Day 2, in Genova

I'm lying here, on my borrowed bed, looking out through the massive open windows in front of me, wondering I might go back to sleep here.

I love this apartment.  It's just a divinely small package of cute but the fact that it's located above two bars in the 'happening' centre of the city means that falling asleep is something you need to relearn. The noise kicks off about 10pm and has still been going at 2am, when I've finally fallen asleep.

But the view and location is divine otherwise.

Life is delicious otherwise.  I'm slowly slowly catching up with everyone I quietly adore here.  Last night we wandered along to a tasting of the loveliest wines at Le Gramole. Wine like I had never tasted before.  They don't have a website but the white wines were extraordinary and the reds were good too.  The company was lovely and I need to find out more before I write on what we tasted.

We had a lovely university student called Raffaele patiently translating my questions to Italian to the guys in charge of pouring and explaining the wines.  Then Barbara arrived at Le Gramole too and there was much laughter.

Back at the apartment, we 3 had a dinner made up of food from the Bio shop and from Le Gramole.  Mozarella, with sweet juicy tomatoes, focaccia, and a bottle of the white wine just tasted down at the Le Gramole wine-tasting. 

Tonight is about meeting up with Donatella and Luciano and there's a good espresso to find this morning and some people to see.  The weather is exquisite, the people lovely.  It's so very good to be back.

Below is a glimpse from the wine-tasting. We were the first people there ... it filled up later.

My Dad's been in hospital these last few days and we finally got what seems like good news.  Fingers crossed.

Day One, Genova

Lying on my borrowed bed this morning, here in Genova, I spotted this trompe l'oeil just across the alley from me.  Loved it, wandered downstairs and grabbed my camera gear. 

It's a beautiful blue sky day out there.  We have a lunch planned with Stefano and a wine-tasting out in the city this evening.

It's good to be back.

This and That & Everything!

 

If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday ...'

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The extract was longer but perhaps this is enough to remind us to leave some time for our senses to do their work ... to smell the flowers perhaps.   There are more quotes from his book here.

These days find me rushing, like a mad woman, through life.  Cleaning, organising, packing, remembering, searching, sometimes finding. 

I am so tired I will probably sleep all the way to Italy on Wednesday.  Meanwhile the Belgian bloke is having a shoulder scan, this week I hope.  He's been in pain for far too long now and physio isn't helping at all.  It seems he has either torn a muscle or ... he needs something for inflammation of a joint somewhere in there.  We'll be so glad when he can use his arm again, and sleep without waking when he turns.

Jess has broken her finger.  Ignoring it didn't speed healing and so she's 'limping around' in terms of what she can do with that ridiculously painful middle finger.

Miss 10 has taken to lolling about and generally enjoying her summer holidays. And Sander is crossing Belgium 5 days per week for work, as usual.

I suspect, if we sat down together and talked of what we noticed yesterday, we might just be a small group of grouchy stressed people who noticed not much at all ... except Miss 10 who may have noticed things. 

I talked to my Dad this morning.  I wanted to wish him well for his hospital tests on Tuesday but, in good news really, his tests were on Monday and he had come through the actuality of them really well.  It was lovely to be talking to him as he had worried me with talk of having to go off his heart medication for the test.  He's staying at my sister's tonight.  They didn't want him to go home alone.

And so the new website needs fine-tuning.  There are emails to write and to reply to.  I'm behind on my writing course, yet again ...   I'm in and out with the laundry, packing ,and ironing while searching for some really important notes I had made.

But I did finish the family portrait series of shots I took last Sunday.  I'm so pleased with the results.  They were another really special family full of adorable little folk, as seen below.

 

Reading & Writing My Way Back ...

Sometimes I get so caught up in issues close to my heart that I lose my own way.

And really, I know that at any given time, in any given century, there are 'bad things going on'.  I would be naive to imagine otherwise.  And I do understand that I know very little of the facts of those 'things'.  I know I need to understand that an absolute 'truth' doesn't really exist.  No situation is black & white.

Perhaps the best is to seek a series of narratives from different sources, accepting that truth is in there somewhere ... in different ways for every soul involved.

I had to find a way back from the sadness that set in after spending days reading of things so bad and so sad that they slipped in under my skin ... like tics perhaps, quietly poisoning my peace of mind and stealing my sense of beauty.

I found my way back tonight.  I've been lost in other, rather beautiful, worlds for an hour or more, since discovering Jodi's blog - Practising Simplicity.

