Field Notes for Curious Minds

Being in the high hills makes me want to say something profound. Surrounding your feelings with vastness is evocative, causing them to tumble like a mountain stream, bubbling and roiling. Those same feelings also sit quietly, deeply, and thoughtfully. They are personal, almost inexpressible. Is it because we live in flatlands that we are drawn to high points? Or are humans summoned to the heights anyway, a siren call we cannot - never want to - ignore? JoJo and I are there because of closely-held memories from previous visits. Returning makes us question everything. Time stills because the mountains are unburdened by the pitiful tally of moments accrued by human experience. As Rob Macfarlane reminds us in his epic book ‘Mountains of the Mind’, these high hills “confront us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage”. We are reminded of our lowly stature; the mountains quietly urge us to know our place. With the wisdom of ages they rise up as elders, their very presence humbling us. We all need that dose of humility in the face of deep time and the powerful, timeless forces of nature. That’s why we need mountains; why we wandered towards them last week, to be quietly and inevitably humbled.

One day I’ll find the words to explain it.

Artist Jason Limon uses oils and acrylic to paint a playful world in which vintage illustrations conceal a fantasy universe populated by skeletons.

We always thought we might live near water. For now, a river swim is a decent 100-km round trip by bike, so JoJo was delighted to dip her toes in an ice-cold Pyrenean stream last week. It got us thinking about water, and the way it looks, sounds and feels. Malaysian photographer Lee Chee Wai produced a fascinating gallery of black and white images that explores the stories of water local to him.

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”

― Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind

When it comes to an ‘escape to the mountains’, there can surely be no finer retreat from the human-centric world than an isolated cabin. Take your pick.

“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning", they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

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. We love how a long distance, multi-day hike prepared Dee Andrews for the long road of turning her writing into a published novel (thank you to Waving From A Distance for popping it into our eyeline).

2. Regular readers will know we have a soft spot for postcards; for their physicality in a digital age, their intentionality, the glimpses they offer into other folks’ moments, perhaps the call to brevity too. It is no coincidence that we chose to capture last year’s interrail adventure through a series of ‘postcards from …’. So we are delighted to discover Simon Woodward who plans to capture a lifetime in the travel sector into considered ‘postcards’.

3. Some of our favourite ‘sights’ when we travel are the seemingly mundane parts of daily life that continue to be lived, uninterrupted by our presence. This fascinating collection of photographs by Juliette Mansour speaks to this as a shopping cart becomes the unassuming star of the show.

4. We love all the photography søren k. harbel shares; never more so than this wonderful gallery of images capturing the way people view art. We see their absorption in the moment, and the way their presence in the scene and the manner of Søren’s framing becomes an art form in itself.

5. Continuing the travel theme (the flimsy thread that loosely binds our disparate collection of curiosities), we were reminded of a treasured escape last year for Susie Mawhinney whose way with words infuses her moments with presence, an invitation to bask vicariously in her world of observation, to celebrate with her the details that make up places, connections and what it means to be human. Travel with Susie to Porto.

Talking of postcards … are these just too beautiful to write on?

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

Barrie and JoJo