Seclusive Sensations

Sitting in solitude at Cape Cornwall as storm Isha makes landfall. 
Gusts up to 142km/h were recorded in Cornwall that day. 

I saw Granny Tessa today. It’s been 5 months since we last rendezvoused. A lot has happened between now and then, a few health checks, a couple birthdays, and a Christmas, but thankfully now we are in the same part of the world and an offer for a cup of tea by my Cornish Grandmother is something one does not simply turn down. 

I had brought a photo album under my arm. It was an assortment of treks, galleries and drunken escapades captured in fleeting snapshots of my recent trip. I opened up the pages to flick through my months of European travels, eventually resting on the pages of hikes I had carried out throughout my time in Cornwall. It was a strange feeling this place had afforded me. I hadn’t visited the west coast of England since I was a toddler, but the environment and the place had an eerie feeling like I had known this land. I felt this place as I trudged through farms and ocean passes. I felt it as mud sucked down on my boots as I plucked them out, like plugging a wine cork out of grey mud. I felt it as tides pulled back and forth to a narrow beachline daring me to run across before the waves swallowed my shins. I felt it as I marched across fog covered cliffs with no one insight, the sea permeating the fog as it settled in my lungs. And after I had walked 140,000 steps in four days, boy oh boy, did I feel tired. I felt tired yet I also felt different, as though the strange familiar land had left some of its mystical powers within my own being.

I never expressed this to my grandmother as we flicked through the pics, I told her the funny stories instead, how I got lost in Eindhoven and how sneaky seabirds had performed successful hit and runs on the pasties in my hands. I explained how much I had walked but had never explained how deep of a spiritual experience it had been to have that experience in isolation. 

Between her sips of tea, English breakfast -milk no sugar, she opened up about her own views…

“When you go the places by yourself, they leave you with a feeling and that feeling will never leave” She said. 

The value of seclusion in nature and in life can be tremendous. It creates a feeling that will always stick to you like a piece of gum travelling on the soles of your shoes. For by tying our own experiences to the vibrancy of the universe, the universe sits within us. Solitude is magnitude, to keep one's own company is to open the door to what the cosmos can offer to your soul. 

Tessa told me saw her younger self in me. She told me how when she was with her horses, one leading while two followed tied by ropes, how the galloping of hooves faded into the background, how the hills widened, how her soul outreached to the quietness and majesty of her surroundings. She told me what powers those mystical cliffs of Cornwall had left within her. 

If a tree falls in the forest and we are the only ones to experience it, it falls for us. For when we are alone we become the only source that can create meaning, we become the world, the universe, the audience and the narrator. When we are struck by the quietness of our surroundings, when the leaves brush so lightly they sizzle like carbonated water, or when the wind blows through carved rock so it sings in ghostly glares, there and then we find our own voice. A voice whose timbre is impregnated by the flavour of the surroundings that we subconsciously consume. 

Leave yourself alone and you will find where you are. In the company of ourselves the landscapes that envelop us become digested and fused to us. And when we depart our surroundings, they will never leave us. For while gullies may be washed out by floods and forests carved down to firewood, as long as memory remains those settings remain too. 

Buried deep within us- our surroundings made our own, but only because we could afford ourselves a moment of solitude to appreciate it. 

Edited transcript from Diary entry

27- February 2024

Surface Tension

Hand details - Portrait of Andries de Graeff I

Marble, 1885, Rijksmuseum

In our lives, our existence is preserved and maintained by our own bodies. That idea is clear and obvious, but a juicier, more subjective rhythm of thought ought to be explored. We can all sense a location where the phenomenon of our own vitality does seem to exist. From the folds of your heart to the lining of your frontal lobe we each feel a position where the sense of ourselves sits, somewhere that just feels right. The query for us to sink our teeth into is this, where do our souls rest within ourselves?

For the longest of times, I protected my soul by leaving it in the bones of my body. With the most important part of myself locked away to the marrow of my calcified shell, my being sat preserved. Although my internal being lay secured it was not enriched to the buzz of the outside world.

As I’ve grown into life my coordinates of my soul have relocated. As of now I hold my own sense of being right below skin. Closest to where I can feel the heat of the sun is where my soul thrives.

To let your soul sit below the surface requires you to develop your own thick skin. You will grow through friction as you let life form its own calluses around you. Yes, when your soul flows through the capillaries, it's easy to feel the pain from life, but it also makes the pleasure oh so much grander. The sensation of energy becomes something more than just a feeling; it forms into tangible objects that lean up against you with their presence. Objects you can envelop in your being, objects whose ambiguous meaning provide raw overwhelming sensation. That’s what occurs when my soul settles to the most external of internal locations, you feel more. And while I understand why people develop their cocoons, their shells to grow into, that living is no longer for me. I’ll live in the danger of opening my soul to elements of life. I’ll let the energised static of existence flow in and out of my being. I will rely on my own strength to preserve myself against the harsh conditions that exist in bitter corners of the world, but I will also allow myself to be overwhelmed by the raw vitality of living.

