View from my bedroom to the terrasse, Baiardo

ARRIVAL

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A while ago, I applied for a stay in May at San Cataldo by the Amalfi coast that houses artists, writers, and researchers. I got rejected. Not letting this stop my longing for Italy, the country I've visited most times and stayed in for a year in my youth, I came up with a much better idea.

A dear friend of mine, artist Athena Vida, has recently moved from Switzerland to the village of Baiardo, on a mountaintop in Liguria, Italy. We last saw each other four years ago, when she came to our new (250 year-old) house in Moen to inaugurate it with a ritual in the garden. As she is deeply missed, I decided to visit her instead. I am quite curious of what place she has settled into.

I am writing this on a terrasse by the apartment, I've rented. I'm also here to write my book. And I am in awe.

The air is different and feels so alive (and healthy) with swiftly changing winds, bringing humidity, rain, bird songs from distant mountain tops, sunbeams and even hail with it

TO AWAKEN TO BEAUTY

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I am surrounded by mountains, the Mediterranean Sea is to my left, the Alps, dressed in snow, to my far right. Everything else is abundantly green. There is an absence of human noises, but lots of conversations between the-more-than-human.

What does a place do to you? How do you immerse yourself in a new environment, how does the body perceive and react a different ecology?

I awaken to beauty every morning. Throughout the day, there is beauty everywhere I look. Not only that, but also the smells of the forest, the cuckoos and the doves, the fresh water, collected from the spring, the busy insects, every living being contribute to a sensuous feast. I feel very much alive and grateful. This is what luxury really is.

I forage herbs in the forest for teas and salads and feel a connection to place

"Thin places" is a Celtic expression. This is where the membrane between the divine and the physical realms are particularly thin. Baiardo is such a place. The villagers know this. I feel it, too.

It is said that the Druids were here. Columns from a pagan temple from the last millenium BC are still standing. In the Middle Ages, a church was built on the site. On Feb 23 1887, 600 villagers gathered in church for Ash Wednesday, and when an earthquake stroke and brought down the vault, the roof fell down and killed 202 villagers, a quarter of the town's population. Today, the church houses doves only, and it is a serene place. It feels thin. I live next door and am alone in this outermost and highest part of town.

A thin place

WHEN YOU SPEAK TO ALL THAT IS AND POETRY COMES BACK

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I listened to a great conversation the other day between eco-philosopher David Abram and storyteller Angharad Wynne, hosted by This Animate Earth.

Angharad explained another Celtic saying: That magic is, when you speak to all that is and what comes back is poetry. We have forgotten that this magical conversation is alive and available to us. We just have to participate in it in order for it to be alive.

I feel the poetry of the mountains here, in their strong presence and manifested deep time. I sing to the doves in the church ruin, and they listen with curiosity.

David reflected on consciousness. Is it inside our skulls or are we inside of it? Are we immersed within a mind that is the Earth’s? What if consciousness, creativity and imagination are not only tied to our brains? Not only tied to our guts? Not only tied to our bodies? But if consciousness is in every living molecule, in the water, in the air? What if we have a degree of our own consciousness, our own flavor of it, but it is, at the same time, part of a greater one, one in which we’re all part? The Earth’s consciousness, or even a cosmic one?

SHARED IMAGINATION

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I personally believe there is a greater intelligence behind everything and that every living being has its own flavor of intelligence and creativity. Everyone must be creative every single day, must improvise all the time. Otherwise, you’ll be eaten in a second, hit by a car, and more! All those amazing patterns of survival, amazing beauty of colors, feathers, songs – all of that may be expressions of the conscious creativity that permeates everything.

What shall we make of place, then? How is it that some places make your imagination and wellbeing thrive whereas others make you dull and uncomfortable? Maybe each place has a unique state of mind, a unique intelligence that is visible in each ecosystem's ways of being.

There is a different quality to imagination, if you’re high on a mountain top, or by the sea, or in Valby, where I normally live. The last Celtic saying (in this letter) came from Angharad, namely that imagination is perceived as something shared. Access to it goes through the inner deep, she said, and the inner deep is both around us all the time, and within us. There is a sense that it is located in landscape.

It is not only us humans who have access to it, it is the squirrel, too, and the cuckoos, and the herbs. All can meet and interweave within that field. So, consciousness and imagination is not a placeless or abstract realm. It is deeply informed by place.

Thank you, Angharad and David, for your words on something felt, dreamed and imagined.

So, I wonder what stories will bubble up from this beautiful place, I'm lucky to be immersed in. I'll participate in this magical conversation with all that is around me - and hope you will, too, where ever you are in the world.

Warm greetings,

Birgitte

The blue hour of Baiardo