Winter Wanderlust

 

Beyond the Blue Horizon

The playwright, Noel Coward once asked a thought-provoking question in a song from the musical titled Sail Away – ‘why do the wrong people travel,/when the right people stay at home?’ He did not explain who the wrong people are in the song. The wrong people he was referring to might be the type of people who ‘go out in the midday sun’ with their mad dogs. Or am I confusing with another Coward’s song? 

I often consider myself that I am one of the wrong people who go out wandering. Like a vintage bottle of wine, I am not suited for long-distance travel. I cannot figure out what one could possibly need to pack in a suitcase for a fortnight holiday.  

 

I admire people who are accomplished in the art of packing , light travelling and arranging the last minute weekend trips to London or Paris. They seem to be well-equipped with an ability to know exactly how many pairs of trousers, shirts and jackets they would need for the duration of their trip. 

They never appear to be in a quandary when it comes to the planning. The eagerness for adventures outweighs the questions of if one needs an extra cardigan or an extra jacket to change in the evening if one goes out for an evening meal. Yes, I admire them.

  

As far as I am concered, I am happy to settle for something more manageable even if it means I shall never climb Mount Everest one day. I do not mean to say that faraway places do not hold magic and wonder for me. Because they do. 

I learn about these exotic places from my love of reading. My wildest dream would be to plan the trip around the marvellous world literature from my desert island books list and tour the homes of the great masters; Proust, Borges, Wharton, James, Hesse etc. 

Gordon provides a solution that I need to travel with a hypnotist so that I am put to sleep the whole time when I am travelling and only to be woken up when I reach to the destination. 

 

In the meantime, my life is enriched by travelling to local places that are close to my home. Travelling to close destinations is a fine antidote to the anxiety-provoking pressures of packing, preparation and planning for the long journey. 

It only takes a few minutes to pack healthy snacks to eat, CDs and audio books to listen during the car journey and one is ready for the road. One feels safe from the knowledge that at the end of the day when the sun is set, one will return home and sleep on a familiar bed.

 

Today we are heading out in the car to the fundraising sale at a church.

One of the great benefits of travelling in a car is that one can take as many comfort breaks as one wishes and one can daydream about the places one drives through and the lives of the inhabitants in passing towns and villages. 

Even the dullest-looking farmland in the placid countryside, the dismal Scottish weather with a flurry of rain pattered against the windscreen or the barest outline of a tree in the grey, opaque mist comes alive for me. 

Travelling with Gordon, I have learned to sit back and enjoy the ride and drift to the unfamiliar, charming and forsaken places.

 

Gordon would play our favourite Henry Mancini’s song, Two for the Road beautifully sung by Nancy Lamott (from her gorgeous album, My Foolish Heart, released in 1993). 

The beautiful lyrics by Leslie Bricusse can soothe the hearts of not only die-hard romantics but also some anxious wanderers.

 

We listen to our favourite Henry Mancini’s song, Two for the Road from Nancy Lamott's beautiful album, My Foolish Heart in the car. What an incredible singer she was. She more often than not leaves a song in your head. 

      

I have always loved to read the notices on the shop’s windows when I am travelling and study what people are advertising. This is usually how I come across interesting places, the new local antique shops, farmers’ markets, art and craft fairs, handmade quilts, and jumble sales at the country church. 

The desire for a change of scene always takes us on a short journey to the unexplored local places which often brighten monotonous, grey days of the winter.

 

A jar of homemade preserve always beats shop-bought. I bought a couple of jars of marmalade for Gordon.

I love talking to creative and artistic people when I go to the art and craft fairs. In my head I always want to find out what motivates these individuals to create, how they make a living out of their creativity and what makes them committed to their art and craft. 

I talked to the lady who was selling her hand-knitted, beautiful woollen jumpers, bursting with colours; the bright yellows and pinks, the shimmering jade greens and cadmium reds, in all different sizes. She hand-knitted all of them during the lockdown in the first wave of pandemic. She must have found it therapeutic to create something beautiful. In times of uncertainty, beauty and creativity are our principal sources of solace and inspiration. 

