Milestones ...

In this new life ... this English life, everyday seems to offer up the possibility of achieving some new milestone.

Today it was walking into the village to find the small bus that runs through the Surrey countryside, village to village.  It was about finding it and getting to my Sainsburys Superstore of choice, and back.  You're only halfway when you reach the top of that mountain and, as usual, I have no idea of my location here in this new world.

It ended up being such a lovely story though.  I was jog/trotting towards the stop, unusually late, when I saw the bus driving towards me.  I body-languaged, sadness and despair ... I may have waved and, much to my surprise, it stopped. 

I was so grateful!!  There was a lovely gentleman driving and I felt like I had stepped into a most marvelous English story as I boarded.  He was dropping off two friendly older woman, who welcomed me to the village as they left the bus at the next stop.

And I traveled with that lovely man, as he picked up other customers, talking ... of course.  Everyone chats on these buses (and so I've found a happy place).  And honestly, the English just keep impressing me with how lovely they are.

I shopped, and felt so successful as I sourced the ingredients for my Slow Cooker Coq au Vin.  I had bought the slow cooker, and a toastie pie maker/ meat griller too, as I settled into my new place.  But then I found a most marvelous little oven, with hotplates on top, for 50 pounds and so I have all I need to cook.  All and more:-)

I have a toaster.  I don't have a Nepresso machine yet but I will have one day. 

Soon I shall be back in that place where breakfast is my holy moment of the day.

I cooked Persian Chicken a few days ago.  I was so rapt to create something familiar and known.  I cooked rice too.  The little oven/stove top (the size of a microwave) does all that I need but still, I found the slow cooker in the January sales over here ... I will use it too.  Tomorrow.

I am settling in.  Losing weight.  Walking a lot. 

I found a desk.  It's so central to my life. I don't know if I realised how central until I tried to work.  But that's a story for another day.  The new desk, a huge pine table really, should be here at the weekend, all going well.  I love the secondhand possibilities out here.

The photograph ... there were some dead roses and I asked if I might borrow them before they were thrown out.  I quite like the result, then couldn't resist adding a border because ... you know.  And the text too.

It's stormy here tonight.  There are trees and woods around me.  I walk to the village on a road that passes through the woods.  There will be photographs.  And I will get better at telling the stories from here.  There have been so many. 

There was a Sunday dash to London ... mostly because I'm never sure of how long it takes to walk to the train station or the village and so dash I do.   I think I have it now.  And seeing Lenn again.  I did enjoy staying at his house these last few weeks.  He's family now.  I haven't told him. 

For the first time in a long time I have almost all of my UK stuff in one location.  I've been all over the place since leaving Belgium at the end of August. Portsmouth, Farnham, London ...  Kim and Andy have been magnificent friends.  I don't imagine I can ever capture all that they have done for me.  It's been grand.  And Lenn.  And others too.

I was reunited with my digital radio at the weekend.  I do love it.  I wander between Planet Rock, and Magic - where lots of nostalgia is played.

I sleep in a beautifully comfortable king-sized bed.  There's a pile of books on the empty side.  I'm reading a biography about Martha Gellhorn, that magnificent journalist, who said Robert Capa was her true brother.  And D. H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', at the same time.  It works.   And really enjoying the second after so many years of reading of him in relation to Katherine Mansfield, who was a friend of his. 

And we're into the second book of the Inkheart series, MIss 11 and I, reading it via skype.  We both love it, so much while we miss living together.  But anyway ...

So that's me.  More to follow as my camera comes out to play in this new world I'm discovering slowly.

MID LIFE WOMAN, BY David Whyte

Mid life woman
you are not
invisible to me.
I seem to see
beneath your face
all the women
you have ever been.

Midlife woman
I have grown with you
secretly,
in another parallel,
breathing with you
as you breathed,
seeing with you
as you see,
lining my face
with an earned care
as you lined yours,
waiting for you
as it seems
you waited for me.

Mid life woman
I see your
inner complexion
breathing beneath
your outward gaze,
I see all your lives
and all your loves,
it must be for you
that I wanted to become
more generous,
a better man
than ever I could be
when young,
let me join all your
present giving
and all your receiving,
through you I learn
the full imagination
of every previous affection.

Mid life woman
you are not invisible to me,
in you
I see a young girl,
lifting her face to the sky,
I see the young woman
in haloed light,
full and strong,
standing before
the altar of time,
waiting for her chosen.

I see the mother in you,
in your past
or in some yet
to be understood
future,
I see you
adoring and
I see you adored,
and now,
when I call your name
I want to see
day by day,
the woman
you will become
with me.

Mid-life woman
come to me now,
I see you more clearly
than all
the airbrushed
girls of the world.

I became a warrior
only to earn
your present
mature affection,
I bear my scars to you,
my eyes are lined
to smile with you
and I come to you
uncultivated
and unshaven
walking rough
and wild through rain
and wind and I pace
the mountain
all night
in my happy,
magnificence
at finding you.

Mid life woman,
In the dark of the night
I take you in my arms
and in that embracing
invisibility feel all of your
inner lives made touchable
and visible again.

Mid-life woman
I have earned
my ability to adore you.

Mid life woman
you are not invisible to me.
Come to me now
and let me kiss passionately
all the beautiful women
who have
ever lived in you.

My promise
is to you now
and all their future lives.

MID LIFE WOMAN from, 'THE SEA IN YOU' :
Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love’
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press


Now Available at davidwhyte.com
or amazon.com

Ngati Ranana ... a Christmas Concert, London

Saturday I was up and out early, wandering off across the city of London to photograph the family of an old friend ...

