"The Love Affair With Life"

 

 

The great affair, the love affair with life,

is to live as variously as possible,

to groom one's curiously like a high-spirited thoroughbred,

climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills everyday.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,

but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

 

Diane Ackerman from A Natural History of the Senses.

 

I like warm, summer lazy afternoons after the sea mist that loiters slowly and silently like a phantom between trees, chimneys and houses, finally shuffles away. Summer is a time of deliverance from winter's heartaches and confinement of staying indoors. The fishermen at the harbour, although they are tired, are reluctant to go home because they would rather like to rest and daydream in a timeless zone on their boats which rest on the calm surface of water. These are people who have learnt the meaning of resilience and survival. They have learnt to live with what life has to offer and make the best of their life.

A time for banquet



A gift from my kind and generous fisherman neighbour



Summer is, after all, a time for banquet, for celebration, reaping, paying back, repairing and restoring. There is an enchanting, hypnotic atmosphere about the summer afternoon. The sea, trees, wild flowers, potent with memories, and the sound of footsteps are suddenly absorbed by the trilling and gossip of birds. In the afternoon, there is no sign of life as if one has drifted into another age - the time of Eden. The atmosphere is a combination of an eerie emptiness as well as stillness. A wonderfully crisp, crystal clear amber sunlight makes the sea look even more expansive than ever. It has a dream-like effect upon me. The modern world with the traffic-jams and the streets solid with maddening crowds and pedestrians are something you leave behind to enjoy the remaining stillness of an ancient, unspoilt world which has a very real and magical spirit of its own.
 

Clouds forming into exquisite blue-and-gold silk brocade

In some ways, the village is like Constable's paintings come to life. Some houses in the village still retain something of its original characters, especially, the houses that were built by the harbour with the local stones. One could imagine that beneath these stones are a good many memories, traditions, dreams, beliefs and hopes. How easily the mind can be seduced into a reverie, a pleasant nostalgia because of the open spaces? I believe that the countryside gives birth to the mystics and the dreamers. Whereas, the cities produce the pragmatists and realists who don't have time to dream as they are used to, day after day, the rush and tear of traffic, making snap decisions, having fit of temper, or passing love-affair like a cloud-drift.

 

The countryside is for the mystics and the romantics

I can share the sentiments of William Wordsworth when he wrote the following lines:

 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"
 

Double Rainbow from my window

A lobster pot in front of the fisherman's cottage