Antwerp ... it's grey and it's raining but coming home on the packed tram, complete with screaming child torturing her mum with a tantrum, I ended up chatting with the guy next to me. A musician, a circus performer, from Cuba originally. A friendly foreigner like me. He even does the high-wire stuff. And I had to smile, even on the grey days, these small sunshiny moments are possible.
Andrew Greig, Writer, Poet, Musician ...
I have 2 mountaineering authors I enjoy more than all others and one of them is Andrew Greig, author of the book titled Summit Fever.
Perhaps this write-up captures what I found so enjoyable about his book: When poet Andrew Greig was asked by Scottish mountaineer Mal Duff to join his ascent of the Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram Himalayas, he had a poor head for heights and no climbing experience whatsoever. The result is this unique book.
Summit Fever has been loved by climbers and literary critics alike for its refreshing candour, wit, insight and the haunting beauty of its writing. Much more than a book about climbing, it celebrates the risk, joy and adventure of being alive.
But having 'discovered' Andrew today, beyond rereading his book and carrying it with me as I've moved towns and countries, I have truly enjoyed finding his poetry and everything else too. He's a well-rounded artist it seems.
And I found Mal's Song (embedded below) ... beyond special. I'm on page 38, rereading my paperback version yet again and Mal is currently introducing Andrew to the mountains ... in preparation for their adventure in the Himalayas. Like in the song.
Mal Duff was an extraordinary man, a superb mountaineer, a good friend to many, and all kinds of other things that I can't possibly imagine, I'm sure. He died at Everest's base camp back in 1997.
Joe Simpson, who also had some epic times in the mountains with Mal, wrote of Mal's favourite quote in the introduction to Andrew's book, Summit Fever. The quote:
He either fears his fate too much
or his deserts are small,
that dares no put it to the touch
to win or lose it all.
- the Duke of Montrose.
But of course.
And that would be Joe Simpson, that other writer/mountaineer whose books I love.
I Loved These Words ...
For a homebody surrounded by the familiar or a traveler exploring the strange, there can be no better guide to a place than the weight of its air, the behavior of its light, the shape of its water, the textures of rock and feather, leaf and fur, and the ways that humans bless, mark or obliterate them.
Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.
Ellen Meloy, Writer.
A Poppy Kind of Day ...
It's a grey day here in Antwerp. Grey in so many ways, and so a splash of colour didn't seem out of order here on the blog.
I'm reading an exquisite essay by Rebecca Solnit - The Far North of Experience, In Praise of Darkness (and Light), cooking the first of two pavlovas, and I'm back on everyday school-runs for 2 weeks as of today.
My photography exhibition is coming together and I have some workshops to plan. There's a Passenger concert to attend soon too.
Wishing you a lovely weekend
Karoline's Work and Words About Working With Me in Norway
My lovely Norwegian clients were teenage sisters. Their eye for composition and their ability to understand what I was showing them about photography, impressed me.
They wrote of working with me and made me adore them even more :-)
Working with Di has been incredibly fun! At first, I thought it was going to be challenging learning everything in English, but it was surprisingly easy.
She is a really great teacher, and a really great person. I will definitely start taking a lot more pictures now that I know how to do it properly.
It has been an amazing experience that I will never forget!
't Stad
Antwerp city... otherwise known as 't Stad, is a city with staying power. Quietly determined, she has stood here, growing, since Gallo Roman times, fighting off every kind of invader. A steenezel perhaps but so solid. Always solid, despite the Spanish, the Dutch, the Austrians, the Nazis and all kinds of other folk too, attempting to rule her.
The story goes that the city got its name via a legend that involved a mythical giant called Antigoon. He lived near the Scheldt River and demanded a toll from those using the river. If people refused, he cut off their hand and threw it into that river. The giant was eventually killed by a hero called Brabo who, in the way of mythical stories, cut off that giant's hand and threw it into the river.
Antwerpen or hand werpen, as in the Old English hand and wearpan (to throw), became the name of this city way back in those days when mythical giants existed ... somehow.
There are all kinds of other, more practical, stories regarding the name but this is my favourite.
Below is a glimpse of the famous river, giant-free, at sunset. You can see the exquisite Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, (aka Cathedral of Our Lady) in the background. Construction finished way back in 1521. The one finished spire stands at 123 metres (404 ft) high, and is the highest church tower in the Benelux. The largest bell in the tower requires 16 bell ringers.
It's a city where I've been lucky to find all the pretty ways home because there are pretty ways. And I do love the ancient heart of the city, its perfectly walkable, cobblestoned and full of all kinds of surprises. It's as quirky as you can imagine. Let me show you.
