Camping, Day 151

We just got back from staying in a yurt on a beautiful farm (an organic farm!) in Gloucestershire. We were surrounded by rolling hills,

lots of cows, sheep and sunshine!

The yurt was in a forest in the middle of the fields. I actually got quite homesick, I think because camping has been my family's thing since I was little.

We took long walks,

relaxed,

and sat around the fire (which I got going every night thank-you-very-much Mother).

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a London organization looking for people to attend a documentary photo workshop. I sent in my portfolio and was excited to find out today that I got accepted! I'm really excited, I think it will be a great experience.

Excitement!!!!! Day 147

It's official! Plane tickets to Greece have been booked! I'm all jittery with excitement! May is going to be the best month ever!

I am leaving to go on holiday tomorrow with no computer so I will not be posting for a while!

xx

Morning 147

An excerpt from a longer piece I have been working on...

This Gives Away Nothing

Something close to hope glistened along the horizon of her mind, nagging at her with soft persistency like a small child demanding a mother’s attention. She was waiting. She was waiting for the curves of his breath to float in twisted disarray towards her and take form of beautiful ordinary words, perhaps caked with something like reasoning or even the vague sound of happiness.

She picked the small scab on her ankle, opening up a sore the size of a pea. Blood pooled in a small bubble, balancing precariously on the surface of her skin. She touched it, releasing the fresh pomegranate red and watched as it ran down her foot as if in a hurry to get somewhere. Anywhere but near her.

She often wondered if he thought she was a joke, wanting to preserve his words every time they left his mouth as if they were candy coated, sacred. As if all the O’s were rings made of gold and the L’s perfect little ninety degree angles, precise enough for her to sit in the crook where vertical met horizontal. As if his words could heal everything.

This gives away nothing, she thought. But she was still allowed to hope.

Day 145

I went to the Poetry Library yesterday (Olivia laughed at me when I told her this then covered herself by saying that I was "just cute". In my defence, all the museums, art galleries and iconic libraries I have visited have been so inspiring and are places that can't be found in Toronto). But anyways, the library is right beside the London Eye and Big Ben


and is home to 100,000 books of poetry, some dating all the way back to 1912. I wanted to go there to read the collection of Sylvia Plath. My English/Creative Writing teacher gifted me Wintering, a novel of Sylvia Plath after I won the creative writing award when I graduated last year. The book explores the weeks after Sylvia moved to London with her children, following the breakdown of her marriage with Ted Hughes. It was during this time she wrote Ariel (her last collection of poems before she committed suicide) and the author weaves the poems from this collection throughout the novel. I'm in the middle of reading it now and has made me appreciate Sylvia Plath's writing much more than I did before. I am beginning to read her poetry in a different way and I think this is because Wintering does such a good job at portraying who she was as a person, making her poetry even more personal than it was before. Although her poems have always echoed pain, this pain seems even more real to me knowing what she was going through when she wrote it.

The light this evening was so beautiful! Little Ava putting on her pyjamas:

Day 142

Today I went to St. Paul's Cathedral to take some photos. It is such a beautiful church (inside is breathtaking!). My nanny and grandad both used to go there on Sundays when they lived in England and it was neat to think they had been standing in the same place many years ago.



I also went to the Museum of London in an attempt to get out of the pouring rain and ended up staying for about 2.5 seconds; it was rather boring!

My dad gave me a really good idea for the portrait project I'm working on; getting the people who are posing to put on a simple white mask that covers their entire face. The photos will be effective if I'm able to capture some sort of a message, feeling or story delivered by the subject even though their facial features and expressions are hidden. I found a really great white mask and have taken some photos already but it's proving to be a bit of a challenge. A lot more thinking on my part needs to take place!