Month: July 2025

People often ask me if, after thirteen years of cruise lecturing, there is any place I haven’t been, and I always answer the same way: Inland.  

It is true by now that except for Japan, Antarctica, and parts of Africa there are very few cruise ports I haven’t been to at least once. Cruising has been a wonderful way to touch down around the world, but when you just spend one port day in a place, and your experiences are curated around what a country wants you to see, I always feel I have brushed up against a place but not really seen it.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I have laid eyes on so many things that would have been out of reach for me otherwise—tiny villages in the Amazon, gigantic Buddhas in Asia, the beaches of Fiji—but most of the time I am gone before nightfall and miss the whole other life of places when the cruisers are gone. This summer I wanted to do something different. In the middle of June, I took a two-week road trip to explore my new home in British Columbia.  After that I  spent a whole week with my friend Megan in Quebec City, which I have stopped in by ship many times but never spent the night. Today, I am back on board ship, but just for two weeks, as a way to spend quality time with my friend Jane, whom I see rarely now that I don’t live in San Diego. And then, it will be the middle of August and the summer will be well on its way to being over.

I am inspired to write this morning because of a weird experience I just had. I did my morning onboard ritual of going around 6AM to the top deck of the bow, where there is a deserted lounge, with a coffee machine and couches overlooking the bow of the ship as it glides through the water.  I was looking at my mail on my iPad, and as Billy Pilgrim does in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I became momentarily unstuck in time. Some part of my brain wondered “are we almost there?” as if I were on a plane or in a car. When I looked up and saw the beautiful scenery of British Columbia’s Inside Passage, I was a little dizzy with a sense of disorientation.  

From the moment I set out in my car more than a month ago, I have been keeping track of time. I have made all the decisions about it, and have monitored it all the time, from how many miles to my destination, to what time is on my entry ticket  to a museum, to how long until the plane lands, to what time checkout is.  Right now I have only the sensation of gliding over water with no need whatsoever to care what time it is.

Are we there yet?  Yes and no. No, in that there are ports to get to, and we won’t arrive at the first one until tomorrow, but having cruised in Alaska several times now I don’t have the same sense of anticipation other guests are probably feeling. But yes, I am wherever “there” is when you don’t have a destination, only a beautiful present where the burdens of obligation and desire vanish. 

‘“Just be, “ I tell myself.  Maybe that is why my favourite part of the day, wherever I am, is this little patch of early morning before time starts mattering. Soon enough the clothes will be out of the dryer down on deck 5 and I’ll need to retrieve them to make room for others. At 7, the cafe with better coffee will open.  Around 8 the Cruise Director’s office will open and I can get my notes printed for my talk this afternoon—

Poof! just like that the spell is broken. But for now, I want a few more minutes of quieted mind, in which I am floating in this little bit of nowhere, or maybe it’s everywhere. And you, whatever time it is, and however pressing your schedule, unstick yourself even for a few breaths. Shantih.  

People who have been reading my blog for some time know how often I process something that’s happening in the political world by analogy to my personal life. I was in a long-term marriage to a narcissist, with my stubbornness to admit defeat being perhaps the single biggest factor in why I stayed married to him as long as I did.  His behaviour brought me to the ground emotionally and financially, and in many respects, I have moved on without being able to fully recover.

I acknowledge that every dysfunctional relationship is a dynamic in which both parties play roles.  In my case, the betrayals were all on his part and took many forms that I won’t itemize here, because my point is not about him. He doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how I make sense of my own history. I was a loyal and completely faithful wife, who took care of him and our children without receiving the same kind of care in return. It’s really that simple.

How I was complicit is in my lack of ability to set the boundaries that would have stopped him from taking advantage of my qualities of loyalty, fidelity, and loving care. I didn’t fight back when I should have, and I played a role in creating a monster. I know better now. One of the best things about my relationship with my late husband Jim is that I went into it committed to never feeling again the way I felt in my first marriage, and I knew to do that I would have to change. Jim was a good man and he helped me learn that I could express my needs and my feelings without being punished for them, and that my happiness was equally important to his own.

