I grew up in East Anglia and now live in Bristol. I find it hard not to think about the beauty of the Suffolk coast, Thetford forest and the Norfolk broads without a stab of the pain from my childhood. I seem unable to separate the land from an emerging mental health illness that stole my twenties from me. I know in the moment I found comfort in wandering but looking back it is dark. I wish I could peel back this layer.
It fascinating to think about isn’t it? Living back in my family home there are rooms I love and others where I too am plunged back into unhappy memories. I’m just outside Bristol and hope you find the Mendips a comforting contrast to home.
Relationship to landscape is a real obsession of mine and your thoughts are really bumping around my head. Thank you!
Landscape’s part in travelling and finding your self is interesting. Sort of, if you plonk yourself somewhere else it sparks an internal reflection, who am in desert, forest or on the surface on the sea?…how does it move me or change my perception of the world / my thoughts? But on the flip side, when you are “home” (for me a sleepy, pudding bowl of a farm in Somerset) I find myself thinking about life with regards to my place within it all…so less internally organising my thoughts but maybe more comfortable to think of myself as fully belonging and connected. Like somehow I’ve inhaled the hedges and the mud dust and when I’m back there every cell in my body recognises that and feels at “home.”
So interesting because there must be a physical response and then we layer a thought response and the two are so linked.
I ponder on! X
Thank you, a lovely thing to think about on a sunny Saturday morning.
Thank you Clover You definitely got me thinking. When my husband died I returned to a village in Hertfordshire where I was freest as a small child it has always been within me. Having lived in London during my teenage 20 years in total. Then we moved to a smallish town in Hertfordshire. None of us really settled in the town.
My husband and daughter had London ingrained in their souls. Sarah went back to London as soon as she could, it was her home. John never really settled out of London. The place of certain landscape/urban scapes are so important to me. Xxx
So many thoughts on this. From feeling the power of Mont Blanc while driving through the Alps one summer, to the simplicity of the endless sea/sky horizon and turn left or right walks on the beach after my parents died when internally I was in chaos or measuring my healing with walks on the moor after cancer treatment. But the landscape that I have absorbed is the Northumberland coast - wild expansive beaches, rugged coastline, sand dunes and lush countryside. I’ve never lived there simply visited but it is the one place where I truly feel at home. What occurred to me watching your video though is how my mum never allowed herself to be absorbed into the landscapes she loved in after she left London & city living behind. She never settled or found her true home and I always felt this friction within her when she was alive and I wonder if that’s made me more aware of it. Lots to reflect on and a conversation I’d love to have. Off to pre-order your book. Thank you for this space, it’s helping me to nudge & reframe my thinking so much.
I empathise with your mum. I grew up in London and lived in Brighton and Bristol. We now live in Devon and I have never felt at home. It's a strange and painful experience. We have been trying to move back to city life but finding the cost of living just too much. Feeling a sense of home is so vital for wellbeing and happiness I think x
It is a strange and difficult feeling, especially when it all feels totally out of your control, like the cost of living in your situation. A lack of money and my dad finding sobriety meant that family life didn't remotely resemble what mum needed or wanted for us children, her or dad. She only ever wanted to be a homemaker, with us children yet circumstances pulled her in a completely different direction and she could never quite reconcile herself with this version of herself or our family.
I feel the magnitude and beauty of the Californian landscape. I used to love visiting my dad there. I went trekking and camping in Yosemite once and it is extraordinary and momentous and as you say it blows your mind. I do think my dad absorbed the landscape when he was there - and when I think of the Redwoods and of San Francisco I can't think of it without thinking of him. I really really want to go back there one day and take my kids and carve out my own relationship with it.
It does. I’ve lived in many different places and initially felt like I didn’t belong. I remember seeing my status on a form ‘Resident Alien’, and that’s what I felt like. I missed the British countryside (there’s nothing quite like it), and you just can’t go for a quick stroll around a tropical rainforest.
In Canada, The Rockies whilst awe inspiring , felt too surreal, making my eyes ache with their splendour. I yearned for a flat green field. The UK landscape is less ostentatious - less in your face. A gentle absorption.
