After I moved to Istanbul in 2006, a Turk named Mehmet told me that one day the European Union would beg Turkey to join. That day may be soon. Turkey is booming in the midst of Europe’s current economic crisis, and Istanbul was recently named by the Financial Times as the #1 liveable city in the world.

In 2009, I moved to Bali. Three years later, I still consider Istanbul one of my “homes”. Last week I returned from a whirlwind business trip to Old Constantinople. Here are a few visual memories from my 10 days there.

Photos were shot with an iPhone 4.

Sunrise on the Bosphorus

Balat neighborhood

Turkish teapot in my apartment

the making of manti in Balat

durum and fresh juice for sale on Istiklal Cadessi

Trolley on Istiklal Cadessi, a 2 mile long pedestrian (mostly ) walkway in modern Istanbul

Turkish sweets

Olives and tea, quintessential Turkey

The view of Sultanahmet from Terrace Three

Been home less than 24 hours after flying half way around the globe – Turkey to Northern California – in time to get my mother to the doctor for Round #3 chemotherapy treatment. …So grateful for the ability to get around the planet with such speed. And for the knowing that the all the world is home.

Hey there…

Where in the world am I now?

Home. Really home. With my parents in Northern California. As you may have surmised from last month’s blog, I am with my mother who is undergoing chemotherapy.

photo shot last week while driving down Columbus Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco

With the soundtrack of Bonanaza, Walton Mountain reruns, and the preaching of Dr. Phil droning in the background – my father is an avid TV watcher – I am mining notes that comprise the story of my search for home.

Sometimes an experience I’d forgotten surfaces. Here’s one found today, circa 2004, San Francisco.

GATED COMMUNITIES AND HOMELESS DINNERS – San Francisco 2004

An old friend from my Tahoe days visits me in San Francisco. We haven’t spoken in over 4 months, pre-Brazil.

“Karen” has a new condo in the East Bay with a private lake, a tennis court, and “it’s in a gated community,” she adds with emphasis.

“What are you afraid of?” I ask, genuinely perplexed. After all, she lives in a suburban town the likes of Mayberry.

“Are you joking? Haven’t you been watching the news?” she says. “Didn’t you hear about that guy who was killed at the Giants game and what about that woman who disappeared last week in Oakland?”

“Yes, I heard. Repeatedly until finally I turned off the TV. Don’t watch the news,” I plead. “They bombard you with the occasional horrific event, and because that’s all you hear, you begin to believe it is the norm and live in fear that you will be next.”

Karen looks at me oddly.

___________

I accepted an invitation for one of Marc Bruno’s monthly dinners in North Beach for the homeless. Bocce Cafe donates the space and much of the food. Other restaurants like the North Beach Cafe and Washington Park Bar and Grill prepare desserts, salads, bread, and drinks. The purpose of these meals Marc says is to give the homeless a feeling of community by sitting down to dinner with their neighbors.

And so tonight I am dining with people I normally see emerging from a blanket on a street corner.

They are memorializing Punky who died last week at age 28 of liver failure. A tall lanky man stands and introduces himself as Macaroni and talks about what a kind soul Punky was and how he was the kind of guy who would do anything for anyone. He adds that they are all going to miss him, “but hey, he is in a better place now.” Then one after another they share how Punky touched their lives.

It is not all that clear who is homeless here tonight and who is not. I am mindful of small talk like, “So where do you live?”

It’s a fine line between us.

I sometimes worry about how I’ll pay for my apartment. (ok so it’s a luxurious worry).
My newly divorced friend has been looking for a job for 6 weeks.
An ex boyfriend buys an SUV so that he can sleep in it if ever he should lose his home.

After the dishes have been cleared, Macaroni stands to announce that he and Dougie need 35 cents each for cab fare. A man at the next table says, “Do what I do and sneak on the back of the bus.” A woman dressed in ski cap and layers of clothes says, “Or look on the ground for a bus pass.”

We, neighbors all, walk to our homes – some under roofs and others under the stars.

Coit Tower towers over North Beach and Telegraph Hill in 2004

Every now and then I read a blog that makes me want to rise up, fist in the air, and shout, “Yeah!” Like the one below by Danielle LaPorte.

Perhaps this particular blog resonated with me tonight because I am finally making good on my promise to write every single day no matter what. I’m not talking emails or journaling here. I’m talking a minimum of 1 hour per day writing The Book. I’ve been editing the first draft today and dang! What an amazing decade.

