MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 28 JUNE 2022
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-01-13

#minuteofmonth No. 28, June 2022. (1/2) Explaining all of June is going to take a lot of words. It will take months, maybe years. So, this is only a sketch, a few thoughts assembled to match this flip book of images. The motif this month was waves. Waves of water, wind, love, hurt, music and other sounds, light, brains, energy. You can’t fight a wave. If you don’t allow the wave to move you, you’ll get tumbled and bashed. The best thing to do is go loose, let the wave take you. It still might kill you, but you have a better chance of surviving if you trust in its path. Construct a break wall or a keel and you will guide the way you relate to the wave, but you can’t stop the water. The month began in Jacksonville, Florida, after a literal break-for-it from a fucked-up situation. Some days of camping in Anastasia State Park, where our neighbor was a spectacular amphitheater we snuck into to watch a concert, and then some puddling and splashing, muddling and pouring it all back down the drain. Tears. Then a solo flight to New York City, because after two and a half years together on the road, it’s good for a couple to step away to remember that we are, after all, lone creatures, not meant to continually struggle and fight to be one with each other. He continued to the next state park, Grayton Beach, and then north according to plan to meet back up 10 days later. I wandered around New York, taking the NYC Ferry system a lot and reconnecting with best friends, going to museums, nourishing, then wandering more, falling for NYC again. Ten days passed and he met me on the other side of the Cross Sound Ferry from Long Island, and we drove to our family home in Rhode Island to drop off the car and stuff. Reconnecting, reconvening, two waves from the same ocean that somehow got pushed from different winds, crashing into each other, and then letting our forces find their rhythm and power again. Then a few more days in New York, where we made the spectacular decision of fantastic substance that this is where we will settle in early 2023, capping our three years of wandering. Then we were on a plane to Athens, Greece. And, at what felt like five in the morning, but who knows what time it was because it never gets dark in the summer on a flight over the Arctic Circle, I saw the organism of the earth in the dusty rose blue merging land and sky. I said hello and saw that we are the only cells of this organism that are shedding off. She will be OK for eternity. (Just my humble report . . . ) We landed, and the first thing I noticed walking around Athens this time was how much marble is everywhere. They make the curbs with it. Steps that lead to terrazzo floors. Everywhere. The midcentury architecture everywhere—I have to get the story why again from our Greek friend—and, of course, the antiquities. Athens has jumble and chaos and absurdity, and this has made me fall in love with it. But our friends here had covid, and we had planned to all learn to sail for a week from Lavrio around the Saronic Gulf with a skipper they knew. So we decided it would be just us two and the skipper, and we left on a Saturday somewhat off-kilter, wondering how this would go, three people on a sailboat with eleven berths. It took a couple of days to adjust. It wasn’t until we anchored in a bay our skipper called Blue Waters off of Poliegos and he went spear fishing for three hours dressed like a superhero from a Marvel movie in a emerald green wetsuit with weights around his waist, that I settled back into my body and saw whom I was with, and where I was, and @gazpachot and I looked at each other realized we were really there. The rest of the trip was fucking fantastic. And I learned to sail, make a proper Greek salad, and the saying, “there are three things you can’t win over: fire, women, and the sea,” which I disagreed with only to the extent that we should swap out “women” for “love.” Our path took us from the port of Lavrio to the western bay of Kolona Beach on Kithnos, where we anchored for the night, the next day a swim in Psiliamos Bay off of Serifos, then docking in Serifos’ port of Livadi, then a day swim in a bay off Goupa in Kimolos, then on to anchor in Blue Waters off of Poliegos, which means Goat Island, where I swam to a pebble beach . . . (cont’d)