Dinner outside in Wallonia ...

There are two Americans, both from NYC ... an Australian, a Belgian, and a woman from Rwanda, and me ... that New Zealander.

There is lasagna, red wine, lots of Belgian beers and there's this exquisite sheepdog creature who chases that ball that he drops at the feet of anyone who might care to throw it for an hour and two.

There's an excellent soundtrack playing and the air is warm.  We're out in the countryside, all cooking and talking and mocking some ... as happens sometimes.

Life is kind of beautiful really.

The word home comes from a root meaning 'the place where one lies'.  The phrase refers to our physical place of residence and rest, our bed, but it also prompts me to consider where the core of the 'one' that is me - who I am, my soul - lies.

Lisa McKay, from Love at the Speed of Sound.

I found this today, over on Marianne Elliott's blog and, as always when it comes to questions of 'home, I paused to consider my sense of the word.

But then I wandered off outside, before the storm, and photographed the sweetpeas ... a favourite flower of mine, back in the days of my childhood because I have lived in so many homes, in so many places, since those stable days of a life lived in Mosgiel.

Love After Love, Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Lewis, Jung, Crowther, Juska and Dylan Thomas

 

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

C.S.Lewis, from Till We Have Faces

Yesterday ended in a frenzy of activity around midnight ... after a long 2 days of processing a few hundred photographs.

A few weeks ago I had fallen while carrying my laptop.  I was lucky and only the cd player was broken but it has taken until now to replace it with an external setup.

Last night was 'the burning' of images - onto cd  and dvds. 

In the end, there are only 600+ images - flying off to various friends in Madrid and Brussels, and sitting here on my desk for Antwerp too.

But yesterday wasn't all about photographs.  I did stop periodically.  I listened to this tv interview with Carl Jung.  And, at some point, I had a craving to search for an old old favourite of mine ... Harry Chapin.

I have Mr Tanner playing as I write this, reminding me of those long-ago days, back in Christchurch, when Trevor first introduced me to Harry.

In days past, I emerged from a beautiful book by Yasmin Crowther - The Saffron Kitchen.  Absolutely recommended.  Also, from the same secondhand bookshop, I have just started A Round-Heeled Woman, by Jane Juska.  It makes me smile.    Who can resist a back cover that states, “Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

I'm loving the way it turns the notion of aging on its head.

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

We mustn't.  We must live until we die.  Mustn't we.

Expecting 32 celsius today ... before the thunderstorms come, around 21.00, and if the Buienradar is to be believed, they look impressive.

Now ... back to the to-do list with Harry.