I am home now with my parents in Northern California. Today we attended my mother’s first oncology appointment. When the nurse called us into his office, I snapped close my laptop where I had been speed reading about gentle natural methods for restoring a body to its healthy pre- cancer prognosis.

No I learned when I asked him, the doctor does not use (nor believe in) an alternative/complementary approach. His is a singular aggressive fight against any renegade cancer cells that may have escaped that little gray mass they removed from my mother’s ovary. The chemicals are so toxic, they will not only kill the bad guys but many of the good ones that make my mother the radiant, vital, sweet woman that she is. This just screams out against everything I believe in – a life lived well – lovingly, joyfully, gracefully, mindfully, proactively, preventively, spiritually whole. My dream of a holistic team of support for my mother is not gonna happen.

That is, unless … Can I be on your team Mom?

The aforementioned blog by Danielle LaPorte, Read it at www.WhiteHotTruth.com

(refer to this when in doubt, or sick & tired.)

“I’m all for mental health days. And gentleness. And I think the world should take the month of December off. And for the love of God, a 4 day work week would revolutionize the collective human spirit and thusly, healthcare. But this pep talk isn’t about taking it easy, this is about another form of self care: doing whatever it takes.

Here goes…

Just got dumped? Lace up your runners and move your body.
Under the weather? Go in to work any way, wearing your favorite sweater.
Up to your earrings in deadlines? Go cheer on your friend. Show up at the bake sale. Call your mother.
Crying before show time? Put some tea bags on your eyes. Say a prayer. Enter stage left.

Pull an all-nighter. Turn up the volume. Go hard. Go harder.
Re-prioritize your aches and pains.
Infuse your sensitivities with courage.
Tell fear to fuck right the fuck off.
Devote to Done.

There are soul-justified reasons to cancel. There are times to stop. This isn’t one of them. Keep going. Show up. Decide to be one of those people who pull it off.

Do what you say you’re going to do.
Don’t let us down.
Decide to rise.

Why decide to rise? Not for the reasons you might think. In fact, these are the reasons that will make you sick and tired:

Do not rise out of obligation. Do not rise because of feared consequences. Do not rise because you think being tough makes you smarter (it doesn’t.)

Decide to rise because you want to expand — your being, your life, your possibilities.

Decide to rise to explore your place in the universe.

Decide to rise because super powers are meant to be activated and applied to real life.

On the other side of deciding to rise is illumination, ecstasy, insight. And the angel of your strength is there waiting, smiling, applauding, with a goblet of endorphins for you. When you transcend circumstances you get special privileges. Like the deep knowing that life wants you to win, evidence that you are indeed amazing, and irrefutable proof that your mind chooses what matters.

Decide to rise.”

Thank you Danielle LaPorte!
www.WhiteHotTruth.com

Robin juicing daily in the Bay Area, California

San Francisco

Bali

Istanbul

I recently read an article online called “Parents of the Third Culture: Where to Retire When All the World is Home”.
http://www.expatharem.com/2011/04/27/parents-of-the-third-culture-where-to-retire-when-all-the-world-is-home/

It got me thinking. I’ve been moving and living abroad in over a dozen countries on 6 continents for over a decade to learn who is moving where and why for articles and a book I was writing about expat life – and ultimately, to find my own way home.

I’m often asked what qualities are on my Where are the best places on the planet to be an expatriate list. Here’s the short one: Geographically beautiful, within an hour of the sea, pleasant year round weather, a community where art and culture and architecture are valued, where colors are bright, where music and dance are an integral part of life, a cost of living significantly lower than that of the United States, within an hour of an international airport, a warm, loving, inclusive, progressive community with a world view, low crime rate, excellent, affordable healthcare with an emphasis on holistic health care, and where good healthy food grows easily and abundantly.

I would learn that most countries don’t allow foreigners to earn money legally, so my list grew to include a place where I could work. I had discovered in Turkey the most hospitable, inclusive people I’d met anywhere on the planet – and the most misaligned, thanks to a movie called “Orient Express”. I dreamed that if Westerners lived even briefly in real homes in real neighborhoods in Turkey, they might go home to report that muslims do not actually sprout horns and that we are in fact, more alike, than different. Maybe, my dream went, the undeclared war that my country had engaged in against all things Muslim, might begin to seem, well, nonsensical. And so Oneworld ltd was born and grew to include 7 apartments which I now rent out to global travelers passing through Turkey.