It is strange not to go ‘home’ home after a holiday. I was away from the UK for three years before returning for a visit, so my immersion in a different culture was intense. When I did return, it was cold and wet (in July). Everyone looked so grey and miserable, blending with drabness of the city streets. I couldn’t wait to get back to the 90 degree heat and smiling faces of my sunny Caribbean island.
I think it’s a good thing to experience. Landscapes teach us much about ourselves.
Oh Idlewild is the most wonderfully romantic name - surely many a love story must have sprung from its magic!
The idea of being absorbed by a landscape, in a two way sense, is very interesting. I’ve commented before that I (like @jolinney) have returned to the home and village of my childhood after many years travelling. Being rooted in the place is an idea I’ve played with in my mind, but it hasn’t felt right, perhaps absorbed is better. While legally I suppose I own part of this landscape I think the truth is it owns me.
I’m very much looking forward to The Giant on the Skyline - can I preorder Kindle? Am going away and while I prefer a book I’m travelling so Kindle is practical.
I have been trying to explore my relationship with my country which I immigrated about for a while now as well.
Despite leaving my birthplace, I still have this tug that pulls me back. A tug which I can only realize having felt only after having visited it and leaving it.
I have tried different ways of trying to explore and express this tug. Whether it's driven by language, culture, music, arts, childhood places but I'm still not sure if I have grasped it completely.
Lately Im not even sure if what I feel longing for exists in real life. It seems like a longing for a birthplace which does not exist anymore. The world has moved on and that place has vanished.
Even if I was to move back today to my birthplace I cannot recreate it. And I will likely end up feeling frustrated
Lately I have been wondering whether this longing is just part of the human condition. A longing for the comfort of one's childhood. A comfort we knew we once felt and forever are doomed to try to recreate again.
Hi Ranas, if I may suggest something... perhaps your tug is not so much about childhood but about the land itself. Sometimes we are so rooted in our birth landscape, we never completely lose that connection. Have you ever immersed yourself in the longing, in the tug which comes from your roots? have you taken time to sit with it, travel down those roots into the birth soil, sense the welcome there? Very often, a simple acknowledgement is all that's needed to ease the longing.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment - Yes. I have been exploring that.
I believe that we underestimate how much we lose (geographically speaking) by leaving the place of our birth - our neighborhood, our town, our city.
We lose access to places tied to so many memories! The place where he picked our first fights, places we used to hangout, our first school(s) - we lose so much of ourselves.
And that on top of the modern asking us to give up everything else - our religion, our language, our culture, our families, our identities.
Living in the same place means being surrounded by those memories, which I believe provides us with a sense of groundedness which we never really appreciate until we become immigrants. It reminds me of Haruki Murakami's reflections on this in his book "Novelist as a Vocation"
"I'm not a particularly patriotic type (I see myself as having more cosmopolitan tendencies), but like it or not, living abroad I became more conscious of myself as a Japanese writer. Others around me saw me this way, and I saw myself that way, too. And without knowing it, I developed a sense of fellowship with my countrymen. If you think about it, it's kind of strange. I escape from the land of Japan, from the rigid framework of its society, and live abroad as an expatriate, only to find myself compelled to return to a relationship with that very land."
I have begun to believe that being able to casually experience the places tied to our memories on a weekly, daily, hourly basis, whether on a drive to work, a casual stroll, while running an errand is a privilege most people don't possess - and those that do, don't seem to value it as much
Oh gosh yes, very much so. A landscape can completely absorb us. Can seduce us like a lover and stir a turbulent longing within us to trust our gut, to stay and experience more of what promises to become a very beautiful connection. A palpable and sensual excitement of possibility.
I’ve experienced myself feeling a huge love at first sight & sense, a giant attunement with a particular landscape. A sensation of physiological wellness and vitality just in being there. And noticing there being a strong feeling that, were I to stay longer, this particular landscape would herald and facilitate such great change and grow me and that I’d like the change and know that I could belong there for a while.