The Final Frontier

Sahara's sand dunes sprawl and wash over Algerian rockfaces and sandstone plateaus, 

Photographed from a height of 259 miles, 2022.

The soul is the final frontier. 

That's what Haruki Murakami says in his final chapter of “Novelist as a Vocation”. A book I’d recommend if you got some time to kill on a beach in Cyprus.  Cyprus was where I crunched through this piece of writing, perhaps it's the warm nights or the white noise of a soft ocean, but there was something about Cyprus that allowed me to chew through this novel. I would finish dinner, an oversized feed paid for about ~8 euros- always cash, wander back through the ancient laneways of stone and meandering gangs of cats till eventually I would reach the waterfront. It would be night but luckily there was always a free bench next to yellowed hued street light, there I would perch myself to do two simple things, read my book or reflect. This little alcove became my monastery of dedication and meditation, not much of a view lay before me, simply a black void, but in that black void was an opportunity, an opportunity to look so deep into the abyss that eventually I came to see myself. 

Maybe that’s why when I read this statement in his closing remarks it stirred in my head so god darn much. For indeed the soul truly is our final frontier. Exploring the frontiers of the mind is a lot like mapping the dunes of the Sahara. It’s a probing task that will only produce ephemeral results. While these results presented are never long lasting, the task in itself is never a fruitless errand. For by mapping the valley and shoals of sands in the Sahara we can see its changes, its movements, we see what time has brought to this land. 

With expeditions into my psyche I see what is the landscape I have fashioned within my mind. If reflecting acts as my scout party then journaling constitutes my field notes. Field notes that require me to return to the same location as a later date to see how I’ve changed. I say require because certain landscapes require repeated expeditions to see where the bedrock is. There's solid rock that sits below the sands of the Sahara and there’s mountains that live under the glacial walls of Antarctica. Some of these will wither back to sand one day while others will stay firm and set. We can separate the transient, from the semi-stable, to the permanent layers because we have studied these areas for decades if not centuries. And while I can’t analyse my brain for centuries I can occupy what decades I have left to that final frontier. An expanse where I can feel my soul shift through the act of my observation. A landscape where the erosion of self growth can wear down even the toughest of stones. A place I will forever call home even in different surroundings. 

Edited diary entry written in Larnaca Cyprus, 12 January 2024

NASA, 2022, A portion of the Sahara Desert in Algeria, Nasa online archives, Accessed on 15/02/2024, <https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/portion-of-sahara-desert-algeria-2/>

 

Re(turning)

Returning to a reiterated declaration.

The familiar familial hometown,

A city of muddy creeks and industrial lots, 

The warm night breeze wraps me dry as I walk through its enclaves.

The creeping itch of childhood's memories fail to leave me alone.

Layers of learnt behaviour swarm the brain in the humm of this night. 

I must pay attention to the now,

So as to not lose the future to a misremembered past,

I return to the places that I feel acquainted,

And realign and adjust myself so the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, 

The comfortable, becomes the trial.

This city becomes the place not where a child was raised but an adult was born.

I sit in that house of friction that scrapes like sandpaper,

And embrace my fate like a molten pillar of gold.

It’s never easy to carve out figures of yourself in the place you grew up,

But easy and fulfilled are two different things,

And I am more than just two different people.

I am more than my past, 

equal to the present,

and infinite to my future. 

I am someone returning to the same spot, 

Only to paint it anew in colours of my own.

Colours I’d prefer to see.

Laterz

And damn baby we're done! That's 137 days out of the way and added to the pile of life. What a wild journey. I took my sweet time walking over 2.6 million steps. I swept past nine countries and nineteen cites maxing out my 90 day visa in the schengen zone. I marched through the cities of northern Europe only to meditate in the mountains of the South. We had thunderstorms in Cypress that quenched my soul and dogs that chased me down the road in Italy. I partied hard in Barcelona and swept into my cosmic resonance in Cornwall. I don’t think I should say Europe changed me, I think it’s more appropriate to say that I changed in Europe. Yes, the passions of the people of Spain fueled my fire, while the warmth of the Portuguese blushed my skin with tenderness, I thank everyone who’s paths we crossed once and surely many we will cross again.  But I also have to recognise my own soul, because recognising my own soul is indeed what's happened here. I had a rule if a walk was under 2 hours I did it and while my butt has never looked so good the real benefactor was my own mind, because in these hundreds of hours of non-stop movement I have found the faint outlines of where I can find my own inner-sanctum. Through manic, feverish pacing on this foreign land I ended up finding the beats and rhythms of my own psyche, what I think and how I think. I learned how my brain pulses with its ugly habits and its own beautiful mosaics. With this rough layout of myself in hand I have something I haven’t felt for a long time, presence. True presence, belly breathing, focus relaxing, mind easing presence, and honey I can’t wait to return to extend that state of mind to the land I know to be my home, 

the place from down under, 

Australia.

Cya soon cuties x

Leach Pottery Studio

St Ives 2024