Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Warrior

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Summer

    My family typically spent a month each summer cruising on a thirty-seven foot sloop called the Phoenix. Four children and two adults relating in such a confined space shaped the warrior skills of my adult personality, including a taste for exploration, for reveling in the physical pleasures of water, wind, storm & sun, for the absolute dissociation of reading and thinking, and for reading aloud, also group card games such a Michigan and Oh Hell played during wild evening parties called “Phoenix A-Gogo.”

    Trailing

    When we sailed I was fore & aft &

    Up the mast –

    Exulting with the spinnaker –

    Bikinied & brown with

    Binoculars in hand –

    Mapping unseen islands

    In the geography of my heart

    Scoring constellations

    To the cosmology of my brain –

    Reading by the light of

    Photo-luminescence –

    Foraging with seals & jellyfish

    Flying higher

    Dreaming farther

    Fish-hooking memory forever.

    Mother warmed the compass

    Father was a sextant,

    Sisters manned the jibs, but

    I owned the reacher-drifter –

    Favorite sail

    Which makes the most of

    Any air