I’ve felt absorbed by several landscapes and each has very much echoed back to the slate and craggy fells of my childhood; first the rugged, mountainous Pyrenees in the very south of France where I experienced lots of adult firsts. And also the north west of Oregon in the US. Both share weather which felt familiar and the kind of terrain I knew how to be upon.
Being Mother to four including a young adult with SEN who will not reach full independence and parenting so far away from extended family, this has really disrupted my ability and instincts to name home, feel home, relax into safety and root. I notice myself travelling the last two decades wanting very much to feel a sense of forever home and community. I think, a huge part of this is attempting to safeguard an anticipated future of care.
It’s so late and my eyes just closed whilst my finger hovered on the screen keyboard. Hoping the words above haven’t garbled, been absorbed by sleep…
dear clover, i love the notion of the landscape absorbing us…
i grew up and lived in the swiss alps until my early 30’s. then i moved to south africa (for love) and as much as i liked the swiss landscape, i totally fell in love with south africa, and for the first time i felt like i belonged to that “earth”.
i have lived here for 22 years now. unless i am forced to, i will never leave this part of the world. it has absorbed me…its vastness, its diversity, its rawness…
a few years ago we traveled to namibia and i can completely relate to what you felt in the desert. my mind exploded in the vastness, i hardly spoke for the first 3 days. i had never seen and felt such subtle variety and beauty, and the quiet, the immensity, i had never absorbed a landscape in that way.
a year ago my husband and i bought land in a region in south africa called the karoo. we were in love, we were beginners in such a landscape. so we researched, asked for help, tried everything to make it work, to be able to build a little home in the semi-arid vastness… sadly last week we had to face the fact that we have to let that dream go. water issues. so now we grieve that beautiful dream, we have to surrender, nature is bigger than us and perhaps, as beautiful as it is and as connected to it as we felt, perhaps that landscape did not want to absorb us…
I moved from West Sussex to Australia nearly 13 years ago. I STILL don't feel like I belong to this land. My longing for home, for the plants, trees and animals that I know and that know me has never stopped. In fact, if anything it's only become more intense since having my daughter and wanting to give her the childhood in the woods that I had. I try to learn the names of the fauna and flora around me, to notice the slight markers of change in the seasons ( there are few in south east queensland) but I have also created a garden with some familiar plants (elder does incredibly well here.) I never 'chose' to emigrate to Australia. I was backpacking and never left. Then I just made choices that seemed right at the time. And in someway I feel a little trapped here now. Very much looking forward to reading your next book.
Woww I love that name Idlewild!! I'm adopted, which is a whole other loss of home, a real feeling of saudade because that home never existed but still I miss it terribly. When I go for a run around the village we live in now, I feel like the effort and the pounding of my feet, and the daily glimpses of people through their windows is fixing me into the place somehow, making me belong somewhere. I'm so intrigued by the thought of such a vast landscape as the Californian desert!
Your post has got me thinking. I grew up in suburban north London, not the most exciting of landscapes, but other parts of London I visited, like Camden market in the 90's left more of an impression and I was glad I was a Londoner. I went to University in Bristol and fell in love with the city, I think because this coincided with me gaining my independence, and 'growing up'. I went back to London after 4 years, this time the south, and was happy there for a number of years, until I wasn't, which took me a while to realise. It was a visit to Bristol 7 years ago when I had an epiphany moment, and just knew I needed to move back. As others have said, a place can hold unhappy memories, and these had built up for me regarding London, but also, London had changed around me so much, that I no longer felt I belonged. I knew I was unhappy, but couldn't put my finger on the cause until I visited Bristol again - for me there was a push/pull aspect. I think landscape is definitely linked to memories, also where we see ourselves fitting (from a practical perspective), but I definitely agree that how we feel in a place is not to be underestimated.
I have always known that I needed the land in my life. The thought of working or living in a building where windows cannot be opened or doors left ajar, where the touchstone of nature cannot be seen or felt or heard is anathema to me.
