In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. ~ Leo Tolstoy
I took this photo over a year ago, which is about how long it has been since I last used my film camera. Too long. Just ... too long.
Also, this new-to-me blog. Crazy lady, in the happiest possible way.
At the corner shop on the way to school I grab a Home magazine off the shelf on a whim. The cover features a concrete kitchen with plywood backdrop, a large window seat, one green teapot with matching cups, and a vase of white chrysthanemums. Exactly the kind of kitchen I would build for myself. I flip through the pages and the joy of looking at great design is such a pleasure that I make plans to ask for a subscription for my birthday. I rip out favourite pages and start a new file for the home I would like to build. Someday. It's not a file of dissastisfaction with my current home, my current life, but a place where dreams can come out to play without recourse to reality.
Because the thing about dreaming is, it's not how far you can reach, but how wide you can imagine.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. ~ C. S. Lewis
I am standing in front of a mirror in a department store, trying on shoes. I won't buy any, I rarely do. As soon as my eyes leave the shoes and glance upward to the rest of my body, a wave of shame, despair, revulsion hits me and I put the shoes back in their box and walk away.
Today is not much different, but different enough. I think that I have outgrown the comfort of denial. I think that I don't need the shield any longer, even if it feels like walking into battle unprotected without it.
In carrying this extra weight, I give the world a reason to reject me that I can live with. The alternative has just been too painful. It's not a truth I am proud of, not one I have even been conscious of, but one I recognise as soon as I see it.
No. I won't be that person.
The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer. ~ St. Augustine
Where do you go, when you let your mind wander? I visit all kinds of destinations, real and imagined. On the day I made this entry in my inspiration journal, I suppose I was in a potter's house in Denmark, which still sounds like a very nice place to be.
I haven't written in my inspiration journal in a while. Sometimes it hurts, you know? Seeing your heart's dreams on paper, not yet understanding how all the disparate longings can be woven together into one short life, not yet quite believing that it's possible.
Still. That ache. It means something.
*A phrase I stole from The Happiness Advantage, one of two books I consumed this weekend while cocooned in my bed (the other being The Smartest Guys in the Room, a brilliant telling of the Enron story if you happen to be interested, and I was). It's possible I read too much. Not likely, but...
The children arrive home from school this afternoon cold, tired, and hungry. I have nothing ready for them, and nothing in the cupboard either. I don't tell them this, they look too weary. I say, instead, I'll make you some scones and a hot drink, to which they smile and visibly relax. Sometimes fresh baked food really is close to love.
Falling up. Using adverse circumstance as a catalyst for better things. If it works for afternoon tea, I don't suppose there is any reason why it won't work for something bigger.
The first thing I notice is how tired I am, again. It's easy to explain: full-time study and full-time mothering is hard work. Once the mid-semester assignments are handed in and the load lightens a little, I don't recover. I sleep all Saturday, take myself off to bed each night as soon as dinner is over. I have little motivation to study.
Then that heavy lump I sometimes have to breathe through slowly reappears and I want to ignore it, pass it off as something temporary, anything but another infection. The doctor listens to my chest, hears the crackles and pops and wheezes. He's reluctant to ascribe it to another infection too, though lord knows why else my lungs would be making those kinds of sounds. I am otherwise too well, he says. It's atypical, and he has no explanation. Join the group, I want to reply. No-one else has one either.
Still. Life goes on, hey? It's just one more thing to be negotiated, worked around, accounted for. Just one more part of the story. I try not to take it too seriously, too personally. I relax my body, release the fear, and, to quote Rabindranath Tagore, I let my life dance lightly on the edges of Time.
The camera is not on an angle, the surfer is. It was the only way to stay on your feet in that kind of wind. I had intended a walk along the beach, but there was no beach to walk along, just one pounding wave after another. We were both about to head home, it was getting too dark for either camera or surfboard.
And you know? I think he had it right. When the storm gets fierce, you may as well pull out your board and ride that thing.
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been! ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
I take myself for a walk in the late afternoon, shielding my camera from the rain, trying to find interesting views on my dull suburban street.
I don't know if the birds eat these berries, but I do know that if you are 11 and squash them against the wall of your house, they will make a satisfying pink splodge. And your Mum will growl you.
Does it work, their sign? Would it work if I put 'No Bills Please' on mine? Or, 'I'd Quite Like Some Nice Letters, If You'd Be So Kind'?
Someone is selling this house, or trying to. It's been months now. I noticed the pink petals against the grey gate and braved the few steps down the driveway that it took to get close enough for a photo. I had the courage for one shot only, before I quickly capped my lens and walked on.
By the time you get to the end of the street, you can hear the ocean. Walking up the hill a few steps and you can start to see it too. The houses here are a fabulous mix of the old, the renovated, and the new.
I like the old best. Not to live in, most definitely. But for sure to take photos of.
Red scooters are good too.
Walking back down the hill towards my less glamourous valley, I find myself wishing I was an anthropologist, spending a year on this street, excavating the stories that lie behind each door.
Perhaps not. Perhaps it would be even more fun to just make them all up.
Writer, picture taker, and maker of things: I drink too much tea, stare out of too many windows, and am a lifelong devotee to the beauty of the quotidian.
Currently a graduate student in psychology, I am interested in the ways in which we create meaning and identity, in the stories we tell ourselves.
I also have an incurable weakness for roses, quotes, and polka dots. Fair warning.
