Around here

 

We went to the sheepdog trials.

“Away up! Right over! Back off. Come be-oind! Stop. Geddup. Stop. Geddup. Get ‘ere. Come be-oind!”

We sat in the boot of the car, out of the wind, and watched lithe little dogs hurtle across the field. They never stopped working.

“That little dog tried her hardest. She could honestly do no more.”

It was a good day out, though. We met some characters. One bloke came trundling towards me on a motorised mobility scooter, his wife and his dog walking beside him. His wife chided him as she realised his intentions.

“Don’t stop and talk to the girls. Don’t stop and talk to the girls. Don’t stop and … oh, never mind.” 

He stopped dead in front of me. “Gidday,” he said. “She’s just jealous.” And gave me a gappy smile. “Got any dogs in the competition?” I asked. “Three in the top 20,” said his wife proudly, “and he’s 81 years old!”

The next weekend we drove in the opposite direction, down the surprisingly quiet Hume Highway to Jugiong, which is really taking off. If you’re on the way to or from Melbourne and you need a break, pop in to the Long Track Pantry for lunch. Or stay the night at the recently refurbished Sir George Hotel. (They didn’t pay me to tell you that. I just think they’re both quality establishments and a great example of what you can do to attract people to a country town.)

We wandered around the corner to find a row of shops selling homewares, gifty things and interesting recycled/salvaged architectural stuff. The front wall of the building was made of a concrete-like material just begging to be touched. It was honey coloured and warm in the morning sun. “Rammed earth,” said the owner of the shop when I asked what it was, and I decided then and there to have a rammed earth wall in the house I’m going to build one day, hopefully not too far away.

We drove on, along deserted back roads, to another town that hasn’t read the manual on how to attract visitors. It was rich in interesting architectural features, but we felt as we stopped to photograph them that there was a bit of an air of menace. We weren’t welcome. We quickly got back in the car and drove non-stop to another place, almost on the outskirts of Canberra, where you can find handmade chocolates and a good cup of tea and sit and look out over paddocks and relax.

The weekend after that there was more driving, a last quick swim in the sea while it’s still warmish, then a catch-up with a friend before seeing to some family biz.

They were the fun bits. In between, I’ve felt like Wile E Coyote, cartoon legs whirring in midair. Or I’ve been like a sheepdog: running, running, running, herding, chasing, turning in circles, rounding things up. It’s not just me. A friend said she feels like a hamster on a wheel and the wheel keeps getting faster.

On top of all the busy, there have been other challenges to face. I fell in a bit of a hole, mentally, a little while ago and I was finding it hard to climb out. I pretended everything was fine but it wasn’t. I really wanted to feel better but I just couldn’t. Then one night a friend came over and said, “We’ve got to scratch that record.”

He was right. That was the answer: getting the needle out of the groove, changing the song that was playing over and over in my head. That led to an extraordinary visualisation exercise that was hard to do but I trusted him and it worked. I feel better. I feel reconnected to myself, to other people and certainly to the world around me.

Since that night, that difficult conversation, I’ve been able to tackle two other tough situations. They’re not completely dealt with or solved, but it’s been liberating to start to address them, to think carefully and speak compassionately to the people involved and feel things shifting for the better. It feels incredibly adult to do that.

This weekend, thank goodness, was a quieter one. Apart from a walk around the lake and dinner with friends, I mostly stayed in my kennel. What a relief! Autumn’s beginning to put in an appearance, calling for long sleeves and an extra blanket on the bed. It’s time to tune in to the season and slooooow down.

And that’s what’s been going on around here.

 

Odds and sods

There’s no overarching theme to this blog post. Nope. Not a one. It’s a ragbag of bits and pieces I’ve been meaning to tell you and haven’t managed to cobble together coherently until now. Hopefully, you’ll find something of interest in it. Here we go.

When I stayed at a friend’s place at the coast the other weekend, I washed my hair in horse shampoo because it was all I could find. It was an alarming shade of purple but it gave me soft, flowing, lustrous locks and I’ve been wondering since why I bother buying expensive human shampoo. If there are any equestrians reading this, do you share your horse’s shampoo?? My next research project is to find out what was in it and compare it to what I use. If it’s the same stuff, I’m switching to horse shampoo. Secretly, I’m still hoping to turn into a palomino (tosses mane and paws at ground).

