Today I am now 27, sitting in a giant blue house in a forest in Brisbane, Australia and surrounded by bags and boxes and piles of possessions. I'm reheating an amazing lasagne I made the other day and listing random stuff on Gumtree to get rid of all the unnecessary bits we collected in the last 9 months here in Australia. In the last 2 years I moved from Dunedin, to Queenstown, then took a 3 month trip through South East Asia, before setting up home here in Brisbane.
But things don't go as planned, no matter how hard we try to control it, my life has been turned on its head in the last month. I am just beginning to emerge again, from under a blanket of sadness and stress to find my motivation again, and as always my camera was waiting for me.
The last 2 years have been a huge range of experiences; being madly in love more recently began to dissolve, and I now find myself alone again, but very very hopeful and optimistic about the new life of adventures ahead of me. I will never regret this time, everyone you meet is for a reason and he has taught me so much about myself and life. A love like that never leaves you, its just that we've had to let it go, and I count myself lucky for being loved and having had been able to love like that. Lately my mind just seems to keep repeating, "sometimes things just don't work out", its become this mantra, that every-time it all feels too much and too sad and too unfair, my subconscious just simplifies it again, sometimes things just don't work out.
I've been working on acceptance and moving forward; packing the boxes, forgiving myself and him, sorting through all the to-dos and never-gonna-dos and making plans of the really-wana-do's: where I want to go, what I want to see and what i want to experience. Our time here is short, I don't want to waste it. Is this a late quarter-life crisis? It just feels like the universe has decided to shake things up, force me back on my feet and to remember who I am. Its so easy to become complacent in life, to take it for granted and just get stuck in the wheel.
So here we go again, end of September, 2014, beginning again. Again.
I hope to use this blog as I intended years ago, to show my photography, but I'm also planning on it becoming my 'visual diary': the people and places, my style & love of fashion, the everyday and the extraordinary, and no doubt a few rants along the way, I read a lot of other peoples blogs and their honesty is inspiring, I hope I can do the same. So thank-you in advance for taking a minute to read and scroll the photos, and for any and all support I receive.
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Seeing whales in the wild was one of the first things I wrote down on my "bucket list" when I decided to accept this new start and luckily the Gold Coast is a highway of migrating humpback whales for 7 months of the year. On Saturday I headed down the coast with high hopes of enormous breaches and close up encounters.
We only managed to find 2 large adult whales and a calf on their journey south and I missed any of their really exciting behavior as I never seemed to be on the right side of the boat. But it was truly awesome just being out on the ocean and even though I only ever saw their tails or their enormous humps, being in their presence was pretty damn magic and something I will definitely do again.