I suppose you could say I retain unprocessed trauma over my first marriage, but the truth is I’m just not that interested anymore. What does continue unprocessed is the connection that his behaviour had to producing two beautiful children who then went on, one in his early 20s and one in his early 40s to end their own lives.  When I look at this from what might be considered an objective perspective, I  see that my firstborn, Adriano, was somewhere on the autism spectrum, which at the time of his death in 1999, at age 22, was associated only with its most severe forms. He could never figure out what others expected of him, and eventually he gave up.  My younger son, Ivan, developed severe bipolar disorder in adulthood, leading to psychotic episodes that would have required heavy medication for the rest of his life. He complained that the drugs destroyed the Ivan he enjoyed being,  replaced by a zombie who could take no joy in life. He hung on for a while, but a debilitating shoulder injury put him over the edge and he too made the gamble that the next world would be better.

I could place the blame on biochemistry and leave it at that, and I do remind myself that faced with those odds, there might have been little that any parents could have done to change the outcome. I could point to history of mental instability in his family, and warning signs I see now that should have made me think twice about marrying him. At 25 there was so much I didn’t know about what would matter in a life partner. Still, I have tried to tread carefully between blaming their father too much and myself too little. 

One thing I do know, though, is that blaming him doesn’t make me feel better. Nor does blaming myself. Still, I think any mother can’t ever put completely to rest any decisions that led to negative consequences for her children. I see more clearly now the role that my stubbornness played in staying married to an increasingly dysfunctional man, when his lack of concern for anyone but himself was hurting my children far more than a divorce ever would. It’s too late to know better now, but forgiving myself for what I didn’t realize at the time has proved elusive.

As often happens with this blog, I take a long time to get to the point. The reason I’m having these thoughts today is an article I read this morning about signs in adults that may show they grew up with a narcissistic parent. I will post the link at the bottom of this entry if you think it might be helpful. Self doubt, hypervigilance, boundary problems, trust issues—the list goes on and on. My response to this article came as quite a revelation. I don’t think either of my children had any of these issues. They could have had them all based only on their father‘s behaviour, but they also had me. 

I provided their normality, their stability, their security in the world. Anyone who has seen pictures of them as children knows that these children were loved. The photo at the top of this post shows a time right after Star Wars was released when I made medals of cardboard covered with aluminum foil that I presented to them for running around the high school track with us. At the bottom, there’s a photo of Adriano (top) and Ivan. It’s me they are looking at, so confident they are my treasured boys.

I protected them in ways I understand better now.  Ivan used to reassure me that I had been a great mom, and in the letter Adriano left he said the same, but I had never been able to accept this because my own narrative about our shared past was so different from theirs. I could have done better in so many ways, and I will always regret that, but given the totality of what was going on in our family, I see now that I did a damn good job of mothering after all. My gift was my love and that will have to be enough.

https://medium.com/the-narcissist-detox/17-signs-you-dealt-with-narcissistic-abuse-as-a-kid-f20a66f6e85f

it’s been more than a decade since I have published anything, and I an delighted to share with you the news that a historical novel I have been working on for several years will be coming out in May 2026 from Sibylline Press. ALOHA WANDERWELL TAKES THE WHEEL tells the fantastic true story of a remarkable teenager who walks away from her boarding school in 1922 to go off on an adventure that will take her around the world behind the wheel of a Model T. Aloha’s story has everything—drama, comedy, adventure, romance, steamy sex, life-threatening events, glamour, heartbreak, joy. Most of all, it’s an inspirational tale of a young woman determined not to cave in to societal expectations, who goes out to live the exciting life she has dreamed of. Do an online search of Aloha Wanderwell, and I think you will see why I just had to tell her story. And while you are here on my website, be sure to take a look at the link here https://laurelcorona.com/laurels-books/aloha-wanderwell/ that will tell you about the book. . The cover, by the way, is a mockup that will be replaced in a few months when I have the actual cover. In the meantime, hereis one of my favourite photos of the one and only Aloha Wanderwell

‘If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” This is the first line of the essay “The Flow of the River,  which opens  Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey.   First published in 1959, the book is replete with anachronisms, such as using the word “man” to stand for humanity, and talking about how someday “man” will go into space, but it is to me one of the most exquisite collection of essays ever written. 

