The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

I wish I could figure out the rules that the universe follows for catching you when you jump off a cliff. There seems to be some sort of caveat that the life rafts won’t line up until after you’re hurtling through the air spread out for a belly flop.

Home—it seemed like a fragile idea to me. Is it where we’re from or where we are?

There’s a much-quoted line by Portuguese writer Raul Brandão: “Já percebi que o que torna as ilhas belas e as completa é a ilha em frente”—“I have come to understand that what makes the islands beautiful and complete is the island that’s across the way.” Maybe life is like that. For all our talk about living in the moment, what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.