Lost in Venice

Getting lost is the only place worth going to.

Tiziano Scarpa, author Venice is a Fish

And we did get lost, Julie and I. We were on our 8-day roadtrip through Italy, Croatia, Hungry, Austria and back into Italy.  We were driving past Venice on our way from Trieste to Como and Julie said, as you do, let's pop into Venice for a couple of hours.

She had been once and wanted to introduce me to that mythical Italian city I had never seen.  So we parked and caught a bus across the long bridge into Venice.  And we were confident, for a while, that there was no way we'd get lost but ... oh we did.

So lost.  But the sights we happened upon were worth it in retrospect.

There were sights I had never imagined before, around every other corner ... like this.

 

Creativity

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

Jessica Olien, extracts from her article, Inside the Box - People don't actually like Creativity.

 

The Lovin Genova Blog

Sometimes, I write a blog post and it hits a wrong note.  If it stays wrong in my mind, I delete it.  Sorry about that ...

Nice news today is that the new Lovin Genova Blog, created by the Office for the Development and Promotion of Tourism of the City of Genoa, has one of my posts up.  It's titled, From The Outside Looking In.

Davide Chelli has written a beautiful post that takes you inside the Oriental Market, on Via XX Settembre in Genova.

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.

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 ...

 

Book Work ...

I first arrived in Genova back in 2008.  I have been returning, as often as is possible, since then.  I would live there in a heartbeat.

I have been reading through notes made and books I've bought.  The port of Genova, active since 5 BC.  I found the note that recorded the fact that I almost cried, in front of strangers, that first time I saw the Ligurian Sea from the path at Nervi.  I had written in my journal that Genova seemed more and more, to me, like a place where New Zealand and Istanbul met and become something more beautiful than either ... back on 21 October, 2008

I saw this scene this year I think, and couldn't resist it

Really?

Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again. The world calls them its singers, poets, and story-tellers but they are just people who have not forgotten.

L.M. Montgomery.

Since autumn began I've been attempting to fit my book in around family commitments and being a housewife.  It doesn't really work.  I remember those days back when I left for the office.  I recall the feeling of relief, of being in that safe space defined by clear boundaries marked 'work'.  That place where the threshold was rarely crossed by 'family'.

There was a degree of separation found there.  A door more-or-less closed on the reality that is home life and all  of those things that happen there ... from poo-filled nappies and sleepless nights, to sick cats and people you have powerful emotional ties to.

Work was always a place where I existed at another level.  Where, more often that not, objectivity was a state of being more simply found.  And I was paid for my presence, my hours, my labour.

Working from home, around a family life I rarely decribe here, oh my ... it's a topic I almost never touch.  But there is no degree of seperation.  I use the bathroom here amd I realise that I am also the cleaning lady and dammit, I haven't cleaned the bathroom lately.  I go downstairs for lunch and realise I'm the baker and that a new loaf needs to go in for breakfast tomorrow.  I make a coffee and see the dishes need washed and dried and put away.  I take a shower, need a towel and voila, I realise there are 3 loads of laundry there in the queue.  And what's for dinner tonight ...?

And really, I just want to hunker down in that seperate space called 'the office', and work for my money, and be objective but it's so unrealistic.  I was trained from a very young age that I needed to be responsible ... as the eldest sister, as a good little girl from Mosgiel. 

Gifting myself permission ... no, gifting myself the luxury of writing all day, it's something I am battling with at every level.  This last week has been impossible.  There are moments where I can do my writing work but as it is only the'possibility of income' ... can I even call it work?  Don't so many, as in those who know 'money doesn't grow on trees', view it as a luxury?  This writing lark. 

When you read of money and trees, did you find yourself adopting the deep voice of your father or some other remembered voice of authority?  I think only men have said that to me.  They get so mad with me and my lack of gratitude.  It's only the housework and the family.  You have it so easy. 

But I'm wondering ... 'really?' 

Anyway, I'll work it out and meanwhile, the image below.  My childish self loves the notion that there are the possibility of other worlds in puddles.

A Small Slice of Genova, Italy

For me, the fountain in Piazza De Ferrari represents the true heart of the city.  Then again, I am a foreigner and I may have that wrong but anyway ... I've taken a few hundred photographs of that fountain since first visiting in 2008.  Slicing it up, as I slice up everything. Examining it in different lights, falling in love with the fall of the water one day, then a reflection another day.

