Romanticism

I am largely a romantic. I like thinking how all the threads of my life end up being intertwined and linked in some way, even from just holding a crumbly rock. This morning I went riding in the bush and I heard the buzzing of bees, of firetails and wattle birds and the distant hum of cars going to work, the warm haze of the spring heat, the fine dust from the trail on my face and legs, and gazed out over the golden wattle covered hills. I felt happy to be there. I always get nuances of this feeling when I am up early, when I am somewhere where others often don’t go, when my fingers and legs are caressed by plants as I walk by, as they are scratched alive from the prickly ones, as I feel the coolness of rock when I place my palms on it and notice its ancient history, and when I am lying in my tent at dawn in a ferny forest listening to lyrebirds as I appreciate the last quiet silences before stepping out to cook jaffles and engage in banter once again on a bushwalk. I love these moments.

Everybody continually is deciding what is right for them in their life. One prominent thing that effects every part of my life is that I am a romantic, but I am still pragmatic and scientific.

Widespread to Romanticism is a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature. However this is particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. Romantics tended to believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

I feel nostalgic for people thousands of years ago in the ice ages. I feel for the people who, thousands of years ago, touched the rocks that I ran my hands over when I walked through farm villages in France. I am reminded of my late friend Pete’s painting of the pathways in life rolling over mountains and past rivers and into the sunset that he painted before he died.