Serendipities Of A Nomad's Life

You’ve probably heard the word “Tao” (or “Dao”) or seen it written on a t-shirt.  And if you’ve ever wondering what it really means and what the concept from China is all about, here is an excellent introductory book. The book isn’t trying to sell the ideas or convert anyone.  This is a straightforward explanation [...]

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Any story might be simply summarized as – this happened, then this, then this happened.  And that might be true for the way we tell our friends what we did today.  But that is NOT storytelling if by that we mean telling a “story”.  So what is a story?  What it is not, is this [...]

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Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, is the most famous place for sailors – even amongst non-sailors.  The mountainous seas, the near endless storms, the scores of lost ships and drowned sailors; this is a legendary place well respected even feared by all those who go to sea in boats (or ships).  [...]

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Canadian author and naturalist Farley Mowat has come in for heavy criticism in recent years for falsifying and hugely embellishing parts of his books. For example, when Mowat said he had spent two summers and a winter studying wolves, the Toronto Star, a newspaper in Toronto, Canada, wrote that Mowat had only spent 90 hours [...]

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Shortly before the United States of America joined the Second World War, the American novelist John Steinbeck joined the marine biologist friend of his, Edward F. Ricketts, on a 4,000 mile voyage around the Baja Peninsula into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.  Steinbeck, who wrote “Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden”, wrote a [...]

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I take no credit for the ideas in this post – I’m repeating one of Steven Covey’s seminal teachings in his book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“.  You may have read the book yourself and if not, I highly recommend settling down with a copy and a notebook and working through his ideas and [...]

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Today we take ships and shipping for granted and are far more impressed by the size of an oil tanker or the container ship bringing our latest “must-have” gadget than the extraordinary system of shipbuilding, navigation, cargo handling and trade networks that demand and pay for such behemoths. And we are even less aware of [...]

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Those who argue that economic exploitation of natural “resources” can go on for ever because it always has gone on, should read Mark Kurlansky’s book “Cod, A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World”. The book is not primarily about the collapse of stocks in the early 1990s but rather a fascinating investigation of [...]

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Definition of sailing – The fine art of getting wet and becoming ill, while going nowhere slowly at great expense. Sailors and non-sailors alike are often baffled by all the jargon of sailing; much of it seems obscure and unnecessary and, of course, comes from the great days of square-rigged sailing ships. However, having precise [...]

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Are you responsible for how your life turns out or is it decided before you’re born? That’s the intriguing, and ancient, question Canadian author Robertson Davies asks in his famous novel Fifth Business. A boy puts a stone inside a snowball and hurls it at his friend. He ducks and the lethal snowball hits a [...]

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