One Day Out Wandering ...

I have a photography exhibition happening in Brussels in the autumn, more information to follow but today ... talking with Marcia, I suddenly knew what my theme would be.  And I spent the rest of the day going through the hundreds of photo folders I have images stored in ... hundreds and hundreds.

Hundreds to the point where there are photographs I took and never really got back to.  In the summer months I have been known to journey from Berlin to Istanbul to Italy.  Along the way, processing becomes impossible and special moments build up and overlap, some are lost.

Today has been a day of delightful finds.  I had forgotten the time I had spent wandering with Julie.  Those photographs, of time spent tearing all over a small corner of England, have been so much fun to go through.

There was this image, taken at Bath ... sunrise or sunset, I don't recall but it was, I remember, absolutely sublime out there in that light.

A Remarkable Woman

Whether we know it, or not, we are all remarkable souls.  Individuals with stories, tapestries of individual beauty. 

Over the years I've realised that each individual carries so many stories inside.

I started moving house when I was 21 and newly married.  Over the years of the first marriage we moved at least 12 times.  And I remember watching and wondering, as we drove by old homes on the road between wherever we were living and 'home', about the people who might have been forever inhabitants in those houses ... wondering what their stories felt like.

I see people as beautiful stories, like books with their own individual covers, and I enjoy the privilege of 'reading' a little when we work on a portrait shoot or simply spend time together.  Some try to tell me that their lives are so ordinary but lives are never ordinary.  It's as fascinating to listen to someone who has lived their entire life in one place as it is to listen to a person who has traveled.

Like wine, we all have our own flavour, our own ageing-process ... depth, maturity, character are all words that can be applied as much to humans as to wine.

Back in Genova, I spent two days with Diny and it was an incredible pleasure.  The tapestry of her life was beautifully woven.  I can imagine her laughing as she reads this but it's less about perfection and more about the deep beauty of being real and present. Of being honest.  Of embracing life in a way that left me admiring her intensely.

And she gave me permission to post one of the photographs I took of her while we worked. 

 

 

Story-Tellers

Maybe I'm 'involved' in too many things ... is the thought that occurs to me as I try to organise my desk as a viable working space after Italy, on this much-cooler Sunday morning in Belgium.

I'm trying to organise all ...  there are the things I want to blog about from Genova, the photography workshop material I'm printing and organising, the Inspiration workbook material I'm preparing for the 5-day workshop in Italy, and the book on Genova I'm putting together ... and then there's everything else that interests me too. Reminders, notes, the appointments book, and and and.

To my left my bookshelves are overflowing with books read and unread but I love that state of being.  No pressure, just pure anticipation.  There was the secondhand beauty I found just before flying - Pablo Neruda, Memoirs.  And I'm still meandering through Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days.

Both books were too heavy to take with my camera gear and laptop as hand luggage, as I acknowledged that sad lack of escalators in Italian railway stations.  A lack that has twice made me consider abandoning my luggage there at the bottom of the stairs as I looked up.

Yesterday, pre-massive night-time thunderstorm, I lay on the bed for a while and zipped through the delightful story of a wandering cat and its owners efforts to track it - titled Lost Cat.  Pure lazy luxury.

And I'm still dipping in and out of Paul Kelly's 100 chapter biography (although not the version I've linked to. No cds included in my copy and, sadly, too heavy to contemplate carrying to Genova), and the Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West  because they're the kind of books that invite dipping.  I discovered 'Portuguese Irregular Verbs' at my .75 cent secondhand book supplier (so many good books found at this price) and it's waiting there in the queue.  And finally I am reading 'TinkerBell, in the Realm of the Never Fairies with Miss 9.  It's an excuse for us to hang-out up here, in the cool of the evening, reading and chatting.  We're looking for the next big series read but will put that decision off a little longer.

I'll leave you with a story-scene from medieval Genova.

3 Things To Share ...

It's a hot muggy night here in Belgium.  I believe all risk of snow is finally gone but I seem to have some lingering issues with the winter that was ...

Oh, you noticed.

Tonight was the night where I wrote a long reply to Laura and afterwards, inspired by my written 'conversation' with her, I wandered into this beautiful performance by my favourite Belgian jazz musician, Toots Thielemans, and Stevie Wonder.

