Encouragement Files
(19-25) Field Notes for Curious Minds
This is the 19th edition of ‘The Encouragement Files’, a weekly celebration of others. This offering is a chance to showcase words, publications and people who have inspired us. It might encourage you to celebrate the creativity that lifts your spirits, and stories that offer a counterbalance to the fractious edginess of an out-of-kilter world.
We tend to take things slow, relishing the ebb and flow of the seasons. Even as Spring simmers, boils and bubbles over with the high energy of our feathered friends and the blossoming colours, we watch, soak it all in, let it be. And yet, this year, we are wrestling with an unexpected impatience. As Jean-Baptiste Poquelin - better known as Molière - put it “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit” but we have plans afoot and the waiting weighs heavily. It is a milestone year for the old man. Celebrations are to be stretched across several seasons; late Spring chills and early Summer warmth will be the escorts for a solo cycle, from Northern Scotland to our home in France. Beyond that self-gifted adventure, we have three months set aside to explore Europe by rail. Perhaps we have peaked too early - judging from our history of internet searches we have peeked very early - but we want to be ‘off the beaten tracks’ already.
In a year that is scampering by, we are foolishly wishing it away.
But Aristotle knows best: “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
Beyond Substack
A D V E N T U R E
Everyone’s adventure has something unique at the heart of it. A definitive (but maybe unspoken?) purpose, a reason for being there, for pushing against human individual boundaries. What about following in the bike tracks and footsteps of a much-loved grandfather whose memories emerged after he had gone?
“The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination.”
― Alexander Cockburn Harper’s (August 1985)
I N T E R I O R S
We wonder sometimes - occasionally more often than that - why we are drawn to spaces designated as live/work. Neither of us work, not in the traditional ‘turn up somewhere and at the end of the month money will be paid’ sort of way. We think retirement conjures up too many notions of purposelessness so we keep busy, more often than not in separate spaces though our home was not set up in that manner. We suspect our next will be more intentional; studios for two and communal spaces in-between. For now, we day dream about other people’s live/work ideas.
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
― J M Barrie
So Good We Saved It
Reading pieces in ‘Noted’ by
comforts and provokes me in equal measure. I am comforted because even the most assiduous note-takers (like Joan Didion) can be as random as I am. I am prompted to do better.We have
to thank for highlighting this fascinating piece on ‘beauty’ in photography. takes very fine images and his words are a vital counterpoint to algorithm-led (lazy) definitions of beauty.Today I gifted myself time to read, when I reasserted a lapsed desire to spend fewer moments lost inside my phone.
puts it lyrically:Dandelion clocks twinkle in the dewy fields: last week’s golden flowers have metamorphosed into delicate, feathery silver globes. Dandelion time is fragile — susceptible to the brush of a passing creature, or a sudden gust of wind — but perhaps clock time, too, is more insubstantial than I once imagined. Soon, the year will be half gone; I feel myself clinging to it tightly, trying not to let it slip away, but still the moments drift from me: lighter than feathers, softer than air.What a delight to read about Camont from a visitor’s perspective as
settles in with as the chef-in-residence.
Brief Encounter
Postcard from Asturias (2022)
Follow the Trail of Breadcrumbs
(In which we start in one clearing then find ourselves deep in the woods)
I found a quote about travel, a light-touch embellishment:
… travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.Miriam Beard
It would have been a shame to miss the trail of breadcrumbs leading to Craig Thompson ‘Miriam Beard: On Travel’ that sets the bare bones in context, as he asks ‘how do phrases become standalone quotations’.
Were it not for
we would not have discovered Russian architectural theorist Arthur Skizhali-Weiss and his fictional cities:
But it would be impossible to stop there and not plunge deeper into the world of unbuilt architecture, such a wonderland of fantasy unrealised. The trail led us to ‘On Verticality’ which soars to new heights. Not surprisingly, our friend Arthur Skizhali-Weiss has his ‘Magic City’ (2002) featured.
P H O T O G R A P H Y
We find the photography of Rupert Vandervell irresistible. Light and shade.
And finally …
When artist Gregory Euclide offers an abstract take on the Anthropocene in mixed-media collages, it offers a new perspective; a counterpoint to realism.
Back next week, same time, same place.
Barrie and JoJo
It's such fun to travel virtually with you when I'm a bit overheated, and tired from weeding and planting in the back yard! Old has a challenge keeping up with the spring, but that challenge is more welcome than no challenge at all. The change to colors is delicious.
So much wonderful inspiration here in all these fragments, Barrie. Thanks for always pointing me in interesting directions. Let me offer just one bit of serious advice - Avoid rural Scotland in July and August. The midges will eat you alive. Trust me on this. I know Scotland like a native. You do not want to make thus mistake.