The word home comes from a root meaning 'the place where one lies'.  The phrase refers to our physical place of residence and rest, our bed, but it also prompts me to consider where the core of the 'one' that is me - who I am, my soul - lies.

Lisa McKay, from Love at the Speed of Sound.

I found this today, over on Marianne Elliott's blog and, as always when it comes to questions of 'home, I paused to consider my sense of the word.

But then I wandered off outside, before the storm, and photographed the sweetpeas ... a favourite flower of mine, back in the days of my childhood because I have lived in so many homes, in so many places, since those stable days of a life lived in Mosgiel.

Moving to the other side of Belgium ... stories to follow

After 7 years spent living here in the heartland of Belgium ... I'm heading away from 't stad' and out into the 'parking' that is the rest of Belgium, or so some Antwerpenaars have told me.  't stad being 'the stad' abbreviated ... or the city.

I'm off on a 2 week Wallonian adventure, complete with one fierce rooster on whom I've been told not to turn my back. 

Stories will follow.  Meanwhile, meet the rooster.  He's the tallest scariest rooster I've ever seen.

 

 

 

Love After Love, Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.