I woke this morning at first light and climbed the four steep companionway stairs into the cockpit. I have climbed these stairs 1000 times in the past 18 months.

The boat interior was dark but the sun, still below the mountains to the east, cast a pale light on the clouds in the western sky. Presently it began to rain, a light sprinkle only, and a rainbow appeared, arcing with one foot in the puffy green mounts of St. John, US Virgin Islands, and the other in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.

A narrow channel separates these two island nations, and some 15 years ago Bill and I got in a dinghy in Tortola and motored through its swift currents so we could snorkel in the national park waters of St. John (where we are moored right now), in Waterlemon Bay. This strikes me now as unwise, both because the current can run four knots through here and also because it wasn’t strictly legal.

That trip 15 years ago was a beginning, the spark that set us planning over so many years to save money, buy a boat, learn how to sail and navigate and care for her, and so many other steps that have brought us to this place at this time.

That trip was taken with five other friends on a charter sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. One of those friends, Jeff, we had sailed with for many years on the Chesapeake Bay. Jeff was the first friend I made when I moved to Washington DC more than 20 years ago. Friendship came easy with Jeff, but an added appeal to this friendship was that his dog Cody was the only dog that my dog Maggie respected. I won’t say liked, because she didn’t like dogs. But Cody she respected. And Cody tolerated Maggie. And we had ourselves a friend family.

Many years later when we headed off to the BVIs, it was a dream trip for Jeff and Bill and I, and there was a moment, somewhere between the islands of Virgin Gorda and Anegada, when a new dream took root, the one I find myself living now. We were all sitting in the cockpit and the boat was sailing so beautifully toward the northeast where the shallow passages between islands ended and the Atlantic Ocean began. One of us, Jeff I think, said “Let’s just keep going.” And we all smiled and nodded and agreed that that was where our hearts would go.

We didn’t own that boat. And none of the other friends aboard would have shared our enthusiasm for the wide open Atlantic, not in the least. But for Bill and I, that experience marked the germination of a seed with dogged roots that clung to a dream for all the years between then and now as I sit writing in the small bay we illegally visited in the charter dinghy so long ago.

We are here legally this time.

This morning, during ‘morning time’ (an unspecified amount of time usually before 11am when Bill and I sit in different parts of the boat and read or write or think quietly) I began reading a book I’ve been holding onto for years. Not because I didn’t want to read it. But because I wanted to read it so much that I was saving it for the most perfect time and place. I wanted to be a certain me when I read it. The me that could understand and appreciate it most. Maybe I am that me now because I opened it this morning while sleep still clung to me and the sound of the ocean rustled against the rocky shores of Waterlemon Cay.

Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us was first published in 1951. Today she is known better for Silent Spring, but it was this book that first brought international attention to her work and ideas, which have since altered the neural pathways of the human species.

I just began the first chapter, which is about beginnings. The beginnings of Earth, the moon and of the sea. In a way it is about the concept of time itself, a phenomenon so hard to grasp for such short-lived creatures as ourselves. We wring our hands about so many details of our lives. About this action we or someone else did or didn’t do. About getting to this and that on time, meeting deadlines, making grades, finding purpose, having an impact. Saving the world. But we are so very small. A stardust mote floating through space time. So small we can’t even really understand time, any more than we can understand how a butterfly sees the world.

I think about everything that went into getting Bill and I to this little bay with its clear waters and thousands upon thousands of creatures living their lives beneath the surface. It is nothing in the scale of time. It is everything to us.

Yesterday I spent one long infinity of a moment with an octopus while snorkeling. I myself was utterly changed forever by this vision of a creature so wondrous, so improbable, built cell by cell through an alchemy of ages and ages of Earth. This living, shimmering, thinking, feeling, water-made-flesh flowing through the shallow sea.

The beautiful octopus has perhaps forgotten me already.

I can feel the symmetry of this day of octopus thoughts to that day so long ago with Jeff, so long ago but in the same space on Earth, when we decided we wanted to be…here. Despite so many events, excitements, heartbreaks and stumbles in the intervening years, we have come full circle in a universe of spinning circles hundreds of thousands of millions of years old, embers sparking and glowing and flaming and dying.

Every moment matters so little and so much.