A storm that smells like tamarind: enormity, spaciousness and saudade
A storm that smells like tamarind: enormity, spaciousness and saudade
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
A friend and I decided to go for a clifftop walk. We stepped outside, and a smell grabbed me in a cartoon-fresh-pie kind of way. I have quite an acute sense of smell. This smell was subtle yet omnipresent. We strolled through the village and down the path to the ocean, and it persisted, now intermingled with the ocean humidity and salty undertones.
The next day, my partner and I walked our usual morning-routine route. There was that smell again, in a totally different place, on a different bit of coastline.
There was something about it that felt distinctly foreign. Perhaps it was dredging up a smell-memory from a time I had been in a distant land. Perhaps it was because it didn’t feel like it belonged here. And yet, there was something also familiar about it.
I honed in. I was taken to faraway places. It smelt like tamarind and sautéd curry leaves. Earthy, aromatic and slightly sweet.
Here, in this place, the wind is a constant feature of our lives.
I remember in my early days here, a Portuguese friend said to me, “Be careful of the north wind.” I thought, tssskkk, I’m from the UK, I know wind… and rain, and cold, and damp. But as it turns out, here, these are their own beasts.
That’s not to say that they are any more beastly. They are just different. And the relationship between them and the people and place is also different. (Actually, I lie, the wind is probably more beastly.)
We know when air is moving from the south because of its distinct feel and characteristics; sometimes, it even carries sand from the Sahara, leaving a fine powder on cars and turning the sky hazy pink. We also know when air moves from the north, with its chilly bite and slippery touch, having danced across the Atlantic and swooped down the coastline. We also know when the winds are offshore or onshore from observing the ocean’s surface.
Neighbours and friends will often discuss this as commonplace conversation. There’s a normalcy to it. Subtextually, we know ourselves as a transitory place for planetary forces far greater than ourselves. We know ourselves part of a tapestry woven together by the ethereal and ephemeral and enormous.
Pretty much every day, I will take pause to stare out at the ocean. I know her enormity – I’ve seen the maps. Beyond that, I can sense it.
Someone once told me that the Portuguese have always looked out to the ocean rather than inward to the land; the ocean has always had a hold over the people here. She has been a constant throughout time. A mysterious, wild presence that’s humbling and arousing.
The town nearest my village has a beautiful old chapel that rests above the traditional fishing harbour, Praia dos Pescadores. It is called Capela de Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem – the chapel of our lady of good voyage. There, every August since 1947, she is celebrated with a fisher’s parade and fireworks and candles and elaborate flower arrangements and music and dancing. There is honouring of those whose lives are entangled with the sea, whether lost or living or bygone. There is asking for protection and safe passage. And there is partying into the night.
I wonder if A Nossa Senhora is the Christianisation of an ancient sea deity and/or if this annual celebration overlays rituals of animistic worship. I wonder if A Nossa Senhora (Our Lady) is (or perhaps was) the ocean.
Here, quietly, subtly, distantly, I feel that there are histories of understanding that we are fragile, precarious and vulnerable little beings. I feel that there is a knowing that we are involved in the enormity of the forces of nature.
I’ve been pondering what this knowing does to the psyche (if there is such a thing).
I’ve been holding and observing this in the context of myself. There seems to be a shifting disposition. I’ve always been reflective and contemplative. But what I’ve been experiencing in recent years feels somehow distinct.*
Staring out, if my eyes were to make landfall, where would they arrive? Actually, it has nothing to do with my eyes. If I were swept up by planetary streams, coursing the Atlantic’s air currents, where would I land? Maybe the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe the Caribbean. Maybe Cuba. Maybe Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
That smell preluded the storms here. As I breathed them in, I read news of the ravaging hurricanes across the plain of water that I stare out on daily. I contemplate where they emerged from and how they were carried across the Atlantic to then be gifted to me in their sweetness, telling a tale of thousands of kilometres of distance and yet an entangled existence. I am connected to all that – wildness, aliveness, suffering. I can sense it. I can smell it.
There is a humbling enormity to that.
Since living here, that enormity holds me more… I’m not sure what the right word is… heavily, strongly, deeply? I feel more viscerally threaded into our planetary interbeing. It is not merely a cognitive exercise. It is felt and known, in the cold winds, in the earthy aromas, in the raging oceans, in the sandy pink skies.