The path of perfectionism

 

I have always struggled with seeking for perfection in everything I do. I do not think that I am unique in this category. Most creative people I have met in my life tend to be perfectionists. We are our own worst critics. 

We all strive for beauty, the embodiment of high order and high standard, in our work. But the standard we set for ourselves is so immense that it extinguishes the flame that sparks our creativity and brings our ability that is expressive, free and natural to a complete standstill.  

 

The poems flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

~ Everything is Going to be All Right ~

A poem by Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems, Gallery Press.

Ever since I was young, negative thoughts about my work or performance that did not come up to scratch invaded my creative practice. I learned later than only when we let go of our perfectionism and rules, our creativity happens. 

Julia Cameron, the famous author of The Artist’s Way encourages the creative individuals to 'think mischief more than mastery'. I suppose that one example would be looking at how children paint in the nursery. They are passionate, free, natural and expressive because they are not gripped by perfectionism or a fear of failure.

 

“Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within.” ~ Kafka ~

 

Since this is the beginning of the New Year and we are on the clean slate, so to speak, I can motivate myself to make some room for self-improvement and to let go of my perfectionism. My creative practice, with all its imperfections and omissions, must serve as best it can.

 

Waistel Cooper, a Scot born in 1921, set up his pottery at Porlock in Somerset in 1952. He was a potter of some distinction, and his work was famous for its textured surfaces; he was known, though, to use wood ash glazes from time to time. In 1983 he moved to Penzance, Cornwall, where he operated from Barbican Pottery. He died in 2003.

Last year was the centenary year of his birth. I love the earthy and rustic tone of his pottery. His pottery is often marked with rough surfaces, scratches and irregularities which are a part of its beauty. 

His signature was the brushed forename 'Waistel' in black. If you would like to learn more about his work, please follow this link

In the art of pottery, perfection is not in human hands. It must be left to the forces of nature and the individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies of a potter’s kiln. Success and failure are believed to be in the lap of kiln gods. 

A few years ago, I purchased this vintage tea set and side dishes of ‘Cotswold’ design from Denby because the warm, earthy colour and texture reminded me of Waistel Cooper’s pottery.  

Nepal is my favourite afternoon tea. A lovely light, sweet and bright tea. Flowery, highly aromatic and soothing.

I decided that I do not have to live under the tyrannical laws of perfectionism that govern my dreams of creativity. Instead, I will be gentle to myself and I do not have to walk on the path of perfectionism. 

The path of perfection is perilous and it ought to be forbidden to all artists and creative people in the world. The path of progression is better than the path of perfection because it is a kinder, calmer, more tolerant and encouraging path to walk.  

Winter in the north east coast of Scotland can be long, bleak and harsh. Lighting candles and creating an indoor garden can help alleviate the winter blues. 

There is another sky,

Ever serene and fair,

And there is another sunshine,

Though it be darkness there;

Never mind faded forests, Austin,

Never mind silent fields -

Here is a little forest,

Whose leaf is ever green;

Here is a brighter garden,

Where not a frost has been;

In its unfading flowers

I hear the bright bee hum:

Prithee, my brother,

Into my garden come!

 

There is another sky by Emily Dickinson

“Keep yourselves…quiet, peaceful, with your eyes open. It doesn't matter at all what Mr. So-and-so thinks of your work; [...] Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling. Rise early, always watch the sunrise, and the way the clouds break from the dawn; you will cast your statue-draperies in quite another than your common way, when the remembrance of that cloud motion is with you, and of the scarlet vesture of the morning.”  ~ John Ruskin ~ The Two Paths (1859)

“…so we'll live,/And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/At gilded butterflies…” William Shakespeare, King Lear

Homecoming

 

Melodious, melancholy, mysterious and mystical, Bernward Koch’s Montagnola (dedicated to the novelist, Hermann Hesse) is a beautiful solo piano album. There is something intoxicating and contemplative and sensual and spiritual about this album. This dual aspect of Koch's piano music also reminds me of Russian composer, George Gurdjieff (1866-1949). I love listening to this album when I am reading in the evening.  

