‘To act but not to grasp.’
~ Wisdom of the Tao
When I was in my late teens, one of my friends did photography as part of her art program and then degree. She sometimes used me in her shoots and I really enjoyed the process and would input my ideas on the day. As I shared in How a Breakup Changed my Life, I was a very creative child but didn’t have an outlet for it after starting high school and turned myself into the art project, developing disordered eating, obsession with food and always trying to diet, over-exercise and perfect myself.
So when I met Satheesh the sound engineer in India, following the breakup, and he offered to teach me to use an SLR camera, I was thrilled. I love taking photos (as you’d know if you follow Wonderlust_intheworld or MireilleParkerAuthor). So I spent the month practising round the suburbs of West Mumbai. My parents, by this stage, had gone home, while I stayed on to see how this all played out and it was just so awesome really, with my dream of developing creativity coming to fruition.
My mum had said that I should go into advertising as I was good with words and images but I didn’t want to sell people stuff I wasn’t passionate about or work long hours. However, Life has its way of leading us to our path. All we have to do is ask.
Because of Satheesh, I got to be the still photographer on a documentary shoot about a matrilineal society for the U.N. in Nagaland, an undeveloped area in the north east of India where tourists were normally not allowed to visit due to tribal conflict.
What I learned there is that it is really very tough working in film. We had to be up before dawn and no one cared about our breakfast. No one seemed to think about food for ten hours or so! Even so, it was an amazing experience being with these local villagers in a society where, unlike in the rest of India, women ruled. And sat around smoking home-grown tobacco and chewing betel-nut.
In Mumbai, Satheesh left me at the studio one weekend to upload old Hindhi vinyl while he went away for a shoot. To do this I’d been learning about sound and Protools, the software. Well, I got so bored that a novel started coming out of me! Words flowed, streaming through me and I just had to get it down. I spent the rest of the weekend on the laptop and, when Satheesh returned, I showed him what I’d ‘caught’.
As Life would have it, he had dated a Canadian-Indian screenwriter for three years and said that, for a first draft, it was amazing and I really had to focus on this now. So that is what I did. The all-seeing I. How magical is Life?! This is the power of mastering the mind. This is the power of tuning into instinct/ intuition. You don’t have to try to paddle upstream, As Abraham says, you only have to put your boat in the river.
I’ll be doing the 30-day Master Your Mind : Create Peace Within practice. If you’d like to join, simply follow these steps.
1.Get Master Your Mind : Create Peace Within.
2.Follow MasterYourMindBook on Instagram.
I’ll be posting the daily updates and insights there. And plus you can ask questions and receive personal help.
Love,
Mireille xx
p.s. On Thursday I’ll share the brilliant #ArtofFlow synchronicity that happened this weekend. It is the perfect example of ask and it is given. Join my community here to receive it.