This line came to me today as I traveled along the western side of the Canadian Rockies. It started with two of my favourite geological features, glaciers and the ridges called aretes they leave behind.  An arête can be as sharply pointed as an arrowhead, or as long and smooth as an axe blade, formed when glaciers on both sides of a mountain pull the mountain down with them until only a sharp ridge remains.  Often the glacier is long gone, but the shape it left behind is unmistakable, and there are hundred of them in this part of the world . Here is a photo I took from a viewpoint above the town of Revelstoke. It’s not the best image of aretes and glaciers, but it will have to do.

I was driving along a river today and looking up at the jagged mountains when I felt this wave of appreciation for how water shapes landscapes. I thought about soft, white, fluffy snow falling on the mountain peaks, then compressing over time into a river of ice so powerful it can pulverize granite. 

It’s early summer still at this altitude, and yesterday I was trudging through patches of remaining snow on a hike in Mount Revelstoke. It was beautiful to hear the tinkling and gurgling of the little rivulets running out from the snow pack, as they joined a slightly larger stream, which eventually would find its way to a larger one, and then perhaps to a lake, which itself feeds a torrent that will eventually find its way through cascades and falls to the valley below, itself carved by a huge river, like the Thompson, the Fraser, or the Columbia, before finding its way to the sea. 

Nothing new about that.  It’s grade school science.  But what was new for me was realizing that every single thing I was looking at was there because of water, from the tiny wildflowers to the trees, to the shapes of the towering mountains, to the clouds hovering over them.  When astronomers and other scientists talk about potential life elsewhere in the universe, they always start with evidence of water, and here I was, surrounded by an explosion not just of life but of all this magnificent scenery that was there because water makes everything happen. 

 I also found myself thinking about Charles Lyell’s theory of uniformity, which states that the geological forces we see now are the same ones that have shaped the earth from the beginning.  Leave a garden hose on in an area of loose soil and you get a miniature Grand Canyon that mimics exactly the way even the hugest chasms have been formed. Today I stood in front of the second highest waterfall in Canada, fed by an enormous glacier on the plateau above, and feeding the milky river you see at the bottom of the photo. What I was seeing was the same in principle as those trickles of water coming out from under the patches of snow on the trail I had taken the day before. 

None of this is magic, really.  Eiseley and Lyell knew that, and so do I.  But there is something that feels like magic about the ahah moments we all get from time to time, when something we saw only in pieces comes together, when our minds are supple enough to see the connection between what what we are struggling to understand and the messages that are everywhere around us. Sometimes the insight comes from the smallest things, such as when Dylan Thomas speaks of “the round Zion of the water bead,” the tiny, fragile perfection of one drop of water that for him stood for eternity.  For me, the illumination came from imagining water at the opposite extreme. 

Today I was thinking about how some people are dragged down by life, like glaciers pull down mountains, and what remains are only their sharp brittle edges.  And then I see water rushing over rocks glistening with the smoothness they have acquired over time, and I think there are people like those rocks too. I want to be one of those. My heart goes out to people who go through life like walking aretes.  These thoughts passed fleetingly through my mind, of no particular consequence.  Making meaning is always going to be fluid, and the best part is that we can throw out thoughts all day and occasionally something is so right for that moment that it changes us. That’s when we feel maybe there is magic after all.

One of my favourite ways of making meaning is through poetry.  Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my favourite poets (I quote him often in this blog), and the last lines of his poem “Inversnaid” feel to me like a benediction for all the wonderful experiences I have been having:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.