As a Christmas present this year, my mother gave me a book by the British writer Robert MacFarlane — The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot. I would describe it to you, but I’m afraid I’d make something profoundly beautiful sound dull or silly. A paragraph in the second chapter caught my mind, and has held it for the past month. MacFarlane says:
As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?
So, I have been thinking about landscape, about travel, about what places I have been have meant to me, about places I may walk in the future.
It is an assumed fact of a freelance musician’s life that they will travel far and frequently in order to maintain a career. For a woman who spent her happily homeschooled girlhood in her bedroom hours on end, translating Vergil & Plato & Hugo, reading Scottish History, devouring 19th c. novels from the safe kingdom of her old green armchair, that is a daunting, and a thrilling thought. My education unveiled countless places to me, but exercised my mind and imagination, not my eyes and legs. And that was all well for me. I felt no lack. In my nutshell I read, and dreamed, and felt myself a King of infinite space, for unlike Hamlet, I as yet had no bad dreams.
The summer after my twenty-first birthday I went to Italy for a language and music program. My first, and - for the time being - only, European adventure. I was wired with excitement. But I remember trying to finish my packing in the couple days preceding my departure, and being hit by sheer panic as I looked from the safe green chair, to the shiny, new, green duffle bag that was supposed to contain all my necessities for six weeks in a new land. Many a time I’d heard heard my father quote Horace: “caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.” That is, “those who rush across the sea change the sky, not their soul.” But the impending journey felt momentous and symbolic to me nonetheless — as if this going-to-Italy marked the point of no return in being a singer; as if being a home-body would no longer be a possibility, because the latent spirit of adventure would awake, and never quite consent to retreat to its shell again.
The panic and the packing complete, I left. I loved it. I hadn’t been wrong in my fearful expectation, but the fear melted away in the warm Italian sun, in the radiant smile of my host-mother, in the brilliance of the Scotch broom and poppies that streaked the hills, and lined the roadsides of Urbania. Horace was right — the sky had changed, not I; but I learned things from that sky, and under that sky, that changed me, made me grow, made me dare a tiny bit more.
What did I know there and nowhere else? That, over the hill, the fork in the road called me and tantalized me. That dust on tired feet can be a beautiful thing. That some risks must be braved, with love, not fear. That if I open my eyes and breathe with my feet rooted to the path, I can feel the ancient, living Earth. That worlds and personalities can mix and overlap without judgment.
What do the walls and cobbles of that town know of me that I didn’t know of myself? As Mr. MacFarlane says, it is a vain question to ask. But maybe six years, and a few, more humble skies later, I can hazard a guess without too much foolishness. Perhaps that place knew of me that there was more fire in my bones, that my dreams were loftier, my ambitions greater, my fighting spirit stronger than I cared to admit. Perhaps that place knew of me that, deep down, I truly knew how to love myself, however long the journey to uncovering that love and self-respect.
Packing has made me anxious to varying degrees ever since that trip. But sitting here on an airplane, flying home from a wonderful lesson, and visit with family in Chicago, I think it is time to release that anxiety — to release myself from that anxiety. I am working towards, and on, something I love. The relinquishment of anxiousness, bitterness, jealousy, and fear of falling down can do nothing but free me to see all the changing skies — all the seas and lands I may run across — with more open, loving eyes.
I have told myself that this year is for daring. May I dare to love where I am, and wherever I go, without fear.
American Airlines Flight 3456, Chicago to Albany
January 25, 2020