Lying on my borrowed bed this morning, here in Genova, I spotted this trompe l'oeil just across the alley from me. Loved it, wandered downstairs and grabbed my camera gear.
It's a beautiful blue sky day out there. We have a lunch planned with Stefano and a wine-tasting out in the city this evening.
It's good to be back.
I'm back in Genova and it is so very good to be here.
The journey began with a 4.30am alarm, a 5.25am tram in cold early morning rain, a 6am airport bus, a 9.25am flight, Milan.
A bus from the airport, lunch at Milan Central Station... where some charm was showered upon us by the lovely chef there. A train to Genova, then a taxi, as we were slightly exhausted.
Out again and off into the ancient heart of the city to visit with Francesca and Norma where a wine-tasting at Le Gramole was confirmed for tomorrow, then a stop at the Bio shop for fruit and vegetables. Back to the delicious apartment we have here, then out for the best pizza ... in the world. Truly.
A walk through the storm, thunder and lightning, the rain had mostly stopped while we were out walking, down the port and back here to unpack and work a little. And here we are, working behind shutters closed over massive old open windows. The noise is reassuringly Italy at night. I miss these sounds when I'm back in Antwerp. People are talking and laughing, sometimes shouting... alive, out there on the streets a few floors below this beautiful apartment in an ancient building.
Sometimes I feel so extraordinarily fortunate. I am living a life that is rich in stories and full of good people.
It's so good to be back here.
Miss 10 slipped a note into my pocket last night. I'm famous for losing notes slipped into my pockets ...
This morning she appeared here, so excited, did I still have that piece of paper? I wasn't sure. She looked sad. I wandered over and looked. It was okay, I hadn't 'cleaned' my pockets, without thinking.
She had written 'Family of the Year', Hero. I had to hand over my keyboard. She's in love, with this song, and like me she plays favourites on repeat.
She's delicious ... and needless to say, I have it here, playing, on repeat.
If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday ...'
Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The extract was longer but perhaps this is enough to remind us to leave some time for our senses to do their work ... to smell the flowers perhaps. There are more quotes from his book here.
These days find me rushing, like a mad woman, through life. Cleaning, organising, packing, remembering, searching, sometimes finding.
I am so tired I will probably sleep all the way to Italy on Wednesday. Meanwhile the Belgian bloke is having a shoulder scan, this week I hope. He's been in pain for far too long now and physio isn't helping at all. It seems he has either torn a muscle or ... he needs something for inflammation of a joint somewhere in there. We'll be so glad when he can use his arm again, and sleep without waking when he turns.
Jess has broken her finger. Ignoring it didn't speed healing and so she's 'limping around' in terms of what she can do with that ridiculously painful middle finger.
Miss 10 has taken to lolling about and generally enjoying her summer holidays. And Sander is crossing Belgium 5 days per week for work, as usual.
I suspect, if we sat down together and talked of what we noticed yesterday, we might just be a small group of grouchy stressed people who noticed not much at all ... except Miss 10 who may have noticed things.
I talked to my Dad this morning. I wanted to wish him well for his hospital tests on Tuesday but, in good news really, his tests were on Monday and he had come through the actuality of them really well. It was lovely to be talking to him as he had worried me with talk of having to go off his heart medication for the test. He's staying at my sister's tonight. They didn't want him to go home alone.
And so the new website needs fine-tuning. There are emails to write and to reply to. I'm behind on my writing course, yet again ... I'm in and out with the laundry, packing ,and ironing while searching for some really important notes I had made.
But I did finish the family portrait series of shots I took last Sunday. I'm so pleased with the results. They were another really special family full of adorable little folk, as seen below.
Sometimes I get so caught up in issues close to my heart that I lose my own way.
And really, I know that at any given time, in any given century, there are 'bad things going on'. I would be naive to imagine otherwise. And I do understand that I know very little of the facts of those 'things'. I know I need to understand that an absolute 'truth' doesn't really exist. No situation is black & white.
Perhaps the best is to seek a series of narratives from different sources, accepting that truth is in there somewhere ... in different ways for every soul involved.
I had to find a way back from the sadness that set in after spending days reading of things so bad and so sad that they slipped in under my skin ... like tics perhaps, quietly poisoning my peace of mind and stealing my sense of beauty.
I found my way back tonight. I've been lost in other, rather beautiful, worlds for an hour or more, since discovering Jodi's blog - Practising Simplicity.
She 'introduced' me to Katie and Reuben's - House of Humble. And they led me over to Inked in Colour by Sash.
And finally, I felt like wandering across this after-midnight-silent room, to pick up my beautiful shawl, having this sense of finding my way back to myself some. The Russian tailor made the changes I asked him to make to the shawl and it's quickly becoming this beautiful thing that makes me smile whenever I wear it.
Martin Luther King said that, 'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'
I believe this, so strongly, but I also see that I need balance. When I speak out there's a sense of standing some place alone. I want the world's eyes to turn to this topic that seems so important to me but in pursuing that desire to share, to speak out, hurts me.
I grew up watching The Diary of Anne Frank on television. It was screened, at very least, annually. And we studied her story ... more than once, in school.
For a long time, years really, watching that movie I would to hope that someone would speak up for those people trapped in that holocaust. But no one seemed able to so effectively. The excuse used later was, we didn't know. And so it is that periodically I am compelled to share information that asks people to 'see' and to 'know'. To help bring about change. To stop really bad stuff happening.
But the slope is slippery and the deeper I go the further I am from that place, that creative space, where I prefer to be. I love being a photographer, observing and capturing without interfering too much. I love writing ... telling stories the way I imagine them. And I believe, so strongly, in justice for all even as I understand it's impossible.
Periodically I step into the ring and challenge peoples desire to turn away, not to see, not to know.
And afterwards, after the sharing, I have to find a way back to way I prefer life to be. The women I discovered tonight pulled me back onto those paths that involve flowers and fruit trees, beautifully captured, along with so many stories.
It's good to be back from that other, much sadder, much harder place for a while.
Today was Antwerpen, tomorrow the road ... that was the title I chose, 8 years ago today. And I wrote:
Antwerpen was stunning today ... 30 degrees celsius and we were out in the city with our American friends. (Old friend and a favourite traveling companion, Mary Lou, and her, then, new husband. Oh the adventures we've had ... in New Zealand, Turkey and Europe.)
We ate lunch at het Elfde Gebold and it was lovely, as usual. And later we sat a while in the Shoemakers Alley a while, a secret space here in the city.
We ended the day in Rivierenhof, a huge park here in the city, wandering home, at 10.30pm ... still 21 degrees celsius. (not unlike tonight, here in 2014).
But no ... I almost forgot, we got stuck in the elevator I've so often teased friends about. (Our first place was top floor, tiny elevator the shook and wobbled a lot.)
FOUR OF US, in this tiny airless nasty elevator. It was 11pm by then and none of us were carrying a cellphone!!
We were lucky, Gert pushed various buttons and managed to get us level with a floor eventually ... we spilled out and nothing but nothing would convince me to get back in. He rode to the top alone while we 3 took the stairs.
The elevator is officially no longer amusing.
I found this blog post while searching for poems by Kapka Kassabova. Google-searching, and I was beamed back to an old blog, the one I began way back in 2005. I thought it might be fun to post something here from that day back in 2006
Back when Mary Lou was still criss-crossing the world to travel with me. She had not long arrived ...
Perhaps I should have titled tonight's post ... Missing you, Mary Lou.