Hermann Hesse wrote: “Oh, I would gaze down lovingly at every wanderer who passed my quiet house, I would follow him affectionately, wishing him well, approving because he has chosen a better way than mine, because he is really and truly a guest and pilgrim on earth, instead of playing lord and master like me…"

He continued: "I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms…and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.” 

Hermann Hesse, Wandering, pp. 41-42.

 

Hermann Hesse – Wandering: Notes and Sketches (first published in German in 1920) capture the author’s wandering spirit as he embarks on a new way of life close to nature. 

There are many beautiful sentences like these in this very short book by Hermann Hesse called Wandering. There are only 91 pages in my English translation of this book which was first published in 1920 in German. I have got a copy of Wandering in German because I bought it for the colour illustrations of Hermann Hesse's sketches.

 

Wandering is a collection of Hesse’s short poems, watercolour drawings and sketches, reflections and meditations on the beauty of places, on the wonder of nature and on his love for the southern foothills of the Alps. He moved to live in the village of Montagnola in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino soon after the end of the First World War. 

HERMANN HESSE (1877–1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning German poet and novelist. One day I would love to visit his home in the village of Montagnola in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino. 

Both poetic and humane in its exploration of the desire to wander and to escape, of art and its inspiration, the mystery of natural world and the blurred memories from one’s wandering years make this book truly compelling and a perfect bedside reading.

 

 “…in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.” Herman Hesse, Wandering, p. 27      

According to Hesse, there are two types of people – a farmer (the one who stays at home, the one who is “the faithful” and “the virtuous”) and a nomad (the one who searches).

He then goes on to contemplate that he is, after all, “a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps.” But Hesse's portrayal of the man who searches has a tinge of melancholy like the characters in W. G. Sebald's novels because a wanderer could also be someone who has been exiled from his country, typically because of war, persecution, or natural disaster.

 

Silhouette of a sycamore tree in the winter

Unlike the aimless wanderer described by Hesse, I have a goal of returning home at the end of the day even if it means achieving half-goal in one’s journey or forgoing untried experiences.

 

There is nothing to compare with a feeling of coming home. When I think of home, I think of gratitude, peace and comfort, the open horizon, the sea air to make one feel human and alive again, and the serenity, punctuated by the distant sound of seagull’s cries. 

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:

a being.  And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task, The day's blow

rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke” – a poem by Denise Levertov, Breathing the Water (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1987) p. 3.

This time of the year, one is rewarded by the spectacular sunsets for coming back home. After arriving back home, I would rush out to the fields of cornstalks and stand still in the middle of the fields. I would look around me with eager curiosity on how Mother Nature paints the surrounding with its shimmering and swift brushstrokes of colours.

 

The afterglow often leaves me engulfed in a haze of the golden light. The sky is ablaze with colours of gemstones or tropical flowers. This is how I celebrate the moment of coming home. It fills me with a strange, intoxicating happiness that is like a feeling of relief or a feeling of deliverance. I no longer care about success or perfection.

 

Now I belong to myself, my mind, body and soul, unobserved and uninhabited, and all around me is the world of the expected and the familiarity and yet, it is mysterious and sublime in every way. This is where I am able to remain grounded while forging my path in life.

I glimpse in the windows to search for salmon-coloured sunsets… 

Stepping outside of one’s comfort zone and taking an unknown turning can be a thrilling adventure every now and then. But there is no place like home. With sunlit windows, salmon-coloured sunsets, a tabby cat coming out to greet on the garden’s wall and a shepherd who finally finds his lost sheep on the meadows at twilight, there is nowhere else I would rather be.    

“And now the purple dust of twilight time/Steals across the meadows of my heart” – the first line of my favourite song, Stardust (Hoagy Carmichael/Mitchell Parish)