Pondering...

Sometime ago I found this precious old-old-old photograph on the Internet of two unidentified women in a garden wearing lovely long dresses and lovely shawls.  Who were they—I would never found out, but their poses and lovely attires of a gone-by era have truly and deeply enchanted me ever since.  

Sometimes I make myself believe I'm from another era... and I live in Spain somewhere in the 1800's, when every woman wore her mantón (shawl) even to go work on the fields. 

Back on the days in Spain, the embroidered shawl became a token habitual of the female dress, above all in Seville, so much among the wealthy women of the high company as among the popular classes.

Sometimes I look at this painting, "A plena vida" (in full life), artwork by  José Pinazo Martínez, an artist born in 1879, and want to believe I'm one among those in the painting. I love to submerge myself into old paintings and photograph and make my own little stories.  It is fascinating.  

I can certainly find myself there with my usual gaze vacantly into space... ;)

The woman standing on the back are softly gossiping among themselves as they stare at this particular woman.  I wonder what kind of a person she must had been... a man-snaring temptresses?  Not necessarily a complicated woman either, or beautiful.  Perhaps someone who didn't measured up to her time's version of ladylike-ness?  She seems uninterested in whatever is going on around her.  Even bored.  But that same 'indifferent' or 'aloofness' in her is what speak to me and tell of the veiled freedom of her soul...  the free-spirited is always herself regardless of the situation she finds herself in.  She's not restricted by other people's opinions.  And perhaps that's what makes her so special?  Whoever she was, or whatever her life might have been, I'm convinced she was just that type of women other women will always be jealous of.  

And here I will have to put a word in favor of those 'other' ladies on the back, who presumably forgot that they were spending their time envying a woman who most probably was spending her time envying someone else because no woman truly has everything.  

We tend to forget that the woman whose life we are longing for is just another woman who is longing for something else... we assume other women have better lives because they have that one thing we want. They have the thing we'd give our soul for, trade for without a second thought. They have a better everything, so they must be happier.  And this is so untrue.

We all have our own flaws. And while others may have something we would like to have, we also have something that someone else would kill for.  So alas, let us just be us... and love the world we live in without complications! 

The temperatures around here are still cold, although the sun has come out today.  I'm wishing for sunshine and the ceased of cold winds.  I'm wishing for blue skies and blue birds and better, happier days.  And I wish you could come by and sit with me for a minute or two...