A Glimpse of Christmas Here ...

The Christmas highlight was watching Miss 9 open the gift we four bought her together.  I may have hinted at the fact we didn't have much money and had simply bought her lots of little presents at the 1 euro shop.  She is the sweetest, undemanding creature and so that was okay with her.

Christmas morning, and after we had handed out the gifts from under the tree, we put the bulky, blanket-covered gift on her lap.  She found it odd.  She said 'It's guitar-shaped?'  We said yes, 'maybe it's a novelty box to put all the little gifts in'.  She lifted the blanket and said, 'Ohhh, you used Sander's guitar case!'  Then she looked at the case more closely and said, 'Oh, it's not his.'

I think it began to dawn on her then but still she busied herself with opening the zip.  The look on her face as she opened the lid was simply gold.  She was stunned and bemused and amazed.  She pulled the guitar out, slipped it into position and started strumming. 

'Did you guess?' we asked her.

'Never', she said.  'I never imagined I might get a guitar!'

And maybe that's why we 4 put money together and bought it for her.  She never demands.  She never even really asks for the big things.  And this is the kid who has written 'oh so many' songs already.  A guitar was a far away dream.

Sander gave her her first guitar lesson on Christmas Day and by Boxing Day she was playing Twinkle Little Star.  We watched as she heard her mistakes and went back to fix them.  As Sander said, she has the music in her already. 

Christmas Day was six for breakfast, then lunch with the same six.  It was oddly non-traditional but lovely in terms of food.  We cleaned and perhaps some of us napped, until Shannon and Erik drove in from Holland.

Shannon and I have become old friends, having met long ago here in Belgium and now there is Erik, her truly lovely Dutch bloke.  He fits in so easily it's like we've always known him.  No photographs from the day and so I wandered through my 'this time last year' folder and voila ...

 

 

The People's Wine, Pinot Noir, New Zealand

I was talking to Julie tonight... she's back home in New Zealand these days, after months spent  wandering the world.  I was reminiscing about a red wine I had enjoyed while I was home.

I remembered there was a truck on the wine label, laughing over the fact that I don't think I ever paid full price for a bottle of The People's Wine - that pinot noir.  I found them on special where ever we wandered.  And, of course, I took that to be a divine sign to drink more because they were retailing for $22nz normally.

There is a photograph, of course ...

Saturday Morning

I don't know how we keep meeting these people that become important to us. Will it ever stop? Are we looking for them or were they always there under a current and we just stepped in the creek at the right time.

Amy Sharp, extract from, We will meet in a flower shop or on a corner in the rain and then later I'll tell you everything.

I'm awake before anyone else, on this Saturday morning in Belgium, and I have my laptop here with me downstairs.  It's resting on a tower of toilet paper, bought on special deal yesterday. I must take them upstairs but for now ... a useful laptop table.

The Tasmanian arrived last night.  Jobe is a lovely bloke who visits periodically, when he's not partying his way through Europe.  I've told him, more than a few times, he must put together some kind of book.  He's much-loved where ever he goes and the photographs of him hanging out with happy strangers in Poland and London and every place else, make me smile.

It's too cold and the pollution hangs heavy outside otherwise I would be off and wandering this morning. Like I did early one morning, back at Cooks Beach, in New Zealand.

Manuka Flower, New Zealand

When I lived in New Zealand I used to love getting up with the sun sometimes, wandering a while with my dog and my camera.  Last year, those days spent at Cooks Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula, were painfully exquisite.

It was something else to return with eyes hungry for home.  I saw ordinary everyday plants like the flax bush or the manuka flower in an entirely different way.  It was as if I was celebrating the familiar and elevating it to the point of extraordinary by virtue of not having experienced 'everyday and familiar' for 8 years or more.

I needed longer, more time to soak up the beauty I saw there. 

Christmas ...

Last year was the first 'real' Christmas I had had in 9 years.

I left New Zealand mid-2003 and experienced my very first northern hemisphere non-Christmas in Istanbul that year.  Living in a predominately Muslim country meant that life didn't stop for Christmas. The weather was rubbish.  It was winter.

