An Ideal Life ...

Lately I've been asked, more than once, what would my ideal life look like ...

I was asked to describe it today. I was quite lost.  How many people know how to answer that question?  'If it could really happen, how would your ideal life look?'  And so I stumbled and bumbled around, wanting to be nice, to be gentle ... but no, there was no nice gentleness allowed.

What would my ideal life look like?!

And it's interesting, to me, because I've quietly been working through Danielle LaPorte's book, The Fire Starter Sessions ... in lieu of having colleagues and friends wandering in and out of conversations with me.  I live an oddly isolated life here in Antwerp.  Maybe I even create some of the isolation myself, needing so much space to write and make photographs.  To think.  To read enough books.  And to maintain the family and home we have here.

Danielle almost beats me over the head with her repetitive, direct questions regarding my professional life.  Initially she set off a protective response in me ... protective, resistant perhaps. 

How much money would you like to be making?  Earned a tentative I would love to simply make some money ... became I would love to be financially independent. 

Her questions focus you down on your business, your self, and your needs.  The last question on her recent worksheet, as follows, was another invitation to dream. 

So ... what would you like to do with your life and career?  (Money is no object.  Dream.)

This morning, a similar question, different requirement.  Tell me how your ideal home life would look.  Dream.  And we're talking 'ideal', if it could be as you wish it to be.

I think I'm getting it.  We need to go in the direction of our dreams.  In fact, Henry David Thoreau tells us to Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

And as we step out, we increase the quality and satisfaction in our lives and so influence the lives of those people around us too.  We're here to live our lives and become the best we can be during that time.  To do the 'right thing', to be eaten up by guilt for not doing so, to conform to the outline of today's 'ideal citizen' ... often these things don't respect who we are.  It seems a bit like a wing-clipping to me.

So here I am, writing a book, spinning a web of planned future actions that will spark financial independence. I'm having some off-the-wall ideas that just may work.  All this simply because people are inviting/demanding that I dream my ideal worlds, both privately and in business, into reality.

I have no idea how it will go but let's see it.

This Time Last Year ...

On this day last year I was posting photographs of Mount Tongariro erupting because I was back home in New Zealand and had recently driven past that North Island volcano.  On December 1st I had arrived at my sister's house, down in Dunedin, and was catching up with her and her beautiful family for the first time in 8 years.

Eight years can go by in a flash ... and they did.  I was always coming home soon but getting home was a hellishly expensive business.  Fortunately I lack a sense of time passing and, while I longed for  home and family something fierce sometimes, I got by.    I was even more delighted when I discovered everyone still there, where I had left them.  

Old friendships had survived, babies and toddlers had grown, and there was enough good New Zealand pinot noir to make sure I survived how old all the babies were now, and laughter too, making every day there so very special.

I was talking to Dad tonight, harassing him in his 9.30am Monday morning from my 9.30pm Sunday night.  Since I stopped traveling so much I've made a point of startling him with a phone call far more regularly.   He's stopped with his startled, 'Is that you Di??!' and is no longer surprised when he hears my voice from some 16,000kms round the world.  I used to disappear for months sometimes.  It's that time passing problem ... no sense of it.

So anyway, all this to say ... this time one year ago I was home in New Zealand.

I may have even taken the photograph that follows today, precisely one year ago.  Sandra popped us all into her car we wandered off down my beloved Otago Peninsula.  This view, on the way home via the high road, is one that I had always loved.

Crossroads - a documentary

I believe, very strongly, in informing myself.  I can't just read one newspaper or follow one news source via the various forms of media.  I don't believe in standing in one place, claiming I'm left or right-wing, or a particular religion.  I can't state that 'these are my beliefs and everything else is wrong'. 

I believe, very strongly, in Nature and the fact that we need to take care of it to survive.  But I see too, that there are fundamentalists and extremists everywhere.  There are fundamentalists in every political religious group, extremists any place you can imagine and I would be naieve if I thought otherwise.

