Day 269

My mission today was to finish sorting through the stuff in the sheds. Some of it (including the much-loved yurt) is going onto Trade Me, I'm giving some away to friends, taking some to the local Salvation Army shop, and taking a few things back to the UK with me.

The state of play at half time:

While I was gallumphing about I spotted a perfect dandelion clock in the grass, so I captured it with Hipstamatic before I had a chance to tread on it.

Day 268

The first two images are a couple more from Wednesday that were originally in my reject pile. On second look I saw something in both of them that I liked. This first one was processed the most. I cropped it, tidied up the background a bit and then used one of Lightroom's cross-processing presets, which I tweaked slightly to bring back some of the blown-out highlights.

I caught this flower below dancing in the wind. I didn't do much processing, apart from some subtle colour adjustments to the magenta and purple channels.

Today's 'official' image is below. Some people can photograph food and make it look good. I'm not one of them -- yet! The weather was miserable today so I didn't get outside for a photo shoot. In desperation, I took a photo of a spiced apple muffin. Oh dear. Never mind. At least it tasted good!

Day 267

Elephants are one of my favourite animals. I got this ornament from an Indian import shop in Wellington a couple of years ago. It hangs next to my bedroom door. I think I might have posted a photo of it before, but this is a new one that I took today.

Another shot from my bedroom: the haiku my friend Melissa wrote for me after reading this post of mine from August: http://365-a-photo-a-day.blogspot.com/2011/08/healing-ritual.html I just love it. It inspires me every time I go past it on my way to the bathroom. :-)

Day 266

I had to make an unscheduled trip to the vet's this morning. When Pookie came in last night she was limping. It turns out she's got a big bite on her leg. The vet reckoned she'd got into a fight with another cat, but the nearest cats live half a kilometre away. I think it's much more likely that she was chasing rabbits and one of the bunnies bit back! The vet gave her a painkilling injection and prescribed a course of antibiotics. She seems a lot more comfortable now, and is currently having a nap on the veranda.

Here are the rest of the images from yesterday's photo shoot.

Day 265

Today was spinning and weaving, so I got a chance to take some photos of yet another lovely garden. I took 230 shots altogether, and ended up with 8 that were worth keeping and working on. I'll share the first four shots today, and the second four tomorrow.

I know the first photo is of an arum lily, but I have no idea what the others are. One part of me feels that I ought to learn the names of the plants I take photos of, and another part of me feels that you don't need to know the name of something to appreciate how beautiful it is.

Day 264

I've been missing Iain so much. Any moments when I'm not giving my mind something else to concentrate on, I find myself thinking about him. Not all of the thoughts are full of rage, regret or pain. Some of them are loving thoughts. But whatever the 'flavour' of the thought, thinking about Iain is making me distressed. I'm keeping myself as busy as possible to reduce the amount of 'brooding time' I have.

Until this week, at least I could take refuge from my thoughts about Iain while I was asleep. But over the last few days, he's started to crop up in my dreams as well. I guess it's just my brain trying to process the loss, but it would be nice to get some respite! I really need to train myself to think about him less. But it's not easy to break a 25 year-old habit.

To help combat the 'poor little me's' over being left on my own, I've drawn up a list of advantages of living alone. So far I've found 42 things that are really good about living on your own. I've got that list in a handy place so that whenever I'm feeling lonely, I read a few of the items on it, and remind myself that things aren't all that bad, after all.

Today's photo is a bit of a cop-out. You can always tell when I'm copping out, because I take a photo of the cat. Looking at the state of the bed when I took this shot, I'm beginning to think that buying a predominantly white duvet cover when I have a predominantly black cat with permanently muddy paws was not such a good idea! ;-)

Day 263

It's a dark, rainy day today, so I decided to take my photo break indoors.

I think I'm developing an obsession with hands. I'm fascinated by the way they can express so many different emotions. Some day I may pluck up the courage to photograph other people's hands. It would make for a fascinating project.

I currently feel as if I'm trying to 'find my power', so I thought a punching fist would be a fun image to try.

Day 262

After yesterday's beautiful flowers, all I've got to offer today is weeds!

