“someone will remember us, even in another time.”
Sappho
Catalina, 18 years old, Beaconsfield.
New York, newly born. 2003
Last night a moon of such orange rose above the serrated edge of the city skyline. As the earth's shadow slowly eclipsed it, my daughter sent me a shot – "Moon!"
She knew how to lift my heart.
Catalina has turned 18.
Our home in New York, 2006
How can I begin to describe the love that I feel for Catalina?
How can you strain the blue from the sky, or damp from a pool?
“the web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together.”
Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well
"Depressed? Depressed? Why I hear her silvery laughter ring out from morning 'til night!" – Ambrose Wolfinger (W.C. Fields).
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
When I think of the girls, it is a pleasant illusion that I like to think of them as calm,
unhurried, bright, filled with smiles, without cares and topped by red hats...
Teaching Catalina to drive in the Hunter Valley. We got to spend 60 hours together -
talking, unloading, singing, laughing, being bored... the life with her that I missed out on.
I also taught Catalina to ride, or at least rode with her...
Brooklyn light, two sisters, 2003. Anna had recently arrived from Turkmenistan, and the two were inseparable.
Kenya, 2016
Sri Lanka, Galle Face Hotel.
Kenya 2016
Traveling is such a bore...
Kenya 2016
On the Swahili Coast
Rift Valley heights
Never sorry.
Catalina, Anna, Bowen
Anna and Catalina, Connecticut, 2005. Always laughter.
Whilst her mother and sister were off watching the great Blue Whale migration,
we sat in the Galle hotel and had high tea together...
Warren Street Brooklyn, 2003. Like a Michelangelo angel
In the place we called "Lina's Gully," in Newcastle
With most of her best pals in Venice.
Wherever I was (in Kenya at this time) I always sent flowers.
Six cousins. Rebecca, Jessica, Catalina, Sascha, Max, Anna.
Two students, Lina and Papillon
Biking in Red Hook, close to home.
Before a performance of The Four Seasons, Sydney's Maritime Museum.
My sleeping honey, Brooklyn, 2004
Two peas in a pod, inseparable
I will never forget the way she gripped my neck that afternoon at the edge of the Rift Valley in Kenya,
when I understood how much she had missed me.
I tease her, that even now, it doesn't matter how far she runs away, I will always be there to find her...
“We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on comes easily;
we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke,
But in the end, no matter what love you might feel for a child, the result is a crapshoot...
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet