The inescapable joy of Sardegna
When we first heard about Sardegna, Italy, we were not interested in the luxury hotels, mega-yachts, and billionaire hideaways of the Costa Smerelda. I didn’t know of this bombastic side of the Mediterranean’s second-largest island (after Sicily,) where Russian oligarchs had recently encountered the impact of Europe’s sanctions and been frozen out of their villas. Instead, we were looking for a place to hunker down, for me to have time to write and rest without breaking the bank account.
Friends had hiked in the Valle della Luna and mentioned its strange rock formations that had the mysterious vibe of Joshua Tree, including having a hippy history. A bohemian hangout in a place named for a moonlike landscape, albeit one lush with myrtle and heather, seemed like it held a laid-back sensibility more aligned with our purpose. We found ourselves nearby in Santa Teresa di Gallura. I scored a sweet rental home built into boulders nesting on a hill, and featuring three herb-lined terraces that staggered up from the outdoor deck to a rock face that overlooked the sea at the Strait of Bonifacio with Corsica to the north. We couldn’t believe our luck. In mid-October we’d be fully outside of tourist season, with a chance for some swims in the ocean before the autumn descended. The house had a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and an outdoor deck, so for the first time since we packed up our home months ago, we would have space for privacy without one of us having to leave.
I had three weeks to edit my novel in the mornings and head out to hike or hang at the beach in the afternoons. I’d have my recovery anniversary here (26 years,) and as was our custom, we’d do some kind of private Samhain1 ritual to celebrate our ancestors. In order to do these things, we’d have to skip a lot of the things people came here for—the ancient Nuragic sites, many archeological buildings, most of the town square. In our wandering journey, choosing had become second nature to us. We tried to stay wise to the way we wanted to live rather than succumb to allure of tourist destinations.
We often found ourselves focused on what we could do with the energy and money we had, rather than what we’d do if we were staying for a week, which would be to cram in as much as possible. This journey wasn’t like the vacations we’d had before, but instead a way to be in other places while we lived our lives. We unpacked. We got into a routine. We drove into town, perched on the promontory overlooking Longonsardo tower, built by the Spaniards in 1577 as a garrison to defend against pirates, stripped off our shoes and walked down to the sand. On Fridays, we ate a spectacular pizza, and on Sundays, we went to a restaurant for lunch, but we mostly went to the market to buy fruit, cheeses, bread, seasonal vegetables, and gelato, trying a new Italian specialty each time. Our host had left a pantry full of local foods, encouraging us to help ourselves, and we did, grazing on local olives, pastas, and grains.
But the real bellisimo was in the eerily translucent swims in the sea. This was the first time I’d been in such pristine water that I could see my shadow on the ocean floor. At the Rena Majore, Rena Bianca and the most glorious beach of my life—Rena di Levante, a protected cove, we swam with little blue sunfish, and floated looking up at the giant boulders of the Capo, and then read books on the beach, gorging on biscotti and chocolate. We hiked through the Capo Testa, finding in the old olive groves and boulders the places where people had taken over abandoned homes tucked into the rocks at the top, barely able to be seen. On my day off, we hiked Isola Rossa at the coast, turbulent days where the roiling sea smashed against the rocks and carried the salty spray into our mouths.
We were between things. We didn’t know how to imagine what might be ahead of us, where we would live, how we would make home. Home had become our bodies, the moment in which we existed. I had a tougher time not knowing the future than my partner who, since his brain event/liberation, nearly always lived in that radical present. The not-knowing also helped me think and act differently. In a new place, I could open myself to what was already happening, instead of willing things to be a certain way. This became a subtle but powerful realignment toward not allowing external conditions to determine my joy.
In a couple of weeks, the Maestrale winds from Corsica in the north would begin to thrash the soft-branched oak trees outside our bedroom window, and we watched them like it was television, astounded with how they could bend and retain their shape. The shifting weather and the late season quieted the villages, and the weather made it dangerous to drive. We learned to rest here, the daily riposo a reminder to appreciate other cultures and ways. Ciaran storms brought high winds and rain to the island, with ferries suspended. Mighty storms are part of life here, but the climate crisis makes them more frequent and intense.
