The Sound of the Sea
Happy New Year with a little Longfellow & wintering in Amalfi.
Buon anno!
It’s a fresh new year and the holiday season is coming to an end in Amalfi. The sparkly Christmas lights around town will soon be gone and the quietest season of the year is beginning. As if knowing there was just a little more calm in the air, my voice seems to have returned.
Somewhere in the midst of a chaotic and challenging—and really hot—summer last year, my voice went into something like a hibernation. One never suspects a summer hibernation. I don’t even think I had the time to notice it had gone. Well, not gone. Just taking a break. Or maybe it got lost? There are just so many twists and turns on the Amalfi Coast Road …
“Storytelling is a strange thing, imagination is a fragile magic, sometimes you have to go looking and wander off and get lost.”
I have sat down to write here on Ciao Amalfi many times since last summer, but it wasn’t until December while out walking early in the mornings that the words started to find their way back. The author Katherine May, who has an inspiring Substack called The Clearing, has been helping me through this winter with her aptly named book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, but in the end it arrived at exactly the right time. (As the best things always do.)
Listening to the audiobook while walking, what resonated the most was her discussion of recovering from a period of having lost her voice - in her case literally. She found:
“Sometimes you have to take a few steps back and start somewhere else.
—Katherine May, from Wintering
It’s been exactly a year since I started taking early morning walks here in Amalfi. When I began heading out just at sunrise last January, it quickly became my favorite part of each day. I had no idea that such a simple habit would become a creative place for finding new ideas - and be a necessary calm to carry me through the year.
In inadvertently taking a few steps back from my newsletter, I seem to have found a new starting point. Sometimes you can even find the clouds your head is stuck in underfoot.
“Our inspiration is the fruit of our solitude. Left to our own devices, we discover a wealth of thoughts. We pursue inklings and ideas. We chase our mind with curiosity: What next?”
—Julia Cameron, from Write for Life
From those quiet morning walks, and many many kilometers (and audiobooks) later, my mind—and notebooks—are brimming with ideas for what’s next. That’s exactly what you’ll find spilling over into my newsletter this year. Those daily walks have also been a time for me to reconnect with Amalfi and one of the simplest things that brings me joy - the sound of the sea. Give it a listen here:
I’ve had many unexpected companions over the past year; one of the most constant has been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. From an epic 15-hour audiobook biography (excellent) to sitting under the bougainvillea covered pergolas at the Anantara Convento di Amalfi Grand Hotel where he strolled, visiting his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spending time in the archives at the Longfellow House and reading his final journals in the Harvard archives, it has been quite a journey. And it has only just begun!
It all started one morning on a walk as the first sun hit the Convento hotel (like the photo above) making it glow a golden that only lasts moments. A little voice inside me asked: “But who was the man who stood up there and was so moved by the view to have written such a beautiful poem about Amalfi?” Without realizing it, that was a: What next?
So I’ll close for now with some of Longfellow’s words and the promise to meet you all again right here soon.
The Sound Of The Sea
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.
Isn’t that something? The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul. I am looking forward to following the tides of inspiration into 2024.
Thank you for sticking around over this unexpectedly long break. I’d love to hear what’s next for you!
Ciao from Amalfi,
Laura
PS: A little more sound of the sea and dancing sunshine in Amalfi.
Winter Reads
If it’s winter where you live or you’re feeling like you’re also in the middle of what Katherine May calls a winter moment of life—which can happen no matter the season—here are a few links:
Pick up a copy of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May.
Her book The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home is next up on my morning walk listening list.
“Keeping the Long Midwinter” from Katherine May’s Substack The Clearing.
Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is one of my all-time favorite reads. It’s something of a love story to reading and those we long to read with.
Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes is the biography I mentioned above. It’s a good read (or listen!) especially for the in-depth research about Lonfellow’s wife Fanny Appleton Longfellow.
An oldie but a goodie: “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer.
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Find more on www.ciaoamalfi.com. My books: Moon Amalfi Coast & Moon Southern Italy. The Ciao Amalfi newsletter may contain affiliate links.
It's so strange-- the ebb and flow of creativity. Wonderful to have you back!
Lovely! I signed up for your newsletter about a year ago, in advance of a trip to Amalfi last April (it was fab). How funny to see that you were just a short distance down the river from me in Cambridge (I’m in Boston)! And researching Longfellow, who went to, and taught at, my alma mater, Bowdoin College. I’ll need to read that book. Anyway, you sound rejuvenated, much as I was after visiting your neck of the woods. Travel can do that for you 😁