Dreaming

We go on dreaming about the trip we hope to make across the Atlantic in 2015. No tickets yet, so it's still a dream, but it's a vivid dream and might well come true. I am hoping to catch up with comments today--at least to replies to my blips, if not yet to catch up with all yours. Sunday morning we went to the art museum to look at photographs and pictures, and as we sat in the museum coffee shop, we talked about our travel dreams and I sneaked this photograph of Sue.

For me, the trip of dreams has to include Wiltshire.

In 1973, when I was pregnant with the baby who would eventually become Bella's father, I read Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, the story of a monk and an adventurer. I recognized these two personae in myself, but while resting the book on my pregnant belly I was sharply aware that the life of a female Goldmund would be complicated by a child or children, and that is where her story would become far more complex and heroic than Hesse's. The life of a female Narcissus would be complicated further by the need for touch and connection. As mine has been.

I wanted to tell that story, or perhaps I only needed to live it.

I imagined I would set my novel in the 13th century in Wiltshire, with a nun at Shaftesbury and an adventurous woman working on the cathedral being built in Salisbury. I spent years doing research for the novel I am now not ever going to write, and I lived my version of the life of a contemplative monastic and the life of an adventurous single mother rolled into one. But in all those years, I never actually saw that cathedral, never saw Shaftesbury or its environs. I'm still living the final chapters of that story of Narcissa and Goldmunda, and I do hope to see Wiltshire.