Homecoming

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Understanding takes time and space.

And it’s fair to say that I hadn’t planned to be away for so long.

But learning doesn’t happen to a prescribed schedule and I needed to devote some time and space to nurture a different sense of being in the world; to address a shift that I knew was disturbing me, making itself felt, but that I couldn’t quite name.

The energy was fading from my writing and social media, my photography wasn’t as fulfilling as usual and finding my way into day-to-day creativity was becoming a chore. What had once felt life-giving and fundamental started to feel like something I could live without and so this has been a time to retire from my usual busyness. I needed time and space to contemplate and reflect, rather than push on through…

In these moments of shift, it’s not unusual to feel lost. In fact, for anyone interested in growth or development, I encourage it.

I’ve come to know that, when I lose my way, additional information often a distraction. This period of inner work has been a soulful rather than a spatial endeavour and so, rather than reaching outwards for familiar landmarks, I’ve let change emerge from within. It’s been important to endure some of the the pain that Kahil Gibran speaks about, the feeling of new understanding that is achieved by breaking our shells from the inside rather than that of knowledge gained by cracking shells from the outside.

As I’ve wandered around my local heathlands, wolds and fens, I’ve reacquainted myself with my landscape. In turn, the landscape has done it’s work on me. A process that is both physical, embodied and cognitive.

Open skies and distant horizons bring a different appreciation of time and space. The feeling of ‘lost’ seems to arrive with an accompanying sense of ‘home’ as distant horizons and vistas keep me orientated. Rebecca Solnit tells us that blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in:

“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can bring your own longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.”

My local landscape is one of big skies and far horizons and, even in the half-light, when I might not know where I am, the blue distance offers me the energy to commit towards the understanding of wherever it is that I’m going.

Notes:

My opening quotation is from Kahil Gibran’s collection of 26 fables, collected together in ‘The Prophet.’ The book has been translated into more than 100 languages and has never been out of print.

‘A Field Guide To Getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit is an essential read for any wanderer and wonderer!

Although I have enjoyed travelling mostly alone through this rather quiet time, the ability to touch base with friends and colleagues who have helped me think rather than just helped has been invaluable. Please don’t feel tempted do deep work on your own.