On this day the fountain was still and I was able to get close, wanting both the text and reflection of Palazzo Ducale.

Genova ... it's a city I could spend the rest of my life photographing.  I never expected to find one place that would capture my interest in this way but it has.  The more you explore Genova, the closer you go, the more there is. 

Then again, if I was more than 2,000 years in the making then I might be fairly complicated and interesting too.

Hope That Deep Sea Oil Drilling Can Be Halted in New Zealand

An Update: Greenpeace today filed papers at the High Court of New Zealand in Wellington asking for a Judicial Review of the decision to allow Anadarko to carry out drilling.

The government’s Environmental Protection Authority made an ‘error in law’ by allowing Anadarko to go-ahead without looking at several key documents, including reports on oil spill modelling and emergency plans to deal with an oil spill, according to the legal papers.

Lawyers for Greenpeace are asking for the matter to be ‘allocated an urgent hearing date’ due to the ‘national importance of the issue’.

If Greenpeace’s challenge is successful, it could bring a halt to Anadarko’s drilling plans, as they should not have been given permission to drill because the requirements of the law were not met.

Sickening Developments Down in New Zealand

Is there nothing at all who can appease your greed,

Could you please leave the air we breath
Why is it something we've done
You all seem to forget
About nuclear fallout and the long term effects

... Let me be more specific, get out of the pacific
Ki te la pacific, get out of the pacific
Ki te la pacific

French Letter lyrics, by the Herbs.  A protest song telling the French government to take their nuclear testing out of the Pacific back in 1982. 

I have embedded a link to their song, a memory of a time when New Zealanders and the government came together to fight for a nuclear-free Pacific.  At the time the French government was testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific and wouldn't stop.  |The French government decided to get very serious with the kiwis and sent some of their crack troops to Auckland where they blew up a Greenpeace vessel in our second-largest city, killing one person. 

These days evolution seems to be spinning backwards and the New Zealand goverment, in a moment of insanity has given a Texan oil giant, with a poor safety record, the right to carry out deep-sea drilling just off the coast of New Zealand.  The risk of an accident is small, they say ... the consequences of just one accident, are huge in a place like New Zealand. 

Anadarko started drilling in the wee hours last night, surrounded by a small flotilla of protests boats ... it's truly a David versus Goliath battle.  Of course, with our very 'special' prime minister at the helm we see the New Zealand government threatening to send the NZ navy out to stop the protestors.  New Zealand has changed and not for the better.

In the last few hours the New Zealand protestors were warned by the Texans that being closer than 500m to their oil drilling rig in New Zealand waters is ... illegal, because the NZ government also changed some rules for them, making it illegal to protest out there. 

So not only has the NZ government broken trust with the people who hired them, as in the public who voted them in, they have lied and changed laws so that the NZ navy can now be used againt the NZ protestors in order to protect the big oil giant.

And they'll probably give Anadarko ships safe passage too, should the unthinkable oil spill happen.

It makes me heartsick because if and when the oil accident happens ... well, what do you with the worst-case scenario?  The documents shows that up to 90 per cent of the wells have a worst-case discharge rate of 100,000 barrels, about 16,000 tonnes a day, but some could discharge up to 350,000 barrels.

"And a couple of months' worth of major spill - unlikely though that may be - would be a significant disaster for wildlife, for the health of our oceans, for our fisheries and for our tourism brand at a cost of billions of dollars to New Zealand.''

Congratulations to Mr Keys and a very shortsighted New Zealand government.  I'm just going to be praying that your greed for immediate returns and thirst for oil doesn't leave New Zealanders with a mess that takes decades to clean up.

Source, The New Zealand Herald.


A Quietly Extraordinary Weekend ...

This weekend was a weekend where I experienced the extraordinary privilege of spending time with some remarkable people here in Antwerp.  It was made possible by Sarah Neirinckx, the personal and third culture coach, owner of Bloom.

But I don't want to write of it yet because I need time to work out how to tell the story true, so that you get a sense of it ... without photographs.  I need time.

It wasn't just about the workshop but I had offered the lovely Lynette a bed at our place while she attended the workshop.  This was also an extraordinarily delightful experience.  Having her to stay felt a little bit like some delightful Christmas fairy had climbed down from the tree and sparkled her way through our family. We all enjoyed her company.

Last night, I could barely form two sentences when I tried writing here.  Today re-entry into the life of the extended family has been so much simpler despite the fact it was another inspiring, challenging, intense day. 

