Afloat Between Worlds
There are moments at sea when the veil between worlds thins. Somewhere between midnight and morning, surrounded by nothing but wind, stars, and the ceaseless breathing of the ocean, I find myself slipping out of time. It’s during these hours, when I am adrift and alone, that visions visit me. Not hallucinations or idle daydreams, but something older and more intimate.
The first came during a night watch on the open Pacific. I was aboard Lorraine Marie, my
Swedish-built Malo 42 sailing yacht, with my partner, Lupita. We were 23 days and about 2,700 nautical miles out from El Salvador and still six days and 770 miles from landfall on the island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia. A young man who once crewed for me told me that the worst part of being at sea was being trapped with his own thoughts. The solitude he felt, despite the presence of others onboard, unsettled him. I’ve never felt that. I find my own mind not just tolerable, but companionable. The sea is vast, yes, and empty, but I don’t feel lonely on it. I feel invited.
The winds were steady and full, the kind mariners pray for and poets revere. The sea moved beneath me like a landscape of swells and moonlight, loud with the music of rigging and rushing water. Lupita was asleep below. I sat at the helm, eyes half-lidded, somewhere between vigilance and reverie, when the waves around the boat began to shift in shape. No longer just moving water, they became bodies—massive, humped forms galloping silently beside me. Not beasts of burden, but kin. Bison. And not of this world, but of memory or myth. We were running together, bound by some ancient oath I had long forgotten but could suddenly feel pulsing in my chest.
They moved with silent thunder, their hooves stirring no spray, their shadows slipping over wave crests like memories across a restless mind. I recognized their shapes first—those familiar back-humped silhouettes outlined faintly by the moon—but it was the feeling that truly undid me. A sudden rush of belonging surged through my body. I wasn’t observing them; I was one of them. My limbs remembered a gait I had never known. My breath synced with theirs, a great pulsing rhythm that stretched across space and time. We ran not in fear or haste, but with sacred intent, as if answering some ancient call still echoing across the plains of this ocean.
There was no need for language. They communicated their presence by vibration, memory, communion. I felt them acknowledge me, not as an outsider peering into a mystery, but as a brother rejoined. We were on a pilgrimage, not to a destination but toward a truth. In their silent company, I felt no loneliness. Only purpose. Only peace.
When the herd faded—suddenly, as if a door had closed—I was left in silence so profound, it roared. The stars returned to their proper places, the boat to its lurching rhythm, the sea to its ceaseless babble. But I remained altered. A part of me had galloped into eternity and not quite come back. I sat there, dazed, with the ache of something ancient pressing against my ribs—a longing for the vision and also for the place within myself that it had reawakened.
It wasn’t grief I felt—more a sense of homesickness for a world I hadn’t known I belonged to. A world where every movement had meaning, where every breath was shared. A world lost not to history but to forgetting. That I had remembered it, even for a few moments, left me both exultant and bereft. I lit a cigar. The flare of flame, the warm hiss of butane, the coarse scent of smoke—these grounded me. As the wind curled around the cockpit and the smoke danced away, I whispered thanks into the dark. Not because I understood what had happened but because I felt it had mattered.
I don’t know why the bison came. Maybe it was to remind me of what I carry inside, or what I once was before the forgetting set in. Maybe it was nothing more than the ocean playing tricks on a sleep-deprived sailor. But I don’t believe that. Not really. I believe the bison came to let me know that I’m not alone. That even here, adrift in the vastness, I am still part of the herd, and the herd is still part of me. I believe they ran with me because they could, because I needed them, because something in the wild and sacred always answers when we’re quiet enough to hear the call. The thrill of running with them still echoes in my chest. It may never come again. Or it may come in some new form, another night when the veil thins. Either way, I’ll be watching. Listening. Waiting—not for answers but for presence.
Not long after the bison left me, another vision came, this time in a vivid dream. If the first was ancestral, this one felt unborn: otherworldly and new. I was no longer the runner in a ghost herd but the caretaker of something fragile and luminous, a being with the vague shape of an infant, yet made entirely of light—strands, fine and spaghetti-like, weaving gently around itself in constant motion. It floated in my arms, weightless, impossibly soft, eerily alive. I didn’t understand what it was or where it had come from. It frightened me in that way the truly unknown always does. But there was no menace in it, only need. It loved me without condition, and I, against all logic, loved it in return. I held it like one holds a sleeping child: with care, awe, and the sense that one false move could undo something sacred.
As time passed—compressed and accelerated in the dream—the little form grew. Not quickly, not suddenly, but as light shifts across the sky: gradual, inevitable, and hard to measure until you realize everything has changed. The infant became a toddler, still composed of shimmering filaments, still pulsing gently with inner light. It took on a rough semblance of human form but remained undefined, as if resisting being fixed too tightly into a single reality.
We walked together along a winding concrete path through a wooded city park, hand in hand, though even its hand felt like a suggestion rather than something solid. It leaned into me, trusted me, looked up at me with eyes it did not have. It never spoke, but I heard it somehow. I felt its questions, its wonder, its dependency. And I felt my own: my fear of breaking it, of failing it, of not being enough for something so delicate and unknown. The love remained, unshakable and pure. But so did the unease. I didn’t know what I was caring for. Was it a being? An idea? A responsibility? A reflection of something inside myself I had only just begun to see? It didn’t matter. The truth was in the tenderness. In the way it nestled into me as if I were home.
I’ve thought often about what—or who—that child was. Not a memory, like the bison. Not a guide, like a spirit animal or ancestor. It felt more like a seed, something fragile and radiant, not yet fully of this world. Something that needed me for survival but would one day surpass me if I nurtured it well. Perhaps it was a part of myself just beginning to take shape, some new capacity for tenderness, for presence, for embracing mystery without needing to control it. Or maybe it was a vision of the future, of something being born through me, something not of flesh but of spirit. It also could have been trust itself, given form. The trust of a universe that hands us something ineffable and says, Hold this. It’s yours now. You won’t understand it, but you must love it anyway.
That child of light never demanded anything of me except care. It didn’t ask to be explained. It asked only to be accepted. It reminded me—just as the bison had—that mystery is not the opposite of meaning. It is the meaning. And our job, perhaps, is not to solve the mystery but to keep it alive by holding it gently in our arms.
Two visions. One, a thunderous return to something ancient and wild—a memory of strength, freedom, and belonging that lives in my bones. The other, a quiet encounter with something asking for my care and trust. One pulls me back into Earth, the other forward into the unknown. And I, afloat somewhere in the middle, am the thread that binds them.
Perhaps that is the nature of the sea voyage I am on—not just a passage across oceans but a walk along the seam between what has been and what is yet to come. Between ancestral knowing and unborn possibility. Between the ghosts who still run with me and the future I hold in my arms.
In the quiet hours of a night watch, when the stars lean close and the wind breathes steady, I remember: I belong to all of it. I always have.
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