Whenever I’m on a trip I think about my mother’s book: ‘Around the World by Mistake.’ In 1962-63 my parents took my brother and me on a year-long freighter voyage. They wanted to inspire us to regard the whole world as our home, and people from every country as our friends. ‘Around the World by Mistake’ is the true story of that freighter voyage. Part travelogue, part inner journey, and part adventure tale, it was an amazing journey that most people only dream of doing.

Here’s an excerpt, where she describes how it’s not the politicians and tyrants who make history, but the poets, the story-tellers, the parents, and the travelers:

Alex joined us eventually and we sat up to dangle our feet over the side of the boat, watching the dazzling rainbow sparkle of flying fish. The smack of the prow thumping along at full speed drove clusters of the winged creatures out of the water. Each group flew for a minute or more, their silver traces marking the air to the back of the ship, there to mingle with the circling of the seagulls and the lacy curls of the wake.

We were sailing East of Aden to Bombay and it would take about seven days. The vast landmass to the north of us was not all a mystery to us. Alex and I had visited a good deal of it on magazine assignments at one time or another.

The whole thing was more a living picture of geography and history. It harbored more than a dozen distinctive peoples. Yet they shared the one identity of time and place: like each other, say, with characteristic differences, rather like those between a Vermonter and a Texan – both American. But this Mid-Asian Continent with No Name, as I called it, resembles America in size. Except that it has nations instead of states, and does not enjoy the protection of one well-guarded boundary. Nor does it have one federal government dispensing fairly equal justice; nor one set of federal laws; nor one currency, nor just one military. Instead, there’s nationalism, racism, repression, and burning embers of revolution.

Over thousands of years, traders, conquerors, pilgrims, teachers, have crisscrossed this continent, moving along dangerous ways and byways to storied cities worth every hard, hot step. From Kabul to Istanbul; from Karachi to Damascus, Marlik to Mecca; from Babylon to Balkh and Baghdad, from Persepolis to Petra.

All jewels in the crown of the Continent with No Name.

Three modern-day world religions spun out from this land: first Judaism, with Christianity and Islam following each in turn. All preached “the One God.” Or one Good. Or one good after another. And yet they have divided rather than united as they killed one another.

Conquerors insist on only One God, describing that Being as Top Dog. Through conquest they carry their own rules and religions with them, ponderously imposing them on the conquered as they pursue their bloody ways. Conquest is always brutal, always despoiling sandcastles not built in a day. Those fleeing the iron chariots go lightly, carrying their songs, chants, and stories with them. Usually their culture and religion is often all they carry – that and their children.

Tyrants coerce, whereas poets, artists, storytellers sing the daily life, the immediate life, the only life we have, the one we love. Jelaluddin Rumi, one of the supremely great poet-sons of the Continent with No Name, is an example of such creative mixing. Born at Balkh, (now in Afghanistan) he was exiled by the Mongols, and walked to the other end of the Silk Road to settle in Konya, Turkey. Rumi spoke in Turkic, wrote in Persian, and chanted the holy Qu’ran as it was written, in Arabic.

A vivid memory catches your soul as a dream-catcher catches your dreams. This is particularly so sailing across wide expanses of oceans. It’s all dream, immediate experience, and memory. If you’re not interrupted, you can sort things out and drop a lot overboard.

Idly from my vantage point, I watched Bjorn round a corner, tiptoeing in and out of the deck shadows. He had been spending the last few days sunning himself and his tan had deepened to a rich cherry-wood stain. He was looking for someone. I hoped it wasn’t me.

Like an animal in the jungle, he felt my eyes and looked up. A few minutes later, he climbed the ladder and waved cheerfully.

“Ah, there you are! I have been searching all over for you.”

If you’d like to buy the book you can find it here: http://janewinsloweliot.com/writing/around-the-world-by-mistake/

In August, every now and then I’m startled by the sight of a yellow leaf. It always seems too soon, and takes me by surprise.

It seems to signify the end of something big.

I try not to get caught up in a whelm of nostalgia. But in August I can’t seem to help it. There’s something about the sighing breeze that feels different now. There’s a new kind of quiet around, broken only by the sound of my children packing boxes to leave home.

There have been so many summers in my life.

There were the summers growing up in England. We spent most of August in Ashdown Forest, with the ghosts of Winnie-the-Pooh, and with W.B. Yeats, who had honeymooned there. We would play, explore, follow the stream to its source, climb trees, seek and hide and seek. How it was that we never got lost, or lost each other? We never did, back then.