Around this time, I began to read Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker’s work, “Weathering: Climate Change and the "Thick Time" of Transcorporeality” that imagines “when we hold onto the belief that we can separate our human bodies from climate (close our doors, resist the winds), we maintain a worldview of relating to the earth, rather than worlding with it.” The tree against the bedroom window had a trace, an echo and a past that was surely winding its way into our bodies on these days when we could no longer get in the rental car and go, when we were beholden to the elements that kept us still but not isolated. In a letter sent to friends that month, I wrote, “I am sitting in bed writing this letter, while the voracious Sardegna island Maestrale wind outside my window scatters dust and acorns and essence of the holm oak tree into my breath and skin and blood, feeding me. I don’t know what these words would be without these wild, unpredictable ones. Or are they only unpredictable to the me through whom they’re newly transiting, the me who has not known them yet?”
This inimitable beauty of this wild place had become in those weeks a force that affected every little thing, shaping every breath, every step, every moment, even the ways that my language connected me to the ones who were far away geographically, yet knit into my body in thick time. I’m still wondering about all the ways that this might be so, and how all this wandering to places once considered foreign might be altering the patterns that I was born with, my genetics and my habits. Part of changing our conditioning seems to be a radical re-routing of experience so that thoughts are also liberated from the dogma that imagines human bodies separate from other-than-human bodies. I often wanted this re-imagination of what life is to shake me, this was what I had gone out to these strange places for.
What I didn’t know was that one tree, one swim, one act of contact could liberate an entire narrative about how we exist.
By November, we would pack to re-enter society, first in a trip to see art in London, and then onward to San Diego for the holidays with our children. By the end of that trip overseas, we had decided to extend the wandering by renting a furnished flat in Vancouver, a city that we wanted to explore. We first imagined 90 days on the road, and now we are at eight months with our things in storage. There’s motion toward a new home, one that we’ll create out of a vision of multigenerational living and extended arts community. I’ll speak more about that soon. But for now, suspension. Dreaming and writing. Daily wandering. Love.
Next time in Wanderland, I’ll write about our recent trip to Scotland and the Isle of Skye, and the hiking adventure with our family that introduced us to munros, creags, beinns, and a magic still alive in the bogs of the Highlands.
If you’d like to write with me, put your name on the class list for Liberating Narratives here. One class has already sold out.
Prompts for this month:
Write about a time where something unexplained led you to living in another way.
Like the storm was for us, what weather/climate are you “worlding” with these days?
Is there an element or being in the natural world who you’d like to have a conversation with? Write how that dialogue might go.
Happy wandering, friends,
Sonya
PS - This newsletter is likely changing over the next year as I begin to write about the themes related to my two upcoming books—a nonfiction book on historical and present day racial violence as well as a novel about genocide and its generational impact upon a body and a psyche. In the next two months I’ll be wrapping up Wanderland as it has existed as a journal of travel and dreams during a life transition. I’ll be launching a newsletter in the months ahead around writing and will give you the option to subscribe when those changes are made. Thanks for your support as I determine how to be in the public view with these difficult stories.
You can find Sonya at~
The podcast I did with my kid.
SOW-in is a Celtic celebration marking the beginning of winter and the end of harvest season on All Hallow’s Eve, and is one of the four Gaelic celebrations our Irish/Scots/Brit ancestors observed. Early literature says great gatherings and feasts marked Samhain when the ancient burial mounds were open, which were seen as portals to the otherworlds. Today, we make ancestor altars and honor the ones who have passed.
Hello from writing workshops past! I find myself looking forward to your words and am endlessly inspired by them. Thank you for putting your writing out into the world and for being that spark when my pilot light is dim!
I’m (somewhat selfishly) VERY much looking forward to reading about your time in the Isle of Skye. A few years ago I discovered—thanks, Ancestry.com—that my dad is not my bio dad and, therefore, I am not in fact Czech but Scottish! The shores the seaweed the slow seasons the selkies the mist have long called—now I know why ✨
Wishing you peace, love, health, and adventure until our next workshop together. May your words continue to flow 🤍
My last trip was 20 days split between Romania and Bulgaria, best described as the more jam-packed style of travelling with all the highs and hotspots, though in low season). I reflected a lot on how travel shifts me into a new way of being and relating to the world around me. I find myself feeling more conscious of my presence in these new places, my relationship to what I'm seeing - perhaps because it's all so unfamiliar. Lately, I feel like I prefer the travel version of me. It offered me such a stark contrast to the routined/at home/habituated Meghan - even as someone who is constantly observing these routines and wondering how I can live in more alignment. Constant travel wouldn't have much appeal, either - unless I adopted a different mindset about what it means to wander long-term. I suppose it's just not feasible with running businesses and raising small kids. But a part of me came home feeling like I just wanted to uproot my whole life. This is where my curiosities are right now.