ALL OVER THE PLACE
July 25 2012
We’ve been feeling restless lately. I’ve always defined ‘restless’ as meaning having an itch to go somewhere new, to get away from where one is. But now I’m experiencing restlessness as a state of wanting to come to rest. We’ve been away for more than 2 month now and yesterday I had a longing for my stuff. I wanted the comfort of being surrounded by my aesthetic.
When we flew the coop in March of last year it was with the specific intention of letting go of all that was known and comfortable in order to go out into the world again, while we still have the mental and physical capacity, with the hope of discovering the world with fresh eyes. In order to do this, as many of you know, we had to sell our sea-side cottage, the first major letting go which, although the sale itself would turn out to be long and stressful, eventually gave us the financial and emotional freedom to do what we are doing now. Neither of us regret that decision.
Still, we do have a ‘home’ in New York, so it’s not as though we severed all ties. Moreover, we were helped initially by having a book commission, which meant we weren’t actually totally free. It’s not like we sold everything, got some travellers checks, strapped on our backpacks and headed off into the complete unknown.
We all yearn to be free, most of the time without stopping to articulate what that actually means on a deeper level. Certainly it implies owing nothing and nobody, being without obligations and deadlines, and having the ability to decide on a whim what to do and where to go next. But like everything we yearn for throughout our lives the experience of achieving these things is often quite different from the fantasy of having them; whether it is the warm puppy that craps all over the house, the adorable baby that becomes a belligerent teenager, the dream house that comes with a hefty mortgage and maintenance, and so on.
Our granddaughter is undergoing major surgery as I write and you can bet that when her parents decided to have a baby they never anticipated sitting in a hospital waiting room one day, hearts in agony, stomachs churning, and eyes on a clock whose hands are moving in slow motion, if at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that our hard-earned freedom is excruciating; far from it. We have gratitude for our lives everyday. But Flying The Coop means that along with adventure and discovery one also must experience being uprooted, restless, and at times disturbed and uncomfortable.
What is it we really hope to discover by being freed of ties? And can one ever be truly free? I can only speak personally. I think my fantasy around freedom involves the misconception that by severing ties to all that is familiar I will eventually find the perfect landing place. In other words, my quest for freedom is actually a quest to find home.
As I write this I become aware that I have been feeling increasingly frustrated and angry the last couple of weeks and I am only just this minute becoming conscious of what lies beneath the anger – because anger is always a cover-up. Anger has an energy that allows us to feel powerful instead of feeling either the fright of being out of control or the pain of disappointment: the latter is the inevitable result of the former.
I certainly can’t control the weather and I’m disappointed that the heat this summer is at times so unbearable that we haven’t been able to enjoy many of the things we enjoyed here last summer and had hoped to experience again. But there’s a deeper disappointment I’ve been putting off experiencing and that is the realization that there is no perfect place to come to rest. For weeks I’ve been scanning the possibilities with an ever-increasing urgency. But the reality is I can’t have the peace of living in nature and be near my children at the same time. I can’t ask my dearest friends to leave 5 different countries and come to the one of my choosing.
I’m presently reading “One Square Inch Of Silence” by Gordon Hempton, an acoustic scientist and spiritualist. He travels the world in search of, and records, the silence of nature. It is the thing he most cherishes and the thing that is increasingly hard to find in this overpopulated world with all its machinery. I’ve always loved the silence of nature myself and have made many pilgrimages to the Cornish cliffs where I wander for miles listening to the crash of waves in the many coves, sitting on rock ledges without the sound of a single motor or plane. And the longer I would listen the more I would hear: the way each wave orchestrates a different sound depending on how fast it is propelled to shore and how many stones it picks up and hurls against the rocks; the caw of a gull, a sudden wind whistling across the moor, whooshing through the gorse. I long for the sound of that silence often when we are in New York.
Hempton says there is hardly a place left on earth where such silence can be heard for 15 minutes before a plane interrupts it.
Even here on the farm the peace and tranquility is broken during the day by the occasional car or a tractor on one of the nearby hills and in the night, just when the silence begins to expand, the hum of the refrigerator begins. And there is just about nowhere now where one can be free of cellular signals. I’m sure if we could see a map of them criss-crossing through every space we enter, we’d be horrified.
So, is it our fate now, as humans, to be continually bombarded by signals and electricity and motors?
A couple of days ago we drove to the ‘medieval’ town of Cortona, looking for an adventure. It was the first overcast day of summer and the narrow streets were packed with tourists shopping for the identical crap that can be found in every town all over the world.
We ducked down a back street and then another and came across one of those tiny restaurants that promises to be one of those discoveries. There were only half-a-dozen tables, always a good sign, and the menu looked promising. We had just placed our order and I was happily listening
to the sounds of the kitchen when the disco music started. Are you kidding me?
Sometimes I wonder if consciousness is all it’s cracked up to be. You can’t, after all, become selectively “aware.” So, does the choice come down to either wearing blinders and ear plugs so that you see and hear less crap or choosing to expand one’s consciousness and thereby accept what seems like an increasing amount of negative impact along with the undeniable, if diminishing, beauty of this world?
I think what Joel and I are discovering as we roam the world searching for that which nourishes us, is that there is less of it than we had realized. So no wonder it seems frustrating right now trying to find our resting place.
It might just come down to a little place in Brooklyn near the kids, with enough of a garden to feel I have some connection to nature. During peak traffic hours I could resort to headphones or go inside and Skype distant friends while admiring all my stuff. And I could remember this:
The sound of the first rainfall in months, splashing on the skylight above my desk; a peal of thunder across the hills, the rain coming straight and faster now, hammering on the roof; another long, deep rumble and hopefully, soon, the sound of our cell phone signaling a text message from New York with the news that our granddaughter is resting safely in recovery.