Hello all
Greetings from a very sunny West Cork. I am sitting under the sun umbrella, preparing this post for you, just back from a long swim. While we have been spared the incessant extreme heat of continental Europe, still, it’s hot! The water, though, has been gold, and today I was relishing swimming among long tendrils of sea kelp, remembering that sometimes it takes a dive under to see the world anew.
The post I am sharing today come by way of water, and wander. I’ve taken some local jaunts over the last few weeks, both solo and then with friends visiting and a group hike. It got me thinking about the role of wander and travels, near and far, inner and outer. And in response, there is a writing/ creative prompt for you.
Below the post, some news of upcoming-ness on The Wild Edge, including Owl Hours, the next Writing Sanctuary, and our Lúnasa Salon at the end of the month.
Lots more coming in July! Stay tuned. :)
Clare
Making: Wanders
It takes me a little while to find words after wanders. It’s like the words are just beyond me, still deciphering the experience. Or perhaps it is that the words are trying to catch up as they reconfigure to the ways in which the wandering has altered me. The wander is way more than a wander.
I’ve been wandering, it seems, for years. Over that time I have come to both appreciate and anticipate the twin routes the wander takes. The outward journey, into new territories and landscapes, always has its inner dimensions. Travel, isn’t just a way to see the world, but to see ourselves. As I get older, I have become even more interested in how the outward journey into place- wherever that place may be - comes into relationship with how we learn to navigate our inner topography, with it rifts, seasons, currents, and cycles. In crossing and encountering new physical landscapes, I am curious about the thresholds of encounter I can meet in myself- who I am and who I am becoming in response to and in conversation with this encounter of place. In return, I wonder how best give back to that place, whether that be through my attention, awe, wonder, engagement or curiosity. ‘Here’, in that sense, is never static, but a dialogue, a negotiation, a new invitation, and new challenge. Whether I travel a thousand miles or whether I step outside my front door, the possibility for deep encounter is always there.
I have always been drawn to journeying. My first big trip was to Russia when I was 15, travelling with a youth group. I can still feel the excitement of climbing into the top bunk of an old sleeper train, traveling overnight from Moscow to a city called Voronezh, to a place I had never heard of before, to a world I had never encountered, in a language I could not speak. Meeting variations of myself which were so beyond the familiar in me, it was as if I was meeting another self. I was beginning to notice that who and where we are in relationship with and to, tells us so much about who we are. At 15, I loved who I was becoming on that top bunk, fuelled with curiosity and a sense that the world could provide answers which Ireland alone could not. The world was opening, and I was too. It did not take much for me to be hooked.
Bless my dear parents sense of trust. By 17, after dropping out of university, there was no stopping me. I saved all I could, applied for grants, volunteered, managed to scrape enough for basic fares and with very modest means, packed my camera and journal, and I was off. There was the overnight ferry from Aberdeen to Torshavn, in the Faroe Islands, sleeping in my rucksack because I was so cold. There was the overnight ferry in places whose names sat on my tongue like spells. From Neiafu, Vava’u, to Nuku’alofa, in Tonga, I remember sleeping on a mat on the packed deck of the Olavaha, starting at the myriad stars, wondering, always, what is beyond. There were top bunks from Beijing to Fuzhou, Kolkata to New Delhi, Delhi to Mumbai, Nairobi to Mombasa, watching the external landscape shift, across rice fields and sunsets, smog choked cities and clear mountain ranges, across rivers as wide as lakes and oceans which crossed timezones. There were night buses in Yunnan, hitching on sailing boats in the Turkish aegean, motorbike trips over the hills of Kampala, picking up lifts across the Balkan borders, and perhaps one of my most memorable journeys of all, travelling in the back of a pick up truck from Lusaka to Harare and on into the mountains of Lesotho to a place named with clicks and music which my heart pounded to wrap itself around.
Along the way, I’d write in bus shelters, terminals, cafes, hotel lobbies. I’d sit on street kerbs, pen in hand, camera tucked. Wandering, I soon was realising, is a way of seeing, but it also a way of learning how to be- letting go of the rigid identities which can define us, and encountering ourselves through the lens of the other, outside the familiar, well-worn terrain of the known self. My journal was there as witness and companion as the wandering was breaking me down, yet moulding me simultaneously.
