Each time I move closer to finding a home: The Wanderer. And even now I have committed – biting the bullet and buying a static – I draw The Wanderer again. Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot, I am reminded. I sigh. I just want to belong.
I haven’t always felt so ambivalent about this image. In the past it has inspired me – when I was stuck in a dead-end job and marriage, to become a wanderer was an aspiration; and, in recent years it has enthused me to persist in my semi-nomadic life, indeed, to attempt to make an art of it. It’s what prompted me to buy my wee Japanese van (and convert it to a mobile writing studio and overnighter), to live for much of the year on my partner’s sailboat, and to continually resist taking up stable employment in order to follow my taiko and sailing muses wherever they might carry me.
The wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road: I’ve romanticised that in my mind for so long now, hitching it to my more existential desires to pare myself down – to put myself through a process of ‘subtraction’ as Milan Kundera would call it, to reach the state of ‘no abode’ of the old Zen traditions of Japan. But maybe I’ve become too attached to the image. It is a great freedom to not have a home you’re obliged to return to and take care of, and a privilege to have friends and family who help you to make it work. Yet homelessness (of my relatively luxurious sort) is its own tether as well. Your mind is constantly entangled in calculations and plans: where to go to do this or to get that or to find the other. And if you’re someone who becomes readily attached to places and people, living such a circuitous life can be tiring. Your heart, strung out between too many of them, starts to become stretched thin and frayed at the edges. This has its own beauty of course – now and again the breeze catches the worn tatters which flutter a moment then settle and still, and you feel exposed and sensitive and close to things. But even wanderers need a break sometimes: a spell on dry land and stable ground to recover spent energies, to heal injuries, to take nourishment in depth rather than breadth and – dare I say it – to grow some roots.
And yet…
Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
4th July 2021