Final Blog: SV Maggie May

August 4, 2025 

The cicadas are chorusing. I sit in a shed, writing. A shed I call the Land Vessel Maggie May, which I spent the better part of a year rehabbing into a studio where I can sit, listen, and try to absorb all that occurred on the Sailing Vessel Maggie May. There is so much, even now. I continue to hold pieces of it to the light and marvel at the way the facets of my ocean treasure glitter and glint. 

Two years may seem a strange amount of time to pass before writing a “final” blog about life on SV Maggie May. But it has taken me this long to begin to emerge from the tunnel I entered when we docked on the Chesapeake Bay in late June  2023. When we stepped off the boat and moved back into our house, and into lives that seemed no longer our own. 

I have heard it said that liminal spaces, those places where you sit uncomfortably between one life and the next, can be places of exponential growth. They feel unbearable at times, like you are never going to emerge from a tight space where nothing makes sense and you are going nowhere. You don’t belong to your previous life, no matter how much you may cling to it, and you don’t have any conception of a future existence, and no real momentum forward, toward that future. That’s where I’ve been. Trying to just be acceptant of living day to day in this cramped limbo, but also hoping the seemingly timeless and endless space that held me was more akin to a womb than a tomb.

In the past weeks, something has begun to change. 

A few weeks ago I found an egg on the underside of a leaf of one of my milkweed plants. One of the things I’ve been doing over the past two years in the endless hallway, has been working in my yard, removing invasive species, thinking a lot about soil and seeds, working on adding nutrients to the ground, and planting new native plants—including lots of milkweed—in hopes of supporting the endangered monarch butterfly. 

And so imagine my excitement upon finding a teeny tiny white egg glued to the bottom of one of the leaves. I did some reading and learned that it would not take long before the seemingly solid, inanimate little pearl, began to darken, just before a very small caterpillar would pop its head out. I needed to see this. So I watched and watched, visiting the plant several dozen times a day, until I began to detect a darkening. 

I got my camera, and set it up in a very uncomfortable position (for me, not the camera). I watched for hours, waiting, waiting… until finally, when my joints had fully frozen up, I could see …movement, movement! For god’s sake, movement! Through my macro lens it was apparent that inside the egg, which was about the size of a sesame seed, there was life, wriggling around. I could see and feel in the movement some eager intentionality, a need to be outside of the solid, inanimate space, and at-large in the animate world. This world so huge and full of excitement and danger and potentiality. 

As I watched, the creature seemed to be thinning the shell of the egg, layer by layer—essentially consuming its enclosure, which I assume must be filled with key nutrients—until the container was translucent, and then just… a sort of mesh, and finally a tiny face… broke through… and wiggled itself into a green world, loud with cicada song. 

It was right around this very time, that I felt the same thinning of the walls of my tunnel, that hallway I’d been walking since I stepped off the boat and onto the shore. I was perhaps, all that time without knowing it, consuming those walls, until finally I could see the world around me. I could feel movement, momentum, inclination and intention, not so much toward the future, but toward the present, in all its aliveness. As much as I worked to be at peace with my limbo, I am awash in relief that I can see once again my own place in the world, maybe better than I have ever seen it. 

And so, I’m sitting down and putting a period, or maybe an ellipsis, (because I really love ellipses)  at the end of the story of the Sailing Vessel Maggie May.

I have thought to write this final blog one hundred times. I could not. What would I write that could encompass what I was experiencing? Those first hours of the journey’s end,  as we entered the Chesapeake Bay in June 2023, I felt only a rending of my heart. A visceral ripping rushed through my body when it realized, cell by cell, that a dream, which had occupied my existence for 20 years and my imagination for much longer, was at an end. I wept in a way I never had, not exactly out of sadness, but something I didn’t understand. The months that followed I felt alien in my own life and a stranger in a world that had changed while we were away. And as time stretched on I existed in that unending—to my perception— liminal space between two lives. 

I am now moving on to a new space where I think I finally have the perspective to make something of what I recorded in my journals and collected on my camera. I have also found some clarity not just about the journey, but also about myself and what I would like my life to be about. My life has for a long while been about goals—some small, some big—things to check off a list as having been accomplished. Most of these goals I conceived around a common purpose—creating meaning by changing the world for the better. Saving wild species and landscapes from destructive human activities. Fighting injustice and cruelty. I wont say those aims have left me, but I believe they have morphed into something more humble. Just this: to try to create something beautiful every day I live. And to see and hear the beauty in the world around me. 

This, this is what I learned from my dearest Maggie May. To release my panicked grip on lofty goals, and just to be, as best I can. To listen and see with ears and eyes open, and give what I can. 

And this is what I hope to share with you all, through a new vehicle. 

Every day for the past two years I have worked toward a telling of the whole thing–the Journey. Or as whole as I can make through the journals, images and memories I keep.

The first element of this telling with be released on August 12, in the form of a serial podcast. My aim with every episode of this audio story is to be as true as I can about who I am and have been and am becoming, and to offer a piece of the great wide world as seen through my eyes from the decks of the Sailing Vessel Maggie May. 

I hope you’ll join me. You can follow the story on most podcast providers, but please follow me on Patreon, where the podcast will be hosted. The podcast is free, but your support as a paid subscriber is critical for me to be able to continue working all the considerable hours it requires to make the podcast. And with small support each month, you will get extra content, including photos, videos, extended podcast episodes, and more. 

You can learn more here: https://patreon.com/FirstMatesLog

Or go to Patreon.com and search for: First Mate’s Log

Thank you all for being a part of this journey. There is so much more to come!