aesthetics of joy

Some vacations are about the sights you ache to see, the wonders of the world, the foreign landmarks that transform you. Others are much more prosaic, filling a need to slow down, immerse in simple pleasures, and feel human. (Both have their joys, but it is hard to have both at the same time.) Iceland for me was the former. And Ireland is the latter.

I blithely ignored all the must-see lists on this one. Every person who started a sentence with, “But you can’t go to Ireland without going to–” was met with a firm Diana Ross hand gesture. I wasn’t after transcendence. I was after a simple, quiet, textural haven. An oasis in which to hear myself think.

I set as my mission for the holiday (and yes, I had a mission – Type A is Type A, no matter we we are) to say yes to all things lovely, and no to all things taxing. So it’s lucky I ended up at Ballyvollane House, a family-owned inn where there are so many lovely things to say yes to. Yes to a homemade ham sandwich and a pot of tea in the sunny back garden. Yes to reading by the fire in the drawing room. Yes to a soak in the claw-foot tub. Yes to a walk around the grounds accompanied by Dumpling, a hedonistic terrier, who knows all the good spots and can’t resist a splash in the muddy ponds. Yes to orange-yolked eggs freshly laid by the hens out back, yes to rocket and fennel salad that tastes like it just came out of the ground, yes to subtly sweet vanilla-poached pears and cinnamon plums. Yes yes yes to homemade blackberry cordial, afternoon bellinis, and chocolate cookies that appear each night in your room in a mason jar. Yes to magnolias and birdsong and a tutorial in daffodils by Fleur, the youngest of the proprietors’ well-mannered children. (“When they’re new they’re nice and yellow, but then they get soggy.” So true.) In short, yes to the good life, experienced in thoughtful little moments, with no pretension or pressure whatsoever.

As someone who lacks the talent for moderation and has a tendency to forget to step away from the laptop, sleep eight full hours, and engage in activities in the real world, you must know that this place is truly my definition of heaven. There doesn’t seem to be any choice but to go with the flow. Justin and Jenny Green, the owners of Ballyvolane, do everything they can to make the place feel welcoming and intimate, without any of the kitsch of a typical B&B. It makes sense that it was Justin’s childhood home; it feels like a family place, a place with roots. (As a side note, they also do parties, meaning mostly weddings, and you can imagine a pretty magazine-worthy shindig happening here.)

In these days of devices and always-on lifestyles, a good oasis is a valuable find. Many places claim to help you relax, and they can force you to detach from the things that are stressing you out, but few can do the harder thing, which is to softly connect you back to the things that will renew your zeal for making meaning in the world. It’s worth remembering that a place can transform you. Not just in big ways, as when you’re standing at the base of a canyon or under a desert-sky full of stars. But in little ways that create beautiful immediacy. Go towards the beauty, or create it, and it will repay you far more than the cost of your travels.

Images, mine. And thanks to Designtripper for the recommendation that inspired the trip.

The painter of Ireland works with a green brush – this is nothing new. But I was unprepared for the extravagance of it all. On arriving in the Southeast, near Cork, my jet-lagged eyes had to recalibrate to process all the shades of green, all the textures. It is a kind of vegetal madness here, a raucous glut of sun-soaked growth. It is a cliché illustrated in hyperbole.

No surface is uncovered by moss or grass or lichen, no branch left unbowed by a corolla of leaves. The plant kingdom sorts itself messily into layers. Ferns spring out of tufts of olive-hued moss, on tree trunks filmed with algae. Grasses race skyward, indecorously. Duckweed forgets its place; it traces a lacy path up drains onto driveways, a cheery, swampy carpet. Frills of perennials pour out of crevices in walls. Spring got the memo here: It. Is. On.

I walk until I hit a fence, trace it until I find a gate and walk on. My footsteps compress the grass, scenting the air with chlorophyll. A rabbit skitters nervously across the field. Flora own this place; the fauna are just tenants here. And we modern, house-dwelling humans are only visitors – guests if we behave ourselves, interlopers if we misstep.

