Pray for us Pirates.

There’s a new kid on the block that’s competing for my evening attention. Tonight it tried to elbow out my time with you, dear reader. Unsuccessfully, obviously. And between this competitor—a 12-day marketing campaign that I put together over the weekend to promote the release of my new poetry book—and this mysterious weather in the Gulf of Mexico and just all of the general whirling and twirling of living life outside the box, I’ve not had very much time to stop and think today.

It seems I might have injured my neck and shoulder a little from doing crunches in a funny way, of all things. Another competitor vying for my attention.

And though we had almost no visitors to the shop today, the ones that did drop by mentioned the weather, and it reminded me of that time I wrote to you about how it seems to be in our human nature to talk and talk and talk about the things which feel big and scary and out of our control. And how all of this talking somehow helps us come to grips with things by feeling connected, like no-one person has to shoulder the unbearable unknown alone…

But I would like to not talk about the H-word because, as it was pointed out to me today, native Floridians are, to varying degrees, like “savage pirates.” The metaphor made me laugh, probably because I relate to it, but also because it’s utterly absurd. The image that my mind conjured up was of Jimmy Buffet, toasting the sunset with a sloshing, half-drunk margarita, standing barefoot on a little Sunfish sailboat, guitar wrapped around his neck with a fraying piece of rope, singing some drunken sailor’s tune into the sea-scented wind.

And though, more and more, I feel the confirmation in my heart that, while there is something unique and, dare I say, gratifying to being a native of this “peninsula of heathens,” it just doesn’t feel like home to me here.

That place—that home place—is written in me like a calling, but also like a yearning. Driving over one of the many bridges in this coastal town today, listening to music which felt like an actual portal into the emotional center of my memory of Tel Aviv, I tried to understand what exactly is this longing within me, for I am wary of the word.

Such a storied expert had I become on the state of being described as longing, it literally sucked all of the life and creativity out of me. For a long time, I felt like my longing (for oh, so much! oh so many things!) was like some kind of badge of honor, to prove that I could feel and that I had felt suffering. “This is what I should write about,” I’d think. Yet, the longing was so powerful, there was no room for exploration. No room to take the pieces of the longing apart for examination—so deeply entrenched it had become inside my being.

But this…This feeling today was so very different than that. That earlier longing came with the darkest belief that I could not participate in this world. The feeling I felt in the car on my way to the key said, “Open your heart and I will give you the world.”

One day at a time, rain or shine.

And pray for us savage pirates careening on the edge of madness, a fine rhum daiquiri in one hand and a busted flip-flop in the other!