Still Looking Toward Portugal -- Has It Really Been 14 Years??

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

      – John Banville, The Sea (2005)

It was late November 2008 and I was sitting in my in-law's study in Gainesville, Florida where we had assembled for an extended family Thanksgiving celebration in Tallahassee the day before.  I was working on some project notes and it struck me that it might be time to start my own blog.

It was something I had been considering for quite some time.  I had been reading those of others, and I decided I had thoughts and observations I might want to share.  I was not sure how it would play out, if at all, but I decided I was going to take a shot.  One can never tell what might happen.

A few days later, on December 1, 2008, my wife and I decided to spend our last day in Florida roaming the back roads around Gainesville – over by Cross Creek, Micanopy, Island Pond, and Hawthorne.  This trip became the subject of my first blog essay which I posted that evening.

Steve and SallyAnn Rogers.  Cross Creek, Florida. December 1, 2008

The narrow country roads passed under canopies of live oak festooned with long gray beards of Spanish moss. There was water in Cross Creek and in the River Styx (not always the case), and we observed white herons and egrets wading the sedgy marsh shallows looking for their next meals while an alligator rested on a nearby bank minding his own business.  We wandered around Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ farm at Cross Creek and the surrounding pine hammock, and we were lucky to have the entire place to ourselves.  I was reminded why I liked coming back to this special part of Florida.  Perhaps Miss Rawlings said it best. “It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.”  It was not my home, but I certainly felt at home there.  I do every time I return . . . , something I hope to do early in the approaching new year.   

So why am I "Looking Toward Portugal"?  I suppose this is a legitimate question and there is no big secret mystery.  For the past three decades I have been gravitating to the coast of Maine.  At first, it was only during our annual summer hiatus, but in more recent years I have returned every chance I get regardless of the season.  And each time I go back, I find myself standing on that rocky shoreline looking out to sea and pondering what lies beyond the farthest horizon.  Gazing in a general easterly direction from the Maine coast, you will see nothing but the rolling expanse of the Gulf of Maine stretching toward the southernmost extension of Nova Scotia.  Yet, if you continue across the Atlantic you will eventually arrive on the northern shores of Portugal somewhere near Oporto.

Doing this I was constantly reminded of Jack Kerouac’s observations when he stared out across the Atlantic from the shores of Long Island (he naturally gravitated to America’s two coasts) – “this last lip of American land.”  Writing in On the Road (1957):  “Here I was at the end of America . . . no more land . . ., and now there was nowhere to go but back.”  Doing this I guess we are reminded of our limitations, but we are also offered a hint of what might be if we only choose to look beyond those far horizons while at the same time considering what lies at our back.

I could have been satisfied with “Looking Toward Nova Scotia,” but I liked to think there was far more to consider beyond.  Looking out to sea from "the Portugal side" of my own life and pondering what lies beyond that meeting of water and sky, I know that my grand search will never be over. Certainly not in my lifetime. I will always return to that "last lip of American land."  It, too, is home.

For the past 14 years I have been drawing on past memories and present-day concerns to try and understand better how I might want to navigate what the future might hold.  

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner writes in Requiem for a Nun. “It's not even past.”   Writing in Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O-Neill tells us “There is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now.”  There is certainly something to this.  Perhaps Søren Kierkegaard said it best.  “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

This is what I hope to continue doing with this blog . . . looking to the past to help me understand where I am now and where I hope to be in the future.  The key to it all is hope. As the Buddha instructed . . . staying hopeful you will never know what tomorrow will bring.

Namasté.