Longing for London

The shaping of a soul through place

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Hello Readers,

Ring the daffodils, chime the tulips—it’s almost time for Mother Earth to wake up and offer us her green, spring smile! March is cold, dreary, and often gray here in New Jersey, but in my mind’s eye, March is light and alive and swells with the promise of what’s to come.

At this time of year, I often think back to the years we lived in London and how spring arrived so much earlier in England. By now, primrose and ivy brighten the city’s window boxes, and early spring crocus and daffodil line walkways and park paths. In March, the grass is indeed greener on the other side of the Atlantic. Spring’s early arrival was one of the joys of living in the UK—I always longed for color and life to break through the monotony of our long winters in Philadelphia—and suddenly a primrose-colored dream came true. Longing was nearly satiated, if only for a season.

My friend Kyle Campbell is an American living in England, and I enjoy her photos and reflections on life in the UK with a fervor bordering on obsession. Her work as an artist, writer, and photographer brings me back to one of the dearest seasons of my life and keeps me tethered to a version of myself I remember with such compassion and tenderness.

Kyle recently wrote an essay called “Landscapes that Call Us” that pulled me into a vortex of time travel, a Sudden Journey¹ if you will, bringing me face to face with myself as a twenty-six-year old new mother living in London. At the time, Michael traveled for work most weeks, leaving me to navigate and fall in love with London on my own. And fall I did. I fell so deep down the rabbit hole of love and longing for a city and a country that was not my own, I can hardly put words to it decades later. Like all great writers, Kyle’s essay gave me the words I’ve been reaching towards for so long.

There is a feeling that rises in me when I see the landscapes of England’s countryside or the cityscapes of London that contains joy and melancholy. It is longing that is both awakened and satisfied. It’s how you feel when you discover a garden rose unfurled in the perfect shade of blush pink and all you want is take the perfection of it into your body—you want to taste and smell and hear and feel the color on a cellular level—but you must be satisfied with it remaining outside of yourself. It is an external beauty that can’t be fully experienced on the inside, no matter how much you desire it.

England is the perfect blush rose to me.

Even decades after moving back to the US, when we visit the UK the landscape still captivates me. I feel the longing for it in my bones, even while my feet walk its streets. The history of London and the twenty-something self who lived there calls me home from across the ocean, the call becoming louder and more insistent even as I wake up under London’s low, gray skies. It is my soul’s home and yet, the longing for it only increases the more I experience a London homecoming.

Two small rituals help me process my visit when I travel to London. I try to visit at least one place where a younger version of me still lingers, and on leaving London, I let myself cry for a hot minute in the airport bathroom. I feel wholly myself in this city, and leaving is saying goodbye to a place that has shaped me and goodbye to the me I’m leaving behind. The tears are cleansing, allowing me to return home to New Jersey still carrying longing, but holding a posy of primroses and memories in my heart.

A Reflective Practice:

These thoughts on longing and place have been stirring in me for a while. While I was musing, I came across a passage in a translated Korean novel—Welcome to the Hyunam Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum.

In this passage, the main character Yeongju asks three questions of any place where she finds herself. These questions are a great place to begin an exploration of the places you love and that have shaped you. And that last question? An entire universe may exist within your answer. It does for me and London.

1. Does this place make me feel positive?

2. Can I be truly whole and uncompromisingly myself?

3. Do I love and treasure myself here?

1. Sudden Journeys is Kyle’s UK-based boutique travel company. They re-imagine small-group tours across Europe and the UK as stories, not schedules. I can’t recommend Kyle and her work highly enough.