When the Grass is Greener
On what distance offers us, and a final yoga class from Sydney.....
"If I seem close to tears / It’s for my sins, not sickness...
I thank my lucky stars for second sight."
— Clive James, My Home
If ever we needed affirmation that time is not linear, that it morphs and stretches and bends in context, then the build up to any leaving offers it. Ten days ago, when I was still in the very the midst of being home (Australia home), the days felt endless and I even wondered whether maybe I had been here too long. I was suddenly feeling the pull of home ( England home) in a visceral way; longing to rest my head on my husband’s chest, to see the real faces of my children, to be at dinner across from the glistening eyes of a close friend or to be curled up by a fire with my cat. I wanted to be planting my dahlia bulbs in pots, which is the point at which I start any real dreaming of Spring. And strangely, I couldn’t stop thinking of the wisteria that still needs its late winter pruning.
But now - as I get ready to fly on Wednesday- the time I have left is moving at alarming pace and of course I feel like digging my feet into the sand of the beach, resisting these faster paced days with the obstinacy that I was famed for as a child. Suddenly I feel a sinking feeling that soon the day won’t start at 6am with the sun bringing the palms outside my window into gradual relief, that I will not be woken by the chortle of magpies, that my daily routine won’t include laps of a sea pool and a coffee on a clifftop, and that my wider family- parents and sister and niece and nephew - won’t be just up the road. Or that dinner at night, just for one, won’t be able to consist of nothing more than a bowl of perfect cherries.
When I confessed to my husband last week that I was feeling the first pangs of homesickness, he couldn’t help but laugh. ‘When you are here you are homesick for Australia, and when you are there you are homesick for England, ‘ he noted. And he is right. It could well be that I simply suffer from a terribly unenlightened example of the famed idiom, ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. Dissatisfaction is one of the hurdles of the human condition and the prospect of loss can have us clinging harder, despite its obvious futility. A friend and I once talked about the strange phenomenon of ‘anticipatory homesickness’ that can descend in the build up to leaving our homes even just to go on holiday. Having probably longed to go away, the days in advance of leaving, and even for just a week, often magnify all that we love and we can still feel a strange undercurrent of lament. Time and then its lack offer up interesting changes in perspective.
But there might also be a more generous way to see this, appreciated perhaps most obviously by those of us who suffer the plight and the pleasure - via heart and happenstance- of having homes in two places and hearts that are split, almost entirely evenly, between the two.
For a language that is so rich in synonym, it has always struck me as a surprise that English lacks a word nuanced enough to explain the feeling of longing that lodges itself in the heart of those who live away from their own land, and especially happily so. ‘Homesickness’ feels too obvious and like it is purely an affliction. The Portuguese word ‘saudade’, in as far as anyone who doesn’t speak Portuguese might be able to understand it, feels like it could be better. Officially meaning a ‘melancholy or yearning for something or someone that is absent’ it somehow feels more embodied, or at least it does to my untrained ear. But still it only really speaks to one side of the equation.
As I have lived a long time with this lack of articulation, I have always revelled in conversations with people whose lives have followed a similar trajectory, give or take, and who find themselves feeling the same complicated and wordless way. In fact I feel such an immediate kinship with those people, no matter how little I ever get to know them, it is as though inhabiting two countries has somehow created a third to which we all belong.
In the first few days of being here, when a little of me was still back there, I got chatting in the local bookshop with the owner and another customer over a coffee. The owner, Raymond Bonner, lives between New York and Australia, and as well as having an enviable wikipedia page struck me as someone who possesses that particular energy that both pulls you from where you are & then just as insistently draws you back. After a lively conversation about travel and books and writing, the other customer and I then lingered even longer, losing a good hour more to a conversation of the kindred. When I asked her whether she was from around here her answer was both yes & no; she was back in Sydney after fifteen years of living in London. When I asked if the homecoming was a happy one, she hesitated and went on to describe the entangled feelings - ones I absolutely recognised- that had her emotionally straddling two hemispheres and always seemingly homesick for the other. As we spoke in glowing detail about everything we loved about each place, about all the things we missed when we were in the other, it struck me that maybe we weren’t simply suffering from a form of homesickness but the altered perspective that comes from absence, one that had rendered both places in an elevated and unique relief. And that the longing that we thought we felt might also be another word for carrying.
In his copious writings about being an Australian in happy exile, the writer and poet Clive James talks about exactly this; that distance from our homes doesn’t sever love but exaggerates it, by offering up what he called ‘second sight’ - a picture so clear and vivid that we can and do take it with us. Seen and felt from one perspective this can easily feel like a burden but it is possible that it is much better than that. That instead of a diminished landscape it is an infinitely bigger one, one that transcends borders and is composed of the best of everything. So that when I am reunited with all that I have missed next week, but no doubt living with a missing still, I can reassure myself that the very thing that is creating the longing might well be something to love about it; a perspective that has offered up memories so techni-coloured that I can do as James did and have ‘ a mind that is basking in the Australian sun even while physically in the misty afternoon drizzle of London.’ And that living in this way, always between two worlds, is actually just accessing the best of both of them.
YOGA CLASS THIS WEEK - Tuesday 10th February
9-10am GMT ( or 8-9pm AEST)
This is the last session that will be zoomed from Australia before there is a break for half term next week. To join live or to be sent the link to the recording which will last two weeks, book using the link below.
Classes will then resume on Tuesday 24th Feb and will run for six weeks. We will be exploring Spring via the Senses. It was a theme I ran last year and found it completely altered my experience of Spring and offered a magical way to get up close to it. Whilst the theme is the same, all the class content will be new and relevant to where we find ourselves each week.
Bookings will open for individual sessions or a pack of them after half term.
A great prompt to revisit some Clive James (...always a good idea!).