I was intrigued by this documentary.  I haven't yet researched it properly but watching it here, I was thinking it's something to share ... leaving everyone who cares to watch it to make up their own minds. 

My Mother ...

My mother would have turned 70 today ... but she died back in 1999, at age 56.  I remembered her birthday as it approached this year.  Maybe I have always remembered but this year I have carried her with me for days.

70.  I can't even imagine how that might have changed her.  I don't think it would have.  She was one of those women who grew more beautiful as she aged.  I think women do that sometimes.  Their authentic self comes shining through and they finally allow it.  They have grown into their skins and they're comfortable.  She was surely getting there if she wasn't already and people who spent time with her in her final months simply loved who she was. 

She was always a remarkable woman but I'm almost sure that she never knew it.  Nobody really knew how to say things like that back then.  What is it about us that makes us write of these things, talk of those remarkable things about people we love, after they're dead?  I have come to believe that we should tell people that we love or admire them while they're alive.  I learned it the hardest way.

My relationship with her has changed through the years, despite her absence.  I've thought of her often, sometimes writing a note that allows me to remember her for a while.

I knew she would have flown over to Istanbul and loved being there.  She would have adored Beste's mum, just as I do.  She would have charmed everyone.  She had this quiet loveliness that I didn't quite understand when I was young.  And Belgium, I could imagine her so easily, out on the balcony at the first place, resting with a glass of white wine after completely designing and planting a balcony garden.

Genova ... she wouldn't have left.  She would have found an apartment next to the sea and spent the rest of her days there.  And I think the Italians wouldn't have minded. She had this innate goodness that you could see in a moment.  She was brave, and as strong as she needed to be.  She was kind too.  She should have traveled but she didn't really. 

So there it is, on the last day of this commitment to blog everyday of November, I wanted to celebrate the woman my mother was ... a remarkable woman I still miss 14 years after we lost her.

She planned her own funeral you know.  We were all there in the church and I had just given my first speech in front of a 'packed house'.  My two brothers, my sister, my dad, her sisters, and so many who loved her, were sitting there feeling so sad and which song roared out through the speakers of that lovely little Catholic church in Mosgiel?

Laughter and tears ...she was a truly remarkable woman.  And she loved Queen.

The Island of Ireland Peace Park, Belgium

I think I'm almost cheating tonight.  It has been a day of a great many ideas but nothing that is ready to be written of and so, I'm going to post one of a series of my photographs appearing over on the Messines 1917 website run by two of my favourite folk here in Belgium.

Martin wrote: The Island of Ireland Peace Park with its distinctive 34-metre Celtic Tower and its evocative stones of remembrance, was opened on the outskirts of Messines 15 years ago in a ceremony that was hugely symbolic of not only the past but also the future.

The occasion on Armistice Day 1998 was the first public event at which a British monarch and an Irish president had officiated jointly. President Mary McAleese inaugurated the park in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth II and HM King Albert II and Queen Paola of the Belgians.

There is so much more to read about the Peace Park over on the Messines 1917 blog and some more of my photographs too.  I'll leave that with you. 

Also, I didn't know it but Martin wrote, the Tower is designed so that the interior is lit by sun only at 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

Terry Windling, on Blogging

Here's what blogging is to me: It's a modern form of the old Victorian custom of being "At Home" to visitors on a certain day of the week; it's an Open House during which friends and colleagues know they are welcome to stop by. I'm “At Home” each morning when I put up at post. Here, in the gossamer world of the 'Net, I throw my studio door open to friends and family and strangers alike. And each Comment posted is a calling card left behind by those who have crossed my doorstep.

Terri Windling, extract from, Reflections on Blogging.

I love when this woman writes.  She's wise and her blog posts are another of the places I go when I'm searching for those things I lack here in my world. 

She has a dog, a forest, some hills.  She writes, I'm a writer, artist, and book editor interested in myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the ways they are used in contemporary arts.

I loved today's essay on blogging and can only say yes.

Yesterday I was working with photographs and history of that beautiful fountain in Genova ...