I spotted a dandelion flower and a dandelion seed head next to each other while I was hanging out the washing, but foolishly I waited a while before going out to photograph them. When I finally went out with my camera, most of the dandelion seeds had been blown away by the wind, and what was left of the seed head was bent and drooping. Even though the image wasn't as I'd originally envisioned it, I took some shots anyway, and I'm coming to think that maybe the photo's better like this. The seed head wouldn't have represented death and decay so effectively if it had been perfect and whole.

There's no 'hidden meaning' in this image of a buttercup; I just like the contrasting colours!

Having made the decision to move back to the UK, I'm impatient to be off. However, I can't go anywhere until the house sells. I've done everything in my power to help the sale along. I've offered the estate agent a bonus if it sells within the next fortnight, I've paid for extra advertising, I've set the asking price $30k below the estate agent's recommendation, and I've insisted on plenty of open home events. Now all I have to learn to do is accept that the results of my efforts are out of my control. It's easy to understand that in theory, but oh so difficult to put into practice. One of the many tricky balancing acts in life is the balance between effort and surrender. Like most people, I find effort easy, but fall short in my ability to surrender. The situation with the house will give me the opportunity to actively practise surrender. I'll let you know how I get on! :-)

Day 261

I felt a lot of joy yesterday. The things that brought me joy yesterday were communing with nature, taking photos, listening to uplifting music and, most significantly, spending time with friends. Last night I treated my friends who helped me with my removals a few weeks back to a drink or two, and then we stayed on at the restaurant and had a meal. I had a great time.

As part of the 'healing process boot camp' I'm putting myself through, I'm drawing up a list of all the things in life that bring me joy. I then need to make sure that my plans for the future allow me to spend as much time as possible doing those things. Other things that I already know bring me joy include yoga, singing and dancing. While I do yoga every day, it's a long, long time since I sang or danced. I can't afford to take singing lessons or dance classes at the moment, but I can spend some time every day bopping around the living room, singing along to my favourite songs!

I also get a lot of joy from learning new things. I'm particularly interested in science, philosophy and psychology. As soon as I get back to the UK I'm going to enrol on an OU course (probably in philosophy). In the meantime I'm going to buy as many audio books on philosophy, psychology and science as I can afford every month. Why audiobooks instead of paperbacks or ebooks? Because not only do audiobooks let you 'read' while you're doing mindless tasks such as housework, but they're also great company for a person who lives and works on their own. A human voice is the most comforting sound in the world.

Day 260

I've put my life on hold for too long. I reckon it's time to kick myself up the backside and restart this 365 thing properly. I can't promise great images, but I can promise that I'll do my very, very best to post a photo every day.

Here's today's effort, a Hipstamatic shot of some grass flowers down on the bottom paddock. Spring's well and truly springing here, which is lifting my spirits no end!

Day 259

Here are a few photos I've taken over the last few days. I spotted this pot of pansies while I was out and about in town. It and dozens of other pots like it were decorating a boarded-up shop. It's a community project called 'vertical gardening'. I've never heard of it before, and I found it really inspiring.

I stumbled on this quote today, and it resonated so strongly with me that I decided to make an image out of it. This image uses the bleach bypass effect, which is a quick way of cleaning up the tones of light-coloured things, including white paper and 'white' skin.

I bought these stones at a garden centre a few weeks ago, and wrote the words on them myself. It was tricky, because the pen nib was too thick, and I was still suffering from the post-traumatic shakes. The words I wrote describe the qualities I need to cultivate in order to move forward with my life. I've written them on stones so that I can keep reminding myself of their importance, and so that when I'm having trouble embodying a particular characteristic, I can literally hold it in my hand and form a connection with it that way.

Day 258

I've not posted for a while because I've been feeling really low. I don't feel like doing anything right now, and that includes getting the camera out. However, when I spotted this rainbow the other day I couldn't pass up the chance to take some photos.

This image is a composite of nine shots. It's my favourite photo so far of my little house. I also like the fact that Pookie's in it. I'm going to miss them both.

