Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Esther Moore. I was born in Brussels, Belgium to an American family but spent the majority of my growing up years living in the heart of the Middle East conflict in Jerusalem, Israel. We’ve just moved back after eight years living in Frome and Bath in southwest England with my husband, Will, and our gorgeous little boy, Caleb (Calev at home and in Israel, although he’s now decided he wants to be called Levy. If it were up to him it would be Levy-O, but we had to draw the line somewhere!). Caleb was given a surprise diagnosis of Down Syndrome at birth and I decided to start this blog to share our journey.

At the end of 2015, soon after finishing breastfeeding Caleb, I found a lump. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I thought it had something to do with weaning, but just after Christmas my husband convinced me to go get it checked. On the 14th of January 2016, a day that will be forever seared into my memory, the results came back from the tests saying that it was cancer. I was 26 years old at the time.

This blog is about overcoming the hardest of circumstances. It is about learning to not be controlled by your circumstances but learning to rise above them. To live in the knowledge that the impossible can happen and that there is always hope. It’s about coming to terms with a different kind of perfect than the life you may have expected. And it’s about learning that being thankful and staying thankful is the key to rising above hard circumstances to live life well, wild and free.

I also have wanted to write a blog for years to share my thoughts and opinions on issues that often go unreported or are slanted in the media, to give a second voice and perspective on conflicts and areas of social justice that I am passionate about. A big part of this is the Middle East conflict, one that I have a unique, very different perspective on than what is reported in the mainstream media outlets.

Having lived my everyday life in a place that is constantly in headlines around the world, it instilled a passion for wanting to document world-changing events. I want to do this in a way that is truthful and, while not sugarcoating the facts, brings some form of hope and justice to the issues at hand. When it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian Middle East conflict, I have a unique viewpoint. Growing up immersed in Israeli culture and with an Israeli brother-in-law, yet going to an international school that was mainly made up of Palestinians where the oldest son of the former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority was a classmate and friend meant that I was able to see firsthand both sides of the conflict. I then spent 6 months working as a photojournalist for an NGO that worked with the Israeli government to bring food, clothes and aid to refugee camps in the West Bank, which gave me even more of an inside look into the reality of the situation. I’m planning on writing more about this as time goes on.

One of my passions is to find the Truth and help others find it, whether that be through journalism, photography, music or the arts. Truth can be a hard thing to hold on to in our culture – with being constantly told that all truth is subjective or being barraged with lies or half-truths consistently from the media, what are we to believe? Because of this, I believe that one of, if not the most, important things we can do is to hold onto the truth at any cost – to find a different perspective.