But this woman ... Dr Brenda Davies led us all on an exquisite journey through these last few days.  I'll write more as soon as I find the words. 

Keys seem like an entirely appropriate image to end this short blog with.  Normal service will surely return tomorrow.

An Unusual Weekend So far ...

I wouldn't be exaggerating if I wrote that I am spending time with the most remarkable people this weekend.  I'm on a two-day workshop that has both filled me with a new kind of energy and left me an exhausted shell of a woman tonight.

The intensity is quite something.  (And I've deleted words and sentences here so many times already...)  I need to get through the workshop and then give it a couple of days to brew some before writing of it.

The bonus is spending time with Lynette.  She is a New Zealander living over in Brussels ... a woman who has fitted so beautifully into our household that we might just keep her.  She's been a great companion on the journey and after about 24 hours together I feel like we've known one another a very long time.

Meanwhile, I'm proud of the New Zealanders out there putting up a fight against the deep sea oil drilling off the coast of our beautiful little islands  And while I know a few grumpy old blokes read my blog and will surely mutter into their long grey beards, I'm going to proudly post a clip from those people who see the huge risks in the drilling.

There Are Days ...

What makes me so homesick at this time of year?

I think it's the realisation that we're on the big plunge into winter where Christmas will be turned into something white and freezing and flat and kind of boring.  Meanwhile, back home in New Zealand, Christmas means summer holidays that go on forever ... strawberries, cherries, new potatoes just out of the ground.  It means white wine in the sun ... actually this song really gives a good sense of it.

My song of choice when I want to go on a melancholic bender ... oh yes.

I have a lovely guest arriving tonight.  There's a dinner in the city and an introductory workshop session.  I'm curious to see how it all goes but just can't concentrate at the moment.

Mmmmm, that could have something to do with the photograph below.  The contents of Christine and Peter's parcel.  It may be that I'm actually in the midst of a sugar rush caused by the Mint Treat Bites and the Chocolate Fish, eaten while I was writing today.

But the Tui bird pictured below.  You cannot imagine how much pleasure I get from pressing the small button that makes it chime ... just like a real one.  I'm still bemused about how easily I've regressed to 'small delighted child'.

I'll get back to you ...

Today ...

So I'm down to the final 90 minutes of today when it comes to meeting my daily commitment to writing a blog post for NaBloPoMo.

It's as close to the wire as I've gone so far but it was one of those days.  I began with the best of intentions and was distracted, just after 8.30am,  by the delivery of an exquisite birthday parcel from New Zealand.  Christine and Peter had sent me a Weetbix tin full of New Zealand chocolate goods.  It was full of childhood and memories.  And there was a soft toy Tui, loaded with the call of a Tui.  I melted. 

But today was going to be about writing ... just writing.  I wasn't planning to leave the house before 11.30am however the Belgian bloke picked up an emergency dental appointment, for the gaping hole in his tooth, and I promised to deliver his money card to him before 10.30am.

I roared out of the house in time but he phoned me, having realised his credit card could be used... the emergency over.  However I was out of the house and wandering.  No point in going home just for an hour  and so I decided to vist my favourite secondhand bookshop here in the city. 

I thoroughly explored their truly superb English selection before settling on one 6.50euro book.  Leaving, I met up with Andy at the cash register and voila, we were out for a quick catch-up before I found a city bike and headed off across the city on the school pick-up run.  I arrived just in time.

The school is an interesting one and I find myself having conversations with quietly extraordinary people sometimes.  That happened today.  Then Miss 9 and I wandered home via the bakery that sells the best chocolade eclairs in the city.  They know us now.  We call by once a week, we chat some.

The final leg of the journey is via a tram and we played the Animal Game all the way to our stop.  It's a spelling game that moves between English and Nederlands.  If Miss 9 says 'tiger' I have to find an animal beginning with 'r' and if I say 'olifant' she has to find one beginning with t.  And so it goes on the long journey home ... we need to google more animals though.

But, oh dear, in searching for how to spell the only X animal I thought I knew, I discovered that it actually begins with an A.  Back to the drawing board on 'Axolotl'.  That is so not how I was spelling it. 

We came home via Puerta del Sol where I called in to buy a red wine but ended up chatting with Frank.  And the delightful surprise being the fact that I was gifted a divine red wine from the woman I was so privileged to interview over the weekend ... which reminds me that I must get all of the interviews outstanding up and out next week.  The Italy ones too, now that I have them.  The story of those Genovainterviews, traveling all over the world, is a story to tell on another day.