With fresh memories of winter, it is a joy to be in this landscape of renewal, immersed in such giddy reanimation. Liberated from ice and hard ground, the yellow-green fronds thrum with audible energy. Something in our souls is listening. This verdant quickening is our reveille, a call to slough off winter’s slowness and participate in regeneration. In temperate climates, it’s a profound inflection point in our relationship with our surroundings, marking the moment where the landscape begins to feel alive to us, and to be a source of energy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after listening to a wonderful interview with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (on a recommendation from my dear friend Mara). O’Donohue brims with wisdom about the relevance of beauty to meaning in life, and speaking of landscapes, he observes:

I think it makes a huge difference when you wake in the morning and come out of your house whether you believe your are walking into a dead geographical location which is used to get to a destination or whether you are emerging into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you but in a totally different form. And if you go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

(Before I go on, I must urge you to listen to the interview because reading the quote cannot give you the feeling you get from hearing O’Donohue’s placid, lyrical voice. I hope you will.)

Now, coming back to the topic at hand, the frenzy of unfurling and blossoming, the green, the growth – these aesthetics of renewal, the reminders of the simmering life in our surroundings. Why should we care about these artifacts of the landscape? Why, as O’Donohue says, should we be bothered with what they might reveal to us? Or rather, in an age where foraging is a hobby rather than a subsistence strategy, why should these inedible, unsellable displays matter to us at all?

Our emotions are often vestigial imprints of our ancestors’ rhythms, and without conscious explanation our neurotransmitters soak our brains with pleasure chemicals in these same cycles. No matter how detached from the earth we are in our workaday existence, our bodies vibrate to its frequencies. The return of greenness feels like a return to life. It’s why we hold festivals to celebrate cherry blossoms. It’s why we freak out about ramps. Spring is our stirring. It rises into us from the ground up.

(Also, a lush environment signals other things that might be beneficial. Clean air. Unpolluted rainwater. Sunshine. Good property values. This practical lens can’t be underestimated.)

Of course, the greenness is just the surface. That lush field is all cell division, pollen, and spores – plants grasping for one another like freshman at a frat party. All this wild greening is nature’s adolescence, and those allergies are testament to a large-scale seduction. These aesthetics of vibrance are also aesthetics of sex. And plant sex brings about all kinds of things we like, such as those that might be baked in a pie, or those that taste best with a sprinkling of sea salt and some Tuscan olive oil.

It’s strange to say from this vantage that I had no particular interest in Ireland before I ended up here. Soul-starved by a winter that dragged despite its mildness, I had a craving for verdure. But despite the platitudes of an emerald isle, sold to us Americans by cereal box leprechauns and intensely scented soap, I hadn’t thought about the greenness in the planning. It was almost an accident that I ended up here: a workshop that never happened, a scrambled plan, an affordable airfare. And suddenly I was here, submerged in it, and grateful.

Landscapes can wake us up, recall us to ourselves, stir us out of apathy, heal pains. They absorb tremendous anxiety and radiate energy. We are just starting to understand the emotional impacts of nature, but they seem to parallel the physical effects of plants, which complement our physiology, breathing in our effluent carbon dioxide, and exhaling oxygen. In seeing some rare, wild landscapes this week, I’m reminded of the destruction we are bringing to so many of these sacred places. I hope through a deeper understanding of what they give us, we might feel inspired to take better care of them.

Happy new year from Iceland!

Beginning a new year in this magical place has me brimming with energy and excitement for the year ahead. It’s been a beautiful and comforting trip, filled with new discoveries, friendships, and moments that simply took my breath away. I have thousands of photos to sort through, and stories aplenty to share with you in the coming days.

