Anchors in an Open Sea

The Yoga of Sailing is Book One of the Anchors in an Open Sea trilogy. "Sailing into the full catastrophe of living" Have you ever wondered what it is like to be driven, most of your life, by an overwhelming desire for spiritual experience? Explore with Alice through thirty tumultuous years, cycling, tramping, sailing, making love, sitting through spiritual retreats, teaching and raising a family. Taste life through mystical eyes, experience being raised to heaven, and experience the torment of being plunged to earth when the heart fails. Endlessly curious about life and the human journey, Alice throws herself with abandon into the natural world, rough and raw, creating heroic confusion while plunging deeply into the mystery of mind. What she discovers at the end is not what she expected. This is your chance to travel with her and come to understand why her desire for spiritual experience was so overwhelming and why she found it so hard to make peace with ordinary living. The autobiographical honesty and poetical language make this story compelling. Hang on as you sail off with her into the ocean of stunning sunsets and wild waves. A romp with Alice, her daughter Emily and father Roger, on an adventure through the Pacific. Sailing is the protagonist of the story — the sails, the sea, the winds, the islands and the sea-sickness. Alice journeys into nature, leaping to freedom, caught in a mystery she doesn't understand. She knows her wondrous mystical experiences don't last, they don't solve anything, but she's stuck. Ordinary life seems mediocre and unfulfilling. She can't let any of it go. While Emily is missing her boyfriend, Alice is falling in love with her mystical beloved — that is until she falls in love with a man. The confusions multiply. Alice spins fantasy and reality, the mystical and sexual into an all-consuming romance. Alice embraces the sailing, exploring, cycling, backpacking — capturing the detail, the beauty, the poignant conflict. She is searching but she doesn't know what she is searching for, what is driving her, so she questions it all, frustrating everyone around her. She is careening full steam towards something, be it disaster or salvation.