Seven Years of "Looking Toward Portugal"

Seven years ago yesterday I launched this blogspot when I posted “Never too late to start.”  I had been kicking around the idea of starting my own blog site having read others; I thought it time for me to chime in.  I did not have the slightest idea then where it might take me or whether it would even last.  All I knew was that I had many things I wanted to say and perhaps this might be the perfect way to get these ideas off my chest and into “black on white.”  I could have never imagined that evening in Gainesville, Florida that Looking Toward Portugal would still be going strong seven years later.  To date I have posted 358 entries on anything, everything, and sometimes nothing at all . . . just a quick random thought in need of being set free.

The significance of the blog’s name you ask?  For almost 30 years I have been gravitating to the coast of Maine. Indeed I now spend several month there each year  and it has become my second home.  I often find myself standing on that rocky shoreline, looking out to sea and pondering this and that (some of these thoughts have been posted here).  If you gaze in a general easterly direction from the Maine coast, you will see nothing but the rolling swells of the Atlantic.  Nova Scotia is out there somewhere, but if you continue across the Atlantic you will eventually arrive on the northern shores of Portugal somewhere near Oporto.  Thus the name.   I am reminded of Jack Kerouac’s observations when he stared out across the Atlantic from the shores of Long Island . . . "this last lip of American land . . . the end of America . . . no more land . . . and now there was nowhere to go but back."   Sure we have limitations, we think we have done all that we can do.  Yet there are other possibilities out there if we only choose to look beyond those far horizons.

I am looking forward to another seven years (at least) of postings . . . new horizons.  I hope you will join me in the search.

Check out the "Looking Toward Portugal" Facebook page for more information and photos.