I feel restored in a way I haven’t felt in a long time, and this trip has afforded me many chances to reflect on what gives me inspiration and energy to compose and create. As I look back at 2011, I realize that at times I was guilty of living through my laptop, instead of placing myself in the circumstances of the joys I write about, and writing from the feeling. There are times for self-discipline, but that can have its own inertia, and it can lead to writing by brute force, rather than affection. Coming to Iceland, in search of light and magic, was an inspiring way to start a new habit. It will not always be international adventures (if only!), but in 2012 I’m resolved to spend lots more time outside the studio. I hope Aesthetics of Joy will be better for it.

Through the vicissitudes of work and life, across time zones and seasons and continents, I find myself ever grateful to have found such a solid source of happiness in writing this blog. I’ve met more kindred spirits through Aesthetics of Joy than I believed existed when I started. (New Year’s Eve was a perfect illustration of this, but more on that to come.) Thank you for the joy you’ve brought me in 2011, and here’s to even more joy for you all in 2012. Gleðilegt nýtt ár!

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

I’ve taken many plane rides before, but never seen a landscape quite like this. I recently stumbled upon this article showing Holland’s tulip fields from above. Can you believe there’s a landscape that actually looks like this? It’s like agricultural earth art. I had to dig up some more images for inspiration. Let’s hope all these April showers will bring us some, well, you know…

Images: livetowander, Daily Mail, powerfocusfotografie, Daily Mail, Samuel_Leo, _Darek, heavenuphere.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.

Painted by street artists El Tono and Nuria in Cordoba, Spain, these doors look like portals to somewhere special. And they probably are.

Cordoba is known for its courtyard gardens, of which the occupants are famously proud. I remember when I was there meandering the winding alleys, a good-natured young man a few years older than me and speaking no English insisted on leading me somewhere. I was 21 and wary, but he was headed the direction I was going anyway and so I followed at a distance. After a few minutes of walking this way, me suspiciously noting street names, him laughing at my suspicion, we arrived at a house with door wide open, framing a lush garden with an old woman sweeping the tiled floor. His home! After I greeted his mother and admired the courtyard, I was free to go, giddy and bewildered by the surprises that lay behind those foreign doors.

{via Unurth}

On Friday I had a post up on Brandchannel about a new initiative by Coca-Cola as part of their Open Happiness campaign. Coke is sending a trio of bloggers around the world for a year to “uncover insights about what makes people happy.” This latest installment in the soft-drink joywashing trend is notable for its intensity and scope — it’s not just an ad campaign, but a constant, year-long push spread over a range of social media platforms.

I think it’s an interesting idea, but it does grate on me to see Coke portray a brand-ambassadorship as a joy-finding mission. These kids are going to be spending barely a day in each country (206 countries in 365 days), barely enough time to exhale, much less derive meaningful understanding (or “insight”) into what makes people happy. But of course this isn’t an ethnographic exploration, it’s an exercise in generating brand stories — warm fuzzy narratives where Coca-Cola is a star character, if not the hero.

More interesting than the supposed happiness insights Coke’s floggers will uncover are the spontaneous interactions outside of Coke’s intentions that will undoubtedly occur along the way — the things that cannot be planned for or factored out when traveling in such unpredictable parts of the world. I don’t think this experience will deliver earth-shaking new insights into emotion, but I think it will illuminate moments of generosity, hope, selflessness, good humor, and compassion that will surprise us. For that reason (and perhaps a little vicarious living), I’ll be watching.

Brandchannel: Coke sends bloggers on an “Open Happiness” world tour

Cluster ballooning is your inner child’s (or inner daredevil’s) fantasy come true. I thought this was something scenic done for effect in movies (see The Red Balloon) — I never imagined people did this in real life.

Oh, but they do, some flying up to 4 miles high (!) in what they call a “something between a sport and a personal eccentricity.” John Ninomiya, a cluster ballooner with over 60 flights under his belt gives a beautiful explication of the sport’s peculiar combination between delight and daring:

Cluster ballooning is also something very beautiful and whimsical – like something from a children’s story, or something from a dream. For me, the tension between those two elements – being carried away with these huge, colorful toys, and at the same time, exercising the appropriate skill not to end up in trouble with the FAA, or possibly injured or killed – that’s what I find so interesting about cluster ballooning.

