I’ve been procrastinating some time now about how to start this blog, and I am finding it pretty stressful, scrutinizing every sentence, when in reality I need this to be a place where I can simply spill my thoughts. Where, without apology, I can misspell, misquote and be wrong. This is easier said than done, I’ve been writing this introduction for three days now! The reason I decided to keep and online project journal was to have a place where I, and hopefully my collaborators also, can work through ideas, problems and developments of the project over the next six months. So here I go, definitely not over thinking…

I’ve been thinking about time

When I am away from home ( and by home I refer to where I grew up) for a extended period of time I get a very real, physical ache in my gut to return there. It is not missing the house I grew up in, nor missing my parents that troubles me (sorry parents), It is the landscapes of my childhood that I crave. I think this is to do with time.

Landscape exists on a different time frame to humanity. Where people age quickly and noticeably, a landscape, unless damaged in extreme conditions, regenerates itself, lasting centuries. I think the reason I find the places where I grew up comforting is that they make me feel like little has changed. Landscape, unlike human relationships, seems permanent. When I stare at the landscape I do not see its face ageing and I do not think of its death, quite the opposite. I feel comfort in the fact it will remain there long after I have gone, it reminds me of the importance of time, and of living.

When I visit my parents, I notice if they have aged, and this is something that perhaps makes me feel more estranged from a sense of home than safe within it. Looking at them grow older, I am sure in the same way for them to see me grow older, I am filled with insecurity. My family made me, raised me and shaped who I have become, when that disappears, am I still the same or from that point does my identity become something different entirely. In many ways this is the same when you end a long term relationship, when you can’t think what your life is without your `other half‘, you feel displaced, ungrounded. Standing in a familiar landscape, where I have before, where many things have passed and changed, I recall all the different versions of myself and I feel grounded.

My grandparent’s house is still within the family, although they have both passed away, and I can still visit it and the coastline right by it. The landscape hasn’t let me down, the way that I irrationally feel they have. There is security in a belief that I will always be able to return to it, put my two feet, exactly where I did years ago, and feel like nothing has changed. It is something from my past that I can touch, I can transcend time, I can go back.