Three years later, Istanbul’s soaring cost of living, bleak winters, and spiritual polarization (one it seems is either a fundamentalist Muslim or an atheist in Turkey, with very little in between), and lack of environmental awareness and concern, resulted in new additions to my list: spiritual, conscious, alternative, environmentally proactive – and led me back to Bali.

Thanks to the internet, a Turkish manager and assorted “assistants” on the ground, I run a business in Turkey from a lumbung in the tropics of Bali.

One of the many things I have learned over the past 10 years, is that expat havens have a growth trajectory. Take St. Tropez for example. Expat havens begin as bohemian artists’ enclaves. Word gets out and within a few years (barring a bomb or ongoing political unrest), the masses arrive, followed by the developers, prices escalate, and the qualities that initially drew foreigners in the first place disappear. The bohemian early adoptors move on to the next best as-yet-unknown place, and the old expat havens become high priced made-to-order-for-tourists parodies of their former selves.

Many of the locales in which I have lived have already peaked on this trajectory – San Francisco, Paris, Buenos Aires, Buzios (Brazil), Deia (Mallorca, Spain)…There are others coming up from behind and they include Istanbul and Bali…

Yep, my antennae are up and quivering. Next best place? Shhhhhhh!

An office of my own

I was blissfully going through emails in my lumbong across the garden from my house in Bali this morning, when I read a friend’s newsletter. That was the first I heard about the recent “random shooting” in Arizona.

I love not being fed the news on a regular basis. It lets me believe that the world is overall, a pretty safe place.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t experience a few of my own OMG events.

Yesterday when speeding along on my motor scooter down a bumpy country road, rice paddies whizzing by, I saw a plate-sized spider inching his way to my left hand on the handlebar. I screamed (which must have looked strange had anyone been watching) and veered to the side of the road leaping from the bike to await the spider’s departure. I don’t know what I would have done had that spider reached my hand before I managed to stop.

“How Safe Do You Feel” is a treatise on living our lives like they might be changed drastically, or end, at any moment.

Thanks Peggy for this latest scream of consciousness.
http://www.screamsofconsciousness.com.

Robin

Gate to my home

November 1, 2010

Yet another amazing dinner at our Write & Sell That Book Now! workshop

We had 14 students and the instructor, Joanna Penn, was AMAZING in every sense of the word. Each of us walked away from the workshop pregnant with cutting edge information about how to get our books out of our heads and out into the world. The Kumara Sakti Resort was sumptuous and accommodating, and the Oneworld Retreat staff professional and organized.

This was my first experience in teaching a class. The creativity session I taught was an experiential exercise on accessing the subconscious and writing from a place that is deep and authentic in order to discover one’s unique message. My course served as a counterbalance to Joanna’s left-brained, info-packed approach.

After our “Write and Sell That Book Now!” workshop, I attended the annual Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, and then holed up in a hotel with a friend visiting from New York. After she returned to the USA, I began the hunt for a new home in Ubud.

My house perched below Sayan Ridge has been feeling less and less secure as the rain saturated earth around it has begun to slide down to the Agung River below. I’d been wanting to move closer to town anyway, so I’ve looked at house after house and have finally found one which I will move into December 10. Thanks to several dear friends I’ve had amazing homes to stay in from a beach house in southern Bali, to a seaside palace on Bali’s northern shore, to an extra bedroom in a friend’s bungalow in central Ubud.

It will be amazing to finally park myself in one place for at least 9 months and unpack everything for the first time since May. That’s 6 months of living out of suitcases!

Back to the workshop. Here’s a recent blog Joanna Penn wrote about our “Write and Sell That Book Now!” workshop. http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2010/10/20/international-speaking-lessons-learned-from-a-multi-day-retreat-in-ubud-bali/

I’ll be posting photos and some of the highlights and tips gleaned for the workshop soon. Until then!

Love, love
Robin

early morning on Echo Beach, Bali, 10/10

And so here I am in Istanbul, the experiences from this rich summer piling high and fast creating quite the blog jam. The “when to live” vs. “when to stop living in order to write ” conundrum is a long standing one for me. I nearly always opt to jump into life rather than to pull out of it to write. But I’m a writer and I get cranky when I don’t write.