I went to see a great movie last weekend: Everybody Knows. It’s a Spanish thriller. Have you seen it? Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem were in it, so there was no way it was going to be bad. The drama was intense and absorbing, but I did have time to notice how beautiful everyone was. I don’t mean in the botoxed, straightened hair way that supposedly stands for beauty now. I mean passionate dark eyes surrounded by crows feet and frown lines, and thick, messy hair falling over high cheekbones. People had curves and paunches and looked tired. And still they were beautiful.

I couldn’t get over how dry the landscape was. It made Canberra’s parched paddocks look fecund. I can say three things in Spanish (apart from hello/goodbye/thank you). “Two beers, please,” (not terribly helpful, as I don’t drink beer, but I can order it for someone else). “What’s in the bag?” (could come in handy at airports and in lucky dip situations). “I am the tall woman who lives in your house,” (I learned that once to amuse a flatmate who spoke Spanish). I definitely want to learn more after seeing that movie.

Can I introduce you to some bloggy people? They recently found me, so I followed them back and now I love checking in on them. No doubt you will too.

https://carolbaby.com/ writes about life every couple of days (impressive output!) and I really love her take on things. I’m usually too lazy/busy to comment on her posts but they always make me think/laugh/feel inspired/feel connected. She lives in ThePalace(Of Love) and works at SaltMinesLimited. See, you already want to read it.

Karen at https://somekindof50.com/ is much more sorted than I will ever be. She wrote a brilliant piece the other week on coping with loss. I wish I’d had it with me at this time last year. A recent post was a collection of 50 quotes, and this little group in particular spoke to me:

• “I don’t have time to worry about people who don’t like me. I’m too busy loving people who love me.” Anonymous
• “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” George Eliot
• “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

This week she posted about reinventing yourself, or at least working out what you want. That’s the second time in two days someone’s brought that up and it’s made me realise that what I wanted last year is not what I want this year. A little brainstorming and clarification is in order, I think.

Last but most definitely not least in the bloggy introductions is Claudia, brought to you by the insightful and funny Julie Persons. Claudia tells it like it is and she’s good at wordplay too. You can find her here: https://theadventuresofclaudia.wordpress.com/ It’s my ambition to be as smart as her when I grow up.

Let’s talk cake. (How are you coping with the lack of linking sentences between paragraphs? Hope you’re still with me.) A work colleague turned 80 recently and I made him this chocolate cake. It was sooo good, even though I made the mistake of putting it in the fridge overnight (unnecessary and slightly dried it out). There’s no photo because I forgot and because it got eaten pretty quickly, but it looked just as good as it does in the recipe. It’s my go-to chocolate cake recipe now, and everyone should expect to get one on their birthday. There’s a shedload of sugar in it, but if you’ve made it to 80 you shouldn’t have to worry about things like that.

What have you been making? If you crochet, do you know about Annie Design Crochet? I like her patterns (a lot of them are free) and her use of colour. I’ve made three scarves as presents, using this pattern: indigo scarf. Next up is this: halo shawl. I bought beautiful hand‑dyed merino by Malabrigo, which I then discovered comes from…Uruguay. Hmm. I should probably find out where to buy Australian merino. My winter project is this: carousel blanket, which I’ll finish just in time for…er…next summer. Maybe I should make it in cotton.

Have you read this book by Malena Watrous: If You Follow Me? I’ve read it twice in four months. I don’t usually do that, but the characters felt like friends and I wanted to keep them by me. She’s super smart and funny, and entangled in a complicated relationship. She wants so desperately to fit in yet can’t follow the rules and often openly challenges them. Underneath everything, she’s grieving the death of her father and coming up to the one‑year anniversary. As am I.

“It never goes away,” a friend of mine said about grief and loss. “You just learn to live with it.” That’s not quite how I feel about it, although I acknowledge that it’s much less visible now. No-one sees it but me. Rather than learning to live with it, it’s as if I carry it with me all the time, like a tiny Russian icon shining red and gold in a dark corner of the heart.

