Looking For Answers...

This week, this long week which has been like a roller coaster for my life, my emotions, and my heart, this week is finally over and I'm so thankful for my Monday/Tuesday weekend that I give myself every week.

In this past week I have looked to a Numerologist and  Reiki healer to try to help my spiritual, emotional funk, the energies are there but they just seem to be in the wrong places, for just a moment, a short blink, life was perfect, a glimpse of the future perhaps?  I want you to know that I have never regretted any action I have ever taken, I may have made some wrong decisions along the way because I always listen to my heart in everything I do but I've always believed that in every mistake we do make there's a chance to learn something new.

I cannot be anyone other than the woman I am but I am constantly changing, learning and evolving, healing and growing stronger.   Since the day I halved my bipolar medication I have become happier, I have become more emotional but even under stress, I have been able to cope.  Yes it's hard to have emotions and understand them after being without them for over 10 years but I love feeling real emotions, last night, for instance, I watched the first season of Miranda, now I always thought it was funny but last night I laughed out loud for all 6 episodes, really hearty laughs which make you feel happy, you can't understand just how amazing that is when you haven't felt that for so very long.

There have been rough times, as my medication levels rebalanced themselves and I was reintroduced to the emotional pain and grief I'd never fully dealt with, and for a time I reconsidered going back to a higher dosage but this too has passed and now I feel more emotionally capable of dealing with everything that happens in my life from this point on.

Work of late has been the busiest I can ever remember and after floundering a little and losing my focus, I am on a mission to not only regain it but to push myself forward to the next level, whatever that may be.  I have felt for a while like I'm on the cusp of the next stage of my life like there's something waiting for me just out of reach, just around a corner I can't yet visualise, I think for a while now I felt like this because in life we have to take the rough with the smooth, we all experience times of great turbulence interspersed with calmer happier times.  I know with all of my heart the things I want and need in my life.  I want to live, I want to love and I want to travel, give me just a handful of all of those things and I'll be happy, I don't want to be the richest or the most successful, I don't want to own an empire, I just want to love and be loved and I want to go on great adventures to far off places, I want to learn and understand more about life and love, I want to dance in the rain, I want to sing out loud, I want to show my children that you can have it all, that it's possible if you work hard enough, wish long enough, love hard enough.

At the end of the day, I'm still young and more than anything, I just want to find my happy, my content, my stable, I just want to find the whole complete me.

Barcelona, The City That Healed My Heart

Travel, it's in my heart and my soul, when I can't travel, I get restless, I get itchy feet, I get distracted so when travel plans are afoot it gives me a buzz and it doesn't matter if I'm travelling with the kids or with my friends or on my own, I embrace each experience and try to get as much out of it as possible and when I have the unique moments I often feature on my blog, it's those moments which have nourished my mind, my body, and my soul.

I often wonder if I love to travel as much as I do because it's something I've done later in life, something I've worked really hard for and something I crave.  I love new experiences and cultures, meeting the people, exploring the cities, trying all of the food!!

When I came back from Barcelona, I shepherded myself back to my desk and into work and so I just never managed to get around to editing some of the images...until now.

While all around in work is chaotic with portraits, I needed to take myself back to a happy summer time, a time spent with my best friend, a time with heat and sunshine, with ice-cream and swimming and with beauty all around us as we lived in the magical city for just a few days.

There's nowhere like Barcelona, it's as Harriet said, a city of so many faces, beaches, architecture, graffiti and Gaudi, it's busy, it's calm, it's very much an oxymoron, a paradox, a paradigm shift, it is a contradiction and it's only when you have visited that you can understand just what I mean.

Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia is all of those things and more, I wished that I could have spent some time when it was calm and quiet to soak in the most spiritual surroundings but when every visitor is essentially paying for the remainder of the building of the great cathedral, this testament to God and to Gaudi it's creator and architect, well it doesn't pay to let it stand empty for any great length of time.

The madness of this most sacred building being unfinished for so many years does not at all make sense but it's hoped that it should reach completion in around 10 years from now.

And then let me transport you to a historic theme park, Tibidabo, the magical mountain, where a theme park lies directly next to the most beautiful church I think I've ever seen.  We'd waited until late in the day to visit Tibidabo and we couldn't have gone at a better time, the most magical golden sunset I have ever seen set over the mountains and my heart was lit up by the calm and serenity of the most beautiful sight I have ever seen, to enjoy that with your best friend is truly an experience I'll remember for the rest of my life.

My Barcelona days were as much about the rediscovery of myself and the healing of my psyche as they were about sightseeing and exploration and I did just that, I found myself again, I knew when I got on the plane back home that I'd healed more in that week than I had in months, I knew the path I had to take, the path to take more travel because nothing is more healing than exploration and new experiences.