Headwaters 8-week writing course begins on April 22nd! We will work through creative blocks, clear the creative life-force river, and dive into soul-led writing in a supportive community. (You can book a free clarity call with me, to see if the course is the right fit for you.)You can find all the information about the course below. 𖦹
“Longing on a large scale is what makes history.”
— Don DeLillo
After winter comes longing.
Longing of time nested in between linden blossoms, tall, giant oaks, and moss-laden stones by the riverine passage of sacred waters. It’s the longing I feel that awakens every summer. It’s stretched into long days of mirth and solitude, silence and symphonic presence of more-than-human lives around. The origins of this longing, I can trace to my childhood. But I doubt it started there.
Growing up, I loved (still do) gloomy spring and summer days. There was a sense of strange possibility I would never feel on a sunny day. During afternoons of rain and thunder, full drops would begin marking the asphalt, announcing the arrival of a quiet time. It felt as if a portal had opened up and created a secondary time-space in which I could exist.
It’s as if the warmth of the rain fed everything in existence, to grow lusher and more alive, including me. Later in life, my time in Scotland fully solidified this feeling.
In the final years of my bachelor studies, I lived in a Scottish Victorian spa town called Bridge of Allan. The town itself was built into a cascading hill, outpouring with old, secretive houses, and a combination of native and exotic trees growing tall behind the garden walls. Summers here were wrapped in spacious solitude. Behind the last streets of the town stood a small wood, extending upstream the Allan Water river. I spent countless days walking the riverine path, up the hills and through the Mine Wood, stones overgrown with moss and small bracken.
My longing extends to how my mind felt during my time in Bridge of Allan. And the only word I can find is enchanted. As if it was not yet fragmented by technology yet to come. Days were simple, yet dynamic, by the design of the wind and the elements around. I still remember the sound of wood pigeons, beating their heavy wings, pushing off from water-laden branches. Everything was covered in water — abundant and lush.
Recently, from a 1945 map, I discovered that behind the woods, atop the hill of Bridge of Allan, there is a small hillock called Fairy Knowe Cairn. Occluded from my vision by the slanted hill, I passed this cairn hundreds of times unbeknownst to me on these walks. The Fairy Cairn was believed to be a burial mound of the Picts. Excavated by Sir J.E. Alexander and his team in 1868, the burial was previously thought to be a sacred place for Druidic worship, selected to oversee the Dumyat hill and the beginnings of the highlands (pictured above).
“After considering the whole circumstances of the case, we are inclined to believe this grave or sepulchral mound to have been of great antiquity. The absence of metal implements of any kind, bronze or iron, shows that it belongs to the Stone Age, par excellence, probably long anterior to the Roman invasion. The supposed fragment of a spear-bead, and of a spear-shaft, with the arrow-heads, indicate that a warrior slept below. The two urns were probably filled with the ashes of members of bis family, and might have been placed in the mound long after his interment,” writes Sir J.E. Alexander.
I remember walking the paths within the hills and feeling so deeply inspired, nourished in spirit. I joked to myself that my runs above Bridge of Allan were spiritual, but now I see how magnetic the land was with so much magical history above and beneath the Earth’s surface.
Looking back at that specific time, when my university time was ending, and a new, unknown time was beginning, I long for that spring and summer, of pure connection to the elemental spirits that lived there way before the town was even built.
I long for the sense of possibility, for hills, for stones, for tree roots holding secrets.
And so, longing begins with absence. Absence of love, of connection, of beauty, of peace, of nourishment, of adventure, of awe, of the living world, of the past or future, of time spent differently.
Not having is the prerequisite for that aching feeling in your chest.
Do you have what you want?
No? Then, you qualify to long.
My longings started early. I grew up in a Soviet-era neighbourhood. The architecture rose out of necessity to house the increasing number of people, after war-devastated city areas. (The Soviet government at the time was giving these flats for free, but you would have to sign up and wait. That’s how my grandmother got it.)
As a child, I didn’t question why our homes, all the neighbourhoods as far as the eye could see, were built like this. It was normal and expected. This is what fascinates me about childhood: we can be born into the strangest environment, and we will accept it and absorb it as the norm. Only later on do we begin to question.
Of course, these buildings from the 60’s still stand today and house many people. But we have lost the necessity for beauty somewhere along the way. Whimsy became a castaway thing for stories, myths, and tales.
The harder the deprivation, the stronger the imagination.
I have to admit, as a child, I wasn’t a reader. I found it hard to focus, and I would rather have watched a film. But then, at a ripe age of 12, a friend introduced me to a story that would change my life forever.
It was The Lord of the Rings.
For the first time, I felt seen by a narrative.
The contrast between here, the real world, and there, the imagined world, was painful. Perhaps, I felt like I didn’t really belong in the time of modernity and everyday reality (like many of us). During that time, my family was going through a lot of dramatic changes, we moved a lot, and I had changed schools. It was stressful and alienating at times.
But this story was a life raft. It showed me that humans are still capable of beauty and reverence. It grew my desire for big trees, forests, rivers, for ornamental patterns and cozy nooks at home, for lineage, for friendship, and fine hobbit waistcoats. (I must admit, I wanted to be an elf.)