Figs are in season! Huzzah! Be quick! Run to the farmers market to get some, because the season is so short! I’ve been buying them in bulk and gorging. You may have seen me cunningly elbowing someone out of the way because they were being too slow in choosing apples and were obstructing my path to the figs. But I will neither confirm nor deny that.

At the farmers market there was a new stall selling flowers by the bucketload, which made me enormously happy. It was such a contrast to the measly, overpriced bunches that you can buy elsewhere. The man selling the flowers had just started out in the flower-growing business and was as excited and happy to talk about it as I was to buy beautiful roses from him.

I discovered via the lovely Pip Lincolne that Nick Cave has a blog where you can ask him questions! “You can ask me anything,” he says, and people do, and he writes openly, from the heart, in return. Someone asked him, “How do you deal with evil?” and this is part of what he wrote in return:

The transcendent spirit for good can be accessed with profound effect through the imagination – the creative force can act as a counter-agent to evil. We cannot eradicate evil, yet it need not paralyse us – rather we should take what steps we can, however small, toward the betterment of the world, and our place in it. This is the essence of creativity.

I try not to allow horror into this blog, but yesterday, after the shocking news from New Zealand, I found myself out in the garden looking up at the night sky for reassurance. The stars were clear and sharp, the moon a half slice of lemon. I was looking for the Southern Cross. As I craned my neck, there it was: that comforting, familiar constellation, like an anchor above me.

That’s it for now, m’dears. Go well. Take care. (Whinnies and canters off.)

What the sign says

Buckle up. We’re off! Yes, I know it wasn’t planned. Yes, I know we have other things to do. They’ll still be there when we get back. But we need to make some space between last week (with its tiring, unexpected blow to the solar plexus) and next week. Let’s go.

Look, while you’ve been swithering about whether it’s a good idea, we’ve already passed Bungendore. Now we’re driving into lovely Braidwood. The agricultural show is in full swing. The farmers market is on. It’s a bit busy. People are queuing for coffee. We’ll come back another day to mooch around and enjoy its 19th century charm.

We’re on the Kings Highway. With a name like that you’d expect it to be a grand, expansive thoroughfare. Instead, it’s a pretty ordinary two-lane road that winds down a mountain for 40 kilometres. People get angry on this road. They take crazy risks to get past each other, not realising that at some point we’re all going to get stuck behind the same three caravans. It never fails to amuse me that the spot that always causes a traffic snarl-up is called Government Bend. Pretty soon after that is when I start thinking, “Get me off this mountain.”

But, see, we did get off the mountain eventually. We’ve just passed Batemans Bay, where fat-bottomed pelicans sit on top of lamp posts. We’re starting to lose the angry drivers. They’re all turning off down roads to the beach. And…deep breath as the countryside gets greener and the roads get quieter. Everything slows down as we cross the melodiously named Trunketabella Creek, past the shiny black cattle grazing on the floodplain. Their rectangular outline, with a fat belly and a leg at each corner, always reminds me of my old labrador. She liked to eat all day too.

We’ve reached Bodalla. Have you noticed that all the towns start with B? (Actually, there were two that started with M, but I chose to ignore them. Poetic licence, dontcha know.) What a spot! Isn’t it beautiful? At one end of this tiny 1860s settlement is an imposing stone church surrounded by majestic bunya pines. At the other end is a church made of gingerbread. In the middle there’s a pub bigger than both of them. That about sums up early European settlement in Australia.

And in the paddocks—surprisingly—there are emus. “Yes,” says my friend D, who’s joining us for lunch. “You see them on the beach too.” If you’re wondering how they ended up in this part of the world, read this. It’s all very well to transport flightless birds to an island, but you can’t keep them there if they can swim.

 

Let’s have lunch. We could go to the Bodalla Dairy and eat nice cheese, but today I’d rather sit in the shaded courtyard of the Blue Earth Cafe and wolf down a bowl of herby, home-grown salad with dips and pickles and crunchy bits and every other delicious thing you can think of. The cafe’s for sale. “You could buy it,” says D, who has a much better business brain than I do. “Where would I live?” She suggests a caravan in the veggie garden. Ten years ago, maybe, or in another life. Right now it’s enough that we’re here, eating this good food in this beautiful place, appreciating someone else’s vision and hard work.

