The Soul Travels on Horseback

After three months of wandering, I returned to a different season last week. I still feel like I am not here. A few years ago, Aviva Dautch, a friend and poet, told me the saying: the soul travels on horseback. I am still galloping. Still en route. The bougainvillea of building sites have been replaced with buddleia; pepper trees’ berries are now Rowan bayas, and the perpetual spring of Tenerife, is aging.

No, no matter your thirst, ride swiftly, mare, stallion,
mother, father, for without you I feel forever homesick.

Mimi Khalvati, from her poem, The Soul Travels on Horseback

I have stowaways on the laces of my trainers from the highlands: mountain seeds. They’re like burrs, and are so good at doing their job that they even stick to your skin. The last time I was in Dublin - while my cooler friends, Vicky and Gemma got matching tattoos in Temple Bar, I went to Dublin Writers Museum. I read about a poet who put mud on the soles of his boots when he came into the city, to remind city dwellers of the turf beyond their streets.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

William Butler Yeats, The Lake of Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree was written in 1888 whilst he was living in London, missing Sligo. I thought of the poem often when I lived there, and when I was living up in my mountain hut in Ireland. Although Yeats lived in Dublin, he'd spent many of his childhood summers in Sligo. It was as he was walking along Fleet Street that he had the memory of an uninhabited islet in Lough Gill, heard the lake and then the poem. To listen to the quiver of him reading it is one of life's joys.

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax."

William Butler Yeats

There was a period in London when I was working extremely long hours for several months and living in a very built-up area. One commute, I noticed something different about the man standing in front of me on the escalator, but hadn’t registered what. He was a suited man with beetle-black polished shoes. On his heel was a bright, wet, green clump: mown grass. It was the only way I knew the seasons were changing. It had been an endless winter. I had been rushing to work in the dark, and returning in the dark. Each day was a repeated stitch: wake, bus, tube, work, tube, bus, sleep. My route was all cement, brick.
 
That morning, imagining him hurrying across his dewy lawn, I realised I’d taken my thread too deep into the maze of the city. I’d lost my elements. Since then, I have tried to live in every season, inhabit them, breath and note and taste them, dive into cold water most days, eat outdoors, run through parks, or mudlark on my lunch breaks along the Thames foreshore…

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements
And be a bit more firey, as incapable of telling lies
As fire is.
I wish they'd be true to their own variation, as water is,
Which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice

D.H.Lawrence, Elemental

It has been a long, burning summer. Now I am back. I am not feeling homesick for one place, but for people, for being on the move, meeting and visiting friends and family. I leave little bits of my heart scattered. It is as damp as monsoon season here. I am sat listening to the weather and watching the direction of the wind. Without trees we cannot hear the subtler breezes. I have been without the mosh and sway of long grasses, branches - willow, ash, lime, oak leaves. I have missed how alive it makes you feel to watch them.