Cluster ballooning aesthetically is the confluence of so many joyful elements, it’s hard to name them all: round, shiny balloons, gathered together in an abundant mass; the transcendent floating and rising movements that make us look above the horizon; the freedom of flight, unencumbered by heavy craft; the wonder of being above the clouds, leaving the earth and then returning to it; and the absurdity that all this is done by a toy, the very same thing used to decorate a mailbox on a child’s birthday.

It’s an extraordinary feeling when something you never thought existed is revealed to you. As I child, the tug of a helium balloon on my wrist filled me with a fantasy of being carried aloft that was part wish, part fear, but all joy.

Read more about cluster ballooning here, and if you’re feeling brave, check out a tutorial here.

Another great weekend. Yesterday I took a day trip with my mom to see Philip Johnson’s amazing Glass House, in New Canaan, CT, which sparked some new reflection on a topic I’ve been pondering for some time: is there a relationship between joy and modernism?

In theory, that relationship is antithetical. Modernism strives for ideological purity, while joy revels in the odd, absurd, silly, and cute. Joy is obviously emotional, whereas modern design is guided by rationality — by principles of formal organization, visual proportion, and spatial balance. Joy is ebullient, modernism is restrained. Joy is youthful and lighthearted; modernism is serious and mature. The advent of modernism was really like a repression of joy, which burst forth in a haze of silliness in the post-modern era.

Form and color choices reflect modernism’s sober attitude, with a devotion to angles over curves and a limited color palette. It was interesting to see this study of average color calculated from MoMA’s art collection, the result being #A79F94, a dull warm gray. The study’s creator calls it “the color of art,” but I wonder if it’s more accurately “the color of modernism” — austere and serene.

Of course, this is not to say there are no joyful modernists. I think if you had to pick one, Eva Zeisel would be the obvious choice, but the Eames and the Scandinavians also had a more emotional, energetic sensibility. The movement evolved over time and softened. Still, a certain detachment and reserve is inscribed in modernism, and too exuberant a notion of form would be incompatible with the doctrine.

Yet, I felt joy at the Glass House. Standing in that transparent box, immersed in the fantasy of a home without walls — it was an exultant feeling. Glass becomes wondrous in this context, creating a porous connection between home and environment that is profoundly emotional. From the outside, the home almost disappears, lost in the play of reflections across its surfaces. From the inside, it expands outward. With no walls, the space is voluminous, endless, growing. And this airy expansion is a definitive aesthetic of joy.

Most of the time, if modernism achieves an emotional quality, it’s neutral serenity. More often, it’s an emotionally-detached sense of awe and inspiration. But as my weekend experience showed me, there are exceptions. Perhaps in spite of all the efforts towards rational purity, the modernist spirit every now and then rises up and revels in the joy of light, space, and form.

I guess moss isn’t the most obviously joyful plant. It doesn’t have brightly colored, showy flowers. It doesn’t have alluring scents. You can climb it, swing from its branches or play hide-and-seek behind its trunk.

But what moss lacks in all these ways, it makes up for in the pure delight of abundant texture. Moss is one of my fingertips’ absolute favorite things to touch. Like the scene in Amélie where she plunges her hands into a sack of dried beans just to revel in the sensation, my senses derive pure joy from the soft, cushiony texture of healthy moss.

This moss appeared on the last day of the trip. It’s the dry season, and most of the Galapagos landscape is desertlike, with spindly trees, spiky cacti, and a ground cover of greyish succulents. But on the last day we headed to the highlands to seek out some tortoises, and the lush, jungle-like environment was a delight after so much dryness. Rich, tactile mosses were everywhere, but of course when traveling in a foreign place the rule is look but don’t touch, and I had to be content with just a photo.

