How softly can you dream?
Hello there dear friend,
I often say, albeit somewhat jokingly, how I wish I were the daughter of some rich gentlemanly figure. It seems dreams would be easier to realise, then. I would buy an estate and plant an orchard running through a meadow that tumbles down a hill. I would build a great big house filled with art and exquisitely handcrafted pieces where friends and families and strangers could come and stay awhile for rest, for inspiration, for a great big dose of much-needed calm and beauty and quiet. She would have large windows and doors opening up on wild, slightly feral gardens where old roses would come up from the swaying grasses tumbling down over wrought iron gates and arches, where dark, rich, burgundy poppies would scatter the landscape and great masses of lupins spring from around corners. Mine would be a garden where Piet Oudolf and Tasha Tudor would meet in a joyous symphony of shapes and textures and colors. I would spend my days, I think, making, creating, dreaming and being a patron to those who do the same.
But I am not the daughter of some rich gentlemanly figure and when I pause to think about it, I am grateful for the road and that rocketty, winding path that I am led to walk. It is in that distance, I am coming to realise, that little, sometimes painful gap that separates me from my dreams that those very dreams are actually being borne.
I have been wrestling with a strange feeling of exhaustion lately, of that kind which presses down on one’s shoulders, as if the great blue skies above had suddenly shrunk around oneself, sucking all of the air out from a cocoon clinging to my skin. I know many others in my life who have been feeling something of the same. But there is something else, also, in yielding to that utter fragility that comes fluttering by, some sort of a strength, or a sensibility, a glimmering beacon of light - a firefly in the dark of the night.
“Al tempo della forza sopraggiunge quello della fragilità [...]” - I happened on this sentence written by Allessandro d’Avenia a couple weeks ago - To the time of might follows that of fragility. “La fragilità ci permette di scoprire la meraviglia, il riconoscersi piccoli. Ci fa percepire l’infinito e lo stato che ci consente di svelare quello che si trova al di là.” - Fragility allows us to discover the wonder, the recognition of being very small. It makes us perceive the infinite and allows us to unveil that which lies beyond.
I have etched these sentences on my heart.
But let’s get back to the dreams, shall we? My partner and I have bought a home in the city - we’ve uprooted our life from our tiny second-floor apartment and moved it a few streets down over to a duplex I never would have imagined purchasing. We now have a backdoor leading to a small, overgrown, weedy garden that we can call our own, great big windows opening up to the outside world and many, many rooms to paint and build and renovate. Last weekend, as I stood on hands and knees washing and scrubbing walls that were twice my age, as I hauled box after box and unpacked my kitchen into an orangey-pinkish artifact coming to us straight out of the fifties, as I was surrounded by friends and family having come over to help, a quiet word of thanks gurgled somewhere deep in my heart. This, this was my dream coming to life - imperfect, incomplete, somewhat tangled up in weeds, but there nonetheless, there to be made and created, there to be borne and there to see that I, also, would be transformed in the process.
One day, I will have an orchard and that great big country house, but in the meantime, I am given this garden, this home to tend and I am so incredibly grateful for it all. We (I?) tend to forget that change is life’s only constant and that change takes time to unfold, that it takes some destruction of ourselves to occur, some little or greater death of self for new life to spring forth. I have spent many, many years fighting this - afraid of the darkness, afraid of the unknown, terribly, terribly afraid of what might come if the might and the power I exhorted myself to exercise should ever come to an end.
“Ora so que la vulnerabilità è l’arma più potente.” - I know now that vulnerability is the most powerful of arms. I wish this for me, for you, for all and everyone of us.
In the next journal entry, I will let you in on a very special project that I’ve been working on and is about to see the light of day (!!!!) and then, I will resume my writings with more about the plans and design inspirations I am drawing upon as I embark on this new project. Today, however, I simply wanted to say hi, share this new chapter with you all and those waves and currents that make up so much of my/our lives.
With much love,
Camille
We were meant to be friends, and sip tea in our Tasha Tudor-esque gardens.
I say that speaking as a woman with a small country house, and a baby orchard plowed down yearly by the deer, who I love deeply. I love them maybe more than the plums that will never ripen, or the baby pears that seem to always drop from the one tree planted inside the potager fence, yes that one tree is the one that seems to have some strange blight in its bones. Alas, we try, and we drive to the grocery store for our fruit.