Freedom and Passion ... two remarkable females

Life is so short. The world is rich. There are so many adventures possible. Why do we not gather our strength together and live. It all comes to much the same thing. In youth, most of us are, for various reasons, slaves. And then, when we are able to throw off our chains, we prefer to keep them. Freedom is dangerous, is frightening.

Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand modernist writer.

I loved this story of 6-year-old Australian surfer, Quincy Symonds.  Her story is simply inspiring.  I found her via this useful website I follow on Facebook ... A Mighty Girl.

A small surfer makes big waves from ABC Open on Vimeo.

'Say Yes to Life' ... Isabel Allende

I was wandering alone for a month, back home in New Zealand, interviewing climbers and mountaineers for a book I wanted to put together.  It was a month off from my first marriage. The synopsis went through two publishing meetings.  They told me they loved it but they didn't feel there was a big enough audience.  They gave me other publishing house names to send it to but my mother was diagnosed and I wandered off to university late.

I still have the manuscript but that was a long time ago.

Anyway ... way back then and I arrived in Wellington, at the home of my truly delightful friend, Michelle Bennie.  I had her absent flatmate's bedroom.  It was a small room in a beautiful old wooden house.  Her flatmate was out of town.  The bedroom was located on flimsy-looking stilts ... located on the side of a steep bush-covered hill there in Brooklyn.  Possums on the roof at night, it offered a beautiful view over Wellington city.

I remember that this was the place where I first 'met' Isabel Allende, via a book on the bookshelf in that bedroom.  I devoured 'Eva Luna' one rainy day, enjoying the strange and exotic taste of her story, curled up on someone else's bed in a city not my own.

I was in town to interview Matt Comesky.  The loveliest high altitude climber I've ever met.  He was  on K2 with Bruce Grant and Alison Hargreaves when they were blown off the mountain.  I so very much wanted to understand the mind of the climber way back then. I still do, and war photographers and journalists have joined the ranks of those who fascinate me.

Anyway ... Wellington, 1998, Isabel Allende was the bonus. 

Dimitris Politis, The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man

I find myself finally crashing today, after weeks of pressure from so many sides that they must have been holding me together until now.

As each problem has been solved, I imagine the pressure came off, leaving me free to crumple today.

Thank goodness for Dimitris Politis and his beautiful photographs from his visit home.

He recently published his first novel and I so very much enjoyed reading it.  You can check it out here - The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man.  I loved it!

'The story deals with the contentious yet universal issues of intolerance and understanding, discrimination and acceptance, violence, terrorism and forgiveness. Dimitris Politis plunges boldly into the Irish reality but always in equilibrium with his Greek consciousness, creating a unique mirror between Greece and Ireland, where the glittering Aegean waves are crowned by the rainbows of the Atlantic and the west coast of Ireland. The reader is drawn to the story through its exciting twists and turns, interlinked through a fast cinematographic pace: the book is an excellent contemorary example of "black" fiction with a subtle and delicate deepening of sentiments, feelings and beliefs linked to the human nature. It voices a loud protest against social and historical stereotypes and is a stern warning of how intolerance and ignorance can lead to disaster. In today's world where many countries are mired in a financial crisis, where make people tend to forget the importance of tolerance and acceptance of their fellow human begins, the author cleverly reminds us that difference and diversity are universally present: they indeed shape our world, they are the rule rather than the exception. He prompts us to remember that we are all born different and grow up differently, making each of us very special in our own unique way whatever the circumstances.'

Homelands ...

Listening to Avicii.  That Wake Me Up When It's All Over song, the one that somehow got under my skin and into my head earlier this year.  Miss 10 just asked me to 'play it again' and so there I was, trying to work out font colour for the photograph below, listening to that music.

Miss 10 heads back to school tomorrow, after the last week of school holidays where it seemed Autumn had arrived.  As traditionally happens ... 26 celsius is predicted for next week. 

Ms 28 and I rushed off to ER early on Saturday morning, 5am actually.  We were mostly the only ones there but that didn't help.   Turns out you're not meant to race off to ER, you're meant to go to the after hour-doctors however ... we were both concerned about abscessed wisdom teeth and the possibility of blood poisoning. She had never had pain like it and I found her pressing a plastic ice pack directly onto her face.

They loaded her up with an IV painkiller and anti-nausea meds.  We walked out there sometime around 8am I think.  The IV dose worked for quite some time but there's no real way of avoiding pain when you have wisdom teeth actually pushing your real teeth out of their socket. 

Turns out she needs 6 teeth, in total, removed.  She's looking into that tomorrow ...it can't be too soon I suspect.

Yesterday was full of 'things that had to be done'.  Two trips to the emergency pharmacy on the bike, the supermarket too.  Cleaning the house in preparation for another lovely guest ... Inge, the Belgian living in New Zealand.  She's back home for a visit and had a 24 hour window of time just for us. 

And there was the pavlova to cook for the BBQ at 1.30pm and then ... once there, Fiona committed to filling my glass while we caught up with Ruth and Lucy.  Marc, Charlie and Benoit too.  And Tom, the lovely Belgian doctor, just home after some years spent living in NZ.

It was a day full of the most marvelous folk really.

I was running on 3 hours sleep and crashed out of this world sometime after 10pm.  Feeling so tired that I felt ill. 

Today has been a new day.  Gert, Miss 10, and I spent the morning spent talking with Inge and Elise. Then I had a few more hours of sleep after our guests had returned to the Westhoek - home for Inge when she's in Belgium.  Elise starts school in the morning too.

As so often happens here in my world, it's been a magical, difficult, exhausting, quietly superb couple of days.  Inge and I spent quite some time comparing our experiences in each other's countries.  Same same but different would best sum them up.

I would love to write of the good, the bad and the ugly of the immigrant thing but perhaps that's for another day, when I'm less tired than tonight finds me.

I noted the following quote in one of my journals.  It's a favourite, by Susana Fortes, and I found it in her interesting book Waiting for Robert Capa.

And the photograph ... it was taken at Herculaneum, in Naples.  I spent some hours wandering there one hot summer's day.

Rob, the Scottish Guy Living in Ireland

A long long time ago, I met a lovely bloke online ... in a chatroom called Travel and we became friends.

He was one of many really good friends I made there.  There was Mary Lou and Marco, Diede and Eltje, Maddalena and so many others.  We're all still friends today but it was Rob, the Scottish guy who used to live in Australia that I wanted to write about here.

He and his wife moved back to this side of the world a few years ago, to Ireland of course, that lovely Scottish couple.  And we were once again on the same side of the world.

We wandered over to stay with them there in Oughterard back in 2011, it my first time driving in years.  Oh how I loved that!

And days unfolded with visits to stations of the cross up in the hills, tree-creatures, and we met highway robbers there too.

It was lovely. 

Today I remembered it all when I found the red rowboat photograph from Oughterard.