The harbor is doing that glittering thing where the sunlight hits each ripple for a shimmering instant. Mother Nature’s diamonds.
My favorite kind.
After months of challenges—gales, seasickness, boat work, and the quiet terror of arriving somewhere unknown after dark—I’m sitting at a table on the ancient circular stone quay at St. Mawes, in Cornwall. A glass of prosecco in one hand, a coffee gelato in the other, melting all over my fingers.
For a menopausal woman, having the sugar of either wine or ice cream is signing up for a sleepless night of hot flashes. I’m doing both. No judgement, please. I’ve earned this.
Or at least I think I should have. But if I’m honest—there’s a small, nagging voice insisting I haven’t.
If you read my last letter, you may be forgiven for wondering why on earth I’ve chosen a life on the water voluntarily. A tiny home, exposed to the elements, no car or bathtub, and far away from people I love dearly. Truth: there are moments I wonder the same thing.
But always the answer comes. And always it’s as a surprise.
Today, the answer looks like being surrounded by hills so verdant, I’m certain Poldark will gallop past at any moment. Yesterday, it looked like anchoring next to a castle. The day before, a glorious downwind sail in the company of cuddly harbor porpoises.
Now on the quay, a parade of dogs strolls by—Jack russels, terriers, and a gorgeous Irish setter—all with tails wagging furiously. (Down one glass of prosecco, if I had a tail, it would have been wagging furiously too.)
But just because it’s near postcard perfect, doesn’t mean it came easy.
Around one in the afternoon, we’d been excited by the prospect of lunch at the seafood kiosk we spotted a half mile away through the binoculars. Google confirmed it was open until four. No problem. Let’s go!
But we hadn’t launched the dinghy before, so there were a few questions to work out.
Should we bring life jackets? Yes. Foul weather gear? In case of rain, also yes. Great. Lock the door. Oh, wait—credit cards. Unlock door. Relock door.
Drop dinghy from davits. How? You hold this. No wait, I’ll hold this, you hold—no, the first way was better. Stand in dinghy. Figure out where to sit. Where to tie the painter.
Attach the electric motor battery. Careful not to drop it in the water! Turn on. Why no work? Try again. Still no work. Error code 30. Look up the manual on the phone—it shows buttons we don’t have. Realize we have wrong manual. Download right manual. Throttle calibration. Ah! We can do this. Which way is forward and which is reverse? Got it. Done.
Nope. Still no work.
We need a key. Did one come with the motor? Yes. A magnetic one. Vague memory of a blue square the size of a Triscuit. Where did we put it?
Commence ransacking a 45-foot boat for a blue Triscuit. Tech room: obvious choice, but no. Aft cabin: also no. Nav desk: emptied and fully re-organized. No key. Consider blaming each other for losing it. Decide that’s bad marriage juju. Blame the company we bought it from instead. Less hurtful. Not more useful.
Check clothing drawers, galley drawers, pants pockets. It’s 3:45. No Triscuit.
Give up looking. No seafood today. We’ve sailed all the way to Cornwall and we can’t go ashore because we’ve no idea how to operate our dinghy. Feel like a true idiot. Make a sandwich for lunch instead. Sit down to eat it.
Mid-bite, have clear memory of the blue Triscuit in a bag with the user manual. The user manual! Fish out from under nav station seat. There’s the key. There’s even a spare. How thoughtful.
Choke down sandwich. Jump back in dinghy. Works this time! Arrive on quay at five minutes to four. Order a second lunch. And a prosecco. And then the gelato.
Then, after the mad rush and the dinghy cluelessness, I’m finally enjoying my hard-earned treat.
Except at first I’m not. Not really. Because even here—ice cream melting toward its last sweet puddle—the voices are still going. You should maximize this experience. Read up on the castle. Walk up into the hills. Explore the history. Yeah. Hard to admit that, somehow, even my play comes with its own to-do list.
Because that’s what I’m good at. I’ve spent my whole life being prepared. Productive. Earning my place. And I’ve hauled every last bit of that mindset onto a boat and out to a stone quay in Cornwall, where it sits down beside me like an uninvited guest.
But this time, my body rebels, and it does something my mind never would have allowed. It overrides me. It goes still.
I breathe. Breathe deeper. I taste the food. I see the dogs and the sunlight, and the hills, no meditation app required. It turns out my body has a built-in downshift gear—I’d only forgotten it was there.
In the silence, I suddenly hear how loud it’s been in my head. All those thoughts careening into all the other thoughts. And underneath the racket, a tentative feeling, familiar from long ago. Almost a different lifetime. What is it?
Oh.
