A Peek of the Glorious Wild
By Lian Brook-Tyler
I see an Italian tree in front of me. I thought it was a cypress but Google says no.
It calls to mind a summer spent sleeping under a fig tree in Ibiza. A summer of sun, sand, nudity, and living hand to mouth via the medium of art, graft and ingenuity. I was 7.
My father and his then-girlfriend Jacky, painted portraits of holiday makers and the now-cliched Ibizan sun sets and flower fairies.
Sometimes he used those polymath hands to break granite or pick apricots.
We dined on eclectic vegetarian concoctions of vegetables, packet soup, rice or potatoes and marmite (for umami and B12) cooked over a camp fire.
Ants stole our food and we accepted it as a price for wild living. I notice that people now don’t quite understand my calm when ants invade my kitchen. Maybe there’s part of me that enjoys their cheeky familiarity.
I remember my surprise at seeing my first unfamiliar penis... It belonged to a man strolling along the nudist beach. I was particularly impressed with the fetching foreskin he was sporting (the only other grown penis I’d seen belonged to my father, who was circumcised).
I suspect I asked a lot of questions on that day.
One day I found a t-shirt on the beach. Quite plain, probably a boy’s though I had little care for gender norms then. That became a staple part of my very-capsule wardrobe that year.
Talking of wardrobes, when we moved from the fig tree (or rather, were moved, the police decided that it wasn’t quite right this strange English family sleeping under a tree next to the beach) to a nearby field belonging to a welcoming farmer, my father built me a bedroom.
I was so proud of that room, crafted from an oil drum and tarpaulin... it was my first private space for some time, it still holds a sweet place in my heart.
As well as my new room, our new neighbourhood provided fresh almonds (so delicate and green), pine needles to throw on the fire (“fireworks”!), an outsize pig with whom I spent hours conversing, and most exciting of all... a rubbish tip! Decades later, my mother’s house still contains a knife I found there. Come to think of it, I’m not sure she ever knew its provenance.
So yes, my Ibizan stay can be recalled by material things but it’s the feeling I remember most of all, though struggle to put into words that have currency in our culture...
It’s something to do with being nourished, held safe and loved by the bounties of this world.
We threw ourselves on the mercy of a strange island and its inhabitants, and were fed, watered and most of all... seen and accepted in all of our full, weird glory.
When the film Captain Fantastic came out, multiple friends told me to watch it, knowing I’d love it.
And yes, I did! It somehow captured at least some of that feeling. I wondered how they knew.
Maybe it’s because we all have our own sense of that glorious wild, sovereign feeling of everything (including ourselves) being Absolutely Good Enough, which can be evoked by a story, a taste, a smell, or a tree that’s not a cypress.
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