For Sale, Exquisite Mosaics
My favourite shop in Genova is closing and they are selling these beautiful pieces of furniture.
Anyone interested in having them in their home or workspace, or who knows people who could use them in their cafe or shop, please don't hesitate to contact the lovely Francesca and Norma. Details are there on the advert.
What Have I Achieved... ?
I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?'
Walter Farley
A wholehearted yes to this quote, found over on Terri Windling's beautiful blog, Myth & Moor.
I have decided that to die rich is stories is another way to measure a life. I have never 'achieved' in the normal sense of the word but I like the way my life has played out so far. I've lost everything twice but not in a traumatic way ... it's more that I simply stepped away from 'stuff'.
I read of people desiring, quite desperately it seems, to declutter their lives and I think, 'move countries' and take only the 23kg limit allowed by most carriers out of New Zealand. It was the same when I moved from Istanbul. What you can't leave behind becomes clear ...
Obstacles ...
I discovered a graffiti park, here in the city, once upon a time ...
Of course developers took it over, 'fixed' it, and these days it's a shadow of its former luscious self. But here's a photograph I made before it was fixed.
Those Landscapes ...
When I went home, back in 2012, one of the places I had to revisit was the river in the photograph below.
It was the scene of much childhood joy. It was my river. I loved the smell of it as it flowed out of the valley and onto the plains. I loved the scent the stones would throw up from under our wet and wriggly bodies as we baked ourselves on top of them, teeth chattering, after being ordered out of the river to warm ourselves a while. I loved picnics there ... warm Greggs cordial in big glass beer bottles, and egg sandwiches and cakes Mum had baked. And I loved the way my hair would smell, full of river water, on the way home.
Later, when body consciousness forced me out of the river and those idyllic childhood days, I returned with my dog. She seemed to share my passion for the river. I would skim stones for her from the shore.
Fast-forward decades and everyone warned me, when I went home ... things will have changed. You will have idealised it. So I was cautious with my expectations, knowing that the landscapes I had loved might seem different, now I was older, more traveled.
But no ... those old landscapes, they rose up in front of me and kissed me full on the mouth. A bear hug, or more, and this deep feeling of joy over simple things like bird song and the scent of bush in the rain at Tautuku.
Nothing had changed. All of the big passionate love I had felt was still there. Those 'scapes allowed me to slip back in and love them like always. No recriminations about leaving.
Well, maybe .... just a few sly questions like, have you found anywhere better? Name one place where the air smells like this ...
Did you miss us?
There Are People I Miss In My Everyday Life ...
I rolled up my sleeves and waded into my photo-archives, wanting to begin the selection process I need to do for my exhibition opening at the end of October.
I popped back to the surface of life when reminded of an 11am appointment, at 11.15am. I'd forgotten in spite of having my appointments book open in front of me. An appointment with a friend but still, I forgot.
Photographs were taken, the last in a series. She made me a coffee, we shared our stories since last meeting, then I returned to my desk ... after lunch and a little more laundry.
Then came a conversation about 9/11, a link shared that pulled me into the world of the 2,200+ engineers and architects who want the event properly examined. Using real science. And I read the discussion that followed amongst friends and bommpft, I fell off the edge of my creative world ... again.
I have 8,000 photographs in the archives of my 2010 visit back home to New Zealand. I have photographic archives that I have never fully reviewed ... folders where I have skimmed off the best and most obvious at the time, meaning to get back to the rest but life has raced on, like a galloping horse sometimes.
Slightly destroyed, I wandered across to my bed. Note: having an office in a large bedroom means that the space isn't big enough to stop the bed-walk from occurring when sadness kicks in. I flopped there for a few minutes before the Belgian bloke phoned from his first day back after his long summer holiday.
Guilt. Caught being so lazy.
So here I am, back at the computer, exploring all these archived images of mine. I love what I'm finding, in terms of memories of home and people I adore but I'm fighting the sensation of overwhelm as hundreds upon hundreds of moments I never want to forget appear here in front of me.
Meet Fiona, my friend Fiona. She has been described in this way since I first left the place where we grew up. My friend Fiona ... my very best friend since I was 13 and still, so many years on, much-adored ... much-missed because we live about 20,000kms apart. I wish we lived closer.
Missing you today, Fiona.
Love, Di
That Creative Place ...
I used to ride horses when I was a teenager. Quite often they were slightly insane horses that the owners had tired of. There was Mickey who used to paw the ground when we crossed streams ... indicating she was about to roll and you could only stay on if you imagined you could stop her. There was Nutmeg who made a vet turn away in horror when he health-checked her for her owner.
