Along the way, 31
“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ― Judith Thurman
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Along the way, 33
“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spain: Arrival Madrid
I look upon international coach air travel as slow torture. Put me on a long enough flight and I’ll tell you anything, promise you anything, simply to disembark. A large part of my view on this comes from being tall with long legs and the airlines shrinking the spacing between rows to get as many of us “cattle” as possible on a plane. Such flights are the only times…
Perhaps it is due to the fact that as a child my parents moved around a fair bit, living in different countries, but I have never felt homesick for home. However I have, on more than one occasion felt homesick for a place I was returning from. I am not quite the dreamer of Thurman’s quote but I can well believe that homesickness can strike the heart for places barely known or even known only in our imagination.
Beautiful tones in your photo. I thought I was looking at old, weathered yarn until I read the caption. Now I am trying to imagine the same scene at high tide. What a contrast that must be.
I felt homesick for home when younger, in the military and stationed in Europe and happily dreamer homesick many times before and since.
Now that you mention it, I can see the yarn aspect to this image. The colors and tones, while enhanced some in this image, were pretty striking.
I certainly understand the sentiment in the quote, although I’m not sure “homesick” is the right descriptor. Like you, I experienced homesickness while in the military or when traveling for business (when I was a young lad!). Home always seemed to be a magical spot, a place that was familiar and comforting. No more. For years it’s just been a place on the map, a place to keep our “stuff”. It’s the lure of the road that better defines “home”. Especially when that road leads to the desert!
I really like the image, Brooks. For me, it’s the kind of image that you don’t want to get too close to. By that I mean that focusing on the details, trying to concentrate on individual components, is probably the wrong way to view this. I think the viewer needs to literally back away so that color is what you see, not the individual twig like structures that make up the “whole”. I also like the diagonal that runs from the bottom left to upper right in the frame. Mostly, though, it’s the mood created by the color and the soft, out-of-focus appearance around the edges.
Paul, in the quote, homesick would not have been my first choice — but I’ve taken Judith Thurman’s use of homesick to mean a yearning for that which seems to satisfy a core desire or need, which I believe is very close to how you also see and described it. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Thanks for the comments about the image. I like your take on it being more about the “whole” which is created by a number of different components. I often think I view all my images “from a distance” these days since I’m limited to post-processing on a 13″ laptop screen. :-)