It makes me so happy to see this long, rambling meditation finally published—and with photos I took (New Mexico, Oxford, Kew Gardens) nicely fitted in by Sybil, making it a true hybrid. Prose, poetry, and images all mine, and me. A kind of screenshot of who/where/why I am at this juncture. Started towards the end of lockdown, when it was dawning on me how stir-crazy I'd become, after so many years of traveling more or less whenever I wanted, and having to worry that I'd never in my life get to travel again; and finished/edited as I was getting ready to travel again (yes, really!) to Santa Fe—time-travel back, for my 50th class reunion. Getting ready to babble on about (in twenty words or less) what I'd been doing all that time, and where I have come out.
So here we are!
The format kind of rambles too, which seems appropriate.
(And I learned after coming home that a Santa Fe friend named Sybil had just passed away—so a tribute of sorts, as well.)
One small excerpt from towards the end:
I am still sad, far from England and all the other far places I love, missing my life as Clarice Lispector describes it perfectly—
“I miss everything that marked my life. ... I miss
the things I lived and the ones I let go. ...
How many times I want to find I don't know what...
I don't know where... To rescue something I don't
know what it is or where I lost it.”
But I have understood, putting the recent feeling of loss down in words, in the same notebook that now holds the little beach, the cardamom, the dogwalkers, the Sterling Silver “wishy-washy” ink I find today along with letters from Emily Dickinson translated charmingly into Italian, that I’m still me, enduringly, even at this remove. Still weird as weird can be. That the whorls of labyrinths, like fingerprints, are uniquely and indelibly mine.
Images: On Museum Hill, Christie Cochrell
Cycladic Figurines, The Ashmolean, Christie Cochrell
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