Happiness. Not the set-a-reminder-to-make-a-gratitude-list kind, or the force-three-deep-breaths kind, but body-level. And there’s no fooling the body. That shit’s real.
So what finally got me here? To this quay, to this authentic feeling of presence? It certainly wasn’t being good at anything. Because I’d just spent an entire afternoon white-knuckling a dinghy launch, ransacking a boat for a Triscuit, and gripping harder the more it slipped away.
And maybe you can see what I couldn’t until that moment. That grip was never really about the key, or the dinghy, or the castle I never got around to researching. It was the same old fear in shiny new boat shoes: that I have to be good enough to deserve any of this.
Did the grip find the key? No, giving up did. I didn’t earn this moment of Zen by being good at anything, but by letting go of the need to be.
It took me straight back to a yoga class in San Francisco years ago—straining to force my stretch one inch deeper, the instructor saw how hard I was trying and instead of praising my work ethic, his voice held a tone of gentle pity as he said sometimes you have to stop pushing. The stretch came the instant I let go.
It was only once my mind grew silent on that quay that I could recognize how much I’d wanted to feel like the capable sailor. The woman who knew what she was doing. Who was good at things. And yet it had all gone wrong, and I was—happy. Life didn’t care a whit for my work ethic. If the universe had a voice in that moment, it probably would have sounded like gentle pity: sometimes you have to stop earning it.
The thing I keep having to re-learn? I’m allowed to set the work down. Not when the list is finished. Not when I’ve earned it. Now—while the ice cream is melting.
Maybe you know that grip. Maybe you’re holding something right now that would survive being put down for an afternoon. Mine survived. It was even waiting for me, with a spare.
The rest of the month was full of moments like that. Small ones. None of them earned.
The mussels at The Bugle Coaching Inn, where they had books on every windowsill. The man at the next table was, oddly, watching a very steamy scene from Game of Thrones on his phone at full volume. Laughing, Colin reached over and grabbed Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit off the windowsill, opened it at random and read me a passage that turned out to be nearly as steamy as the scene behind us. Steamy Dickens? Apparently, I have yet to read all his works.
Then there was the local sailing club raft-up, with Pristine tucked in the very center. Ever more happy and welcoming people gathered by our boat, drinks in hand, until the whole dock sank and every one of our fenders popped up. More great laughter.
And the little coffee shop at the end of a twisting cobblestone street, where the owner had made fresh flapjacks and I got an excellent, hands-on primer of how the sweet English oat cakes differed from American pancakes.
None of that had anything to do with me trying hard or being good at anything. It turns out life is full of surprises when you forget all the lessons you’ve learned along the way.
Meanwhile, on the writing desk, Book 2 of The Navigator Series is in the editing stretch, and is finally—finally—feeling fantastic.
Every writer is different. Some love outlining. Others find joy in discovery drafting. But my favorite part is always after the manuscript has been worked and re-worked a half dozen times, each pass taking away more fluff and layering in more nuances of character, world, plot, and language until they sing. Until this point, the work always feels a bit like the cacophony of a symphony warming up. Now, the instruments are coming into alignment, and the fine-tuning of language can begin.
The soup’s still cooking, but here’s a little taste, straight from the pot:
The raging nor’easter tore tendrils of Ellen’s hair loose, sending pins clattering to the quarterdeck, while even shallow breaths proved no match for the ungodly stench of South Street—harbor mud, boiled pitch, and something pungently dead.
Well, what did you expect? Captain Papa would have said. The sea’ll always take your measure.
“Dearly beloved,” the alderman began.
A small confession while we’re here. I’d originally called The Navigator a prequel novella because that’s what I’d planned for it to be: short bonus content. But as with the best books, this one had ideas of its own, and by the time I finished writing, it was both novel-length and a full-on introduction to the series rather than a side-story.
That situation was confusing everyone, including me. So I’ve changed the numbering. The Navigator is now Book 1, and A Course to Steer will be Book 2. If you have the original ebook, you can download the updated book here. And if you have the original paperback, then congratulations. You now own a rare first edition that we all hope will someday be worth a fortune.
All this really proves is that the real Eleanor Creesy was a mathematical genius who ran spherical trigonometry calculations multiple times a day with life-or-death stakes, while her author, apparently, got stuck counting to one.
So that’s what’s been happening on this side of the water. A dinghy that thoroughly defeated me. A body that remembered how to downshift when its owner forgot. A symphony that is finally—finally—starting to sound like music.
I’m still not much good at any of it—the sailing, the stopping, the letting myself be happy before I’ve earned some invisible right to it. But I’m beginning to suspect that being good at it was never the point.
This. This is why.
Fair winds,
Cheyenne