That year I was given the day off to celebrate Christmas because I was considered a 'christian'.   And my Turkish boss took me home to her family that evening, generously celebrating Christmas for me and with me.  The next year I was teaching English conversation class at the university on the day, then raced off to English friends to experience my first-ever English Christmas (in Turkey).

Then came Belgium and the next few years were spent attempting to get used to the whole Christmas-in-winter thing.  But the traditions here have simply moved Christmas so far from my New Zealand origins that I don't experience Christmas as Christmas.  It's just this strange holiday that people mess about with over December, beginning on the 6th - that day when Sinterklas comes, leaving gifts for the children who then, more often than not, have to head off to school after present-opening.

This time last year though, I was home in New Zealand and it was magnificent.  With a little bit of terrible thrown in too.  I was trying to do that final organising of a lifetime's worth of possessions.  I needed them to fit into just a few boxes so I could store them before shipping them over to Belgium.  I think I arrived at 4 medium-sized plastic containers ... giving the rest of my stuff away or throwing it into the rubbish.

Christmas Day, 2012, in New Zealand was so familiar and delicious however throwing out most of my previous life and trying to pack two 21kg suitcases to fly in the morning ... it was difficult despite being the best Christmas day I had had in a long time.

This year, I seem to have misplaced Christmas.  I haven't bought any presents (except for that gift organised for Miss 9, shared between 4 of us.  A gift she will love because it is simply marvelous).  Nor have I sent any cards. I haven't even managed to organise Christmas Day but perhaps that's because it's not really Christmas Day to me anymore.  There is none of the excitement of summer, of cherries and strawberries, of finding a box of new potatoes ... it's just so different.

It will come together on the day, we have children around and I'll make sure it's marvelous for them but I am suspecting that Christmas just is that thing I don't get excited about anymore.

Let's see how it goes.  Meanwhile ... my people, last Christmas in the land Downunder.

The Jandal of Joy ...

When I changed my jandals for something more sturdy the plump and middle- aged dog was seized with a puppyish urge. He pounced on a jandal, ran to the lawn with it, tossed it high, pounced again as it landed and shook it to death like a rat. Then he looked at me with both ears cocked and the jandal pinned and I had to smile at his joy. Don't let anyone tell you that beasts don't feel.

Indeed, as I tied my shoe I asked myself when I was last as happy as the dog was now. And the answer was Wednesday.

Joe Bennett, extract from, Happy as a Dog.

This captures something of what my New Zealand life was like sometimes.  Although I only fished off the wharf and out of a lake.  No fly-fishing.  But it was possible to live so much closer to Nature than it is here in Antwerp.  And lately I've found myself attempting to weigh up what means more to me ... the proximity of Genova, Paris, and the rest of Europe, or quiet moments spent wandering on an empty beach with my dog.

I loved the morning hours back then ... dog-walking, or dreaming over breakfast coffee taken on the steps of some house I was living in.  I lived in so many houses between 1985 and 2004.  And all over the South Island of Home.  Each place I lived would be added to my list of places colonised by my soul.  Mosgiel, Dunedin, Cromwell, Blenheim and Te Anau, before circling back to Dunedin.

I had one dog for most of the years of my first marriage.  She and I had so many places we loved.  She knew the joy of jandals although we were happiest with stones or sticks, a tennis ball, a lake, river or beach.  We needed so little to be joy-filled.

Joe Bennett's article set my soul singing a song of longing this morning.  I'm just in from zero celsius and horrific pollution.  Miss 9 and I headed out into it at 7.30am, mostly laughing our way across the city.  We're both very amusing ... we tell ourselves.  We shared Gert's big old woollen gloves.  She wore his left glove, I wore the right glove, we held hands with the hands left bare and were warm enough out there in the mist and the frost. 

She's wearing the cutest little bear hat these days, with long sides that hang down as pockets for her hands but more effectively, those long  bits can be worn as a scarf.  I hand it to her some mornings saying, what did the fox say?'  It's our signal to begin ... she says, 'It's a bear!!!'  but we can't help singing that bloody song.  'Bloody' as explained in this interview with the guys who created it (the language switches to English quite quickly, if you haven't viewed it already).

And here I am, still smiling over the long answerphone message I left for my baby brother over in Perth.  It's Kim's birthday today.  He's surprisingly old, not the 17 year old I still imagine him to be.  There was that surprise of time moving on when I picked up our Nana's ancient birthday book, looking for the year he was born.