My travels have, gratefully, given me a greater sense of the vantage point of privilege from which I get to depart. As I can still cross borders with excitement, there are so many others who cross them in dread. Travel as wonder, is not the baseline for the refugee, the war torn, the asylum seeker, the immigrant. I hope for me it still becomes a way of breaking the moulds of me so I can welcome the stranger in myself, and encounter the stranger in the other - whether human or more than human, not from fear, but from welcome too.
My wanders of late have had a different dimension. Less miles, but universes, everywhere. Walking down the road, I enter the world of the hedgerow, learning to read the language of foxglove, clover or the summer plumage of meadowsweet. There is the world of the sky too- seeking to read the journeys of traverse: of swallows and swifts, of butterflies and bees, and how each of our journeys intersect. I zoom in, to the universe of insect, mycelium, lichen. I enter the watery otherworld of kelps, wracks and moon jellyfish. There is the cosmos of the rockpool. I turn the compost heap, and stare into death being birth again. The journey to meet the ground at right my feet is an encounter with intelligences I do not have the intelligence to comprehend. Once again, I am cast into the unknown. On the top bunk of the mountain ridge, I watch the clouds recycle the ocean into breath. On the islands just beyond my home, gannets dive and humpback whales make their journey south. As I learn to be in relationship with the particulars of this place, leaning into its own cycles, rhythms, seasons and shifts, those dual worlds unfolds again: the inner, the outer. This time, I am more conscious of the wander as a relationship with the more than human world, so vast and so wondrous, I am perpetually taken.
I still get asked the question, will you ever settle down. My answer, I hope, will always be the same: I never want to settle, even if I am in the one place. Behind my response, is a knowing: that place is not a static point, but a site of perpetual arrival, encounter, comings, goings, revelation. In truth, I think it is an impossible task to settle, even if we try, for the constant is change, and to be alive to ourselves, as we are to the world, is to be in relationship with the shifting terrains which make our places, and which in turn, make us.
I am soon to book another journey, to a country I have never been to before. I’ve been looking at ferry timetables, and train timetables, and have that bubbly anticipation of planning a trip with new questions already exploding inside of me. Who will I be there? What strangers might I encounter? What can I offer in return?
Alongside, as I write this passage to you, I am held in a place by the shore, light dappled on my journal, near desiccated thickets of sea thrift, yellow prints of bird foot trefoil, colonies of limpets and periwinkles, grasses whose names I do not yet know. And as I sit here, reaching for the words, which still feel one step away,,I realise it is in the reaching for, the questing outwards, always onwards, the seeking inwards, that the world becomes an endless quest itself. Every step, ever mile, every top bunk, every night ferry, ever hedgerow, every passing swallow, threading it deeper into wonder. All those miles outwards, and all those paths inwards, through the ups and the downs, the inevitable twists, turns, heartbreaks, challenges, mercies of grace, documented on the page and through the lens, the journey is always offering dimensions beyond the travel itself. I am who I am now because of the road, my journal, my camera, and my parents who said, Go. The wander is always more than a wander. The wander, and the words, are still my making.
Your Writing Prompt
How about you?
What journey have you taken which has shaped both her external view of the world and your interior landscape? What aspects of that journey are still alive in you? What version of yourself did you encounter there?
Write about the details of the journey- smells, sights, sounds, textures.
In revisitng these sensory aspects of the journey, what is stirred in you now?
Would love to read some of your recollections in the comments, if you care to share, or drop me a note directly.
Owl Hours: Creative Co-working
Monday July 13th 6-7pm Irish/UK Time
Monday July 20th. 6-7pm Irish/UK Time
Writing Sanctuary- Sunday 19th.
Sunday 19th July, 6-7pm Irish/UK time. (Please note this falls on the third Sunday of the month, rather than the usual second).
Lúnasa Seasonal Salon
Poems, prompts and creative ritual to mark the next turning of the Celtic Wheel of the Year. .
Friday 31st July. Tickets include in Gold Membership of The Wild Edge, or available here.
Thank you all, and sending summering wishes,
Clare.