There’ve been comments lately, lots of them about the dearth of recent blogs on my website and well… OK, no more excuses. I’m either a writer, or I’m not. And so I sit down to write.

Immediately I begin to think about the party this afternoon that I will attend at Ellen and Husam’s yali (a summer home for former sultans on the shores of the Bosphorus ).

Then the To Do list for Oneworld, my business in Istanbul, fills my head…..

Followed by the biggest I’ll do it later boogeyman of all, Mr. Perfectionism – the only Virgo trait I’ll admit to. I can’t bear to post anything less than perfect, and, well, perfect as we all know, never arrives.

And so I’m going to post stream of consciousness experiential stuff in this space, because if I don’t I may as well retire this blog, and I really do want to share the richness of the life that has been mine these past few months (make that years, but we’ll settle for months for now).

It’s not easy to get going after a good long bout of procrastination and so I begin in as good place as any – “Yesterday…

The phone rings. I get up to answer because I am expecting a call from my manager Elif. We discuss me walking to her apartment (30 minutes through central Istanbul) to clear my things from her home where I stayed last week and to pick up the keys to the flats we rent out. I remember that I need a manicure and a pedicure before catching the bus to meet Alexandra in Fener to ferry over the Bosphorus together to Husam and Ellen’s party in 3 hours.

Oh yeah. The blog.

Yesterday…

Yesterday after meditating, I got up to prepare coffee. But the refrigerator was bare in the apartment I’d just moved into, and so off I went, down the 5 flights of stairs, and up the hill to Galata Tower (the Coit Tower of Istanbul) and down the back alleyway called Camekan to Molly’s Restaurant.

Molly's Cafe

Molly is from Toronto, Canada, a robust redhead with freckled white skin and a sweet smile and big bosom that makes me want to curl up in her lap. She has this little cafe that I’ve been wanting to try, she’s got filtered coffee and she’s got internet. So I sank into a big leather armchair facing a floor to ceiling bookshelf packed with books at Molly’s Cafe, next to where a cat was sleeping in a window sill, and someone in an apartment across the alley was playing a violin. We chatted for a few moments and next thing I knew I was sipping a mug of coffee and eating a breakfast burrito prepared by none other than Molly herself.

I opened my Mac and begin to write. My morning stream of consciousness journaling is free form, completely unedited and done directly from my heart in a nearly subconscious manner, often with eyes closed. After approximately 30 minutes, the writing stops itself. I just know when it is done. And usually I have no idea what I have written until I read it again. And I am nearly always surprised . I wrote THAT? It’s my daily visit with my inner therapist.

I left Molly’s leaning into the winding cobblestone alleyway twisting, climbing, dropping past the hamam shops, past the new designer boutiques, to a ezcane (pharmacy) . I showed the pharmacist a piece of paper on which I had written the name of a medication I needed for a minor but persistent infection. I understood in bir az Turkish that they were telling me that they must order the medicine, and would I please return in half an hour. So I crossed the street to Sok Market, filled my basket with milk, yogurt, almonds, and plums and headed back down the hill and up the 5 flights of stairs to my apartment to unload the food. I slipped out of my sweaty clothes (this has been the hottest summer in Istanbul’s recent history) and into a sundress and flip flops and returned to the pharmacy.

The pharmacist pointed to my dress and said something in Turkish. I looked down and horror of horrors, saw that my dress was on wrong side out, its big white tag flapping like a flag from one of its exposed seams. The pharmacist motioned to a room in the back where I could change.

I stood there in that room eyes focusing in the dark and what i saw was row after row of dusty brown jars in all shapes and sizes with white labels with names like Boric Acid and Sulphur. Ancient bronze scales and crusty bunson burners. My God. I was in an old time chemist’s workshop. I wanted to whip out my camera and start shooting. Sometimes memory is best.

I walked across Galata Square (which is actually a circle)

Galata Tower

Hours later I was walking back home along Istiklal Avenue (a 2-mile pedestrian artery through central Istanbul with over 1000 restaurants, taverns and bars), when something caught my eye in a side alley way. Looking into an early evening summer sun, there in sillouette were several old Turkish men gathered around a tiny turkish table, a cloud of smoke billowing up behind them from the nargile pipe they shared, and I heard the click clack of backgammon pieces being picked up and set back down again on a wooden board. I was filled with something that can only be described as joy.

