A place to return to, room to wander
What draws me this October: cottages, gardens, gentleness, open country, and room for awe. A visual letter about embodied life and the relationships that give it meaning.
This month, I keep returning to pictures of cottages, gardens, animals, and people who seem at home among them.
There is a cottage with pale shutters, washing on a line, and a little table outside. There is an older woman—a baba—bending towards a cat in her garden. And there is a man standing in open country, a pack on his back, surrounded by grass and rock.
I don’t know the lives behind these pictures. A photograph leaves so much outside its frame. But something in them draws me: the suggestion of a life close to nature, with ordinary pleasures and things to care for.
The smaller images belong here too. Steam rising from a kettle. Bread, grapes, chocolate on a beautiful plate. A tiny frog resting inside a flower. Different kinds of abundance.
Some of the religious images touch something less easily explained. Faith, beauty, gentleness, longing, awe. Something unresolved. I want to leave room for that uncertainty. I can be drawn to an image without having settled everything it brings up.
God or no god, we are still embodied beings. We get hungry. We feel warmth. We reach towards other lives. Whatever answers we arrive at, there is still the question of how to live here, with one another.
I keep thinking about the difference between what exists, what we can sense, and how we interpret it. Much is unknown. Much is interpreted. That leaves me curious about my own assumptions, and about what another person might notice that I miss.
Meaning happens in relationships: with people, with animals, with places, with the things we attend to and care for. The cat leaning into a hand belongs in this collection as much as the candle or the open landscape.
The song beside these pictures is To a Poet by First Aid Kit. For me, it carries a longing for something natural and simple. That is the feeling I would place beside this month’s collection.
A cottage. A garden. A cat leaning into a hand. Open country, with somewhere still to go.
Let’s continue feeling awe, and exploring what being human is.
Collected via Pinterest; original creators not yet identified. The monk with a cat is labeled AI-generated.
