When I was eight years old, I taught myself to swim in a local lake on the outskirts of my home town. I don’t recall a lifeguard. Mostly, mothers and the elderly gathered at the lake’s edge to take the sun and watch the kids. I wasn’t sure I could really swim and thought I was cheating because close to shore I could put one foot down and touch the bottom. To be sure, I jumped off the end of the pier into about ten feet of water. I figured I would sink or make it to shore. But if I made it to shore, I knew I could swim. This desire to test myself at eight years old and to survive foreshadowed how I would live my life.
I remember the sense of empowerment I felt having taken a risk and succeeded. I believe I imprinted at that moment that it paid to step out of one’s comfort zone for the rewards it brought in self-reliance. The feeling carried over into my teen years when I decided to continue with higher education in spite of my parents’ objection, and moved to New York City on my own to attend college. I truly believed that what didn’t kill you, made you stronger.
It was with this same belief that I took two small children and went off to Mexico to live as a single parent when a friend living there told me she’d find someone trustworthy to care for my children while I worked. This was before child care centers and nurseries were established, and I had trepidations about leaving my children with strangers. I learned a new language, expanded my scope of understanding people, and gave both my sons and myself a taste of possibilities that are open when one moves out of one’s comfort zone. Every time that I stepped out, my life became richer and I became more self-assured. It opened the door for me to say “Why Not” when I had a chance to explore the world on a small yacht
I felt secure stepping into the unknown so long as I kept the most vulnerable part of me, the part that could bring judgment and rejection, safely hidden inside. I pushed down my desire for creative expression and channeled it into helping others develop theirs.
It took a life-altering experience to shatter that fear. Many years later, I was diagnosed with cancer and knew I could die. It opened my awareness that life is truly awesome and fleeting, and this was my small window of opportunity to reach inside myself and discover what’s there. In facing my mortality, all that mattered was my integrity and being true to myself. It was the biggest step I’d ever taken outside my comfort zone and the beginning of my road towards self-realization. I wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone, but it brought me a courage that changed the trajectory of my life for which I have no regrets.
Seeker: A Sea Odyssey is the story of two people who meet in Mexico and fall in love. Rita is an American part-time English language teacher and freelance reporter for an English language tourist magazine struggling to raise two young boys on her own. Bernard is a French geologist under contract to the Mexican government to search for underground thermal springs. She dreams of finding Shangri-La after witnessing a bloody government crackdown from which she barely escapes. He dreams of having a yacht and sailing the world. Their dreams mesh, and they immigrate to Canada to earn the money to build their boat.
Seeker: A Sea Odyssey is available to purchase at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million. You can also add this to your Goodreads reading list.
Rita Pomade— teacher, poet, memoirist—lived six years aboard a small yacht that took her from Taiwan to the Suez to Mallorca, dropping anchor in 22 countries. She and her husband navigated through raging monsoons, encountered real-life pirates, and experienced cultures that profoundly changed them. Seeker: A Sea Odyssey, published by Guernica Editions under the Miroland label tells her story.
Rita Pomade, a native New Yorker, first settled in Mexico before immigrating to Quebec. During her time in Mexico, she taught English, wrote articles and book reviews for Mexconnect, an ezine devoted to Mexican culture, and had a Dear Rita monthly column on handwriting analysis in the Chapala Review. In Montreal she taught English as a Second Language at Concordia University and McGill University until her retirement. She is a two-time Moondance International Film Festival award winner, once for a film script and again for a short story deemed film worthy. Her work is represented in the Monologues Bank, a storehouse of monologues for actors in need of material for auditions, in several anthologies, and in literary reviews. Her travel biography, Seeker: A Sea Odyssey, was shortlisted for the 2019 Concordia University First Book Award.