As the storms arrive in intense deluges, I contemplate saudade. This word seeks to encapsulate <something> that sits within the Portuguese disposition. A longing. A melancholy. A wistfulness. A nostalgia. A poetic agony.
I asked ChatGPT to define it. Among its long answer, it said: “a nuanced emotional state where longing and appreciation intermingle … with a sense of melancholic beauty.”
I notice – perhaps even fear – that I may be starting to understand this feeling firsthand.
I wrote recently about beauty, saying: “Sometimes, when we create space to see beyond ourselves and feel into the rawness of what it means to be alive as temporal beings in an unfathomable existence, the world is so beautiful that it hurts.”
I will add “relational” as another adjective to “temporal beings”.
We are relational, temporal beings in an unfathomable existence.
When I really, and I mean really, feel into that, there is a deep melancholic beauty. To live into the fullness of our human experience is to weather all parts of it and our own emotions in relation to the humbling enormity of the world, of life, of the cosmos, of all we will never know or understand.
I ponder the relationship between enormity and spaciousness, the latter referring to the space we create in our lives in order to meet the world presently, mindfully, intentionally. I question how this place, at the threshold of terra firma and wild ocean, where I am embroiled in storms and enraptured by wind and the scents it carries, may have asked me to succumb to enormity in ways I haven’t before.
I think about Josh Schrei’s words on The Emerald podcast, episode (Why Mindfulness isn’t enough), “But mind isn’t ours. Where do we think that this mind that we speak of so often, and label ours so often, actually lives? The mind isn’t located in our heads. We aren’t isolated individual minds; we are facets of the mind, of the world. Land made what we call this mind. And this mind is land knowing itself.”
Am I, a relational, temporal being in an unfathomable existence, being entirely reshaped, being transformed by the enormous forces that are present here? Am I melding into a new territory? Am I becoming territory, and is territory becoming me?
“And this mind is land knowing itself.”
This reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote (which Josh hints at later in the episode), “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
It reads profoundly. Yet my weary head right now is struggling to fold into the depths of meaning of these statements. But maybe I shouldn’t try to be cognitive. Perhaps that misses the point entirely.
*I will say that, if you are paying attention, the years are getting increasingly heavy amid a worsening shitshow of polycrisis as the colonial capitalist paradigm exercises its might against uprising resistance. Yes, territory may be reshaping me. But I think also witnessing so much horror and pain is too.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
Interestingly, a few people have mentioned to me that they almost don’t believe that I write in a stream of consciousness, which has made me feel a bit sad that I may come across as disingenuousness. So I thought I’d share a little more of my process:
An idea, or seed of an idea, or most often, a quandary arrives with me, most often when I’m out running or walking; I often speak this out with friends and peers, sometimes over the course of weeks and months. These quandaries and ideas are always somehow related to the bigger inquires that I hold; so by the time I come to write about them, I’m normally still confused but I’ve sat in that confusion or thought-ecology for a while. Then I start writing, into the flow, usually with little to no idea of the structure. Usually half-way through, I take a beat to think about if this writing has something to say, something bigger than a dear diary entry; then I continue writing. Sometimes I return to it 2-3 times to finish it, because often I get creatively depleted. I always let it marinate before publishing, but I only tweak for grammar and sometimes clarity. Rarely, I remove sentences I can’t or don’t want to stand behind. Then I publish.
Recommendation
In each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world.
I’ve listened to this track non-stop for about a week. I first listened to it as I was driving along the coastal road, driving into sundown and sweeping vistas of the Sintra Hills seen through pluming sea mist that glittered in the warm light. I truly felt as if my life, in that moment, was a movie. It was so all-consumingly beautiful that I cried.
This weekend just gone, out of the blue, a friend asked me, “If your life were to be made into a movie, what would be the central theme or the one thing that would be pertinent for the audience to learn about you?” I couldn’t give her anything concrete – which she hated. I’ve thought about it since and realise that I love films in which complex characters are developed through the nuances of interactions, the subtleties of behaviours, postures and tone of voice, the negative spaces, the atmosphere created around them. May my atmosphere be this track.