travel and inspiration – by Hannah Warry-Smith

What’s this? A Tuesday post? Yes! The last one was in late September and here at Continual Breathing, we make our own rules! Enjoy this much-belated post that has been stuck in draft-mode for weeks.
I mentioned in my last post that in September I went on a trip to New Mexico. My friend Julia (she has a substack too! clothes horse! It’s the best thing!) and I went to a music festival on Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived for the last many years of her life and found her creative inspiration. We also did some road tripping and spent time in Santa Fe (finally bought my own pair of tried ‘n’ true cowboy boots!) and Taos (mountains!!!). I’d never been before, but had long coveted the New Mexican landscape as one dear to my heart. It was a perfect end of summer trip, where the evening breeze was still (mostly) warm, and as we drove through the winding mountain roads, we could see patches turning yellow and red up the sloping hills in the distance. We drove over the Rio Grande several times, saw an elk on the side of the road at night, bent our necks looking up at the stars, and rode horses through the sage. It was the kind of trip that takes a long time to leave your body after, which is why, more than a month later, I’m still going on about it.

Every time I go somewhere new I get a burst of creative inspiration. I dust off my leather travel journal with its replacement pads of paper strung inside, and flip the page from what is always, sadly, the previous entry from at least a year before, ready to re-commit myself. I find stories in snippets of people or scenery that sometimes flourish into actual pieces of work, and sometimes stay in a folder on my computer titled ‘older writing’, collecting digital dust. I suppose it comes with the territory of arriving somewhere; don’t we all end up putting on our kid glasses and seeing the world with new awe and wonder? Don’t we all point out horses and cows in fields off side roads, and stop to stare at the clouds? How can you NOT get inspiration from taking extra time to soak up the world?
On top of just being in a new place, I think the other reason that inspiration tends to strike me more when I’m away from home is because I make more of a concerted effort to read when I’m travelling. Don’t get me wrong – and if any of my Masters professors are somehow reading this, believe me!! – I absolutely read at home. I usually have a book thrown in the backseat of my car (right now it’s Who By Fire by Matti Friedman, about Leonard Cohen’s trip to the Sinai desert in 1973) and I have a small but ever shifting stack by my bed (Currently, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and Two by Two by Eve Babitz are duking it out for the top spot), not to mention whatever gets hauled home in my bag after I inevitably wander into a book store during the day. I love reading and I love books and this may be controversial in 2024 but Kindle will never get me! I know it’s unreasonable to travel with real books but I don’t care, and I’ll be lugging hardcovers onto planes, trains and into cars until the day I die!




Strangely, driving through the mountains and vast plains of sage in New Mexico reminded me of a Yehuda Amichai poem, titled poem without an end. I’ve put it below, at the end of this post, so you can read it. Though we were thousands of kilometres from Jerusalem and the Negev desert, though we didn’t pass any synagogues (did spot the Taos Chabad house though, which I was surprised to see in a town of roughly 5,000 people at an elevation of 7,000 ft! Go tribe!), it crept into my mind from where it lives eternally, nestled in some deep part of my skull that is connected to the rest of my body with what feels like an old, thin, but ever reliable string.
I think the poem showed itself to me because the landscape, however unfamiliar in the physical sense, was so familiar on a deeper level. On the trip, Julia and I talked about how it feels to walk through a desert; how it feels like something long churning coming to fruition, because in a way, it is. How many generations before me have sat around a seder table, proclaiming next year in Jerusalem? Too many to count, surely. My bones are made of calcium and Judaean desert dust. It’s why I sat in the backseat of a friend’s car years ago in Joshua Tree, where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meet, silently crying at the expanse of it all. It’s why the sunrise I saw at Masada shifted something in me – made me feel calmer for the rest of the trip. More whole. I felt it watching the red rocks bleed in the morning light at Ghost Ranch and when Julia and I walked to dinner through Taos and saw a sunset so spectacular through the clouds and mountain ridges that we stopped on the street corner and found ourselves saying “Ok, ok, we get it. We believe in God.”
It’s easy to get caught up in every day aspects of life that don’t as easily show us the unfolding magic of the world. It’s happened to me, beating myself up for not writing as much as I want to in the last few weeks as work and life stress has piled up. It happens often, it is a constant tug of war with myself and what needs to get done in life and devoting time to writing and other creative pursuits. It’s hard to pause a life and things you have to do for more time alone with words. Travel certainly breaks that up, and gives an easier opportunity for creativity and inspiration to sneak in, but in the times in between trips, I’m going to vow, here and now, to try and make more of an effort. To find that balance. To find that buried place in my heart and, day by day, coax it out into the open.
Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum– yehuda amichai, poem without an end
h
link