I was that horse-mad kid for a while. The vet had spotted multiple 'issues' with that big, slightly crazy, ungainly chestnut called Nutmeg. And then there was her paddock-mate, Cinnamon, the ex-racehorse who occasionally raced off with whoever was riding him. He was a geriatric.
I survived.
But there were days, few and far between but enough to keep me going, of sublime happiness. When, just occasionally, everything would come together. The sky would be blue, the air warm, and the horse would be having a best-behaviour kind of day. Those days were the days where being out with the horse was like floating along on my own private cloud of joy.
Writing is like that for me. Just sometimes it all comes together.
Photography I can do anywhere. I enter that state of non-thinking ... that creative space, easily and work almost unconsciously, losing my self in the process. But writing, that's something else entirely.
Writing, for me, comes from another place. It's a space more consciously created. I feed it like I might feed a fire. Building the flame from a spark up into, if I'm fortunate, a roaring fire. And I'm finally learning that sustaining that space or that mood, is the trickiest thing.
I'm almost bullet-proof as a photographer and yet I am as fragile as a butterfly when I write. I had spent two hours building that creative space yesterday. I have a photography exhibition opening on 31 October and the theme is complex. I want to get it right. Dreaming it into being involves writing. Writing involves building the fire.
I was horrified to realise how fragile I was yesterday. How fragile the creation of that space is. At the same time I was glad to finally understand the different creative spaces I inhabit when I move between the two things I love doing best.
I knew I couldn't interview someone and photograph them at the same time but I didn't know why. I think both disciplines ask for a similar depth but they're different. With photography I'm simply searching for the soul, or for a small glimpse of the true core of a person. I want to capture something of who they really are ... to show them their own personal beauty.
When I interview someone it's completely different. I am listening, intently, consciously. I can't lose myself in that photographer space where I don't really exist, where it's all about slipping under the surface of the person I'm photographing. I have to be present with an interview. Later, when I'm writing it up ... perhaps then there's that slippage into the soul. Or, more nicely put, into the shoes of that person.
I was a writer first. I thought that was what I would be in my spare time, after I found a sensible job that paid ... but I never ever learned to protect the space. Photography allows me to move in and out of the creative space with ease. Well ... coming home after a photography shoot is sometimes slightly fraught, as I am empty and exhausted by all I've given but ... I can flick in and out of photography without building a fire slowly.
I love that I will be 50 soon. I love that I'm finally getting curious about who I am and what I do. And I love that I have the opportunity to put together this photography exhibition and explore complicated things while knowing I need to keep the line through it simple and clear. I love that I have to find the poem within the story... the few images that capture multiple layers.
But most of all, I love that yesterday, I finally understood that I need to create and protect the space where I write. That I begin with a spark and build a fire.
Mmmhmmm, only took me 49 years to learn this simple thing ...
Listening to Van Morrison's Into the Mystic today. Working now ...
Freedom and Passion ... two remarkable females
Life is so short. The world is rich. There are so many adventures possible. Why do we not gather our strength together and live. It all comes to much the same thing. In youth, most of us are, for various reasons, slaves. And then, when we are able to throw off our chains, we prefer to keep them. Freedom is dangerous, is frightening.
Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand modernist writer.
I loved this story of 6-year-old Australian surfer, Quincy Symonds. Her story is simply inspiring. I found her via this useful website I follow on Facebook ... A Mighty Girl.
A small surfer makes big waves from ABC Open on Vimeo.
Stavanger Konserthus, Norway
Located in Southwest Norway, Stavanger counts its official founding year as 1125, the year Stavanger cathedral was completed. Stavanger's core is to a large degree 18th- and 19th-century wooden houses that are protected and considered part of the city's cultural heritage. This has caused the town centre and inner city to retain a small-town character with an unusually high ratio of detached houses,and has contributed significantly to spreading the city's population growth to outlying parts of Greater Stavanger.
Stavanger is today considered the center of the oil industry in Norway and is one of Europe's energy capitals and is often called the oil capital. Forus Business Park located on the municipal boundary between Stavanger, Sandnes and Sola and is one of the largest business parks with 2,500 companies and nearly 40,000 jobs.
Source: Wikipedia.
I was walking back to Ren's place when we passed the Stavanger Konserthus. I couldn't resist attempting to capture a sense of the place ... from the outside.
Scenes from a Boat in Norway ...
