Did I ever mention how much I love this song?
I remember the sea ... Brighton Beach, Dunedin, New Zealand. So many good memories of swimming there.
And another, of startling my dog one day ... Long Beach, Dunedin. That day I ran into the surf, fully-clothed, and that dog of mine followed, quite startled.
Pippa, laughing, of course.
Film clip for Missy Higgins' song Everyone's Waiting, from the new album The Ol' Razzle Dazzle out now. Directed, Edited and Produced by Natasha Pincus.
Today a storm passed through, reversed/returned or swirled back on itself and crashed and over the city again ... a storm so powerful that, for now, the air is clean and sweet-smelling. It's reminds me of New Zealand ... where I know almost all of the scents that you will find in the South Island air.
The thyme-filled Central Otago air, the rainforest lake air of Te Anau, the merging of beech forest and ocean spray down at Tautuku - photographed at the end of this link to another rain post. Then there's the glacial rock and ice scent, mixing with the huge forests on the wild west coast, and jasmine-scented harbour air on the verandah of my Broad Bay house back in Dunedin ...
And that's me, the woman sitting next to my open window here in Antwerp while Spring rain continues to splatter nosily down. The rain is so juicy and sweet-smelling that I am compelled to stop and open the other side of the window occasionally, undoing all of the good that the insect screen does, just to lean out and inhale the delicious scent of wet vegetation ... created by a garden so lush that the smell of it reaches my first floor window here.
For years now, this song has been one of my favourite songs. On Paul Kelly's cd version of Midnight Rain, he opens with the sound of heavy rain ...
These guys.
I was in awe of the high-energy, joy-filled street performance of the Reggae band called Microguagua.
I bought one of their cds because I wanted their music back in Belgium.
They're brilliant. Seeing them perform live made me smile. Perhaps I caught a sense of them here but honestly, their music makes you smile.
I found them out in Via San Lorenzo, in Genova. I had to stop for some photographs.
Sharon Olds said something beautiful about sometimes thinking of her poems as instructions for how to put the world back together if it were destroyed.
From Amy Heppel's interview, with Paul Winner, from the Paris Review where she said so much that was wise and beautiful.
I was introduced to the story of Lisa Bonchek Adams via an exquisite article by Zeynep Tufekci, titled Make the Most of Your Day. They wrote ...
Her love of life and courage was a lesson to me, everyday. She sent out these tweets almost daily, her lessons of life and death.
Make the most of this day. Whatever that means to you, whatever you can do, no matter how small it seems.
Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can't find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.
Saturday, I reread this book and realised all over again, how beautifully written it is while remaining a tale so powerfully written that it destroys me each and every time I read it. Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. It's worth seeking out.
Meanwhile, I'm enjoying this song by Andrew Belle as I listen to music here ... reading and writing, taking notes, enjoying the weekend ... at last.
I wonder, was I the last person to discover Hozier's music?
Love it.
Life is different in Italy. Different to any place that I know.
Then again, I could say the same of New Zealand, and of Istanbul.
I know I find points of intersection in each place I go, as well as individual features that make me love those people, or that view.
There are the things that seem familiar and take me home. And the views that fill me with longing for places I've known ...
Home is a thing I've been trying to define forever. Is it inside of me or back in that place where I was born and raised. 'My' country or those places where I've felt most welcome. Or that place where I felt a deep (and inexplicable) sense of recognition and would have liked to have stayed a while, just to see because I feel like I'm still looking.
Some places engage me, so deeply, that I could spend years just attempting to photograph the feeling of them. The moods, the light, the people ...
Genova's like that for me.
Anyway ... I'm listening to this particular song by Sting as I work here. On repeat, as I do sometimes.