Certain stories nurture our longings; they open the passage to a secret garden, which, from then on, leads us to a world that we will go on missing and wish we could return to again and again. Stories bring us closer to the desires they themselves created.
Around 18 (during my move to Scotland), I read a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, where I learned about his hatred towards modernity, the industrial age, war, and technological advancements.
Was it a shock? No. Was it deeply comforting? Yes.
Knowing it, I felt that there were people, just like me, who didn’t fully feel at home. That there was perhaps a different time, or a different way to be in relationship with this planet, that I had not seen modelled before. Tolkien shared his own longing, and as a consequence, unleashed the collective longing for generations to come.
My time in Bridge of Allan and Stirling fed into the yearning for ancient, old time.
I was aching for time before all of us could remember. Time, lost with each coming generation, songs and tales forgotten. Ruins and stones, inscribed with labyrinthine circles and ornate scripts of magic. Only brought to memory through our bodies, resonant with places we have never visited in this lifetime, ancestral memories of melting with the land and the spirits of it. They run in our blood. Undying minerals in the waters carry these memories forward. The future reaches us through our yearning.
I pushed away this longing as I moved to Germany. Here, the land feels different. Spirits of the place don’t whisper to me. The wind doesn’t comb my hair. The rivers lay stagnant; they don’t dance, nor jump over the passage of rocks and pebbles. Only the old oaks lean their branches to soothe my heart that feels out of place.
But over the years, Scotland began calling me back. I returned, and returned again, feeling a strange melancholy and a deep nostalgia, growing inside me.
Last year, my partner and I attended a beautiful retreat called Song of the Seasons, lead by Emergence Magazine in Devon, South of England. We stayed in Sharpham Estate, an 18th-century villa, overlooking beautiful pastoral land and the River Dart. Someone mentioned that this place looked like from the Pride & Prejudice (2005 version, of course). I agreed. My 15 y/o self rejoiced. Someone like Elisabeth must have walked these meadows, riverbanks, and hills.
Our days were filled with workshops, meditations, walking, nourishing food, connection with other participants, and land-connection practices. Surrounded by ancient Yews and Oaks, by the rolling hills and meadows of wildflowers, I spent several days in a dream state.
It’s as if my longing was met: you get to live in this old castle, walk as much as your heart desires, sit with profound questions of life, and bow in humility to all of the growing, ancient beauty around you.
And yet, the desire deepened.
During one of the afternoons, in my journal, I wrote:
“I feel a longing that cannot be satisfied.
I am down by the riverside of Dart. Below the Sharpham house. Longing to live on the landscape so vast, time unfragmented. Of sisterhood and friendship. Of communing with the spirit. I cannot contain this longing, and so it leaps out of me in a form of tears. My soul misses such vastness, and oldness, and beauty.
The oak trees older than 4 generations of human ancestry. A place where I cannot see modernity, and its vile treatment of the Earth. I don’t want to return to the city.
The river is on a low tide, and the mud with seashells and seaweed are exposed. The river slowly returns to its full width, expanding like the heart.”
At that moment, I realized that places like these empty us of toxins of the mental technological age, at least for a couple of days. They reset the sense of time, even for a short while.
In all of my searches to trace down the roots of my longing, I realized one thing: we miss time, time that we have lost as a Western society. Time, untouched by the constant fragmentation of the mind.
I remembered Tolkien and his lifelong effort to bring this world closer. Teaching us to desire a different kind of existence, and then deepen it through intricate details.
Proust has encapsulated this sense so well:
“We can feel that our wisdom begins where the author’s ends, and we want him to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.
He awakens these desires in us only when he gets us to contemplate the supreme beauty which he cannot reach except through the utmost efforts of his art.
The end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.”
— Marcel Proust
As I round up this piece, I am sharing what is sitting within my heart. I am planting it. I invite you to leave your longings in the comments, to plant them, so we can yearn together.
I long for a time with women, a stone circle, a lively ancient river running by. To feel deeply nourished by the friendships, time together in magic, and a sacred passage of time.
I long to trace and know my maternal line.
I long for ritual and ceremony.
I long for nourishment on deep layers of my body and soul.
I long for unfragmented time.
I long to be in Scotland again.
I long to write my book one day and to publish it.
I long for minimal technological exposure and my focus and attention being my own again.
I long for deep reverence for Earth’s beauty on a mass scale.
I long to live in a land-based community of like-hearted humans and more-than-human beings, that holds the ancient wisdoms.
I long for growing nourishing vegetables and a big, beautiful, old garden of flowers and trees.
I long for ease, for days in the mountains, for meadows, for scale that brings me awe.
I long for softness and kindness in this world.
With love,
Rūta
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!
If you long to write, then join us in Headwaters 8-week writing course. We will begin on April 22nd! We will work through creative blocks, clear the creative life-force river, and dive into soul-led writing in a supportive community. (You can book a free clarity call with me, to see if the course is the right fit for you.)You can find all the information about the course below. 𖦹
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