But food isn’t the focus of this trip. There’s something a few kilometres down the road that will really reinvigorate us after such a big week. On this last day of summer, we need to get in the water. Not the water at the long, golden beach where surfers catch the curling waves and ride them in. I’m talking about the flat, clear water at the edge of the turquoise inlet. I’m talking about lying on our backs and floating in the sunshine while kids snorkel by the rocks and shout, “Look! There’s an octopus!” I’m talking about swimming out to the shark net and feeling, even there, in the calm bay, the push of the tide coming in. I’m talking about total relaxation and surrender.

There was a sign that I kept seeing at the side of the highway, on the way down to the coast. “Stop. Revive. Survive.” That’s what it said. And, yes, that’s what was needed.
Stop. Revive. Survive. In life, as on the road.

(With love and thanks to D, S and little P.)

Listening

Are you a listener? I am. I didn’t plan to be one. I guess my status as a listener evolved over years of being a shy child. It’s not that I don’t like listening. I find people’s stories interesting. There are endlessly fascinating things to hear, to learn, when people speak. I’m often surprised by the things they tell me, their deepest secrets given up so easily.

Listening isn’t just about words, is it? Sometimes it’s about listening to the tone of voice and understanding the emotion. Sometimes there’s so much subtext, so much to notice beneath the words. I listened to someone speaking very confidently just the other night and thought that what they were really articulating was need and self-doubt.

I’ve been listening to the soothing sounds of recorded rain to get to sleep lately. For most of this week I’ve been hearing Fleetwood Mac’s gorgeous Songbird in my head as I’ve gone about my everyday business. Today I’ve enjoyed listening to Kate Bush’s crisp diction on the beautifully recorded Hounds of Love album. And the burbling, bubbling splutter of the coffee pot on the stove has made me smile.

As I started writing this, I realised that for 30 years my work has been about listening. This is probably a weird admission to make, but I do enjoy the challenge of playing and replaying a piece of audio, isolating different channels on the recording until I get exactly what’s being said. A colleague once told me I was the best listener they knew. In another job, someone called me “Lynx” (after the pointy-eared cat, not the brand of deodorant…I hope!) Someone even wrote me a letter once praising the quality of my listening.

It is a tiring occupation, though, listening. Last year, for example, I didn’t have the emotional space to listen to people. There was so much talking. It was exhausting. I had to switch off my listening skills and withdraw a bit. I still need to from time to time. That’s upset a couple of people.

And sometimes I want to do the talking but I don’t get the chance to or I feel out of practice or unable to say what I really want to say. Perhaps that’s why I write. It’s a way of telling the stories I want to tell or saying the things I want to say. After so many years of listening, it’s become easier to express myself through the written word.

Lately there’s been another kind of listening going on. I’ve been listening through dance. I signed up for another dance class, in addition to tango. It’s a kind of freeform dance, no set steps, just listening to the music, listening to the way the body wants to move to it. In our overly structured world, with all its layers of etiquette, it’s so freeing to step outside the expected patterns of behaviour and just dance. Sometimes it feels a little crazy to do that. At the first class I did occasionally think, “This is a bit bonkers!” But I still did it. The energy and connection in the room were rather wonderful. And almost no words were spoken.

That dance class led me to this exquisite short film. This is what it feels like, I think, when you listen to your own heart and express it in dance. So I’ll keep listening to all the stories people want to tell me, and most of the time I’ll love hearing them. But from now on I’m always going to make a little space for a different kind of listening.

Not lost in translation

Is it raining cats and dogs where you are? It rains shoemakers’ boys if you’re Danish. In Dutch it rains pipe stems and sometimes cups and saucers. In Greek it rains chair legs and in Czech it rains wheelbarrows. Ow!

Perhaps you’ve got a frog in your throat. The French have a cat. Italians have a toad. Hungarians have a dumpling, which makes much more sense and is surely easier to remove.

We call a spade a spade. The French call a cat a cat. The Portuguese just say, “Bread, bread. Cheese, cheese.” I like that. I think I’ll start saying it.