A Little Bit of Me, Myself and I ... at work in Norway
I have finally had time to sit down and begin working on the photographs taken in Norway.
I was, once again, photographed while working with photographers ... Ren Powell is responsible for two of the photographs in the montage below. I couldn't resist taking the third.
I still need to get permission to post photographs of the lovely people I worked with while in Stavanger but ... I permitted myself to post these.
'Say Yes to Life' ... Isabel Allende
I was wandering alone for a month, back home in New Zealand, interviewing climbers and mountaineers for a book I wanted to put together. It was a month off from my first marriage. The synopsis went through two publishing meetings. They told me they loved it but they didn't feel there was a big enough audience. They gave me other publishing house names to send it to but my mother was diagnosed and I wandered off to university late.
I still have the manuscript but that was a long time ago.
Anyway ... way back then and I arrived in Wellington, at the home of my truly delightful friend, Michelle Bennie. I had her absent flatmate's bedroom. It was a small room in a beautiful old wooden house. Her flatmate was out of town. The bedroom was located on flimsy-looking stilts ... located on the side of a steep bush-covered hill there in Brooklyn. Possums on the roof at night, it offered a beautiful view over Wellington city.
I remember that this was the place where I first 'met' Isabel Allende, via a book on the bookshelf in that bedroom. I devoured 'Eva Luna' one rainy day, enjoying the strange and exotic taste of her story, curled up on someone else's bed in a city not my own.
I was in town to interview Matt Comesky. The loveliest high altitude climber I've ever met. He was on K2 with Bruce Grant and Alison Hargreaves when they were blown off the mountain. I so very much wanted to understand the mind of the climber way back then. I still do, and war photographers and journalists have joined the ranks of those who fascinate me.
Anyway ... Wellington, 1998, Isabel Allende was the bonus.
Dimitris Politis, The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man
I find myself finally crashing today, after weeks of pressure from so many sides that they must have been holding me together until now.
As each problem has been solved, I imagine the pressure came off, leaving me free to crumple today.
Thank goodness for Dimitris Politis and his beautiful photographs from his visit home.
He recently published his first novel and I so very much enjoyed reading it. You can check it out here - The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man. I loved it!
'The story deals with the contentious yet universal issues of intolerance and understanding, discrimination and acceptance, violence, terrorism and forgiveness. Dimitris Politis plunges boldly into the Irish reality but always in equilibrium with his Greek consciousness, creating a unique mirror between Greece and Ireland, where the glittering Aegean waves are crowned by the rainbows of the Atlantic and the west coast of Ireland. The reader is drawn to the story through its exciting twists and turns, interlinked through a fast cinematographic pace: the book is an excellent contemorary example of "black" fiction with a subtle and delicate deepening of sentiments, feelings and beliefs linked to the human nature. It voices a loud protest against social and historical stereotypes and is a stern warning of how intolerance and ignorance can lead to disaster. In today's world where many countries are mired in a financial crisis, where make people tend to forget the importance of tolerance and acceptance of their fellow human begins, the author cleverly reminds us that difference and diversity are universally present: they indeed shape our world, they are the rule rather than the exception. He prompts us to remember that we are all born different and grow up differently, making each of us very special in our own unique way whatever the circumstances.'
Today ...
Gert is home after having a shot of cortisone to the shoulder. The specialist told him not to expect much for 2 to 3 days. Fingers crossed this is the beginning of a cure, as he's been in pain a long time.
Jess is out of surgery and they're waiting for the doctor to let her come home. I can't even imagine how it must feel to have 4 wisdom teeth removed but we have a freezer full of good quality ice cubes, and there are the popsicles too. She has her very own Flemish bloke with her there.
Inge raced in to spend some time with me this afternoon, only to race out about 10 minutes after meeting, as a small family emergency called her home. It wasn't serious in one way but it couldn't be ignored in another. We'll try that Antwerp city tour again, if possible. Meanwhile she's invited me to visit her in her Westhoek world. That would be her Flemish childhood home ... as, these days, she's a fulltime resident of New Zealand.
It's been an intense few months but today signaled a change in direction. I'm working on something a bit special and hope to mount a photography exhibition here in October. More news to follow with regard to that.
Meanwhile while Jess recovers from tooth abscesses and surgery I'm back on the trams 4 hours a day, not enjoying the heavy pollution we have here but having fun with Little Miss 10.
So yes ... it's like that.
The image below was taken at Cooks Beach in the Coromandel. Early one New Zealand morning when I was out wandering alone.
Well yes ... I am having fun with the new set of photography borders and tool kit they come with. Thank you.
My Office Space ...
