Early Morning, New Zealand

... with an Erica Jong twist.

I found this beautiful image out walking, early one morning, at Cooks Beach, in the Coromandel, New Zealand.

Listening to favourite song, favourite singer, as I load this. 

It opens with a torrential downpour in the recorded version.  I think I love the sound of that rain, more than anything.

Or have made your home in a country not your own ... Anne Michaels

I think, one of the things that become most obvious when you leave the country where you are known and understood, is that those invisible unspoken things protecting you ... the habits, the customs, the family and known behaviours will disappear.  Out here, it's just you.

One of my favourite poets, Anne Michaels, writes in her poem Blue Vigour:

I think, if you have lived through a war,

or have made your home in a country

not your own, or if you've learned

to love one man,

then your life is a story.

Yes.  A story because all that you have known and understood is somehow broken. Smashed even.  Each country is different.  The way I lived in Turkey is different to the way I live in Belgium.

Those 3 months in Berlin ... so different to all my 2 and 3 week stays in Genova, Italy.

And I feel like a blind woman sometimes, reading braille. The braille of being human ...

So this behaviour, I wonder, where did it come from? 

What formed these people, their culture? 

Why is this acceptable here and not there?

I'm always curious.  And not learning the language of each place I arrive in helps somehow.  I do try learning but I am beyond terrible.  I think I have some kind of learning disability however these weren't invented until after I was educated and so ... I am simply judged lazy.

But not learning the language ... sometimes I'm not sure it's some kind of gift.  It means I have had to become a close observer of body language.  I was a photographer alreadyand so perhaps I always was a close observer of body language.  Even in that country called Home.

There's a massive birthday approaching this year and I have this feeling of being filled in ways that I didn't expect.  Filled with so many stories, of so many people and places, that perhaps it's time for me to re-evaluate who I am and where I am heading. 

Anyway, enough ...let's leave this post with the ultimate in wise men, quoted there on the photograph below.

Wandering With Barbara ...

Barbara took the photo that follows.  This Genovese woman who told me she was quite unable to take good photographs ...

It's rare that I approve photographs of me for publication and, while I don't look like Sandra Bullock (at all) in this image, I don't mind it too much.

Barbara, meanwhile, considers this publication of her image a 'great gift' due to knowing how terrible I am about photographs of myself ... writes the photographer.

In These Days ...

The season is turning here.  We've been choosing to use the heating at night, wearing boots outside because of the rain, warmer clothes because it's no longer Hot.  Sad that summer is probably over ...

Barbara flew in from Genova last week and we have been wandering.  Or to write that more accurately, we have been wandering and talking a lot.  Laughing too.  We had all kinds of possible plans but the days have simply unfolded instead.

Miss 10 has been spending time with us too.  They waved to me from the massive Ferris Wheel, outside of Central Station, yesterday ... as we made our way home from the city's Bollekesfeest.  The feest was disappointing in that to purchase anything you had to commit to a standing rugby scrum to reach counters.  I'm not really a rugby scrum kind of woman however I did manage to get us two sausages, and to find a small glass of Elixir d'Anvers for Barbara to taste.

I chose to wait until we reached Het Elfde Gebod (The Eleventh Commandment) for my glass of red wine. 

Today is another busy day here in the city and I shouldn't really be sitting here at all.  Just a hello from a very cool Antwerp.

Cairo ...

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time ...

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.

These frantic busy days ... they just keep coming at me.  I'm hoping to complete so much in the days ahead, allowing me to concentrate on one or two things instead of juggling 20.

So here I am, taking  a little time out, needing some peace of mind, I was searching for something beautiful to note down, then decided to share old photographs from other adventurous days.

Back in 2008 I found myself in Cairo, working with good people, meeting lovely Egytians, having one of those delicious adventures.

I wrote of arriving in Cairo: I felt an incredible overwhelming of the senses as the taxi flew through the (far too) long underground traffic tunnel taking me to downtown Cairo ... the driver completely ignoring the 50km speed limit, then calmly settling down to wait, windows open, when we were caught in the middle of the tunnel’s 3km length with carbon monoxide choking us.

I noticed that Cairo drivers talk to each other via their car horns ... a gentle reminder they are there, that they want to change lanes, and anything else that needs discussing out there on the road.

I hadn’t known what to expect ... perhaps Istanbul but the only similarity to Istanbul was only that it was so different to most of my everyday life.

Later, I read that Cairo has some 17 million people in the metropolitan area and is the sixteenth most populous metropolitan areas in the world ... a busy city.

It was full of people and pollution and when I looked round, from my 6th floor balcony, I could see this layer sand and desert on rooftops.

The first 48 hours was challenging in almost every way.  Challenging but oh so excellent to be out again.