We left Vancouver Island today.  Perfect day.  Detached, mackerel clouds in a tall, blue sky, scudding in front of the rising, warm summer wind.  A crow watched us leave from the top of an ancient cedar towering on the shore, calling out how crazy we are to be leaving this breathtaking beauty that has the feel of home in my DNA.

Choppy waters today.  Leaving day.  No easy slide to the mainland on the mid-day ferry.  Whitecap froth reached up to say ‘good-bye’, call us back, slow the leaving.  Do I really want to leave?  That’s a question already asked and answered a hundred times.  We’re leaving.  For a new adventure.  We just don’t know what it looks like yet.  Funny how that’s getting harder and harder to swallow with any enthusiasm.

A float plane slips through the air just above the growing swells, or so it looks from the ferry deck.  It pulls on my heart-strings as if it were a lifeline, to wing me into the air, and back.

Another ferry boat chugs toward us through the newborn whitecaps, metal belly bulging with people seeking the place we’re leaving.

“Jump ship!  Jump!  Swim back!” something in me cries.  “Come back home!  Don’t go!  Don’t!”

But life pulls me forward into today and now and tomorrow and new.  As we ease out of the harbor on our two-hour ride to the mainland, yesterday begins seeping into memory archives for safe keeping.

 “Come!  Seek!  New!  Now!  Try!  See!  Ask!  Look!  Discover!  Live!”