#1 Introducing Soulscapes
a reintroduction | showing up for your inner child | stories the land holds
Hi friends, it’s been a while - and if you’re new here, welcome to Soulscapes (formerly known as Wonderings - explanation below!). I hope you’ve been keeping well and, if you’re in the UK, you’ve been able to make the most out of the sunshine 🌻
Welcome to Soulscapes
Earlier this year, the Dulwich Picture Gallery held an exhibition called Soulscapes, featuring contemporary landscape art from artists in the African Disaspora. I took myself there on a day off in April, beginning a tradition of going on monthly solo dates. I put on a cute outfit and headed on the long journey to South London, by tube, train and then foot, finishing a book along the way. Arriving at the gallery, I was greeted by open lawns and a large cherry blossom tree swaying in the wind. Children played on the grass and elders sat sipping tea on benches outside. Like an oasis, time was suspended for play, rest and presence.
Walking through the tall arch of the gallery into the exhibition turned out to be just a formality: with the luscious greens, yellows, purples and reds filling the rooms, nature’s aliveness was just as palpable inside. In photographs, paintings, video installations and fabrics, were Black people in real and imagined landscapes, in nature in ways I had never seen before in art. Soulscapes challenged the histories of landscape art, a form steeped in Eurocentrism that holds ideas of neutral land, a pastoral idyll, a sentimental utopia. Through the themes of belonging, memory, transformation and joy, the exhibition offered an alternative view on landscape art that put place, identity and power at its core: ‘landscape cannot exist let alone be understood in abstraction from human perception’.
This exhibition invites the visitor to consider how our emotional, inner relationship with our ‘natural’ surroundings might be informed by the territories of our soul, the constituent parts of our identity and the layers of our personal histories, cultural values, gender, family relations and beliefs. It explores how this soul territory informs how we experience and feel about the stretches of forest, field, parkland, mountain range or the expanses of sky, the rolling surfaces of sea, lake or river.
I’ve been thinking about this exhibition and the idea of a ‘soulscape’ since visiting. Beyond our souls shaping our experience of landscapes, I’ve deeply internalised the idea of the soul as a landscape, a protected territory of its own valleys and rivers and mountains and seas. It was a reminder of a guided meditation I once completed. I was prompted to ask my inner self if had anything to tell me. What I remember is the image I received: a version of myself sitting on a large rock in a desert, legs swinging and looking out onto the plain that extended far into the distance. All around me was a sky full of lilacs and deep pinks and purple. It’s an image I often return to and take an allegory of my life. These plains for me to explore, for my path to unfold. There are treasures and bones to be unearthed, wonders to be discovered.
This is where the new name for this newsletter comes in. My least favourite part of writing is naming things. It feels like a Goldilocks exercise of wanting to get a title just right. While Wonderings was close, Soulscapes is better - it is just right. The name has given me clarity and refined what I’m doing in writing this newsletter and the space I am hoping to create for myself and others: expanding the heart, exploring the territories of the soul, creating a nourishing space for reflection and beauty. In each newsletter, I will share some reflections and recommendations and my hope is that you (and I) will feel richer, more present and more alive 💛
On Writing & Showing Up
Apart from one fruitful Saturday in June, I have done very little writing recently. We writers often joke that writing is also thinking about writing, but eventually comes the realisation that writing (shock horror) requires you to actually write. However difficult it is tending to the letters, the words, the punctuation, the structure, however difficult it is to accept the gap between the writer you are and the writing you aspire to be, the act of writing - sitting at your desk, in bed, on the sofa, with a pen and notebook, an open laptop - is remarkably simple. You write.
What isn’t so simple is the journey to the page. Years ago, at the end of a series of acting classes, my teacher said, your work is so beautiful when you take the end off. Take the end off. The phrase has stayed with me because I see the way it applies in many areas of my life, a reminder of how I often experience myself: as an obstacle and an obstruction. Coming to the page is often an emotional rollercoaster. The countless starts and stops: the excitement of having an idea, opening a blank document, and soon enough, I find my chest tightening, an enclosing pressure that squeezes the life out of the excitement, the idea, and I find myself paralysed, unmoored from my intuition. At times like this, I am most vulnerable to the ideas and opinions of others. I find myself looking all around me for direction - what I should write, what is popular, what is worthy of being read. Eventually, I tell myself that it is better to sit on the sidelines and protect myself from my own shadows.
I’ve noticed I experience this more frequently when writing for Substack than my other, unshared writing projects. Because the truth is, for all the positive attributes of Substack as a nicer and more community-oriented social media platform, it is still a social media platform. That means raw, hard performance metrics. I lie to myself when I say I’ll take a break from Substack to focus on other writing, when really, I feel the need to alleviate my discomfort and the exposure I feel sharing my writing online. When I first joined Substack, I was impressed and unnerved by the depth of data and analysis - views, opens, shares, top readers etc etc. It is almost impossible to avoid them. To create and share your creations in a public, online space today means it’s inescapable to judge their performance. Even if you are less/unbothered, it is difficult to not be aware of the marketplace: that the numbers are a sign to others that you (your art) is worthy of their time and attention. The metrics feed into the part of me that thrives on validation, the gold star, the part of me that seeks to do her best - the best - and who wants to be noticed and seen. Creating art of any kind is to sit with your own reflection and be in an intimate relationship with yourself, to reckon with all these difficult, hidden parts that rise to the surface and demand to be confronted, or else they threaten undo you. And so the dance of building the courage and retreating, courage and retreat, and the question of who will win.
