December 2022 Soul Notes
I’m thoughtful about place right now. I feel a restlessness in my bones and a longing to wander; to smell fresh scents; listen to unfamiliar sounds; to excite my tastebuds and feel wild air on my skin. As I visit the landscapes of my imagination, I wonder how our physical setting affects how we attune to life, and to ourselves. I would have described myself as a nomad in my early years. My father and stepfather were both in the army so we wandered countries as children. Some of my fondest and most vivid memories are bodymind memories of place. I recall a setting, and then revisit the sensations and emotions of that location, which are now of course, located in me too. One imprint is of 6 year old me in a red and white striped t-shirt and denim shorts, cupping fresh mountain water out of the stream after a night's camping in the Harz mountains in Germany. I drank my fill and then stood up, put my hands on my little hips and closed my eyes to breathe it all in. I was exhilarated. I remember the world felt big and full of possibility, and so did I. A few years later, my sister and I were playing games on the basalt pillars of the Giants' Causeway on the Atlantic coast of Northern Ireland, daring the mythical sleeping giants beneath to rise up. For me these were lands of mystery and wildness, places where something in me came to life that hadn't been stirred in the drizzly, grey, red bricked streets of Manchester. I headed to Russia in the 80’s and tasted life around the vast former Soviet Union for the next 14 years. I was happy to travel light – to explore and to feel into the possible different versions of myself. I remember sitting at the foot of the Caucuses in Georgia on one of our student trips. We had paused for a meal of freshly caught fish and I was staring into the crisp blue sky and watching an eagle soar above us. I still recall how every nerve tingled with delight. I felt so alive. I fell in love with life in that place and felt such a rootedness in the Georgian soil that I couldn't explain. This was 5 years before I met my future Georgian husband and 13 years before we had a daughter together, marrying our cultures in her. The connection to this land was firmly engraved somewhere within me. As Jim Harrison writes above: “Nature has portals rather than doors.” and I was certainly transported into another realm that day. Once I had my daughter, life settled. I settled. We based ourselves in St Albans, one of the oldest towns in England. St Albans’ Celtic Iron Age name of “Verlamion” actually means “settlement over by the marsh”. I chose a place synonymous with the mother I had become. Stable. Calm. Safe. But the gypsy is returning as I transition out of mother. Longing to join the caravan as it winds its way. Psychologist and mythologist, Sharon Blackie muses on questions of place in her latest brilliant newsletter The Art of Enchantment. She writes: “I’ve been focusing in – and not for the first time – on the two very pertinent and insightful questions that Robert Macfarlane poses in The Old Ways: ‘What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?’ And, ‘What do I know when I am in this place and nowhere else?’ Robert similarly suggested…… that ‘cognition is site-specific, or motion-sensitive: that we think differently in different landscapes. And therefore, more radically, that certain thoughts might be possible only in certain places, such that when we lose those places, we are losing kinds of imagination as well.’ “ Robert Macfarlane is a nature writer who argues for a fundamental change in our relationship with nature and campaigns to protect and give access to our wild spaces in the British Isles. In his book, The Wild Places, he writes: "We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it.” I appreciate the connection he draws between the inner and outer world possibilities - his argument that our destruction of the natural world, is essentially self-destruction in the most immediate sense. If a place knows something in me that I don't yet know in myself, as the mountains of my childhood knew my soaring soul way before I did, then surely we bow to this greater wisdom, rather than annihilate it? The School of Life has a lighter but illuminating take on place in How To Travel: I like this musing from the short essay on The Importance of the Sun: “we feel our character changing in the sun: becoming something we like a lot more. When the world seems bountiful and easy (as it does in the heat), material accumulation looks less impressive or necessary. When we can have so much pleasure from sitting in a T-shirt and shorts and feasting on a feta and tomato salad, competing wildly for promotion loses its point. When it is so hot, there is no point even trying to read – or think too much. The sun can correct our usual vices. The ways of the north are liable to be overly dominant and entrenched in our lives. We need to lie on the beach not because we are light-minded or indolent, but because we can be so dangerously dutiful, serious, hard-working, disconnected from our body, over-cerebral and cautious. It is a deeply noble search for wisdom and balance (which are the ideal goals of art, civilisation and travel) that has led us here – to an enchanting world of sun cream, dark glasses, recliners and vividly coloured cocktails by the pool.” There's little sunshine here right now and the “enchanting world of sun cream” and cocktails seems a long way away from the winter idyll that I currently occupy, but I can conjure up the warmth and indolence if I close my eyes. For the next few weeks, I shall enjoy the invitation of the wintry, windswept landscape to hibernate, to nestle down by the fire with loved ones in life and in my books, with the occasional foray into the elements. Time to see what “this place” yet knows of me, and what I know only in this place before I open up the year to find out what else is out there.
With much love,
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