Another patchwork quilt of a post. If you’re chilly this afternoon or evening, maybe you can pull it up around your chin to warm up? If I’ve lost you already — an emotional relationship? a patchwork quilt?! — sorry about that. You’ll miss out on a sailing riff on homing. Or perhaps a homing riff on sailing.
Rosslyn Redux is proof aplenty that I have an emotional relationship with my home. Boating, in general, and sailing, in particular, exert another lifelong emotional relationship. And lately there’s an unusual convergence between the two.
There’s a shift in the works, and I’m within it. Atop it. Sometimes beneath it. Like guiding a sloop through surging surf.
[…]
A home. A sailboat. Much overlap.
[…]
Coursing along, one with the turbulence, the urgency, the force pushing away and pulling toward,…
(Source: The Art of Flux)
Either I’m conflating the emotional relationships with Rosslyn and sailing, or there’s an overlap. A convergence of forces.
And I’m I’ll equipped to articulate exactly what’s happening at Rosslyn without leaning on sailing, literally and metaphorically. To shore up my blathering, I’ll pass the helm to Pete Goss. This passage from Close To The Wind, read with an eye to the parallels in my experience with a house, translate some of what I need to say.
The boat was starting to look and feel like a boat and I would let myself into the building at night when all was quiet to spend time on her. It is important to establish an emotional relationship with a boat and I would visualise us in the Southern Ocean. I was starting to psych myself up for the rigours of the challenge. It is something that I always do before a hard trip; I sail the course over and over in my mind, slowly building up the picture until it is 3-D, in full colour, and I can even imagine the smells and noises. I leave nothing out – from cooking a simple meal to facing the worst possible sea conditions. It is through this procedure that I make small changes to the boat, perhaps moving a grab handle a few inches from where it had been placed in the plans, for instance. I know, having already used them in my mind, what spares I will require for every kind of jury rig. I even know how I will feel after a particularly bad spell and what meal will most cheer me up. By the time the start gun goes I am taking on something that I feel I already know intimately.
Having sailed round the world a few times in my mind I then think about what will happen afterwards. It is important to have a long-term plan. There is always a bit of a downer after crossing the finish line, a kind of mourning. To end an adventure and think, ‘What the hell do I do now?’ is a mistake. Better to have the void already filled and be getting on with the next project.
— Pete Goss , Close to the Wind (1998), p103
Where from there? From sailing to homing, if possible.
It’s worth touching on the fact that Susan’s design school training and AutoCAD aptitude lend her a more logical, structured, sometimes methodical, and always more product-centric approach than mine.
My journey is slower, intuitive, meandering, profoundly experiential, and inevitably more process-centric.
Long before we were living in Rosslyn, I was imagining myself in the buildings, on the property, living, living, laughing. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I’ll abbreviate now.
Much like Goss, I was pregaming and experimenting, iterating and evaluating. My process of learning, connecting and learning, building a relationship with a home or a space within a home, or a landscape, an exterior space, is nothing if not romantic and psychological. Where Susan focuses from the outset on a finished product, I linger — always longer than she would like — in why’s, how’s, and what-if’s. I need to build an emotional relationship to draft map from which to navigate.
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