There are parts of me that don’t give up so easily. Parts that tell me I am capable and good and more than enough. Parts that can point to the evidence of certificates and publications. Parts that are confused why I find it so hard to accept all this goodness. Parts that know what it feels to be out of my own way, to be free and uninhibited, to be capable of being a conduit for self-expression and for beauty. And among them all is that whole part, the little girl within me, who just wants to express herself and who, before the gold stars and the numbers, would write and tell stories because it was always what she loved.
As I enter a season of being truly and deeply committed to showing up for myself, I find myself in a new dynamic to the creative process. Yes, there are parts that try to protect me by sowing doubt and anxiety and fear, and I know that sometimes they will get the better of me. But then, even then, I know they don’t belong to me, nor do they define me. I’ve found new resilience. There is something powerful in saying I will not be defeated. In getting up and trying again. And in all of this, remembering who this is all for. I recently found a note from my seven year old self about her love of reading stories. I welled up at her innocence and simplicity, how she didn’t know what her words then would mean to me now. Showing up is knowing that little girl is always there, and that she deserves and celebrates all my efforts. She is just so proud of me, and your inner child is proud of you too.
What the Land Holds
Do you ever find yourself wondering who has treaded the same path as you? I mean this in a literal sense - who has walked on the same streets as you, lived in the same home as you, taken the same bus as you and so on. How did they interact with the space? What were their rituals and relationship to it? I’m not sure when I began to pay attention to the layers we make on the spaces and places we exist in, but I’m fascinated by this invisible topography and interconnected web of relationships and interactions with each other and our environment. We shape places through our presence and absence, contributing to routine, disruption, health and harm. I think, for example, of the dad who takes his two girls to school in the morning. If I look outside my window at around 8.25 on a school day morning I’m sure to see them, the older girl on her scooter ahead, the other holding her dad’s hand. I find great comfort seeing them through the seasons, noticing whether they are rushing or on time; I wonder what has happened when I don’t see them. I imagine we have all experienced something like this, the familiar stranger that assures us all is as it should be.
Where I am transient, the land/building/space is permanent (or at least more permanent than me). And so I wonder what happens when I am not present. Life goes on, moments occur and pass: the place holds and contains it all. All the beauty and the horror.
Phoebe Boswell’s I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know (2019, above) is a 19 minute meditation of life on a beach in Zanzibar. The two-channel video loop, recorded over many years, is projected onto a tall screen depicting the stories the sands and the waters hold: fishermen, children at play, men chatting, a fire burning, a group of women on their way, the ever presence of birds. The shores are the foundation for life, a structuring force that shapes the movement and rhythm of the place. Time is collapsed and it is unclear who exactly is on the beach at one time or another which is, exactly the point: they are all on the beach through their literal presence and the trail of presence they have left behind. We are always leaving traces, the record of who we are and who we have been is held in these interactions, held in the places we inhabit and pass through. We are always in conversation and connection with each other. As the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh wrote, we are in a community of interbeing. We inter-are with one another and all of life. There is no separate self, separate story.
Reflecting on composing the video back in her studio in London, Kenyan born Boswell says, “it’s both poetic but it’s also awkward. There’s a kind of awkwardness to my gaze. And that’s something I’m always considering: how is my gaze compromised by place, by who I am and where I am contextually right now.” The quotidian life shared in the video exists in the context of overfishing, climate change and the impacts of tourism on the island. So much of the everyday - of its beauty, joy and wonder - exists in the context of violence and harm: failing state apparatus, economic instability, discrimination, capitalism. Like a rose growing in concrete, the beauty finds a way to survive. To refuse one story of the land for another, saying look here, look at what is possible. And so, as I look out onto the world, I consider my gaze. How is it generous? How is it problematic? What are the web of relations that exist here? How am I helping or harming? How can I bring more beauty and joy?
🌳 Reflection Prompts
What are your soul’s colours, textures, light and shadow? What natural landscapes are present? Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and allow yourself to look out to your inner world and imagine the landscape of your soul. (Paint, draw, gather objects etc if you like!)
What does your inner child need you to show up for today?
How are you being an obstacle to yourself? What’s one thing you can do to remove it?
Think of a place or space you visit often. What is your relationship to it? To the other people present/absent? What stories are held by the space? What stories can you imagine being held?
🌸 Recommendations
Read my first newsletter on walking and wonder for more on how we interact with our environments (featuring my lovely mama).
Listen to this live performance of Ever New by Beverly Glen-Copeland
Physically hug someone you love (bonus points if they’re someone you haven’t seen/won’t see for a while). Hold it, don’t let go. How does it feel?
Message someone who came to mind. Or, if you dare, call them.
Listen to this episode of Hurry Slowly on the importance of honouring your own idiosyncrasies
If you enjoyed reading these reflections and recommendations, please share and leave a comment below. I hope we can build a nice community of vulnerability and beauty here 💛
Soulscapes also has an Instagram (!) where I share lovely words and images so be sure to follow :)
Thank you for being here.
Love,
S
Beautiful. I love the new name and some of the pics from the exhibition lit me up! x
Thank you Becky! X