Does the landscape absorb me? Do I absorb it? Or is it a mutual acknowledgment of our deep connection, for are we humans not born of the land? And is there a soul connection, where we, as our own ancestors, put down roots generations ago that still call to us? I used to feel a deep tug whenever I was near Dunkeld, in Perthshire. I never lived there in this life, hardly ever visited,but there was something in me that yearned to be there. Once, I drove over an hour with my eldest brother to Dunkeld, parked the car, got out and stood for a moment, then back in to drive home. After that, the insistent longing was gone, although I still like to visit if I'm passing. I think it was a soul connection. I felt the same on Iona. On my first trip, I had no interest in the buildings;I wanted to be with the land.
Thank you for this ponder, Clover. It's reminded me of riches I can explore.
I look forward to reading your book so much. I feel like I need it in my life so much as that sense of home is just an abyss for me right now. I have lived in Devon for 7 years and I feel different now. I have made friends, but there's something here that I just haven't settled into. I miss the buzz of city life, people milling about and cafes and creativity. Nature is magical and beautiful, but living in a rural town for years has changed me. I feel this landscape has absorbed some of my more upbeat flare...I feel quieter and less confident. Maybe that is age, but I think the landscape and life here has changed me.
Oh this is fascinating, and you've really got me thinking. I always think about the versions of myself that I've left in places, timestamped and left to guard the memories I've made there. But landscapes...yes. I grew up in the Middle East. Full desert landscape. I've never seen anywhere else like it, except when I've visited the desert cities in California, as you mentioned. The beauty there is indisputable, but I think the barren landscape can be jarring for many. When I'm there, I feel a sense of peace that is fuller than I feel on the central coast of California, which I've called home for about a decade. It's like I can fill my lungs completely. This idea that landscapes absorb us...perhaps the type and not just the place?
I grew up in East Anglia and now live in Bristol. I find it hard not to think about the beauty of the Suffolk coast, Thetford forest and the Norfolk broads without a stab of the pain from my childhood. I seem unable to separate the land from an emerging mental health illness that stole my twenties from me. I know in the moment I found comfort in wandering but looking back it is dark. I wish I could peel back this layer.
It fascinating to think about isn’t it? Living back in my family home there are rooms I love and others where I too am plunged back into unhappy memories. I’m just outside Bristol and hope you find the Mendips a comforting contrast to home.
Hi Vanessa, We are so lucky here in the South West. I find Bristol's green spaces and beyond very comforting. Must visit the Mendips soon!
So lucky, and sooooo green (can’t think why 🤔😂) x
I love Bristol it's such a creative city with beautiful landscape surrounding it.
Relationship to landscape is a real obsession of mine and your thoughts are really bumping around my head. Thank you!
Landscape’s part in travelling and finding your self is interesting. Sort of, if you plonk yourself somewhere else it sparks an internal reflection, who am in desert, forest or on the surface on the sea?…how does it move me or change my perception of the world / my thoughts? But on the flip side, when you are “home” (for me a sleepy, pudding bowl of a farm in Somerset) I find myself thinking about life with regards to my place within it all…so less internally organising my thoughts but maybe more comfortable to think of myself as fully belonging and connected. Like somehow I’ve inhaled the hedges and the mud dust and when I’m back there every cell in my body recognises that and feels at “home.”
So interesting because there must be a physical response and then we layer a thought response and the two are so linked.
I ponder on! X
Thank you, a lovely thing to think about on a sunny Saturday morning.
Thank you Clover You definitely got me thinking. When my husband died I returned to a village in Hertfordshire where I was freest as a small child it has always been within me. Having lived in London during my teenage 20 years in total. Then we moved to a smallish town in Hertfordshire. None of us really settled in the town.
