'The more personal you are willing to be' ...

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don’t mean universal only within our culture… There’s a lot of balderdash thrown around — “You don’t understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don’t know that culture.”

Well, there’s an element of that — but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.

Sherwin Nuland, extract from yet another brilliant Brain Pickings post.

One of the constant battles I have with this blog of mine is just how much raw and gritty truth I write here.  And in struggling with 'how much', I suspect I lose quite a lot. 

I do know that friends in real life enjoy catching up on the details I usually leave off my blog.  I have a complicated family life ... like so many these days.  I have much to write about on the subject of being a step-mother, perhaps.  And even more about being a foreigner in this day and age.  Or on traveling without languages (usually).  And on just making it home ...   And even more on why I haven't dedicated my days to learning the language in this country I'm currently a citizen of.

I have this theory ... but that's for another day.

I love red wine.   I mostly drink sparkling water though, with 2 espressos per day, and lately, a hot chocolate sometimes.  Most other drinks don't agree with me because they're full of sugar, or sugar substitutes, or have too much caffeine or tanin or goodness knows what.  I used to be able to drink and eat ANYTHING!  Now I have food allergies and grass allergies, and they just added dust mites to that list but I've only just begun to check the facts of it all. 

I prefer not to take anti-histamines.  

I'm not good at learning languages but I love people and traveling.  It seems to work out.  We 'talk' anyway.

'I'm from New Zealand ... ' gets me further than I could have imagined, in terms of excuses for everything.  We Kiwis are a delightful people from an exquisitely beautiful country.  So yes, what am I doing out here in the northern hemisphere?!  That's something else I could also write much and often about.

I love photography and books, and writing and people and other cultures, and conversations that go on into the night.  I love sitting down on that airport bus, leaving to fly someplace, and I love coming home to people and places I know.  I love music. All kinds.  I love people who are passionate about what they do, and I adore people who are kind.

I'm a grouch.  I should write on my blog on my grouchy days.  I'm quiet and need space, and if you hurt me I'll disappear into a silence.  I'll try not to argue ... so don't make me.  Just believe me, it's better you don't.  I also love talking.  And meeting new people.

So you see, I leave a lot of this off the blog but I'm thinking, in 2015, I might experiment with just being me on the blog. Let's see how that goes ... I'd like to be more universal.

Georgia O'Keeffe, on making the unknown known.

I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known.

By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—

Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing.

Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.

Georgia O’Keeffe (painter) writing to Sherwood Anderson (writer).  

Source: Brain Pickings.

There was something about this small article, by Maria Popova, that made me want to note these words and keep them to read again and again.  I loved the first paragraph most particularly.

I enjoy reading what artists write to each other, seeming to want to think on an important thing that so many wouldn't find important or interesting.  Sometimes these things seem like the real stuff of life, as opposed to the forms we fill out and the lives that we Must live in that 'real' world people talk of.

Soon I will be heading off on another adventure, in a small village somewhere between Naples and Rome.  There is a house and some dogs that I've been invited to visit, while breathing some good country air, with a view that I suspect I might want to photograph every day.

There is a book that wants to be written, or two.  There are the photography workshops to announce, the ones I've planned for 2015.  There is a bar where I'm hoping the espresso is perfect and where my beloved crema brioches are possible.  Where there's a delightful red wine waiting for me.

Another adventure in Italy, in that land where everything is possible and sometimes, just sometimes, you find giantic lightbulbs out in the carrugi.