Through other people's eyes...

Recently, we've had the immense pleasure of seeing our home, garden, animals and lives through the lens of other people's cameras and words. I always find this kind of thing interesting, because we spend so much time just living our lives, that we often don't pause to think about how everything looks and seems to other people. 

Our first peek came in the form of a feature in the current issue of Peppermint Magazine (fittingly, the Autumn issue...), with photos taken by the lovely and quite photographically gifted Rohan Anderson, when he came to stay with us a few months back. Things looked great! Things looked stylish! It was kind of amusing and slightly unexpected actually given that to us, our place just mostly looks messy and/or overgrown and/or kind of unfinished and/or needing attention of one variety or another. Thank you Rohan for making our place look so pretty!

Next up was a feature in the incredibly wonderful, brand-spankin'-new Australian permaculture magazine, Pip. If you haven't got one yet, you should get one! It's very very beautiful, and it's also the first edition, so is bound to become a hella-cool collector's item. The words and photos are lovely and funny and generous and we felt so very proud to be in such an important and quite frankly such a spunky magazine with such a perfect duck on the cover!

And then as if that all wasn't enough, we got a beautiful little package in the mail from Ally and Richard at Happy Earth, containing (amongst other joyful treasures) a thumb drive of photos they'd taken on their recent visit to our little farm. 

Of course, there were photos of food. Here, zucchini fritters, a chopped salad and some home-made flatbreads. Very very common summertime fare at our place.

If you've seen their blog, you'll know that they take beautiful photos, so it was kinda nice to see our place through Ally's attentive eye. 

She photographed some of the things we take for granted, and, reflected back to us, they made us feel even more grateful for all the beauty around us - especially the stuff we don't even see any more because it's such a daily part of our lives.

 What a treat! An opportunity to reflect on the bounty of our everyday lives has been a real gift, and I, for one, have enjoyed it tremendously. Especially this photo of our chickens and ducks...

This photo, to me, looks like something out of a poultry version of Grease, with all the gang assembling for some kind of musical number sung by the protagonists, who are, of course, a Rhode Island Red and a Light Sussex. That makes sense, right??