My husband and daughter had London ingrained in their souls. Sarah went back to London as soon as she could, it was her home. John never really settled out of London. The place of certain landscape/urban scapes are so important to me. Xxx
So many thoughts on this. From feeling the power of Mont Blanc while driving through the Alps one summer, to the simplicity of the endless sea/sky horizon and turn left or right walks on the beach after my parents died when internally I was in chaos or measuring my healing with walks on the moor after cancer treatment. But the landscape that I have absorbed is the Northumberland coast - wild expansive beaches, rugged coastline, sand dunes and lush countryside. I’ve never lived there simply visited but it is the one place where I truly feel at home. What occurred to me watching your video though is how my mum never allowed herself to be absorbed into the landscapes she loved in after she left London & city living behind. She never settled or found her true home and I always felt this friction within her when she was alive and I wonder if that’s made me more aware of it. Lots to reflect on and a conversation I’d love to have. Off to pre-order your book. Thank you for this space, it’s helping me to nudge & reframe my thinking so much.
I empathise with your mum. I grew up in London and lived in Brighton and Bristol. We now live in Devon and I have never felt at home. It's a strange and painful experience. We have been trying to move back to city life but finding the cost of living just too much. Feeling a sense of home is so vital for wellbeing and happiness I think x
It is a strange and difficult feeling, especially when it all feels totally out of your control, like the cost of living in your situation. A lack of money and my dad finding sobriety meant that family life didn't remotely resemble what mum needed or wanted for us children, her or dad. She only ever wanted to be a homemaker, with us children yet circumstances pulled her in a completely different direction and she could never quite reconcile herself with this version of herself or our family.
I feel the magnitude and beauty of the Californian landscape. I used to love visiting my dad there. I went trekking and camping in Yosemite once and it is extraordinary and momentous and as you say it blows your mind. I do think my dad absorbed the landscape when he was there - and when I think of the Redwoods and of San Francisco I can't think of it without thinking of him. I really really want to go back there one day and take my kids and carve out my own relationship with it.
It does. I’ve lived in many different places and initially felt like I didn’t belong. I remember seeing my status on a form ‘Resident Alien’, and that’s what I felt like. I missed the British countryside (there’s nothing quite like it), and you just can’t go for a quick stroll around a tropical rainforest.
In Canada, The Rockies whilst awe inspiring , felt too surreal, making my eyes ache with their splendour. I yearned for a flat green field. The UK landscape is less ostentatious - less in your face. A gentle absorption.
It is strange not to go ‘home’ home after a holiday. I was away from the UK for three years before returning for a visit, so my immersion in a different culture was intense. When I did return, it was cold and wet (in July). Everyone looked so grey and miserable, blending with drabness of the city streets. I couldn’t wait to get back to the 90 degree heat and smiling faces of my sunny Caribbean island.
I think it’s a good thing to experience. Landscapes teach us much about ourselves.
Oh Idlewild is the most wonderfully romantic name - surely many a love story must have sprung from its magic!
The idea of being absorbed by a landscape, in a two way sense, is very interesting. I’ve commented before that I (like @jolinney) have returned to the home and village of my childhood after many years travelling. Being rooted in the place is an idea I’ve played with in my mind, but it hasn’t felt right, perhaps absorbed is better. While legally I suppose I own part of this landscape I think the truth is it owns me.
I’m very much looking forward to The Giant on the Skyline - can I preorder Kindle? Am going away and while I prefer a book I’m travelling so Kindle is practical.
Yes, that would be wonderful! The link for Kindle is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Giant-Skyline-Home-Belonging-Learning-ebook/dp/B0CF8GJSKB/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?nodl=1&_encoding=UTF8&qid=1696867421&sr=1-1&dplnkId=2d772865-c686-4e7d-8984-9d2d3f2cbbc8 x
I have been trying to explore my relationship with my country which I immigrated about for a while now as well.
Despite leaving my birthplace, I still have this tug that pulls me back. A tug which I can only realize having felt only after having visited it and leaving it.
I have tried different ways of trying to explore and express this tug. Whether it's driven by language, culture, music, arts, childhood places but I'm still not sure if I have grasped it completely.
Lately Im not even sure if what I feel longing for exists in real life. It seems like a longing for a birthplace which does not exist anymore. The world has moved on and that place has vanished.
Even if I was to move back today to my birthplace I cannot recreate it. And I will likely end up feeling frustrated
Lately I have been wondering whether this longing is just part of the human condition. A longing for the comfort of one's childhood. A comfort we knew we once felt and forever are doomed to try to recreate again.