I'm nursing a pollution-inspired ache in my head, putting off beginning the work I know I must do.  My Genovese friends are in Brussels today and I'm cooking them dinner tonight.  The skies have been clear since they landed, this morning's mist is already gone ... 10am.  They'll never believe me next time I'm in Genova, when I tell them I'm fleeing the grey grey skies of Antwerp.  They just haven't experienced those skies, and I'm torn between glad and compromised.  They leave on Monday.

But anyway, today's quest ... I would like a small jandal of joy moment like Joe's, like his dog too.  I looked through my this time last year photographs from New Zealand and found this one.  It was taken on a beautiful sun-rising morning while out wandering Cook's Beach in the Coromandel.

New Zealand in Antwerp

It seemed I only needed to roar a little and voila, the words came bubbling up afterwards.

I sent the advert text away before rushing out and across the city on the Thursday school pick-up.  It's a half-day, like Wednesday.  So now I just need to do the bio and locate some photographs of Genova.

But the happy news from today was that Miss 9 and I stopped for lunch at the new New Zealand shop located in the heart of Antwerp.  Pies ... Buzz bars, L&P, and etc.  We love it.

Miss 9 is a fairly radical vegetarian at the moment and so she chose the vegetarian pie which, to me, seemed like a very big waste of 'pie'.  I had the Stoofvlees pie ... a pie filled with the rather divine Flemish beef and beer stew.

L&P was our choice of drink.  Miss 9 because she finds it delicious and me because it takes me straight back to those childhood days where it was always summer.

Fortunately, before devouring too much pie, I remembered to stop for a photograph.  An imperfect image but I was far more interested in eating it.

Winter Blue ...

I posted, over on Facebook, that some friends in Genova will no longer believe me when I tell them I go there to escape the grey skies of Belgium.  Roberto and Doris flew in from Liguria on Monday, just as a high pressure weather system stalled over us.  They have enjoyed deep blue skies these last 3 days ...

We have had our first frosts here but a lot can be lived with if deep blue skies are involved.  I mentioned the fact that I had laundry drying on the clothes-line outside ... not completely drying but still, it was out and it was drying some, and she asked if I had photographed my lovely December clothes-line.

The thing is, once I pick up my camera, the difficulty is in putting it down again.  So rather than simply photograph sheets and duvet covers drying on my clothes-line outside, I wandered round our little pocket-sized garden.  I noticed the honeysuckle has been fooled into flowering again and that the raspberry leaves look rather divine in their autumn state. 

And so, a collage ...

Standing Still ...

I've been standing still since Paris, 13 October 2013.  It feels very odd.  A little like sleeping, or perhaps napping.

As a result the house is looking pretty.  My bedroom/office space has been refined.  I like it.  And Gert's building me a 2m wide corkboard ... so that I can hang the photographs I'm using for the book.  Apparently he was inspired to create the corkboard when he arrived home and discovered my lines of nylon thread, filled with many pegged A4 colour images.

We negotiate this office space that we share here in our big old L-shaped Belgian bedroom.  He is a very organised man.  I am a chaotic-while-preferring-to-be-organised woman.  I have my little nest of books and papers, photographs and paintings, memories and all kinds of other things too, tucked away behind a small shelf-wall.  I'm in the corner, next to a window, where the predominant colours are deep red and terracotta. 

It's winter here.  I am in need of colour.

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.

 

Vapor Trails ...

I’m looking up and in the sky there is the shiny glint of a jet airplane caught in the sun’s grasp, pushing silently east; I’m thinking there are four hundred people going somewhere else. I’m hoping that most of them realise the freedom of being 38,000 feet up and headed somewhere new.

Anik See, from A Taste for Adventure

I've been noticing the vapor trails jets leave behind lately.  So many planes pass over Belgium on their way to someplace else. So many.

Last night, a sliver of a moon showed up early, the sky was blue but with a rose-tint, the one that appears in the sunset hours.  I pointed my camera up from my seat here by the window and took a series of photographs. 

I think I captured something of what was out there ...

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.

Home

The desire to go home, that is, a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

Rebecca Solnit

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.