I’m intrigued by this article I found on BBC. “How did a bucolic dreamland became the perfect escape from real life? Anita Rao Kashi explores a whimsical world of nostalgia, tranquillity and folksy mysticism. A few weeks into lockdowns everywhere, a curious thing happened on Instagram feeds. More and more, they filled with images of pretty cottages adorned with climbers and flower-laden trellises . . . .”
“Much like Scandinavian concepts hygge and friluftsliv, the pastoral aesthetic of cottagecore is striking a chord.“
Nothing new here. We re-discover a romanticized nostalgia when life gets hard. Or, so it seems to me. When I was in college at Boulder in the mid-1970s, I was surrounded by a back-to-nature aesthetic. That’s the time in life I began wearing jeans and hiking boots. It wasn’t just the local zeitgeist; it was even stronger in Utah. There, the Mormon pioneer nostalgia is always a part of everyday life. Years later, I was still on the fringes of it. Missey and I looked at buying a property in Cedar Fort, where we wanted to build a cabin.
I’m not surprised to see nostalgia surging in this time of Trump’s virus but the fashion can be overstated. The kernel is an aesthetic of slowing down to live more deliberately. Here in Denver, we were locked down for 6 weeks. Life was deliberately slowed. I spent much of that time sorting and disposing books and bric-a-brac. I could look at that period and find signs of a nostalgia for rural life. However, that was only an erratic component. The stronger drive for me and for many others I know has been looking for a simpler life.
Mari Kondo more than Mother Earth News.
- Anita Rao Kashi. “‘Cottagecore’ and the rise of the modern rural fantasy.” BBC <bbc.com>. Dec. 8, 2020, retrieved Dec. 8, 2020.