” That they can understand. They gallop...

The sky breaks open and bleeds bliss. I swim in sweet water. I sip on honeysuckles. I vibrate in the tall grass. The day drifts like a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. I sink, I sink, I sink. I sink into the earth and swallow an antiquated light…. it’s...

The vagabond inside of my heart has led me to a grass ocean in Uruguay. These days I find it best to do whatever the vagabond in my heart says. Wherever it tells me to go, I go. I go before tomorrow is today. I go. I go consumed by...

While writing Koko Head & The Flying Vagina, I was reminded of a moment at sea that scared the bejesus out of me. I mentioned the incident briefly in Surfing the Deep Blue Sea, but I didn’t tell you how much it melted the interior of my mind, because to...

Chapter 1: Koko Head I am back in Oahu working on Juniper, for better or worse. The sun has faded the colors of everything that was left on deck. The sun is such a potent thing.  Eventually everything in my life will fade beneath it, even me. I will fade...

Everybody knew that the Coral Sea was haunted by the ghost of the heartbroken. And the ghost who rattled the loudest among the pulsing of the whales and the sharks and the sea dragons, was named Viola. Viola’s story is a sad story. It begins once upon a time on...

I’m currently back in LA, carrying the sea in my pocket and following the flow of land. The flow of land…. What is the flow of land? Is it the weeds growing in the cracks of concrete, the smoke of a forest on fire, a river of lights, a snake...

I had been warned, but nothing could have truly prepared me for the sail from Kaua’i back to O’ahu The day after the forest, Sam and I snorkeled, climbed palm trees that grew sideways, and watched an endangered monk seal beach itself. Have you ever seen a wrasse? That species...

Sam and I locked Daisy( the dinghy) to a palm tree and decorated it with leaves and flowers. It was an offering of protection, because people had lost dinghies to the hands of thieves on that shore in Hanalei Bay. But that can happen on any shore.  We made our...