On how one orients himself to the moment, depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.
Henry Miller, reflecting on the art of living, extract from a superb article at Dangerous Minds.
Today is the day where I step back into the 'fray'. While I get to travel and have some truly marvelous adventures, there's a price to it all. I live in a house full of people and I'm what might be called the chief cook and bottlewasher. Mediator, babysitter, housewife, wife, mother, cleaner ... all those roles that so many women fulfil on top of everything else that they do. So it's nothing extraordinary and yet it is challenging sometimes.
And it's not so much that our partners force us into that space... For me it's simply the fact that I was shaped by those expectations of womanhood from the time I was small and so yes, I clean the house as thoroughly as I can before I go traveling. I clean it up when I return. I speak for those who don't speak here and generally organise life when I'm in town.
I was the eldest child and somehow I carry that with me too, that feeling of being responsible.
And so I have returned to process a portrait shoot I did for friends before leaving, an interior shoot too, and I'll be photographing another family during the week. There is ongoing work with A New Way of Seeing, the advertising and still the web content needs enlarged. My book-writing course (which has fallen down into a hole that looks more like a crevasse than a crack but I have until December to finish up on that), my book about Genova, and so much more.
I dream about being one of those people who simply lines up one thing at a time, or of being at ease with the beautiful chaos of my life. I dream of having a personal assistant, someone who does all the work I can hand over, that doesn't need me, leaving me free for the intense stuff only. I dream of having a cleaner ... oh how I dream of that in this quirky old Belgian house.
So I write, with so much joy, of my adventures woven into a work day but there's the other stuff too. It's life. It's normal but I decided to write of the other side of my life ... the things I don't write on because they're less about joy and more about that grittiness that is everyday and real too.
Now ... to make a list and get things lined up and in some kind of order. That list will be long.