Hi Ranas, if I may suggest something... perhaps your tug is not so much about childhood but about the land itself. Sometimes we are so rooted in our birth landscape, we never completely lose that connection. Have you ever immersed yourself in the longing, in the tug which comes from your roots? have you taken time to sit with it, travel down those roots into the birth soil, sense the welcome there? Very often, a simple acknowledgement is all that's needed to ease the longing.
Hope this helps a little :)
Thanks for the thoughtful comment - Yes. I have been exploring that.
I believe that we underestimate how much we lose (geographically speaking) by leaving the place of our birth - our neighborhood, our town, our city.
We lose access to places tied to so many memories! The place where he picked our first fights, places we used to hangout, our first school(s) - we lose so much of ourselves.
And that on top of the modern asking us to give up everything else - our religion, our language, our culture, our families, our identities.
Living in the same place means being surrounded by those memories, which I believe provides us with a sense of groundedness which we never really appreciate until we become immigrants. It reminds me of Haruki Murakami's reflections on this in his book "Novelist as a Vocation"
"I'm not a particularly patriotic type (I see myself as having more cosmopolitan tendencies), but like it or not, living abroad I became more conscious of myself as a Japanese writer. Others around me saw me this way, and I saw myself that way, too. And without knowing it, I developed a sense of fellowship with my countrymen. If you think about it, it's kind of strange. I escape from the land of Japan, from the rigid framework of its society, and live abroad as an expatriate, only to find myself compelled to return to a relationship with that very land."
I have begun to believe that being able to casually experience the places tied to our memories on a weekly, daily, hourly basis, whether on a drive to work, a casual stroll, while running an errand is a privilege most people don't possess - and those that do, don't seem to value it as much
Oh gosh yes, very much so. A landscape can completely absorb us. Can seduce us like a lover and stir a turbulent longing within us to trust our gut, to stay and experience more of what promises to become a very beautiful connection. A palpable and sensual excitement of possibility.
I’ve experienced myself feeling a huge love at first sight & sense, a giant attunement with a particular landscape. A sensation of physiological wellness and vitality just in being there. And noticing there being a strong feeling that, were I to stay longer, this particular landscape would herald and facilitate such great change and grow me and that I’d like the change and know that I could belong there for a while.
I’ve felt absorbed by several landscapes and each has very much echoed back to the slate and craggy fells of my childhood; first the rugged, mountainous Pyrenees in the very south of France where I experienced lots of adult firsts. And also the north west of Oregon in the US. Both share weather which felt familiar and the kind of terrain I knew how to be upon.
Being Mother to four including a young adult with SEN who will not reach full independence and parenting so far away from extended family, this has really disrupted my ability and instincts to name home, feel home, relax into safety and root. I notice myself travelling the last two decades wanting very much to feel a sense of forever home and community. I think, a huge part of this is attempting to safeguard an anticipated future of care.
It’s so late and my eyes just closed whilst my finger hovered on the screen keyboard. Hoping the words above haven’t garbled, been absorbed by sleep…
dear clover, i love the notion of the landscape absorbing us…
i grew up and lived in the swiss alps until my early 30’s. then i moved to south africa (for love) and as much as i liked the swiss landscape, i totally fell in love with south africa, and for the first time i felt like i belonged to that “earth”.
i have lived here for 22 years now. unless i am forced to, i will never leave this part of the world. it has absorbed me…its vastness, its diversity, its rawness…
a few years ago we traveled to namibia and i can completely relate to what you felt in the desert. my mind exploded in the vastness, i hardly spoke for the first 3 days. i had never seen and felt such subtle variety and beauty, and the quiet, the immensity, i had never absorbed a landscape in that way.