This is the 6th of my 14-photo series reliving joyful moments from my recent trip to the Galapagos. It’s part of an attempt to keep the vacation spirit alive a little longer, and I hope you enjoy them.

Lava lizards are underfoot on many Galapagos islands, perfectly camouflaged except for the bright spot of color under their necks. I love that peek of color.  If you look closely, you can see rust red, mint green, sunny yellow and a kind of apricot color too, all overlaid with chocolate chip-like spots. It reminds me of the joy I first felt in drawing, when I was forced to look at things really closely, and I realized how much there is at small scale in the world. If yesterday’s post was about big experiences that cause us to zoom out on the world, this one is about zooming in.

The lava lizard is among the smallest of the attractions in the Galapagos islands, and therefore often overlooked. But it’s a reminder to me that nature has way of cramming extraordinary beauty and wonder into incredibly tiny spaces.

One of the things that has struck me in all the interviews I’ve done on the subject of joy over the past 6 months or so is that many people have talked about moments of joy as moments where they felt “small.” At first I found this perplexing — it doesn’t fit with the expansive, larger-than-life, abundant nature of joy — so I dug deeper.

When talking about joy, people often talk about time spent with families, vacations, successes, and simple pleasures. They also talk a lot about experiences with nature, and often these are experiences with nature’s enormity. People talk about wrapping their arms around a giant redwood and realizing that tree has seen a world their grandparents didn’t even see, and may outlive even their grandchildren. They talk about sitting on a beach and contemplating the far horizon. They talk about stargazing and wondering at the contrast between the marvelous stillness they feel and the knowledge that they are actually hurtling through space at great speed. They talk about witnessing migrations of birds or vast schools of fish or seeing a world under a microscope.

I realized that small is about feeling in context. It’s about a realignment of perspective, an understanding that your worries about the noise your car’s muffler is making or the extra cookie you had at lunch are inconsequential. It’s a scale shift — what were big problems are now small ones. They don’t go away, they just reassume proper proportion, and in their place is a joy that comes from the freedom from all that pressure. It’s the ultimate kind of transcendence — transcendence of the self, where we can step outside the identity we continually build and inhabit and be free for a moment.

The Galapagos made me feel this way, the enormity of the sea and sky all around. Driftwood is like an artifact of this enormity, its gnarled surfaces a text of the ocean’s power written in a language we all understand. Perhaps this is why driftwood is so often collected and brought home as a souvenir. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it makes us feel joyfully small.

Eggs are a very joyful form. They represent possibility, new life, things full of energy waiting to burst out into the world and get moving. The form itself is symmetrical, balanced, and whole, suggesting comfort and stasis. But in reality an egg is just a moment in time, a moment representing potentiality rather than completion.

Can you remember back to when you first learned that birds hatched from eggs? Can you remember when you first saw it on a nature program or, if you were lucky, on a farm? Or even luckier, in the wild? It was magical. In one second, there was this hard, smooth, perfect surface, and then in another, there was a beak poking out, and then shortly after there was a real, whole birdlet cradled in a jagged egg-cup. In cooking we break an egg from the outside-in, but when you see it the way it was designed to be opened, it is startling and wonderful.

I wish I could say I saw this egg hatch, but sadly, this egg will never hatch. It was abandoned. But knowing that fact was still hard to reconcile with my visceral reaction to the sight of an egg, and all the joyful potential it represents.

From the feet up, these birds are comical. Of course the blue feet have an absurd quality (better visible here), but their faces, too, have a quizzical look that makes it seem like they are endlessly surprised to see you, surprised even just to be existing in the moment where they are. And that ridiculous name!

These boobies are all over the Galapagos, so its easy to get blasé about them. They fill the sky around you, alternately hovering on thermals and torpedoing into the water to spear an unsuspecting catch. From the boats, there is the frequent ping of a splash, followed by a surfacing and a rustle of feathers. Oh, another booby…. Where are the flamingos? But once home, they regain their odd, wonderful specialness.