She 'introduced' me to Katie and Reuben's - House of Humble.  And they led me over to Inked in Colour by Sash.

And finally, I felt like wandering across this after-midnight-silent room, to pick up my beautiful shawl, having this sense of finding my way back to myself some.  The Russian tailor made the changes I asked him to make to the shawl and it's quickly becoming this beautiful thing that makes me smile whenever I wear it.

Martin Luther King said that, 'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'

I believe this, so strongly, but I also see that I need balance.  When I speak out there's a sense of standing some place alone.  I want the world's eyes to turn to this topic that seems so important to me but in pursuing that desire to share, to speak out, hurts me. 

I grew up watching The Diary of Anne Frank on television.  It was screened, at very least, annually.  And we studied her story ... more than once, in school.

For a long time, years really, watching that movie I would to hope that someone would speak up for those people trapped in that holocaust.  But no one seemed able to so effectively.  The excuse used later was, we didn't know.  And so it is that periodically I am compelled to share information that asks people to 'see' and to 'know'.  To help bring about change. To stop really bad stuff happening.

But the slope is slippery and the deeper I go the further I am from that place, that creative space, where I prefer to be.  I love being a photographer, observing and capturing without interfering too much.  I love writing ... telling stories the way I imagine them.  And I believe, so strongly, in justice for all even as I understand it's impossible.

Periodically I step into the ring and challenge peoples desire to turn away, not to see, not to know. 

And afterwards, after the sharing, I have to find a way back to way I prefer life to be.  The women I discovered tonight pulled me back onto those paths that involve flowers and fruit trees, beautifully captured, along with so many stories. 

It's good to be back from that other, much sadder, much harder place for a while.

Hoping For A Belgian Win In The World Cup Tonight.

Meet the team.  Belgium's Red Duivels - aka the World Cup Football team.

The story of the photographer and this project is over on Fans of Flanders.

The game begins in 15 minutes.  People wearing 'the colours' of Belgium have been streaming by, on their way to the nearby park to support the team with like-minded souls.  Apparently beer glasses were joyfully thrown in the air last time, Belgium had scored, so no one seems too worried about possible rain. 

It's been muggy all day ... we're absolutely 'in theme' for Brazilian weather here.

Let's see how it goes.

I'm Back ...

There's no headache this morning!  It feels so unbelievably good.  I found this area in my neck at 5am ... because it was stiff and sore, so I rubbed and stretched it for a while and voila ... I woke with no pain.

Meanwhile everything continues to happen here.  My huge ring-binder folder, the one I use for my book-writing course, is full of assignments and we're only halfway through.  It's been beyond excellent having to work out things like defining your book's genre, imagining how it will look - ideally.  Hardcover or soft, photographs, text, binding-style, after learning about different options for bindings.

Creating a vision board, a mind map, a set of core values for the book and the process.  Listening to published author interviews, learning all that Christine Mason Miller knows from her publishing successes.  Writing a synopsis and so much more.

It's intense and although we only work with Christine for 6 weeks, the material remains available to us for 6 months.  This course is all about fitting a book in around real life and all the distractions that most people live with ... which is so realistic for a creature like me.

Last night I began trying to select books for the journey next week.  I love reading at night in Genova.  I'm still not an electronic book reader-type, although the Belgian bloke is working on me.  My camera gear makes me a little sad about the extra weight I can't really carry in books but read I must. 

I have Kay Cooke's 2 poetry books on my desk, and 2 of Ren Powell's too.  I'm thinking they would be a great study while I'm out wandering.  Gert found me another Claire Messud book, secondhand, and I picked up Christos Tsiolkas's book, Dead Europe while in France but I think that one might be a little bit darker than I expect.  Let's see it.

There's all that but then I adore La Feltrinelli's in Genova.  It's one of my favourite bookshops out here in the world.  The English selection isn't huge but it's good.  Really good.  Last time I didn't allow myself to go in.  This time, we'll see ...

Anyway, enough of that.  I'm behind with my photo-editing.  I was lucky enough to wander over to Brussels last weekend, to photograph my lovely colour therapist friend, Marcia's, beautiful family.  I need to get on to that now that my head has stopped aching.

They are a truly, madly, deeply exquisite family and I so love photographing them.  It took most of the day but it wasn't just about photography, there was also a delicious cooked lunch after the picnic captured below.