a year ago my husband and i bought land in a region in south africa called the karoo. we were in love, we were beginners in such a landscape. so we researched, asked for help, tried everything to make it work, to be able to build a little home in the semi-arid vastness… sadly last week we had to face the fact that we have to let that dream go. water issues. so now we grieve that beautiful dream, we have to surrender, nature is bigger than us and perhaps, as beautiful as it is and as connected to it as we felt, perhaps that landscape did not want to absorb us…
I moved from West Sussex to Australia nearly 13 years ago. I STILL don't feel like I belong to this land. My longing for home, for the plants, trees and animals that I know and that know me has never stopped. In fact, if anything it's only become more intense since having my daughter and wanting to give her the childhood in the woods that I had. I try to learn the names of the fauna and flora around me, to notice the slight markers of change in the seasons ( there are few in south east queensland) but I have also created a garden with some familiar plants (elder does incredibly well here.) I never 'chose' to emigrate to Australia. I was backpacking and never left. Then I just made choices that seemed right at the time. And in someway I feel a little trapped here now. Very much looking forward to reading your next book.
Woww I love that name Idlewild!! I'm adopted, which is a whole other loss of home, a real feeling of saudade because that home never existed but still I miss it terribly. When I go for a run around the village we live in now, I feel like the effort and the pounding of my feet, and the daily glimpses of people through their windows is fixing me into the place somehow, making me belong somewhere. I'm so intrigued by the thought of such a vast landscape as the Californian desert!
Your post has got me thinking. I grew up in suburban north London, not the most exciting of landscapes, but other parts of London I visited, like Camden market in the 90's left more of an impression and I was glad I was a Londoner. I went to University in Bristol and fell in love with the city, I think because this coincided with me gaining my independence, and 'growing up'. I went back to London after 4 years, this time the south, and was happy there for a number of years, until I wasn't, which took me a while to realise. It was a visit to Bristol 7 years ago when I had an epiphany moment, and just knew I needed to move back. As others have said, a place can hold unhappy memories, and these had built up for me regarding London, but also, London had changed around me so much, that I no longer felt I belonged. I knew I was unhappy, but couldn't put my finger on the cause until I visited Bristol again - for me there was a push/pull aspect. I think landscape is definitely linked to memories, also where we see ourselves fitting (from a practical perspective), but I definitely agree that how we feel in a place is not to be underestimated.
I have always known that I needed the land in my life. The thought of working or living in a building where windows cannot be opened or doors left ajar, where the touchstone of nature cannot be seen or felt or heard is anathema to me.
Does the landscape absorb me? Do I absorb it? Or is it a mutual acknowledgment of our deep connection, for are we humans not born of the land? And is there a soul connection, where we, as our own ancestors, put down roots generations ago that still call to us? I used to feel a deep tug whenever I was near Dunkeld, in Perthshire. I never lived there in this life, hardly ever visited,but there was something in me that yearned to be there. Once, I drove over an hour with my eldest brother to Dunkeld, parked the car, got out and stood for a moment, then back in to drive home. After that, the insistent longing was gone, although I still like to visit if I'm passing. I think it was a soul connection. I felt the same on Iona. On my first trip, I had no interest in the buildings;I wanted to be with the land.
Thank you for this ponder, Clover. It's reminded me of riches I can explore.
I look forward to reading your book so much. I feel like I need it in my life so much as that sense of home is just an abyss for me right now. I have lived in Devon for 7 years and I feel different now. I have made friends, but there's something here that I just haven't settled into. I miss the buzz of city life, people milling about and cafes and creativity. Nature is magical and beautiful, but living in a rural town for years has changed me. I feel this landscape has absorbed some of my more upbeat flare...I feel quieter and less confident. Maybe that is age, but I think the landscape and life here has changed me.
Oh this is fascinating, and you've really got me thinking. I always think about the versions of myself that I've left in places, timestamped and left to guard the memories I've made there. But landscapes...yes. I grew up in the Middle East. Full desert landscape. I've never seen anywhere else like it, except when I've visited the desert cities in California, as you mentioned. The beauty there is indisputable, but I think the barren landscape can be jarring for many. When I'm there, I feel a sense of peace that is fuller than I feel on the central coast of California, which I've called home for about a decade. It's like I can fill my lungs completely. This idea that landscapes absorb us...perhaps the type and not just the place?