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

Soul Stuff ...

 

The practice of any art isn’t to make a living, it’s to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt's quotes seemed like an answer to my angst about money and art. 

Meanwhile, this singer is making me smile. Most particularly, her song, 'You and I'. 

I love the lines: let's get rich and buy our parents homes in the south of France
Let's get rich and give everybody nice sweaters and teach them how to dance.

I was out early this morning, 5 celsius, a clear-sky day but the air hurts the lungs we decided.  Cold or pollution, or both, we couldn't decide.

I'm using Frances Mayes book, Under the Tuscan Sun, to pull me through the quieter moments.  The tram was packed coming home but I was off in my mind and wandering with her in Sovana, where she wrote of being in ancient places, We can walk here, the latest little dots on the time line.  Knowing that, it always amazes me that I am intensely interested in how the map is folded, where the gas gauge is pointed, whether we have withdrawn enough cash, how everything matters intensely even as it is disappearing.

 

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.

 

 

On Gallivanting ...

 

There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.

Ryan Adams

I read this first thing this morning, pre-breakfast, and thought, yes.   I was reading Amy's blog.

It was a quiet yes.

One of the things I have most consistently done through time  ... and it's dancing for shadows really, is defend the way I live my life.

My ex-father-in-law was an outrageous monster sometimes ... one who made everyone laugh.  He assured me that the more he mocked the more love there was.  Eyes twinkling, he pointed out how much he must care about me.  He could be charming at times.
I can still see him there in the kitchen of 40 Tyne Street in Mosgiel.  He's gone now, that man who was planning on spending his retirement near some beach where he could fish everyday.  But his most serious and real accusation was always his ... have you been off gallivanting AGAIN?
The men I grew amongst were men who believed that a woman's place was there in the home, next to their husbands.  They also believed that a husband's place was right there next to their wives.  Kind of chained together.  And that was a problem for me because I've always wandered.
My first husband gifted me an entire month off interviewing climbers and mountaineers for a book I was writing.  If the authority figures in my young world were telling me I must stay at home, then my husbands have always told me to ignore them and wander anyway.  But maybe they knew that I had to.
'Never apologize for your enthusiasm' was timely.  I have tempered my enthusiasm over time.  It is less evident although still explodes out of me on occasions but the need for flight ...  there are no apologies in me.  If anything, I'm becoming more convinced about the beauty and the need for flight.
There is the goodbye and hello of it all.  You never stop appreciating a partner when you have a little distance sometimes.  But more than that, filled with a compulsion to fix things for people, it's better to give myself a little people-less time.  To live on toast and red wine and stand on the edge of societies I'm not part of ... there's something healing about that.
I do worry that things will collapse while I'm gone but it's so good realise that it's not all about me and that the world does go on when I wander off.  I knew it as the small child who wandered.  Perhaps I was my entire universe back then.  I didn't care so much as the teenager who disappeared with her dog and dreamed dreams that she doesn't recall now.  And I needed it on becoming a wife and a mother.
Negative people find their walls. So never apologize ...  I'll run with that I think.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race” — and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning.

A book I intend buying as soon as possible.

Perseverance ...

Of course you must perservere. Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Some days, working my way into the state of mind I need to work, I am fortunate and begin by reading a post by Terri Windling, a writer, artist, and book editor, and so much more. 

She offers up inspiration more often than not.  I smiled when I read her Cartier-Bresson quote this morning.  Just the first 10,000 photographs ... perserverance is all.

Conformity ...

If you eliminate that private realm, you breed conformity. When all your behavior is public, then you’re going to do the things that the society insists you do and nothing else and you lose so much of who you are as a human being.
Glenn Greenwald, an interview with an interesting man.

I put this quote up on my facebook page today and it sparked some interesting conversation.

Women called by to comment, women I respect, and in the end we decided that the journey is the destination ...

It came up because we're all out there, either self-employed artists or living in countries not our own and the temptation, on the bad days, is to simply put down our passions, our impulses, our work, our funny little dreams perhaps ... to put them all down and turn back into that world where a weekly pay cheque is guaranteed and our souls aren't so tied up in our work.

But I suspect we gave one another courage and voila, I'm back at work here again ... in Belgium on a Saturday night but remembering that beautiful fountain in Italy.

Artists, Julia Cameron

As artists, we live in a separate culture, embedded in the world of mass media but separate from it. For us, the paycheck is not what says 'Job well done. ' The power to buy is not what constitutes our power. Our worth is not quantified in fiscal terms.

As artists, we are engaged in the process of self actualization, and it is our success or failure at producing a body of work that determines our stature. ...living side by side with a culture that tells us our worth is our net worth, we must hold to a different standard, knowing in our bones that as we embrace life, life embraces us.

Julia Cameron.


Rebecca Solnit, The Art of Not Knowing Where You Are

A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.

In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.

The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence. 

Rebecca Solnit, extracted from The Art of Not Knowing Where You Are

I am loving this woman's writing.  Reading her is something like devouring a beautiful feast.  This one essay alone is truly exquisite.

She goes on and talks of empathy: The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.

Few if any of us will travel like arctic terns in endless light, but in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.

How Do You Fall In Love? by Jeanette Winterson

 

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear.

It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signaled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home.

And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

 P.S. You have to be brave.

 

Eduardo Galeano, Writer

Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories. And so, each one has something to tell that deserves to be heard.
Eduardo Galeano, extract from an interview about his new book Children of the Days.

I so very much believe this ... that everyone is a story, everyone is full of stories.  His interview is fascinating and made me think I should look for this book of his.

 

Laura Young

Laura's words have been haunting me ...

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

She's a photographer, a writer, a river girl, so she writes ... and so much more.

 

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if our only labels were our names and all we had to do with our life was figure out how to flesh that out, just that one name.  Stop worrying about being a good mother, daughter, son, neighbor, grandfather, and all the rest of it and just figure out what it means to be "X".

Seems it could it could take a person their entire life to figure out how to do that well.

- See more at: http://laurayoung.typepad.com/photography/2013/06/day-38-scraps-all-over-the-cutting-room-floor.html#sthash.xc43GKV7.dpuf

John Szarkowski, a quote

In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.

John Szarkowski, photographer, curator, historian, and critic.

To know life.  I thought, 'Yes!  That describes how I approach photography.  To know life, to attempt to capture slices of it, with my camera.

To slip into the midst of it, to disappear, and to come away with images where my presence was forgotten.

Take down a musical instrument ...

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
- Rumi

A beautiful soul I met and was fortunate enough to photograph in those days when I lived in Berlin for a while.  Thank you, Noga.