My life is an aquarium and I am soaking in salt. I like my life. No, I love my life. It’s like a blue hole with honey it. And it doesn’t even matter that I’m almost out of shampoo and deodorant and vegetables and cooking oil. It also doesn’t matter that something must have been …
MOONLIT & HOTTER THAN A PEPPER
MOONLIT I woke today all wild haired and rocket eyed. I’ve been on the archangels rollercoaster. It’s an endless ride. I feel raw but satisfied. Sunday was Fiji day. We planted 51 pieces of coral in a coral garden to celebrate 51 years of independence. The ones I planted looked like violet deer antlers. Some …
RAINBOW REEF
I am 30 feet below the surface. Water rushes past me in cold currents. I see a pod of dolphins above. I see a humphead wrasse bigger than a pony. I see clownfish hiding inside a sea anemone forest. I see the rainbow, it’s getting brighter. I swim into a cave. There are pockets of …
THE GARDEN ISLAND
I followed the mountain to the moon, or did I follow the moon to the mountain? I can’t remember, but here I am, floating in Paradise. Every day on the Garden Island is a wild green dream with a runaway pulse. Beneath me, the water glows in the dark and I can hear the poem …
FIJI IS THE END OF THE RAINBOW
People often ask me where my favorite place on earth is. I motorbiked through Nepal during the fall of the Maoist revolution, and drank ayahuasca in the jungles of the Amazon, and danced inside secret night clubs carved into the caves of Cuba. I communed with the slave-rebelling spirits in the waterfalls of Haiti, and …
THE WILD WOMEN OF VULAGA
I kind of feel like I’m inside of a golden egg and I’m about to crack open and break out as something brand new, but I don’t know what that something is yet. You ever feel like that? I wonder what kind of gal is going to pop out? Maybe she’ll be a dusty cowgirl. …
VULAGA
I’m anchored on a lagoon the blue of butterfly wings. I see sand beaches, long and empty. I hear the crack of coral. I feel the rush of the outer reef. Sea turtles slide by. Fish jump up doing the junebug. Slack-jaws hang on the surface, mouths open. And somewhere a fan coral blooms. Volcanic …
CICADAS & THE MASSAGE
It’s not a cockroach on the $100 bill, it’s a cicada. Everyone told me that it was a roach, starting with three women in a grocery store and ending with someone from biosecurity. I don’t know if we were lost in translation or if everyone in Savusavu was lying to me like a flat fish. …
HIDDEN PARADISE
The first thing I did when I got to shore was hug a tree. I hugged that tree until it blushed, and the dirt beneath it shook, and the butterflies sang. I sang too and all the people stared because I’m no kind of singer, but my daddy is, which makes me a great pretender. …
QUARANTINE & MY LITTLE SECRET
I have yet to see Fiji. I am in quarantine on Juniper until later today. How do I feel? Peaceful, pleasant, perfect. Like I could exist here forever. Alone. On this water without the touch of land. Like being able to sit in the cockpit and stare at the unicorn clouds and constellations with the …
