Good research into John Steinbeck's Journey to/Log from the Sea of Cortez. Your title drew me in like a magnet. I read this book while living on a tropical island (Puerto Rico) and after losing a big corporate position in 1975 ! Yes I was very young (26) distraught, confused and crying in my beer while licking my fresh wounds as it were.

That book contains such vivid images of mirage where the desert meets the sea; floating islands, land that vaporizes and water that turns into land, false channels, cul de sacs and outright visual hallucinations. Sea over land and land over sea.

I remember Steinbeck writing that "One cannot help but feel, not a little jaunty when disembarking from your own yacht, however humble the craft, in a foreign port. There's an unavoidable swagger in one's steps upon reaching terra firme once again." (I paraphrase from memory -44 yrs.)

And yes, regardless of the circumstances, the mind will Rise and Fall in elation and depression, gain and loss, love and fear as long as you are alive and sentient (feeling).