Sunset swim. The boy-child enjoying the hotel pool, Tahiti. Image: Su Leslie, 2011
It’s been too long since the Big T and I had a “proper” holiday, and wanderlust has definitely set in.
Perhaps a return trip to Tahiti, where we enjoyed a week with our boy-child when he was still young enough to want to holiday with his folks.
Wine, pool, sunset, views. Yep, ticks all the boxes. Le Meridien, Punaauia, Tahiti. Image: Su Leslie, 2011.
Written for the Daily Post Photo Challenge : wanderlust.
Still life with hibiscus — or afternoon tea with a good book. Image: Su Leslie, 2017. Edited with Snapseed and Stackables.
The Making of Home, by Judith Flanders (pictured above) is my go-to book at the moment; something to be savoured and digested carefully in small, thoughtful bites.
It’s a social historical account of how the mythology of “home” has been constructed over the last few centuries, and of how that has changed everything from the placement of furniture to the value of women’s work. To quote the Financial Times’ review:
In The Making of Home, Judith Flanders has many interesting, and sometimes startling, things to say about what domesticity means to us, how that meaning has changed – and how it has endured. As she points out, nostalgia is the presiding spirit in the age of consumerism and has been so since the 18th century. Suburban homes across the developed world represent a longing for an imaginary pre-industrial age. These dreams are of course fantasies: until very recently, most homes were hovels carrying no deeper meaning for their inhabitants than shelter and survival. Few people, even two centuries ago, had more than one chair, let alone chairs sufficient for the contented family meal at the simple cottage table that is so integral to the northern European ideal. — Financial Times, October 11, 2014
In the Introduction, Flanders sets out to show how our notions of what “home” means are shaped by cultural representations. She examines Dutch 17th century paintings of domestic scenes — which have come to be regarded as “the very epitome of homeness” — yet bear little resemblance to actual Dutch houses of the time. This point is reinforced in a recent BBC Culture article “Why Vermeer’s paintings are less real than we think.”
These days, I measure the quality of a book partly by how many creative ideas it inspires in me. The Making of Home is scoring highly here; beginning with the little still life above. Simple capture of a peaceful moment? Or highly constructed ironic comment on hegemonic representations of domesticity?
This digression into the sociology of home was written for Sally D’s Mobile Photography Challenge at Lens and Pens by Sally.
To this I would have to add:
4. Because being part of the blogging community that has embraced me is a truly awesome feeling, and I can’t imagine not having that.
1. I’ve got a fidgety brain. I need to write because it seems to be the only way to channel the fidgeting; to get the ideas that won’t shape themselves in my head somewhere I can see them and construct some sort of sense. It’s cerebral knitting. And yes, I do the actual kind too to stop myself grinching fabric and picking at my fingernails.
2. I’m basically sociable. I like talking to new people; having them become part of the narrative I’m constructing. And more importantly, I love sharing in other people’s stories. My mum can go for a bus ride into town and come home with eight strangers’ life stories. I used to both marvel at that and be slightly freaked out by it. But you know what? I’m becoming my mother – only I’m riding the cyber-bus.
3. I like technology. I used…
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The last butterfly has emerged and flown away, leaving an empty shell and the Big T and I with new skills and great memories of our Monarch rescue mission. Image: Su Leslie, 2017
For ANZAC Day, one of our family’s WWI stories.
Enlistment portrait: Eric Andrew Gray (20 October 1895 – 27 March 1918), with sisters Doris and Ethel Gray c. 1916. Image: Gray family archive (courtesy of Peter Duncan).
Today is ANZAC day; the day that New Zealanders and Australians commemorate our countrymen and women who have died in wars, and honour our returned servicemen and women.
The date marks the first landing of Australian and New Zealand troops (ANZACs) on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey; 25 April 1915. The ANZACs were part of a larger Allied force comprising also British, French and other Commonwealth troops which aimed to capture the Dardanelles (strategically, the gateway to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea) from its Turkish defenders.
The campaign lasted eight months; cost over 130,000 lives (Turkish and Allied) and ended with the exhausted and…
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Stripping the earth. Site of new housing development, Hobsonville Point, Auckland, NZ. Image: Su Leslie, 2017
I guess I am being somewhat literal in my interpretation of this week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge.
All around my city, topsoil is scraped and carted away, trees are wrenched out and whole ecosystems are destroyed. The land is stripped of its ability to sustain life, ironically to make way for more people who rely on the Earth for sustenance.
Am I missing something here?
Each WWI serviceman or woman from Auckland who died at war is remembered with a white cross or Star of David on the lawn at the Auckland Museum. Image: Su Leslie, 2017
Take 2: the tiny violet-like flowers sprouting out of the lawn.Image: Su Leslie, 2017
Image: Su Leslie, 2017
All it takes is a change of focus to see what lies beyond us. Raindrops on Loropetalum chinense (chinese fringe flower) leaves. Image: Su Leslie, 2017
I woke this morning to find the world beyond my street has disappeared.
A mist has rolled across the harbour and made an island of this, slightly elevated, piece of land I call home. Beyond the neighbours’ roofs, a stand of macrocarpa trees fades softly into a flat, grey void.
The still air carries the sound of motorway traffic in the distance, but like shapes in the mist, the sound is muffled and indistinct — a mere hint of life beyond this temporary island.
For this time I am alone; the drivers, dog-walkers, joggers and cyclists either still at home or invisible to me.
For this time I can enjoy the quiet and solitude, the safety and peace, of my island. Soon it will be gone; evaporated by the climbing sun. Once again I will be part of a bigger, messier, noisier whole.
I can’t ponder this without thinking of John Donne, and THAT poem:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
I imagine all over the world right now, good people are reading and quoting this rebuke of isolationism, even as the sound of guns being cocked and drawbridges being pulled up echo through the mist.
For those of us who have a safe place — a home, a friendly neighbourhood, a peaceful country — it is tempting to build a fence, patrol the boundaries, create rules for entry. It is tempting to hold on to what we have and create a mist to obscure that which is beyond.
It is tempting to zoom in and focus on what is near. But however blurred by our lens, there is always a background in shot which must share our attention too.
Written for Sally D’s Mobile Photography Challenge at Lens and Pens by Sally.
Zimmerbitch 