I thought about that as I walked the remaining half mile home. Why did the sight of those men in that cinematic setting make me so happy? Why did I love finding myself in that old timey chemist’s shop this morning? Why did I delight in seeing an Islamic woman on the street earlier, her head covered in a scarf for modesty, whilst her blouse was revealing and tight? Why did hearing the gypsies play beneath Galata Tower make me smile? Why did I stop to watch the man with the little round hat on, long pointy beard, standing in the street selling big platters of baklava?

Because I’m hooked on surprise. I love being childlike, wonder-filled, confronted with things I’ve never before seen, smelled, tasted, or touched, and I like it pretty much all of the time.

I thought about this and the fact that I have been on this search for home – a place on the planet to settle.

What is this thing called home that I am looking for? Do I really want it? Is it possible that home for me is the freedom to change my environment whenever, wherever I want? Is home for me an eternal state of surprise and delight? A never-ending state of wonder? If so, why am I looking?

Maybe all this searching and not finding has just been an excuse for the journey.

Maybe I am home.

Robin on the rug drug

I have traded houses with a friend temporarily…my Sayan Jungalow for her home 5 minutes from central Ubud in Bali. I wanted to taste community again, she peace. We both got what we wanted, me in spades! I’ve been writing happily on my sunny terrace surrounded by the sounds of Balinese village life humming all around. Until last night…when at 3am I was woken by the sounds of chopping. I’d heard that Balinese men rise early to begin preparation of lawar before Galungan, but 3am? Yes, apparently so. One of Bali’s biggest holidays begins tomorrow, in celebration of ancestral spirits who come this time of year to visit. And so, I replaced the irritation I felt at being woken early morning with a sense of contentment, a knowing that the sounds of chopping just outside my bedroom window, represented the men of my newly adopted “village” preparing a feast, taking care of us, continuing the thread of hundreds of years of tradition…It was then that I remembered the curious squealing of a pig I heard in their yard yesterday…

And so, this is village life.

Over the backyard fence

I am reading Lawrence Durrell’s book “Spirit of Place”. And it has got me thinking. (: Durrell, like myself, lived in places in order to intuit his heartbeat and considered himself more of a foreign residence writer than a travel writer.

About capturing the essence of place, Durrell writes,
The great thing is to…travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly — but with real inward attention…in so doing you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you’ll be there….

…travel becomes a sort of science of intuitions which is of the greatest importance to everyone — but most of all to the artist who is always looking for nourishing soils, in which to put down roots and retreat. Everyone finds his own ‘correspondences’ in this way — landscapes where you suddenly feel bounding with ideas, and others where half your soul falls asleep…Writers each seem to have a personal landscape of the heart which beckons them.

I love the way Durrell takes me there. Take this description about Egypt for example:
If you sit quite still in the landscape-diviner’s pose — why, the whole rhythm of ancient Egypt rises up from the damp cold sand. You can hear its very pulse tick. Nothing is strange to you at such moments — the old temples with their death-cults, the hieroglyphs, the long slow whirl of the brown Nile among the palm-fringed islets, the crocodiles and snakes. It is palpably just as it was when the High Priest of Ammon initiated Alexander into the mysteries. ….of course you cannot arrange to be initiated through a travel agency! You would have to reside and work your way in through the ancient crust – a tough one – of daily life. And how different is the rhythm of Egypt to that of Greece! 


On Greece,
Just try for a moment sitting on the great stone omphalos, the navel of the ancient Greek world, at Delphi. Don’t ask mental qustions, but relax and empty your mind. It lies, this strange amphora-shaped object, in an overgrown field above the temple. Everything is blue and smells of sage. The marbles dazzle down below you. There are two eagles moving softly softly on the sky, like distant boats rowing across an immense violet lake.

Don’t you love this???? I am so there.

And finally, Durrell on Scotland,
…the poetry, and the poverty and naked joyous insouciance of mountain life…Clearly she is a queenly country and a wild mountainous mate for poets.

Why do you write about Place? For me it’s about cultivating recognition of our common web of humanity. For it is through sharing our stories that I believe peace is possible.

Join us October 1-6, 2010 for Write and Sell That Book Now! An amazing adventure in Bali where you will learn how to get your book out of your head and out into the world! http://www.oneworldretreats.com/ubud_bali_yoga_retreat_robin_joanna.php

Robin in Ubud, Bali

Come experience the essence of this beautiful island and learn to write about it. Create a book and sell it!