They were playing as I read through Justine Musk's latest post, on finding your passion.

She wrote:  We forget – if we were ever even fully aware — that passion is rooted in suffering. As Todd Henry points out in his excellent book DIE EMPTY: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, the word ‘passion’ is rooted in the Latin word pati which means “to suffer or endure”. Our culture’s distorted understanding of the concept has created what Henry calls “the passion fallacy” as well as “a false notion of what it means to engage in gratifying work.”

So perhaps — when we try to find the great work of our soul and build out an epic life for ourselves ...

She suggests that we should ask... “What work am I willing to suffer for today?”

I'm aware, that when I wander in Genova, it reads as if it is all beauty and joy but it's one of the more difficult things I do to myself.  I fly high on the beauty I find there, on the people I meet ... on the experiences I have but I empty myself in the high and then ... sometimes, I crash.

Reading Justine's words I  thought, Well yes, Genova is a passion.  My passion for that city isn't without suffering.  Sometimes I feel like I fly so close to the sun, as I explore the city's history, colours, culture ... sometimes I go back to the apartment and attempt to recover from something that feels not unlike Stendhal Syndrome.

Realisation over, I read on, catching up on my incoming and voila, there was this ... and it made me think that I must blog tonight's finds.  Titled 40 Inspiring Workplaces from the Famously Creative ... see what you think.

I thought it exquisite.

Below, I'm posted a fragment from an ancient painting I loved back in Genova ...

Sono Pronto A Tutto.

There is a creaking, grinding roll-up metal door that is activated about 6.30am ...near my bedroom here in Genova. 

It's a feet-on-the-floor explosion of sound.  To give you a sense of it, an army would be proud of this vehicle of noise when waking and/or scaring the living daylights out of their new recruits or prisoners of war.

Some mornings I hear it, some mornings I don't.  This morning I woke, completely heart-thumpingly disorientated.  I lay there a while and then, sure enough, some kind of pressure-building noise followed as the cafe primed its coffee-machine with the required level of explosiveness ...perhaps.

I stumbled out of bed to see if I had missed the possible thunderstorms predicted for while I slept but they didn't come.  It's overcast but that won't hurt after yesterday's 32 celsius, with humidity of 76%.

The kitchen window is open, next to my laptop and the breeze is almost refreshing.  The 'ciao's' have begun and people sound lively and engaged in this language I love.  So upbeat, even at 7.37am.

Meanwhile friends here are rebelling.  Maybe they're pretending but some have decided it's time I spoke Italian.  Of course, I agree but language acquisition has never been the thing I am best in.  Two years in Turkey and I remember the Turks were amused by my using a very English pronunciation in my simple greetings.

Learning Dutch hasn't gone well either.  Maybe there is some forgotten colonial impulse buried deep in my New Zealand genes but I tend to begin in English in Belgium and mostly they reply in the same.  Actually, they reply in English when they hear my Dutch too.  I have come to believe that my attempts are so impossibly bad that they are found to be abominable.  

But anyway, English is a useful language to travel with ... or not.  Depending on what one believes about language.

So ... last night I began working through the 200+ Italian flashcard exercises I have stored on my computer.  While the language itself is often straight-forward, in that it is pronounced as it appears, I realised that words like 'di' and 'a', with their multiple uses, could be troublesome.

'di' (that Italian word that isn't my name) = of, from, about, than, to, with, by.  And then there is 'a' = to, at, in, for, with, by.

The road could be long.  Here too, the 'i' sounds like my 'e'and so Di of me becomes Dee.  Although it is the same in Dutch and so I have adjusted to that kind of thing.

I can see how this language-studying commitment is a necessary commitment because to post graffiti without being sure of what is saying is a risk I don't often take.  However this one refers to, or was written by, Melina Riccio.  Hers is an interesting story for sure ...

The espresso and cappuccino cups are rattling in the cafes below, a man is telling a story so amusing he can barely squeeze the words out through the laughter he is trying to control.  It seems like old friends are at the cafe, meeting on their way to work perhaps, and talking about things I don't understand ...

Buongiorno ... it is morning here in Genova.