Branded Blog

For the last 3 months we’ve been living on the side of a mountain that I’ve been taking photos of.

I’m not a photographer, despite having passed an undergrad course in photo-journ at varsity where the greatest praise I got was about my awesome choice of captions for my final course project. I kid you not. Words are my thing, photography with all it’s nuanced and technical wizardry blended into art, evidently was not.

I’ll admit, I have a fair eye for line and form, but that’s where it ends. I have zero recall on the technicalities of f-stops and exposure, and I am absolutely reliant on the wonder of my i-phone apps for capturing the splendours I see.

TrueHDR is my magic wand of choice. It moves mountains onto FaceBook and around the world.

And when I see all those little thumbs-up signs come streaming in, when people send love back to this mountain in my backyard, I realise how impossible this little life of mine is, really.

How impossible that I should live on the foothills of a mountain that people love from around the world with a barefoot man who has re-taught me that life is beautiful and unexpected. And who married me on a beach almost a year ago already.

With a 13 year-old grumpy and gorgeous Fox Terrier who follows me around to my amazement and that of my lovable & smiling dad who still shakes his head at me loving a little doggy. And her loving me back.

With two little blonde girls who seem to grow both older and closer by the day, and who it seems utterly impossible for me not to have known 3 years ago.

With a new circle of new people who have added to the already wonderful lists of people I am blessed to know – whose number includes poets, publishers, writers, artists, doctors, skate-board designers, and photographers. And yes, even visionaries. People I never believed I could know. People who all deserve lots of little thumbs-up.

How impossible that I should read an article this week called “How to be a happy and successful freelancer” and think, sheesh, I’ve done that. Really? Really. I have. And it’s working. I’m working. It works, this stuff. Unexpectedly and unceremoniously, it works when you’re not looking. It works despite us. And all it needs is a decision somewhere along the line, often a small one. A decision to stop and change, whatever that means at the time.

A decision to go off-path is often smaller than you think, bigger than you expect. Different to what you thought it would be.

And watching it unfold is breathtaking. It’s almost like looking out the window and realising that you live on the side of a mountain that is on bucket lists in a hundred languages all round the world.  And understanding that it’s your responsibility to share that mountain when you can – maybe that one extra picture will inspire change you can never imagine the ripple effects of. It’s not hyperbole, it’s life. And it is, in every cliché, beautiful.

ps.

As a small postscript (because it will make my lovely mom happy), this wholly amazing little life I’ve stumbled into lead to one of those totally impossible and strangely comic twists that happen when you go off-path and wonderful people invite to you do things that would never have occurred to you before…

Last month I had something published, formally, for the first time ever.

The last thing I ever expected to publish:

a poem.

In Afrikaaans.

That’s the way things work off-path!

 pps.

Also congrats to Izak de Vries, Elsibe Loubser and Cas Vos – all of whom are much more meritoriously also included in this anthology and who I am wondrously lucky enough to know!