Miss 9 and I lunched at 3pm and the day continued on in much the same way.  We're onto 'The Silver Chair' in The Chronicles of Narnia.  And although we only finished Harry Potter this year, I'm wondering if we can read it again after Narnia ...  

I ended the day with a much-loved friend.  Mary Lou is that friend who twice flew to New Zealand and traveled with me.  Once over to Istanbul and then later, we met twice in Europe.  It had been too long since our last conversation and it was grand to catch up.

It's 23.18 as I finish this.  Sliding in with 42 minutes to spare ...leaving you with my favourite Mary Lou and Al photograph, taken when visiting them in Ohio.  Tomorrow, a whole new set of adventures are set to begin ... news to follow.

Woman Enough ...

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, 'Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?' Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas -- inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

Doris Lessing.

This ... this is so true for me.  I recently deleted my facebook account and experienced a most astounding silence.  It took time to adjust to a life without interesting voices crowding in but I did.  And I loved it.  I wrote.  Eventually though, I realised how little people-contact there is in my everyday world and so I went back to facebook.

The alarm goes every morning at 6.45am here.  I have breakfast ready by 7.30am, when I'm home, and I'm usually here at my desk by 8.30am.  And then I read my way into the place that I work from.

It's a mixture of going through email, a scan of my facebook wall for news of the world, catching up on my blog feed and picking through a selection of new reading there.

There's no physical journey, beyond climbing the stairs to the first floor but there is some kind of journey into that place where I work.

So much can go wrong ...

I think it's why painters have studios, photographers too.  Ateliers.  Mine would be locked some days, with no visible signs of life showing.  I have this 4 hour window of time where I can concentrate intensely.  It's the time when the best of my creativity comes out to play.  I know this but I can't always hold onto it.

I'm studying the 'how' of it because I have had 5 disasterous days in a row, with life crashing into me, again and again.  I think, in the process of opening your self to dig deep and create something that didn't exist before, or to write of something you love so that the passion leaps off the page and convinces people ... you need to go to a place where you can take off your skin and just kind of feel your way with your nerve-endings, with your senses perhaps.

An argument can lay waste to that 'place', to that state of being.  Or realising that this person or that really needs you, or that the house is a mess.  That particular 4 hours out is all that I require but it's so difficult to actually take that much time in the world where I live.

Exit Stage right, and Genova.

I have a favourite poem by a writer I've loved for years. I've posted it before so forgive me if you have already ready it.  Otherwise, maybe this captures something of the struggle ...

Woman Enough

Because my grandmother's hours
were apple cakes baking,
& dust motes gathering,
& linens yellowing
& seams and hems
inevitably unraveling
I almost never keep house
though really I like houses
& wish I had a clean one.

Because my mother's minutes
were sucked into the roar
of the vacuum cleaner,
because she waltzed with the washer-dryer
& tore her hair waiting for repairmen
I send out my laundry,
& live in a dusty house,
though really I like clean houses
as well as anyone.

I am woman enough
to love the kneading of bread
as much as the feel
of typewriter keys
under my fingers
springy, springy.
& the smell of clean laundry
& simmering soup
are almost as dear to me
as the smell of paper and ink.

I wish there were not a choice;
I wish I could be two women.
I wish the days could be longer.
But they are short.
So I write while
the dust piles up.

I sit at my typewriter
remembering my grandmother
& all my mothers,
& the minutes they lost
loving houses better than themselves
& the man I love cleans up the kitchen
grumbling only a little
because he knows
that after all these centuries
it is easier for him
than for me.

Erica Jong.

I had to shower, dress, go find a birthday present for a party this afternoon.  I had to get lunch from the supermarket.  After it all, I came back upstairs just after midday and experimented with layers and frames for my photographs ... trying to 'play' my way back into writing. 

Let's see how the rest of it goes.  The shot ... a city street in Genova.

Some More On Writing, then veering off in Ylvis

19 days of blogging everyday ... sometimes more than once a day. 

And it's interesting, for me, to realise that the more I write the more I want to write.  Last Wednesday I took time out to photograph an event and that had its own rewards.  And then Saturday I took a little more time and interviewed a truly interesting woman. 

