Three visits
I never planned to come back to Semèstene. The reason I came in the first place, two years ago, is that my friend of over twenty years, Jean, moved here to build a different way of living with Antonio. At the time of my first visit, she was newly settled in and comfortable, but a little lonely sometimes, so I came to spend time with her and to experience her new life in a new place.
I came in the spring. It was spremuta season: the season of harvesting the last rounds of blood oranges from the tree in the back of their house, which I took it upon myself to squeeze nearly every day to make fresh orange juice. I live in New York, and for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has been to Semèstene and at least heard about New York, they are about as different from each other as two places could possibly be. Semèstene is a tiny Sardinian village of mostly older residents, where the handful of people who regularly leave their homes (perhaps a few dozen) know each other by name, and where it’s common to drop in for a visit just because you were walking by and happened to see that someone was home. There is nothing to “do” in that conventional sense of having entertainment or social venues readily available, not even a single restaurant (there is a single cafe/bar now, but it hadn’t opened yet when I first visited)—but there is always much to do in the sense of caring for one’s self, family, home, and land, the continual march of tasks in growing, harvesting, preserving, cooking, cleaning, building, in accordance with the seasons.
All of this means that time literally passes differently in Semèstene. It’s demarcated less by numbers on a clock than by the sun’s daily arc and the changing of seasons, by one’s own hunger, thirst, or sleepiness, by the way time expands and contracts when you gather with friends or catch up with the neighbors that you inevitably run into. This and many other differences make it a place alien enough from where I live to shake me out of my habitual existence and let me truly enter, even just briefly, a different way of being.
I don’t mean to idealize life in Semèstene; it’s challenging in many ways and not a place that it would suit everyone to live in, including myself. I knew Jean was committed to a future in this place, but when I left, I didn’t have any particular plans to be back. Actually, Jean and I had a—not quite a plan, but you could call it a loose desire—to travel to Asia together, we hoped in the following year, which for me would’ve probably meant skipping Sardinia for that year. But when the following year rolled around, she found out she was pregnant, and by then she was already starting to feel tired and ill every day. And I realized our Asia trip was unlikely to happen anytime soon, and that if I wanted to see her this year, I’d have to come back to Semèstene.
So almost exactly a year after my first visit, I returned. I again fell easily into the rhythm of life here, the passage of days and meals, the comings and goings of friends. One day, about a dozen friends came over, many from the city or from other parts of Sardinia. We all hiked a short way to a sort of plateau where we could see across the land for miles. There we picnicked, and Antonio recounted to everyone, over the course of a couple of hours, the story of their involvement with this land and what they envision doing with it in the future. I wish I could tell you what he said, but lacking enough understanding of Italian to follow most of it, I was content to sit there, unaware of past or future, appreciating the moment.
After the picnic and the story, everyone broke out the rest of the things we’d brought up from the house: buckets, cans, tubs, sticks and utensils of every kind, jars full of beans, mini recorders, and other toy and makeshift instruments, to hold a sort of jam session on the plateau. I had been told about the jam session but I hadn’t been planning to play an instrument in it at all, as the idea was so new to me and I wouldn’t have known what to play and felt too self-conscious. But it just so happened that I sat down right next to the “percussion bucket,” which was completely full of things to hit, and things to hit those with. For lack of anything else to do, I emptied the bucket and started just seeing how different combinations of objects sounded together, and all of a sudden the jam started and I found myself a part of the percussion group.
It was easy to make music with people, in the end. You catch on to the rhythm that someone else is laying out, and contribute something—something that follows and reinforces it, yet adds a new element or accentuates some part of it. A good group of people to jam with will fully incorporate your contribution and build on top of it. Playing my makeshift instruments felt like literal “play,” like something I’ve always known how to do without having to learn it, and I was sad for our song to end as the sun was going down over the distant hills. Someone in the group had set up a microphone, intending to record the session, but they realized only afterward that it had run out of battery and failed to capture most of it. Which made me a little sad at first, but later I felt it was better that way: our actual song wasn’t and would never be a part of recorded history; it was just something that happened once, in that place, on that day, with the people who were there.
In part because I could no longer travel to Asia with Jean that year, I ended up going to Asia with someone else later in the year. And that person and I fell in love and got together, right around the time when Jean and Anto’s baby Landhe was born. Jean invited me to come back to Semèstene for the next spremuta season, but my new partner and I lived very far apart and already had to travel internationally to see each other, and since I planned to spend the summer with my partner, I told Jean I wouldn’t be able to make it back this year.
But before summer began, my relationship ended. I was heartbroken, but it meant that not only was I free to return to Semèstene, I now had a reason to come back: to get myself back into that different way of being, and be among friends, and start to heal; to meet a newborn, to be reminded that there are things in the world outside of myself and my minor tragedies. There are always new things in the world, beings in need of care, happenings to be overjoyed about.
So a couple of flights and a train later, I’m back in Semèstene for the third year in a row. Which makes it look a lot like I always intended to visit every year, even though I never did. The very same circumstance which resulted in me visiting last year in spite of not planning to visit—Jean having a baby and not being able to travel with me—also led to the reason that it didn’t look like I would be able to come this year. And yet here I am.
As you can see, I never planned to come back to Semèstene. Rather, all of the above has led me to see that it’s not plans that have repeatedly brought me back, but the pull of an intricate web of friendships, family, shared values, and my own connection to this place, my perception of it as a healing place and a refuge from my usual world. My plans apparently always change; the important things don’t.
Animals, plants, the weather, and pretty much everything else observable in nature that I can think of, don’t appear to operate based on this concept of planning for the future, either, at least not consciously. They have what’s written in their genes for them to do, and they have the circumstances in front of them, the ability to react to the present moment, the ability to fulfill their role in the web of relationships in which they exist. They have no future projects. At most, they have different instincts according to the season of the year, or the season of their lifespan. Elsewhere, I’ve called this cyclical time, as opposed to linear time. Planets and moons, and the Earth itself, always come back around—not because of plans, but because of gravity. Because some law of nature inherent in the relationship between their body and other bodies in space keeps them in orbit, always moving yet always nearby. Whole ecosystems, biospheres, galaxies emerge without anybody doing any planning, with only our starting states, the ways we collide with each other, and a generous helping of chance and randomness.
So if you were to ask me if I’m planning to come back to Semèstene in the future, I would say no, I have no plans to come back, and yet I fully expect to end up back here before too long. I expect the future to bring the pull of longstanding ties along with unforeseen new reasons to come back—the way it always has.