DON’T SET SAIL on someone else’s star, says one Swahili proverb I turned to often when I lived in Zanzibar. I’d see this phrase a lot on the kanga cloth, a colorful textile of text and image sold in pairs at the local market, and the saying stuck with me while living on the islands, where navigation metaphors are everywhere.
In a place where everyone’s eyes are on each other, the saying steers the individual to navigate life on their own terms, finding their own north star to light the way. Easier said than done in a place bound by the power of cultural collectivity—to strike out on one’s own was often met with side eyes and suspicion, if not outright disdain—sailing solo seemed strange.
I arrived in Stone Town alone from the United States when I was around thirty-three years old, young enough to make moves like this, old enough to know better than to stay for a decade without a plan in place for how to return.
I’d set sail on what I thought was my own star, and yet when I shook the inner compass for direction, I tended to stall out there in still waters, my toes no longer touched the mud of ocean floors.
To be honest, I wasn’t a very good swimmer, and I chose to live on an island when I was afraid of the ocean.
Way-finding is more art than science.
I came across the Instagram account of a young woman currently kayaking from California to Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean—she has all the navigational bells and whistles at her fingertips—and yet, she described how the hardest part of the journey so far had been finding her way out of the harbor closest to the shoreline.
She had to fight against fierce winds just to make it out onto the open sea.
And so she did and lived to tell about it, reporting live from the middle of the ocean, telling her viewers what it’s like to make contact with a young captain of a cargo ship, who’d called her when he saw her floating and assumed she was in distress, and asked if she needed any help.
“No,” she replied, “I’m just waiting for better winds,” or something like that.
And the young man, who said he was from China, sailing from Peru back to his home country, asked the kayaker for her email address, hoping he’d hear from her when she reached Hawaii.
Before anyone leaves on a big trip like that, they have to visualize where they’re going even though they can’t yet see it on the horizon. We spend most of our days out at proverbial sea, don’t we, visualizing where we’re headed if we’re working on consciousness, though much of our motion is motivated by trust in the unseen self that exists over there in the future of victorious arrivals.
If I picture my heart like a perfect apple, it will be so, and I’ll love with a sweetness and a wholeness only an apple can embody. And if I picture my heart like a black cherry and worship it as one does with fruits of this ferocity of deliciousness, I’ll love with a tenderness only a black cherry can evoke.
And if I visualize to some extent where I want to go—however winding, however unwieldy—I’ll eventually get there, because I’m already there in my mind’s eye, and neuroscientists say we can’t tell the difference anyway!
But the problem with me—and maybe with you—is that I have to know what I want, and that’s the hardest part, because I learned at some point that wanting was a waste, and wanting led to suffering, and wanting wanted to want more of itself. I hung out here in this headspace for a while, letting myself make one move and then the next, congratulating myself for going with the flow.
Which is a very fine way to go—where the wind blows—sure! Now, though, I’m wanting more to work with the winds and trade with them my secrets for the gift of their power—so that I can arrive at a future version of myself that will greet me and welcome me back home from the long, long journey.
All of us probably have an innate, instinctive sense of where we want to go—it’s a game I play with myself these days to name it and orient in that direction—even if I can’t see it yet, I trust it’s there, and I’m on my way!
In a place where everyone’s eyes are on each other, the saying steers the individual to navigate life on their own terms, finding their own north star to light the way. Easier said than done in a place bound by the power of cultural collectivity—to strike out on one’s own was often met with side eyes and suspicion, if not outright disdain—sailing solo seemed strange.
I arrived in Stone Town alone from the United States when I was around thirty-three years old, young enough to make moves like this, old enough to know better than to stay for a decade without a plan in place for how to return.
I’d set sail on what I thought was my own star, and yet when I shook the inner compass for direction, I tended to stall out there in still waters, my toes no longer touched the mud of ocean floors.
To be honest, I wasn’t a very good swimmer, and I chose to live on an island when I was afraid of the ocean.
Way-finding is more art than science.
I came across the Instagram account of a young woman currently kayaking from California to Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean—she has all the navigational bells and whistles at her fingertips—and yet, she described how the hardest part of the journey so far had been finding her way out of the harbor closest to the shoreline.
She had to fight against fierce winds just to make it out onto the open sea.
And so she did and lived to tell about it, reporting live from the middle of the ocean, telling her viewers what it’s like to make contact with a young captain of a cargo ship, who’d called her when he saw her floating and assumed she was in distress, and asked if she needed any help.
“No,” she replied, “I’m just waiting for better winds,” or something like that.
And the young man, who said he was from China, sailing from Peru back to his home country, asked the kayaker for her email address, hoping he’d hear from her when she reached Hawaii.
Before anyone leaves on a big trip like that, they have to visualize where they’re going even though they can’t yet see it on the horizon. We spend most of our days out at proverbial sea, don’t we, visualizing where we’re headed if we’re working on consciousness, though much of our motion is motivated by trust in the unseen self that exists over there in the future of victorious arrivals.
If I picture my heart like a perfect apple, it will be so, and I’ll love with a sweetness and a wholeness only an apple can embody. And if I picture my heart like a black cherry and worship it as one does with fruits of this ferocity of deliciousness, I’ll love with a tenderness only a black cherry can evoke.
And if I visualize to some extent where I want to go—however winding, however unwieldy—I’ll eventually get there, because I’m already there in my mind’s eye, and neuroscientists say we can’t tell the difference anyway!
But the problem with me—and maybe with you—is that I have to know what I want, and that’s the hardest part, because I learned at some point that wanting was a waste, and wanting led to suffering, and wanting wanted to want more of itself. I hung out here in this headspace for a while, letting myself make one move and then the next, congratulating myself for going with the flow.
Which is a very fine way to go—where the wind blows—sure! Now, though, I’m wanting more to work with the winds and trade with them my secrets for the gift of their power—so that I can arrive at a future version of myself that will greet me and welcome me back home from the long, long journey.
All of us probably have an innate, instinctive sense of where we want to go—it’s a game I play with myself these days to name it and orient in that direction—even if I can’t see it yet, I trust it’s there, and I’m on my way!
