Beautiful Things Found In These Days Of Searching For My Voice ... (it's coming)

A friend shared this article with me ... Why Some People Are Interesting And Engaging Storytellers.

And this, The Wanderlust Gene and Why Some People Are Born To Travel.

I watched Pane e Tulipa ... again, last night.  I love that Italian movie.

I thought this was interesting, How One Woman's Body Was Photoshopped To Meet 18 Different 'Ideal' Beauty Standards.

This may have made me giggle a little, as I shared it on Facebook.

My beautiful friend, Lisa Chiodo, shared some of her Italy.  I cannot recommend staying with her and Sam enough.  They are truly wonderful people living in Italy and opening their home to the world.

Moana Maniapoto wrote of the traditional Maori funeral here, and I loved how she captured it - Tangihanga - a dying tradition.

And this - Karanga Ra.  Sometimes I just play it up loud because somehow it takes me home. 

It's there on my playlist, between Tim Finn's, Parihaka - a song about the non-violent action preached and practiced by Māori prophets Te Whiti and Tohu at Parihaka in Taranaki forms one of the most compelling episodes in NZ’s 19th century history, as they resisted Pākehā confiscation of their land and home. Tim Finn was inspired to write this paean to the pair, after reading Dick Scott’s influential book Ask That Mountain. Band Herbs provide the accompaniment. Fane Flaws and cinematographer Alun Bollinger’s video was shot over a night at Auckland Art Gallery and takes Colin McCahon’s striking Parihaka triptych as its centrepiece.

Source: NZ on Screen.

And Little Bushman singing Peaceful Man.  Performed with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, it's the story of the peaceful Maori resistance leader, Te Whiti o Rongomai.

And then there was the poem!  Written by my exquisite friend butI need permission to share. I'll get back to you.  It's all about those days after my first divorce, when she was my soulmate and confidant.  There were beaches and long conversations, red wine and laughter.  And so much kindness. 

But that poem about those days ... I'll ask her.

Giovanni Tiso Writes ... and David Whyte too.

Giovanni Tiso wrote a beautiful piece about childhood homes and memories ... To visit now, if only electronically, to see that light again and the shallow sky, is to relieve the migrant’s grief for places and a life left behind.

I know these feelings he writes of, so well ...I cannot say that I miss this place, in the sense that there is no place for me there. Not in my grandparents’ house, that was sold over twenty years ago; not in the village, where I couldn’t build a life if I wanted to. I have a fondness for it that is reserved to distant things and for the past. I miss the people in it, but especially those who are no longer there. I miss my childhood, or maybe more precisely the idea of it: those interminable summer days and weeks, all identical to one another yet always charged with the remote possibility of adventure. I do not subscribe to the current fashion for romanticising boredom, but I wouldn’t trade that sameness, my few friends, our games for excitement and travel.

And David Whyte wrote this beautiful poem:

THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny close
grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels
of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun had made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.


'The House of Belonging'
From The House of Belonging
Poems by David Whyte
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Alice Phoebe Lou and her Berlin Blues Song

Alice Phoebe Lou wrote this about her music video, 'This video means a lot to me as it goes from my present in Berlin winter to the memories of my past growing up in Cape Town. My father filmed these childhood moments and last year he came to Berlin for a week and we became really close and he filmed bits and pieces of our journey together.'

I love it.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from 'Gift from the Sea'.

'Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in a woman's life.

For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel.  The pattern of our lives is essentially circular.  We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive likes a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.  How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives.

...With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.  I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children.  It has to do primarily with distractions.  The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; the human relationships with their myriad pulls - woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. 

The problem is not merely on of 'Woman and Career', 'Woman and the Home', 'Woman and Independence'.  It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.'

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, extract from, Gift from the Sea.