In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
'The House Protects the Dreamer' ...
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
Gaston Bachelard, Philosopher.
I needed to try and capture that place where I spend most of my hours for a project I discovered recently. I'll write more on that when it happens.
Today the sun came out for a while and this is what I saw ...
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.
Under The Tuscan Sun ...(or a recipe for dreaming)
Whenever I am unable to create my own sense of beauty, I have this book that has traveled with me since the 90's. The date I wrote in the front reads 'pre 1999'. I remember how it saved me when we moved to Te Anau, from the disruption and loneliness that is moving, and that it has saved me so many times since. For me, there is this sense of falling into the beauty that is Frances Mayes prose, like sinking below the surface of a swimming pool, immersed for a while.
Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct. There are places I've been which are lost to me.
I've heard so many angry women talk of Frances Mayes book 'Under the Tuscan Sun' - and make no mistake, I am talking of the book not the movie, which is another story entirely - and these women rage about this book and that woman's unrealistic portrayal of a life lived partially in Italy.
I listen, sometimes I speak up but mostly I quietly decide that they are not lovers of beautiful poetic prose writing ... that they simply lack a dreamy writerly soul. But truly, I'm not sure why I love what they hate.
The outrage ... I would love to unpick it, to understand where it comes from.
The second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace gleams. They've made the bed with the new blue sheets and left the terrace door open to the sound of the cuckoos and wild canaries in the linden trees. We pick the last of the pink roses on the front terrace and fill two old Chianti bottles with them. The shuttered room with its whitewashed walls, just-waxed floors, pristine bed with new sheets, and sweet roses on the windowsill, all lit with a dangling forty-watt bulb, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell. As soon as I walk in, I think it is the most perfect room in the world.
These are soul-soothing words for me. I once lived in the brick house of a friend who was so good to me when I divorced. It was everything sensible, that borrowed brick house, but my soul needed something else. I found a funny little 1.5 bedroom cottage out on the Otago peninsula.
I moved there and was happy. I would drink my morning coffee out in front of the massive rough wooden-framed windows that made up the front wall of that cottage. My view, a few metres of lawn, maybe 2, a small road just below, and the sheltered water of that beautiful harbour.
I require beauty but mostly it's simple. It's about Nature and good air, it's about views that make you stop and dream for a while. It's about having a dog, when possible.
New Zealand spoilt me in a way. My Belgian bloke understood more of me after our trip home last year. He realised that while I believe natural beauty is a right, he understands beauty is a luxury. He comes from a small country, 1/10th the size of New Zealand. In Belgium there are 11 million people, New Zealand has 4 million.
After a few days, my life takes on its own rhythm. I wake up and read for an hour at three a.m.; I eat small snacks - a ripe tomato eaten like an apple - at eleven and three rather than lunch at one. At six I'm up, but by siesta time, the heat of the day, I'm ready for two hours in bed. Slumber sounds heavier than sleep, and with the hum of a small fan, it's slumber I fall into.
Finally entering into university studies at 34 was one of the best things I have ever done. There was an appreciation of all that I studied, an excitement that I might not have felt back when I was 18. In those days, I lived in 4 different homes along the peninsula. My first husband and I bought an exquisite cottage down there back in 1999. We divorced and I lived in a series of cottages on that narrow strip of land between the harbour and the Pacific Ocean.
Under the Tuscan Sun got me through dark times and lonely times too. It was like a burst from a sun-lamp perhaps. It traveled to Istanbul with me, as one of the few things I could take from the old to the new life. It lives here on my deep-red book shelves in Belgium, a much-loved book that I recently pulled out as these autumn days grow grey and the darkness comes so much earlier.
For me, the book is a meditation on the beautiful moments, written in the prose of a woman who began as a poet and went on with prose. It's a writers book. A book for dreamers and lovers of beauty.
Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor.