More exotic Augusts: on the west coast of Ireland, with bonfires on the beach, and swimming in the surprisingly warm Atlantic Ocean under a full moon, and being kissed for the first time.

Or cruising up to the Arctic Circle and exploring fjord after fjord and thinking I was going to the ends of the earth to be so far north, and with so much light around.

Living high up in the Greek mountains there were always intense thunderstorms in August. The little house where we lived would shake and tremble and the sky lit up again and again, as though with excitement. Ominous: summer was coming to an end. What was next?

Most of all I remember New York City in the summer when I was in my twenties. Maybe we didn’t see many stars, but the stars were all around us, in the lights of the city, the clubs, the music, the stars in his eyes, and in mine. That was the decade of love, after meeting and before marrying; and I know there were autumns, and winters, and springs, but when I go back to those early years together I think mostly of summer.

When we first moved to the Berkshires with our young children I’ll never forget the fireflies – sometimes it felt that our garden was alive with them. But there were fewer and fewer in August.

That felt as ominous as the Greek thunder.

Each August I knew the voyage would soon be over. Or that a childhood adventure was ending. Or that bliss of love had to become grounded.

In August it was always time to move on.

But this is the first time that August feels different. That’s why I’m startled by the small yellow leaf. I’m not moving on – my children are. The Greek thunderstorms and the dying fireflies pale in significance.

In a recent essay on Writers Block and other Urban Legends (http://dosomedamage.blogspot.com/2009/08/writers-block-and-other-urban-legends.html#comments), Jay Stringer defines (and dismisses) the affliction that he says is erroneously labeled as writer’s block. At first, having suffered painfully from this alleged ‘affliction,’ I read his piece with a certain amount of resentment. But then he wrote this:

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I’ve recently become a ‘twitterer.’ Twitter – this brave new world of sorts – has opened up new vistas that have made me view the whole world differently. I joined initially at the persuasion of my friend Richard (http://twitter.com/RCaro) – who seemed to imply that tweeting was essential for anyone who 1) is a writer; 2) is interested in other people knowing about one (i.e. ‘success’); and 3) cares about community, other people, the world, and who wants to know what’s what.

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The Letter

The phone rings. My daughter is calling from California. Not unusual – but imagine my surprise when she excitedly informs that she secretly nominated me for a Diva Do-Over at Body & Soul in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It’s a six-session program for women fifty years old and over.
Well, bless my soul. Here I am – a decrepit old lady – and I’m being offered an opportunity like this!

Samantha emails me the letter she wrote to nominate me:

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THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED ONE WEEK BECAUSE OF THE ICE STORM!! Come on December 18 instead.

The “Meet the Berkshire Poets” monthly series continues on Thursday, December 18 at 7:00 p.m. at the Mason Library. Please come to hear December’s featured poets:

David Jaicks, Dawn Barbieri, and Winslow Eliot

The Mason Library is located at 231 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230.

For more information please call 413 274-3738.

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In an effort to try to shape society in a way that they hope will be healing, Seth Jordan and a group of friends recently founded an inspiring new organization called Think OutWord. Loosely based around Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on the threefold social order, Think OutWord is a peer-led training in social threefolding.

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Around the World by Mistake
By Jane Winslow Eliot

In the summer of 1963 Jane and Alexander Eliot put the last of their money onto a trip around the world: a Yugoslav freighter that was scheduled to deliver all sorts of exotic goods from Rijecka to Osaka and then back again. They trusted to fate that they could pick up the pieces of their freelance writing lives again when they returned. (more…)

L’innocence du Mal, the French version of The Bright Face of Danger, has been reissued for the fifth time in France!

The latest edition is under the ‘Bestsellers’ imprint – “une marque deposee par Harlequin S.A.” Beautifully translated by Francois Delpeuch, L’innocence du Mal continues to be enjoyed by readers all over France!

Interview with Winslow Eliot

Posted on Why Waldorf Works

Last May, Kate Christensen won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for her novel The Great Man. Kate graduated from Green Meadow Waldorf School in 1980, determined to be a novelist. She proceeded to write and publish four humorous, caustic, utterly compelling novels: In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament, and The Great Man. All are well worth reading! Although she attended a Waldorf school for just her junior and senior years, her teachers and classes left a lasting impression on her. (more…)

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