Clare had sent me an almost perfect set of directions for making my way from the Underground to their place and ... with just a little help from strangers, I arrived.

I spent two hours attempting to capture the essence of this really special family whose wedding I had photographed 4 years before.  It's another 'favourite' kind of photography.  Family portraits.

We talked, caught up, I got to spend time with their small, soon-to-be-bigger, family, and then I was off again, heading for Oxford Street ... into the thick of the pre-Christmas madness.  Ngati Ranana, the London-based Maori Group, were performing their Christmas concert.

I'm so glad I made the effort.  I arrived hungry and kind of exhausted but was immediately inspired to pick up my camera and get serious.  I moved between the ground floor and the first floor at venue, trying to find the best angles without getting in the way of the audience.

They finished performing around 5pm and as I arrived back in the world of conscious thought, I realised i was completely destroyed. Saturday night was spent at home, in pyjamas, with a bottle of red wine and a laptop full of photographs that needed post-processing.

Here are some of the Ngati Ranana photographs.


Wandering Lost ... and having a lovely time, London

It was one of those deep-blue sky mornings here in London today.

I packed up my camera and headed into the city, out on a mission to explore a little.  I'm getting there but so slowly.

It was a quietly exquisite day, one where I was mostly unsure of where I was but one where I learned that you're never really lost for long in London ... there's always another Underground station, and it's relatively simple to find your way home in the end.

I had lunch at a restaurant called Spaghetti House.  An older gentlemen smiled as me as I arrived and I decided that all restaurants should have lovely older gentlemen, in that front table, who smile as though you're some old friend returning.

The staff speak in Italian, as did so many of their customers, and the food and wine were just what I needed.  And I have finally learned to say no to extras, like water and bread, in London ... to just have my dish and a small glass of wine, not the large glass.  And an espresso to finish is fine, grazie.

Italian is spoken all around me out there in the city and so, while I'm so tempted to move to Genova and try a life there,  Im not completely cut off from that culture I love.

It was a day of wonderment, amusement, and quiet bemusement.  There's a story I would love to tell but, to be honest, it would need so much wine for me to even speak of the incident.  No doubt, friends will hear of it over time, perhaps. 

It's enough to know that, on hearing it, Lenn laughed and said, 'You have to stop with the drugs, Di'.  

My excuse is that I had just taken the series of shots of the fountain, at the start of this post, and was still kind of lost in that world of light and movement.

There's more, there's always more, but this is enough for tonight.  It's late and I'm tired.  I'll leave you with a photograph of the landmark I use to find my way 'home'.  I always do this thing.  In Genova, it's Porta Soprana that guides me into my street whenever I'm there.  In London, it's the apartment building in the photograph that follows.

I looked up as I walked past it this morning and couldn't resist attempting a shot of it soaring into the blue.

Morning Light, Istanbul ...

5am … dawn on a summer’s day, my first morning in Istanbul.

I remember leaning on the sill of a barred window and hearing the muzzein’s call to prayer go out across the city

5am because I had woken early, a mix of jetlag and panic.   What the hell was I doing, moving to Turkey.

But hearing that call go out ... perhaps I began to understand something of why I was there.  It was for moments like these, safe in the home of a friend, listening to a new world wake up around me, enchanted by the sound of an invitation to prayer in Arabic, blessed by the beauty of that sun-lit morning.

I believe that was the moment when the city slowly began to slip in through the gaps that a new world opens in me. You arrive as a child, without language, without knowledge, and you begin again ... until that new life becomes something like familiar too.

I have been thinking about this piece of writing, begun so long ago and far away, as I adjust to yet another new city not my own.

It's London this time.  And slowly, those almost terrifying spaces that open up in me each time I move, are beginning to fill with new knowledge and understanding. 

I understand the Underground.  I'll walk home from my station after 9pm, through the winter-city darkness and along almost deserted roads.  I can agree, although reluctantly thatfirst time, to meet friends for an impromptu dinner in Piccadilly Circus, without studying Google maps and making notes.

The people at this new Sainsburys are kind too.   I go out and buy all the food for dinners that I am remembering how to cook, as each move seems to involve a degree of amnesia in me when it comes to 'things I can cook'.  My repertoire is growing, although all of my cookbooks are back in Belgium.

There is no call to prayer here in London, although two of my 'homes' in England have involved early-morning alarm clocks that have made me smile over the inventiveness of alarm-creators.   Those crowing roosters and other, barely remembered, sounds meant to wake the hard working people who have shared their homes with me, have come through doors and walls, leaving me amazed that anyone can sleep on.  I wake easily, always, since I was small.

My way home is familiar now.  The homes I pass are semi-detached and I enjoy checking out their gardens, making up stories about who might live there.  I met a lovely neighbour the other day.  Bob alternated between gentleman and mocking Englishman.  He made me laugh.

My host, he's the kindest man.  Wise too.  I'll tell the story of him, with his permission, once I have some photographs.  I met him out on Flanders Fields and we stayed friends.  He takes in strays sometimes and so I'm one of those.  A wandering stray until I work out where I'm heading and anchor myself again.

Accidentally, I am living a life where I have traveled a lot and lived in more than a few countries - long term, short term.  Never planned. 

This website is back in an 'under construction' phase ... perhaps 'reconstruction', as I re-cut my cloth to fit this new life.

I miss joy but I'm getting there.  I guess there's the grieving first.  Then the learning how to live a new life.  And then there's working out the next part.  I am exploring some possibilities and so, I guess, it's all about watching this space and seeing how things unfold.

Not even I know.