Beyond the window

The power of a room with a view

A room with a view is no small thing. I have moved, recently, from a view of the wild, to one of the city. I have gone from opening the curtains first thing each day, stepping outside onto a balcony with water and mountains on the horizon, to struggling with a broken blind that looks out onto a disused office block.

Let me describe my first view: all around is green. The balcony is glass, almost floating, all those shades of green pressing through, coming into the inside. To the right there is a small track, tree edged, that leads down to a red roofed barn, the only building properly in sight. To the left; hills, thick with greenery, growing too close together to push through. Ahead thefe is a small pond, edged with reeds, decorated with water lilys. Beyond, more trees, more green, dropping their shifting shapes upside down into the water. And beyond that - the sea. An inlet, a sea loch, stretching out a finger into the ocean. On the horizon, in the distance, the mountains of Gigha, a small island home to 170 people. The mountains are blue. The water, silver grey.

From this point I can watch the CalMac ferry make its way to Islay. I can watch swallows swoop madly overhead and the pampas grass wave in the wind. I can hear the rustle of all those leaves dancing together with each gust. I can watch sheep cluster around the pond, then scatter when the occasional walker passes. I can see two horses, sometimes, in the field beside the barn.

I wake every day and I go to the window. For six weeks I watch no television, because I don’t need to - the view is enough. The local village is pressed up against water and when I go to buy eggs the houses shimmer in the water. As I drive to work I see deer, see fields and trees and the twisting edge of the land where it gives way to sea. I am drunk on the wild beauty that presses against my eyelids.

I had similar thoughts about the power of a view at the Mawddach residency earlier this year. There I would wake with the sun and go to the window. I would eat breakfast while I watched the light shift across the estuary, while I watched for the turn of the tide. There is a power in waking and immediately looking outwards. There is a power in seeing space. Everything feels so much more expansive, so possible, so beautiful. You have no space for your small petty concerns, for mind gymnastics, for the attempted wrangling of the day into the shape you hope for. It simply is and that is enough.

But what the wild lacks, perhaps, is people. Those office windows are small stories, each held in a square pane of glass. Each one is a life, lived and precious. With no people, would we have stories? I have written less with my beautiful view. I have wanted to spend all my time out, adventuring, gathering the seeds of stories to be written later. Perhaps there is need - or if not need, then space - for both.

Now, I open my curtains and I look up, to the sky, far ahead. I notice the white flash on the undersides of the pigeon’s wings as they swerve in a group above my little square of sky. I push the sash up and feel the morning on my finger tips and notice the temperature of the air. I look at a print that I bought at the weekend of two seed heads, scattering, background hazed with crosshatching - crosshatching that to me gives the texture of history, of a thing from a place that endures, that has a past and a future too. I put flowers in the bathroom and I look up, when I leave the building, look up as often as I can. Look up at the sky, because whatever the immediate view is, however wild or controlled, however spacious or tight, there is always sky above somewhere. There is always weather, there is always possibility and space, up there, somewhere.

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You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.