I miss my morning walks in New Zealand

Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge.

Reif Larsen, from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.

Meanwhile, I'm playing this song on repeat and up loud as I work here this morning. 

And before I forget, I found the opening quote over on the marvellous Terri Windling's blog.

A glimpse from one of those early morning walks I took, back home in New Zealand ... Cooks Beach, on the Coromandel Peninsula ... sunrise.


An Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,Strong and content, I travel the open road.
Walt Whitman
The quote was discovered over on the lovely Madelyn Mulvaney's blog and the image ... well, I took that one day in Italy while staying with Stefano and Miriam.

Dorianne Laux, Antilamentation

Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux, an extract from her poem, Antilamentation .

It has been a truly insane week ... involving 5 intense hours with a camera crew filming me, a corporate photo-shoot and life.

Blog post to follow soon.


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.