Iain signed the division of property agreement last week, so the house is now officially mine, which is both a blessing and a burden. I feel like I'm in limbo at the moment. I can't wait to get back to the UK and move on with my life, but I can't do anything until the house sells, and that, of course, is something that's entirely out of my hands. I've had eight groups of people come to view the house, but no potential buyers yet.

Day 257

This is a new photo of Scully, my 'pet' sheep's skull, with an old photo of flowers superimposed over her. I've always been interested in the juxtaposition of decay and growth, and the concepts of metamorphosis and resurrection, and they seem like a particularly apt subject area right now.

A couple of friends wrote to me this week mentioning the 'A' word - anger. It was only after I read what they wrote that I realised I've not written anything about anger yet in this blog. It's an emotion I don't feel very comfortable expressing, but I've certainly felt plenty of it over the past few weeks.

Anger hit me for the first time on the third day after Iain left. The feeling was so strong I was afraid I was going to get completely eaten up by it, so I asked my brother for advice about what I could do to work through it. He suggested writing a letter to Iain that listed everything I felt angry with him for, and then burning it. I spent an hour writing the letter. My hand was shaking so much and I was writing so fast, my handwriting was barely legible. To avoid having to write 'I am angry with you for...' at the beginning of every sentence, I set out my grievances in a numbered list. There were 75 of them. About half of them were habitual things rather than just one-off events. And some grievances went way back, to twenty or twenty-five years ago. I never realised until I wrote that letter that I had been bottling up so much anger for such a long time. It wasn't a very nice thing to discover about myself. One of the many, many life lessons I need to take away from this experience is that I need to learn to express my anger (non-destructively, of course), rather than suppress it. Reading back my list of grievances, I came to the sickening realisation that our marriage had not been anything like as happy as I had always told myself it was. So I can add self-deception to the growing list of personal failings I'm beginning to recognise in myself.

Writing the letter was very cathartic, and burning it afterwards was a nice symbolic touch. As I watched the smoke rise into the sky I could feel anger's hold on me lessen, and I could feel Iain's power to hurt me any more start to melt away too.

When we started building the house, we moved out of our rental in town and moved into the yurt, and we put most of our furniture in storage. When Iain left we'd still not got round to taking our stuff out of storage, so on Monday I rented a removals truck and, with a little help from eight of my friends, cleared the storage unit and filled two sheds with stuff - one with stuff I want to take back to the UK with me, and one with stuff to sell on Trade Me, which is New Zealand's equivalent of eBay. My 'homework' over the next few weeks is to put a few items every night onto Trade Me, and gradually reduce the 'to sell' pile.

Anyway, I've wittered on for long enough, and my yoga mat is calling me. I am so grateful for my yoga practice right now. 

Day 256

I've decided I'm going to take things easy with this blog. I'm not going to commit to making a post every day at the moment. Instead, I'm going to make a post when I feel inspired to, and only count those days towards my 365 total. I'm sure that gradually I'll begin to post more often, and who knows - after a few months I may be back to making a daily post.

I've had a really tough week this week. I had to meet up with Iain in town on Monday to go to the bank and sort out our finances, and I found it very upsetting to see him again. He seemed cool, calm, collected, and genuinely pleased to see me. Somehow, that made it much, much worse. Wednesday was the most difficult day so far. It would have been our 20th wedding anniversary. 

Plan C (keeping joint ownership of the house and selling it together) wasn't working for me. I told Iain this, and explained that if he wasn't prepared to buy me out (Plan B), then we'd need to either go back to Plan A (I get the house) or else we'd have to get the lawyers involved. 

Iain agreed to go back to Plan A, so I'm currently in the process of getting the mortgage and the deeds transferred into my name. This means I've got an awful lot of work ahead of me, and I will have to put my new life on hold until I can sell the house, which, given the current state of the housing market, could be a very long time. But on the plus side, it means I can break off communications with Iain, and begin to heal emotionally. And, of course, in the end I'll be better off financially, even taking into account the considerable expenses I'm taking on, which include making the mortgage payments, and paying thousands of dollars for the landscaping and fencing that needs to be done before I can get the house 'signed off' with the council.

I spotted this unusual cloud formation yesterday evening around sunset, and I just had to go outside and snap it with my camera.