Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order) by Bridget Quinn, illustrated by Lisa Congdon, came along with me on my recent trip to the Cayman Islands with the Chaplain. I read most of it sitting at a couple of pristine stretches of beach on Grand Cayman, and those times were some of my favorite parts of the trip.
What made the book a great beach read?
When we got off the plane on Grand Cayman, we were greeted at Customs by lines of white people, wearing beachy clothes and smelling of laundry detergent and sunblock. Lots of families. At least one person in each family group had a shirt touting a destination from a previous vacation. These were professional tourists. The kind that go on vacation to the Caribbean.
I go on vacation in the Caribbean, too. But I’ve never done it as a stranger. Our many trips to Trinidad and Tobago have been met with family at the other end, and our trip to the Cayman Islands was no different.
Since the Chaplain’s friend had arranged our accommodations, we didn’t know the address of the place where we’d be staying – something you need to provide at Customs. The Customs Officer called the Chaplain’s friend on his cell to find out the address, while we waited at the counter, hoping the friend would answer a call from an unknown number.
I’ve made five pairs of pants using the Arenite pattern, and I saw on Instagram that Meg of Sew Liberated had made one of her pairs of pants into shorts. I was looking for a couple of quick makes before our trip to the Cayman Islands, and this Arenite shorts hack came together in just a few hours.
Doubles are a street food you can get in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s a flat bread wrap full of channa, which is potato and chick peas in curry sauce. The first time I had it was the only year we were in T and T for Carnival.
We left to go back to the States Carnival Monday or Tuesday, and had a few hours in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to walk the streets before our flight. That year, we had three kids, and the youngest was a baby. Soca music was pounding. There were crowds. I was concerned about the kids losing their hearing with the music blasting from every direction.
The day was a little overwhelming, but I had two favorite moments:
A friend from the retreat asked me if I’d been able to keep up my meditation practice while we were in Tobago.
The answer is yes, and no.
The first week, I read the fantastic Breathing Underwater. One of Rohr’s observations was that when you find positive practices for your life, you should find that you need less of them over time to get the benefit, not more.
For a while now, it had felt that the law of level of diminishing returns was starting to apply to my meditation, yet I was afraid to scale back and lose ground. In the weeks before our trip, I’d gone from an hour and a half to 2 hours a day down to about 1 – 1.5 hours. I’d been keeping up with an hour plus a day since we’d been on vacation, but was trying to figure out how Rohr’s idea applied to my practice.