But always, I return to the writing.  And the book is growing.  And it's just as I had experienced, twice before, it feels something like a pregnancy.  I didn't finish the other two books, I didn't make time ... it was life then, the usual excuses I guess.  But with this book ... there is always some thing that is happening with it, some thing that excites me at least once a week.

Of course, there are all the other things too.  I guess they would be the equivalent of cramps too early in the pregnancy, gestational diabetes, elevated bp ... the highs and the lows of growing something you very much want in your life.

My cousin, Julie, the creature who so generously took me traveling with her back in October, has finally arrived in New Zealand.  She left her life in the Cayman Islands a few months ago, came to Italy via a lone roadtrip in the UK, then stayed with us in Belgium, and we did some more of Europe together, and she did Lisbon, and later traveled on to Greece and Malaysia and Australia alone ... but I know I have forgotten some of the 'everywhere' of her travels.

However at some point I realised she had my October interviews, the three I had worked on in Genova.  She had bought a voice recorder there, saying she needed one ...  but really it was so I could borrow it because mine was back in Acqui Terme.  She's like that, one of the kindest people I know.  And so I had a series of delightful interviews recorded on it.  It was a crazy-busy time and somehow I never downloaded them because there was always tomorrow. 

Having finally arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand a couple of days ago, she was able to send them while I slept last night, despite another earthquake there.   And as I downloaded them, I realised how nervous I had been about it all.  The nausea slowly disappeared as I realised they were all there.  They're for the book too.

So it's like that these days.  The weekend was impossible, Monday was challenging.  Today ... today has started so well.  And I received an exquisite book in the mail.  Oh and last night, I was introduced to the most interesting Norwegian brothers.  Not really 'introduced' actually.  But they call themselves Ylvis.  I don't know which youtube to link too because you have to see them all ...

So ... probably everyone else knows about their song that went viral.  (They're mortified about it just by the way which I find hilarious.)  They explain some of it to Ellen Degeneres here.  The song they're talking of is here ... What Does The Fox Say.

But I think this is the best of their story found so far.  An interview they did on a Norwegian talkshow.  It begins in Norwegian but only the introduction.  Like so many Europeans they speak beautiful English.

Enjoy.

Rain, by Hone Tuwhare

I love rain.  The heavy stuff ...the kind that used pound down on the iron roof back when I lived in Te Anau.  That small town located in Fiordland, a region of mountains, massive lakes ... a national park that is 1,260,740 hectares in size.

Heavy rain on a gloomy Sunday can actually rescue a Sunday.  It's when the day crosses over from 'lifeless and dull' into cosy and delicious', somehow. 

Real rain is joy-filled.  Drizzle is drab.  The stillness of a grey day, energy-sapping.

I took rain forgranted in New Zealand.  It simply was.  I realised I missed it in Istanbul.  My apartment was 5th floor and the closest I got to hearing the glorious sound of heavy rain on the roof was when the rain angled in and hit the big useless metal air-conditioning unit attached outside my apartment.

Belgium doesn't really do torrential ... although these last two years there have been downpours that have caused cellars to flood, due mainly to the problem of a massively concreted landscape that lacks drainage capabilities.  Te Anau was built on glacial moraine.  Rainfall is massive, drainage is fast.

Genova does rain that makes my heart sing although there have been some tragedies in recent years.  I think it used to be October for the real downpours but these years seem less certain, less defined.  Change is afoot.

I was caught in a Genovese deluge one night.  Unbelievable rain ... like a huge bucket of water pouring down from the heavens and it was so unexpected, so crazy, that I ended up laughing out loud as one of the umbrella-selling guys from Pakistan offered to sell me an umbrella.  It was beyond umbrellas.

What was it about that experience that made joy well up like a bubble.  I have no idea but we were laughing like fools in the impossible rain. 

Anyway, favourite poem ever ... just about.

I can hear you making
small holes in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind:

the steady drum-roll
sound you make
when the wind drops

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

But if I should not
hear
smell or feel or see you


You would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

The image that follows ... I took it on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand last year.  I'm looking down on Tautuku Bay, scene of more than a few school camps.  The rain there was flavoured by the sea and the beech forests.  Sweeter rain you couldn't know ... except in Fiordland ... or traveling up the West Coast of the South Island.

Actually, scratch that.  Rain in New Zealand's wilderness areas is usually sweet.  I was rapt to see some of these favourite places in rain when I was showing the Belgian bloke home.  There are places I just don't want to see blue skies and sunshine in ... it's like that.