Like many animals in the Galapagos, there are no guarantees with the flamingos — either they’re there or they aren’t and there isn’t much you can do if they happen to be feeding elsewhere that day. Fortunately, we lucked out, and were able to watch them graze on lunch for awhile. I choose this shot out of 40 or so flamingo photos because of the constrast in the poses of the two birds, the reflections in the still water, and the vast expanse of blue lagoon around them.

The reflections and the negative space accentuate the absurd gesture of the flamingo form and its odd proportions: the weight of the body atop implausibly skinny legs bent at awkward-seeming angles; the long, S-curved neck with the hairpin turn at the top; the chunky, toucan-esque beak; and the unlikely color, make these birds look like caricatures of themselves, like living lawn ornaments. And yet, what seems so cartoonish was transformed in an instant when the birds took flight.

Necks and legs in one smooth, undulating line, with black-fringed wings outstretched, they were not only no longer absurd. They were utterly graceful.

Well, I’m back! And as hard as it was to say goodbye to my family and those magical, remote islands, I must say I did feel a rush of joy walking into my apartment late last night. I was exhausted from dawn-to-midnight travel, but it sure felt good to be home.

The Galapagos are everything people say and more. Their relative isolation for thousands of years means that you can observe at very close range all kinds of animals that anywhere else would flee in fear. It’s a little like scuba diving, that way, and it creates opportunities for all sorts of joyful encounters.

Take these sea lions, for example — our welcoming crew at the port on Baltra island. Most animals used to human presence become opportunistic; trained by handouts of food intentional or accidental, they are reduced to beggars. But the Galapagos sea lions greeted us with a disinterested sigh and the occasional snort. Napping on the benches and the steps of the pier, they made evident that this was their home and that we were free to come and go as we pleased but they were not going to trouble themselves about it one way or another. They let us get so close to them, closer even than one could get in a zoo, and with that physical proximity came a sense of almost spiritual closeness, because there was mutual trust and respect, so rare among man and wild animals.

The sea lions are the hedonists of the Galapagos, lolling around in the sand, napping for hours on sun-baked rocks, their eyes nearly always drowsily half-open. They cuddle, these sea lions, in twos or threes or eights or tens, their smooth fat bodies massed together, an occasional fin draped over one’s neighbor. You see so many sleeping sea lions in the Galapagos, you might wonder if they ever do anything else. But then you see them in the water, utterly transformed.

As indolent and awkward as they are on land, they are exuberant and agile in the sea. I was lucky enough to get to play with one while snorkeling, entirely on her terms, which left me equal parts terrified and delighted. The game she plays is this: she swims full speed from ten or so yards away, her snout aimed straight at my mask, looking with full determination like she’s headed for a collision. At the last second, she ducks under me, turning, swimming away for half a minute or so, leaving me a few breathless moments to get ready for the next round.

Over and over this happened, and I felt what I have so often tried to describe on this site — the repeatable rush of true joy. Each pass the sea lion made gave the same rush of delight, over and over again, and I know that were I to zip on a wetsuit and get back in the water tomorrow or twenty years from now, I would still feel that same wonderful feeling.

More photos and stories to come. I took over 500 pictures, so I have a lot of work to do before I put them up! Stay tuned….

xx Ingrid

How’s this for a joyful pizza delivery experience? Place an order with Pink Flamingo Pizza near the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and they give you a pink helium balloon. You take the balloon with you to your chosen picnic spot by the canal and their bike delivery uses it as a floating beacon to find you.

It’s a simple, joyful way to create a magical experience for customers, a gesture that costs very little but pays dividends in the way it makes people feel about your service and your business. Aesthetically, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than those vibrating hockey pucks, both for the user and the surrounding environment. A bobbing balloon gives everyone a little lift.

It costs no more to make something joyful than to make something dull, but it can mean the difference between a ho-hum neighborhood joint and an international destination.

Via Frugal Traveler. Thank you flickr user Antonia Hayes for the image.