Essential Meaning of Wanderlust: a strong desire to travel.

Full Definition of Wanderlust: strong longing for or impulse toward wandering. – Merriam Webster

If you check the definition for wandering on Merriam Webster you’ll notice that it includes “meandering, not keeping a rational or sensible course, or movement away from the proper, normal, or usual course or place.” Anything but hiking which the original German term “wandern” refers to.

Wanderlust was at its root about hiking, a desire to get back into nature, explore the natural world during the period of German romanticism. Artists from the 18th century on tried to find new inspiration beyond the cities and experience or express their feelings rather than simply depict scenes. That was true for visual artist as much as composers and authors. The fear of nature, as represented by forbidding mountains or cliffs or the vagaries of the seas transformed into fascination, even awe.

Later, and perhaps connected to the European system of artisan apprenticeships and journeymen, Wanderlust took on the meaning, probably more familiar to us, of the urge to roam anywhere but home, the longing for seeing the world at large and confronting unforeseen challenges.

It was all about the hero in nature, made small by awe (just look at these tiny figures in their immense surroundings), or seen big as conquering the obstacles encountered. It was about deceleration and a certain longing for glorified older times. It was also about the larger story of finding meaning in life, or allegories of a life’s progression, or expressing one’s relative take or standing in the natural order of things, a rise in individualism. And often it was linked to nationalism and pride of the beauty of one’s country.

The quotes convey it well: “The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.” (Eugene Delacroix.) “Amid those scenes of solitude… the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.” (Thomas Cole.) “I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full. I hav to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am.” (Caspar David Friedrich.)

A few years back Berlin’s Alte National Gallerie had an exhibition of paintings ranging from romanticism to expressionism that focused on landscape and the wanderers within. Some of today’s paintings are from that show, some are personal picks from other encounters, and they leave out the more familiar ones. They do show a trajectory, though from the early romantic leanings to more expressionist offerings that de-emphasize the human/landscape interaction. This was the first painting you saw when you entered – and the only woman of the bunch…

However you frame it, I was bit by the Wanderlust bug since early childhood, and felt suffocatingly stifled when first Covid made travel impossible in 2020, and then health issues put a curb on hiking as well in 2021.

I am therefor thrilled to report that on the very first day of 2022 I managed part of a hike, in snow no less, that reprised my last one in 2020 before things fell apart. I had reported on it here.

Today’s images are a comparison between July and January conditions of the very same sights on the trail up to Mirror Lake, OR (I did not do the full hike up to the top of the Tom Dick and Harry mountain on New Year’s Day.) Or I would have looked like this.

It is hard to explain why hiking feels so empowering – beyond the stress relief of physical exertion and the pride to pull it off (even in slo-mo and across much diminished distances.) I have no spiritual inklings when out in nature (have I ever?) but an endless appreciation for the beauty around me and the sensory input that reaches from smell to sound to visual reflections of light and shadow. I cherish the resilience of the landscape that surrounds me and, I guess, take it as a model. I like to observe change, when revisiting familiar sights over and over again, as long as that change is natural and not imposed by human interference. Drives me up a wall, when parks are closed for remodel…. no matter how much environmentally sensitive reconstructions are warranted – I feel deprived! And, I admit it, I like the “hunt” with my camera for wildlife of all sorts, the sudden gift of sightings, hoped for, but never guaranteed. I hiked long before I took up photography, though, so that’s just a bonus. Maybe it is the freedom that Hardy (below) describes, to move away from daily anchoring by duty.

So grateful that at least day hikes are back on the menu!

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Freedom 

Give me the long, straight road before me, 

A clear, cold day with a nipping air, 

Tall, bare trees to run on beside me, 

A heart that is light and free from care. 

Then let me go! – I care not whither 

My feet may lead, for my spirit shall be 

Free as the brook that flows to the river, 

Free as the river that flows to the sea. 

by Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)

I’ll hike to that! While singing Schubert’s ” Der Wanderer.“

One should not forget, though that there are serious alternatives to hiking, in case you are housebound – read this fascinating piece and consider!