Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
Nora Ephron, Wellesley's Class of 1996 commencement speech.
a little of this and a little of that ...
Life has been busy, with days tumbling over one another and to-do lists that seemed impossible. The knowledge of things left undone was pressing down on me.
I knew that I had to wait. That there were things to be done in those weeks leading up to us taking my daughter and granddaughter to Frankfurt. And we had the lovely Australian called Jobe staying with us in that last week. A Tasmanian, and a friend of Jessie's, he ended up helping her with the packing and cleaning here in this Belgian life, in-between visiting Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp.
Saturday rolled round and exhausted, we 3 New Zealanders and the Belgian packed ourselves into the car and began negotiating the roadworks that hugely delayed our 4-5 hour journey between here and Frankfurt.
It was hot. The rental car didn't have A/C. One series of roadworks saw us take 30 minutes to crawl 3kms. We were stuck in it for 45 minutes ...
But Frankfurt is beautiful. It's not my beloved Genova but the city planners have bowed to Nature, seemingly respecting her. It's clean, it's pretty and it was okay leaving my people there.
Home again, and the itinerary for the 2 and 5-day photography workshops is done. I have projects and plans all over my working desk here, forcing me to move my book work upstairs to the now spare big bedroom. The step children have gone home ... it's just about me and my work. Well, there is 3-storeys of quirky Belgian house to clean and reclaim but that can be baby steps.
Summer comes and goes here, on a daily basis. We can go from an ordinary 15 celsius kind of day up to 29 celsius, almost in the blink of the eye. Gert's rhubarb is going crazy ... actually his garden is. There are parsnips and silverbeet seedlings, raspberrys, and the herbs are ferociously wild. My Jasmine and Lavender are pleasing me ... actually, it's not bad outside, in the tiny pocket-sized Belgian backyard.
And I have a title for my book on Genova that is so unbelievably perfect that I shall keep it completely secret until publishing.
I'll leave you with a photograph of Miss 7 and I messing around with the camera in Central Station, here in Antwerp sometime last winter ...
Miss 7 leaves for Germany tomorrow ...
I do believe I shall be miserable without my little soulmate somewhere close by ...
Andy Campbell ... an inspiring bloke
I read about Andy Campbell this morning and had to share news of him with you ...
I've embedded his introductory video below but he introduces himself over on his website, starting with this: 'On the 7th of June 2012, eight years after becoming paralysed, I set off from London to travel 30,000 miles around the world in a wheelchair.
Following an idea never before attempted, the record-setting two year adventure will cross four continents and almost every type of natural environment on the planet, from seas to deserts and everything inbetween.'
Going Home ...!
I fly back to New Zealand, after just over 8 years away, on 25 November.
There will be tears!
A small change in direction ...
Years ago, there was this girl-child and she was me, and she was clear on what she wanted to do. As soon as she was old enough she began wandering.
It was always known by my smallest self that I loved people and new places. Later I loved writing and reading - which is really just wandering in other ways - and I was gifted my first camera in my teens. I loved being the keeper of memories.
However, when I was about 10, I spent two years with a teacher who was obsessed with the fact the world would be ending ... SOON. CATACLYSMICALLY.
There was the Cold War and the imminent nuclear holocaust but he had a list of other options that would see the world fall to pieces before I was 16.
My small self would also break out in a cold sweat whenever he talked of his ideas. A memorable one was the fact that so many oil-carrying ships would sink that they would cover the ocean with a slick that would stop the sun from doing its thing.
We were all going to die.
It was about then I started having some serious anxiety attacks, often in the middle of his class. No one made the connection, not even me. I was too little.
Not only was I an anxious child, I was so right-brained and curious that I learned to be constantly mortified by this terrible character flaw.
I was stubborn. I was placed in secretarial school at 16 or 17 but I escaped into a lawyer's office ... just before final exams. They weren't exams I was going to pass. I wrote poems in Mr Thornycroft's accountancy classes. I looked at the keys when learning to touch-type, and I despised Teeline. It's the form of shorthand I was meant to learn so as to be employable as a female back then. The options were, and it came from a place of love, secretarial work or nursing and I knew I was never going to be a nurse.
I exited after 9 months with the lawyers. I wrote poetry there too because the work was in no way taxing and I had time to fill. A friend had two uncles who owned a rather posh caryard in the city. I moved, impulsively, to work as a car groomer when the 'emperor's new clothes' nature of the office job overwhelmed me. I learned to drive, and how to add quite some value to a car with the thorough clean but one day, I left.
Finally I found a most marvellous job with one of Dunedin's top photographers back then. He was very right-brained too. It was maddening and fun in the same moment. It was so good to find such a creature existed but I didn't quite understand all of that yet. I didn't really know that there were creative people and that perhaps I was one of that tribe ...one of the irresponsible ones.
I married my first boyfriend, moved to a small town in the middle of the middle of the South Island and, like a piece of driftwood at sea, I began following the currents of his life. He was a teacher with a university degree. I was the wife who wrote and took photographs, while raising our daughter.
Fast-forwarding a huge number of years and the Cold War is over but the world is, as it always has been, unstable. The oceans are a mess but we're still breathing. And I made it past 16.
The anxiety didn't stop me. I earned a university degree in my 30's, moved to Istanbul alone despite being terrified, and I cried in the shower before flying to Rome that first time. Sometimes, when I'm in Genova, I almost die from my imagination and fears but these days I'm working with someone on pulling out these slightly wonky pieces and fixing them some.
It's interesting, for me, and has become that thing I wish I had done so many years earlier. I always had the 'just do it' attitude but I worried ... A LOT. I really didn't like flying but flew anyway, so far from New Zealand. I'm terrible at languages but spent two years living alone in Istanbul, and now there is Nederlands. I still bite my fingernails.
I love the story of people so much that I forget to be businesslike. I need a personal assistant to keep me on the rails and stop me from having a million ideas that are good but that involve so many lifetimes that it's better to have them nipped in the bud. I still struggle to understand that I have some talents.
I struggle. Maybe that's what I'm trying to write here. I think we all do ... or maybe not everyone but here on the blog, I have written mostly of good things and I'm not sure that I should because what I do, this way of living, is really difficult. It's full of doubts and insecurities. It's full of feeling a fool for all kinds of reasons.
So I'm stepping back from just writing of photography and travel here and perhaps, sometimes, I'll write of the things that I'm learning as I make my way back to that little girl who knew who she was before she learned to be scared.