The happiest of new years to you friends! Time to peer through a reflective lens on the year past, yes?
Well, I can't reflect adequately this year just gone without remembering where it began. That's always a good lesson isn't it; to fully appreciate where you are, remember where you came from. 2011 began from a relatively dark place, an exhausted position, but one of survival.
Summing up the adventures and new life that followed in 2011—and these were huge—I wonder what it was about the year that characterised it differently. I think it's partly about the opportunities that are lined up ready to happen, but it is also about you, your attitude and openness to learn, and how you choose to grow through pains and traumas which have the potential to sculpt you. Your fit with the shapes of other lives and events may depend on how you responded to those other happenings in the first place.
So my friends and I gathered at the cusp of 2011 and 2012, and we pondered our questions and gratitudes for the journey through 2011. For me, an unexpected outcome of doing this was realising a significant ignition of courage had come out of that determination to be thankful for all the crap that had happened previously. Somehow, claiming that position lead me to a new perspective on the age-old question, 'what's the worst that could happen?' You know you have struggled, and won, and and this inspires a bold grip on new opportunity and a strong fight in your heart to persevere and see right.
August 2011, there I am in South America at the end of a five-week trip when I had originally applied for a ten-day hike in the Rockies. I have delivered training programmes to local photographers, which makes real sense of my newly-achieved-through-hard-graft teaching qualification, and after travelling all around Peru I'm in the poorest district in Lima giving these school girls a go on my camera. These are Peru's future documentary makers, and it's a buzz to give them a glimpse of how it might work for them. Then just three months later I'm standing in a packed gallery in London talking to supporters about African street children and our photographs of them, and beginning to have the kind of conversations that happen because somewhere back there I managed to say 'yes' in the face of challenge, and maybe there was a glint I my eye because I'd survived something awful.
Battled, and won.
I am grateful for courage, which has produced a strength to really live life thoroughly through all its adventures. And yes, love comes with that, with bells on.
I hope and pray in this courage and new life for everyone I love, with gratitude.
A very happy new year. x
{Today's Soundtrack: James Vincent McMorrow - Early in the Morning}
