The Journey As Home
When I woke on Istanbul mornings in spring and summer ... there was already a breathless quality to the air. You knew you were in a city, inside a dome of pollution with its gradually darkening layers that reached their most discoloured at the point where they appeared to touch land.
But there was a smell that went with it ... so unlike my New Zealand scentscape that instead of rejecting it, I loved it as 'city', perhaps in the same way that I love different perfumes for memory, mood and ocassion. Pollution is my city perfume, first smelt in Los Angelos and forever associated with that city of sunshine.
Antwerpen shares this city scent, mostly particularly on blue-sky-sunny-days. The sky appears to be deep blue at the uppermost point of the dome but slowly the graduated layers of pollution appear to thicken until they touch the ground and the air becomes deeply discoloured in the distance. The air quality here is better than Istanbul but it is also cooler, less exotic and less full of promise. It doesn't matter, I still love this scent of a living breathing city.
I will deny it back in New Zealand. There are a million smells I love there. I have memories of waking at Lake Rotoiti, in a cabin in a Beech forest and only being able smell the sun heating the trees after a stormy night... the air was thick with Nature. And there is the incredible smell of the wet forest down at Tautuku ... the rotting top layer, the ferns and old trees, with the scent of the Pacific Ocean, just a few 100 metres away, mixing with everything. I always wish to bottle that smell and carry it with me.
I sat for a long time at the edge of a lake close to Queenstown. It was up in the hills and I was trying to break down and identify the incredible air there. Perhaps it was a mix of Rosehip and golden grass, of Matagouri and the lake itself ... it was complex and simple in the same moment.
Matsuo Basho wrote that, 'everday is a journey and the journey itself is home'. Perhaps this explains my fickle nature, I can love both the land and the city ... the journey is home for me.
I will deny it back in New Zealand. There are a million smells I love there. I have memories of waking at Lake Rotoiti, in a cabin in a Beech forest and only being able smell the sun heating the trees after a stormy night... the air was thick with Nature. And there is the incredible smell of the wet forest down at Tautuku ... the rotting top layer, the ferns and old trees, with the scent of the Pacific Ocean, just a few 100 metres away, mixing with everything. I always wish to bottle that smell and carry it with me.
I sat for a long time at the edge of a lake close to Queenstown. It was up in the hills and I was trying to break down and identify the incredible air there. Perhaps it was a mix of Rosehip and golden grass, of Matagouri and the lake itself ... it was complex and simple in the same moment.
Matsuo Basho wrote that, 'everday is a journey and the journey itself is home'. Perhaps this explains my fickle nature, I can love both the land and the city ... the journey is home for me.