Serendipities Of A Nomad's Life

Quote of the day:  “Live all you can….” When I first started blogging my website was called “Life is Your Adventure”, so it’s inevitable that this quote from author Henry James caught my eye this morning.  In the novel, the character Lambert Strether declares: Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t [...]

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You don’t have to be a sailor to admire the extraordinary accomplishments of Sir Ernest Shackleton. His example as a leader is outstanding and the story of how he brought back alive all 27 members of his expedition after their ship was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica can [...]

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Adversity comes to all of us – in greater or smaller measures – from time to time throughout our lives.  There’s little to be done about that – but how we react to setbacks, heartbreaks and frustrations in completely within our own control. One of the most inspiring stories of human beings overcoming extraordinary difficulties [...]

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Next time you’re having a hard day, the world is dumping on you and you need some inspiration to get yourself moving again, read Sir Ernest Shackleton’s account of his “failed” expedition to Antarctica.  I keep a copy of his book “South” on “Kuan Yin” for just such occasions when  I need to grit my [...]

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The seas were teeming with wildlife – fish, birds, seals, whales – when Europeans first arrived off the eastern seaboard of North America. Yet within a few generations, that wealth of life had been destroyed, species that once were counted in hundreds of millions are extinct, and the whole biosphere of life degraded to the [...]

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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. first published in 1996. Years ago a newspaper reporter asked my mother, “Are you not afraid when you’re son goes off into the Amazon wilderness alone in his canoe that something might happen to him and that you’ll never see him again?” My mother gave what I have always [...]

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Isn’t it amazing that for all the millions of words and thousands of books written (including two of mine) about the Amazon rain forest, that almost none have been fiction.  Novels about the greatest rain forest on the plant are rare.  Even short stories and novellas are hard to find. And poems are rarer still. [...]

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Very, very few stories can succeed without people, and even those that do usually need a narrator who is in him or herself a character in the story.  Think of the “unreliable narrator”.  So how are great characters, characters who come to life off the page, that stay in our memories and become people we [...]

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However much you or I may love to travel to some pretty remote places, or be fascinated by the exploits of Amundsen, Scott or Shackleton, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever entertained the thought of sailing single-handed around Antarctica.  It’s one of those few voyages that I’d really would rather read about than attempt for [...]

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One of the added pleasures of reading this book by the sailor Tristan Jones is the challenge of deciding what is fact and what is fiction. According to Mr. Jones, he sailed single-handed around Iceland in a reburbished lifeboat. According to Jones’s biographer, Anthony Dalton, the story is almost entirely fiction.  According to Dalton, in [...]

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