Field Notes for Curious Minds

Most weeks I arrive on newsletter day with something ‘part-formed’. There is a draft, perhaps an article or two, the structure around which to build the latest edition of our weekly curation. Not this week. Today, I am faced with a blank page. In a ‘good morning’ exchange of notes, Mark Thomas asks me how I feel about that. So nice to be asked a question … I’m a little out of practice in answering. It turns out I am undaunted … I’d go as far as to say relaxed. This newsletter, or a version of it, has been arriving weekly for over nine years, so perhaps there is a quiet confidence that ‘something’ will emerge. Not least because the world we are curious about is brimful of interesting, inspiring, thought-provoking work that we get excited about sharing. There is no shortage of people whose work, ideas and creativity deserves to be amplified. So the blank page is an invitation, not an absence. Unlike - if you are anything like me - the first page of a new notebook where the blank first page feels like a challenge too far. That blank page feels like an admonition, a warning that only the VERY best work should be presented to it, for fear of putting a hex on the remaining pages. I swapped notes with Lesley about this earlier in the week. But, fear not, although the blank page of this newsletter is no less worthy of ‘the VERY best work’, I just happen to be more confident about its shape than my notes that I hope might stir themselves into short stories or thoughtful articles. Those blank pages are tricksy. Anyhoo, on with the curation … it looks like I’ve just started!

‘Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’, they say. But what about seeing the natural world from a bug’s perspective. That’s what Theo Bosboom does.

“Stand in any forest and look up, and it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the swaying of tall trees and their elegant canopies casting shade onto the woodland floor. But imagine being an ant or beetle and peering up at the stems of wild geraniums, garlic, or buttercups and experiencing the same sensation. For photographer Theo Bosboom, this ground-level view of flowers and plants gave rise to a series that captures them in the way we might photograph a grove of towering, ancient sequoias.”

Next week we will be ‘adventuring’ in the Pyrenees. The old man will cycle up some hills; JoJo will be hiking, her final preparations for an upcoming Tour du Mont Blanc. In a timely coincidence, we found ourselves re-reading these reflections by Alex Roddie for Sidetrackedmag about what adventure means.

This is not our first trip to the Pyrenees … there is a draw to this magical place of high mountains, deep valleys, and turquoise glacial rivers that is hard to explain. Recent planning has been an excuse to re-read a piece I wrote about the ‘mountains of the mind’ that form part of the lure.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Often, the most popular articles in these curations prove to be cabins, retreats and hideaways, impeccably designed, and full of stylish ideas. Staying in the Pyrenees - on the Spanish side - we find a modular summer home.

If you like the Pyrenean summer house, you might also love:

1. A design for a mountainside refuge.

2. This clever adaptation of an old stone built house, and the spectacular views of the mountains it realises.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

John Muir

Every week we seek out and highlight writers who stop us in our tracks with their words and ideas.

Do, please, click a link or two and discover some amazing folk

1. Ten years ago, around about ‘now o’clock’, I attended The DO Lectures, an ideas festival in West Wales. That’s where I met jim marsden and I am so happy to see his atmospheric photography arrive on Substack. By way of introduction, here’s a pause via a train and a ferry over the sea to Skye.

2. Talking of a life in photography, Takashi Yasui reflects on ten years of learning by laying out imagined sections of a book, and in doing so reveals an underlying philosophy, maybe even imagining the book into being.

3. The craft of photography is flourishing, widely practiced. In Japan, many traditional crafts are disappearing. On the one hand, Satomi Takayama bemoans such demise; but this is an appeal for adaption, an invitation to find contemporary interpretations of these crafts, tradition in a new context.

4. If my craft is writing, I have a writer’s propensity for believing in the power of a new notebook to fuel my ‘best writing ever’. And yet I am terrified of a ‘first page’; at one level it is a glorious invitation, on another, a blockage born of perfectionism. This week, Lesley has been celebrating the pleasures of a new page as her favourite recipes were captured anew.

5. Writing will forever be kaleidoscopic to me, a pattern yet to form, dazzlingly full of colour yet so often of indiscernible shape. I constantly pan for the gold hidden in ‘books for writers’ so I am indebted to Terry Freedman for more suggestions for growing my to be read pile.

   Truth be told, the searing heat of this Summer has made it hellish for this particular scribe. Poor sleep, early starts for long bike rides, and the competing lure of ‘flag drop to sprint finish’ coverage of the Tour de France means that my one attempt to write a short story is stalled between stops on an imagined New York bus ride.

6. I am delighted that not everyone’s writing is blocked by Summer. Take Priya TenThousandJourneys … the words have sneaked up on her.

7. Some folk travel then write. Harry Watson promised he would show us the Caravaggios he set out to discover on an epic journey by rail.

8. We love that travel is most illuminating several steps beyond those places favoured by tourists needing a quick fix of someone else’s ideas or the same backdrop used for everyone else’s holiday snaps. Pablo Naboso guides us to the back streets of Catania and a deserted beach in Crete through a series of gloriously human interactions.

Catania caught our eye during a 3-month interrail adventure:

That’s it for today. Back next week, same time, same place.

Barrie and JoJo