Do you tend to make a mountain out of a molehill? A Russian might make an elephant out of a fly. A Turk might turn a flea into a camel.

If you’re losing your marbles in English, you’re losing your goats in Turkish. In German you’d be missing cups in your cupboard.

If you’re going bananas in English, you’re going cucumber in Danish.

 

In the British parliament there was some confusion recently when a Belgian delegate at a forum said that someone had sent his cat. Imagine the conversation:

British peer: I say! Chappie sent his cat to the meeting. Dashed impertinence!
Belgian visitor: No, no. It means he failed to show up.

While we’re on the subject of politicians, we might say they like to beat around the bush rather than give a straight answer. But in German you’d say they were talking around the hot porridge. In Spanish you might say there was a lot of noise and no walnuts.

Perhaps you’ve put your foot in it recently. In Norwegian you’d say you stepped in the salad. Or maybe you’ve got your wires crossed. In Finnish you’d have crossed skis instead.

If you’re not cut out for something, in Icelandic you’re on the wrong shelf in life. If the horse has bolted in English, in French the carrots are cooked. If something seems fishy to you, a Norwegian would say there are owls in the bog.

It’s time to let the cat out of the bag (or the monkey out of the sleeve if you’re Dutch). Sometimes I feel like a fish out of water. But in Spanish I’d feel like an octopus in a garage. I think that’s my favourite idiom of all. Imagine that confused octopus floundering around amongst the cardboard boxes and tools and bikes and camping equipment!

In Iceland if someone says, “I took him to the bakery,” it doesn’t mean for a nice sugary treat. It means they gave him a piece of their mind rather than a piece of cake. And since we’re in Iceland, wouldn’t a visit to the Blue Lagoon be the icing on the cake? (Yes, it really would. I’ve been there. It’s fantastic. Do go if you can.) But in Icelandic you’d say it was the raisin at the end of the sausage.

We all want an easy life. That’s the nub of it—or, as a Russian might say, that’s where the dog is buried. But some people really do have it easy. Some people just slide in on a shrimp sandwich, according to the Swedes. Most of us, though, just have to crack on and get the job done. Or, as the Dutch say, wash that little piglet.

Don’t hold your breath waiting to win the lottery. You can take your little horse out of the rain. (That’s Portuguese for don’t hold your breath.) Pigs might fly. If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. (Italian for pigs might fly.)

Possibly I’ve taken this too far now. Perhaps it’s all Greek to you. (German: I understood only “train station”. Dutch: I can’t make any chocolate from that. Icelandic: I come completely from the mountains.)

When I went on a ramble through cyberspace to research all these silly sayings, I also found two very sweet videos about concepts that we don’t really have the words for in English:

• A Filipino word for a cute, adorable thing that gives you joy: gigil
• A Japanese phrase for predicting love: koi no yokan

Now I feel like looking for more examples, but that’s a job for another day. Let’s not get carried away. Leave the church in the village, as the Germans might say.

 

 

 

Hot and seeing spots

Hello, hotties. How are you faring? It’s a bit much, isn’t it? I’m talking about the weather, obviously. Ooof, it’s been HOT! Heatwave records seem to be tumbling all over Australia. Every night the weather map looks like a band of molten lava across the country.

I’ve been thinking of changing the name of this blog to Slow, Wilted, Sweaty. Honestly, I’ve been as limp as an old lettuce. The bedroom’s been too hot to sleep in, so I’ve camped in the lounge room and spent lots of time looking at photos of snow in Sweden and wishing I was there instead of here. 42 degrees Celsius is no-one’s favourite temperature, unless you’re some kind of lizard.

Talking of which, I had to turn the water off to get some plumbing done. The mains tap is down a pipe underneath the courtyard, and when I peered down into it I saw little eggs, lots of them. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw many wriggly things too. Baby skinks! I had to relocate them to turn off the tap. Have you ever tried catching baby skinks with a spoon and getting them to travel up a pipe? Luckily it was such a hot day that no-one was around to ask me what I was doing: “Oh, you know, just encouraging skinks to take the spoon escalator up to ground level.”

When I was a child and lived in England, there was a heatwave one summer which now seems mild by Australian standards. I think the temperature went over 30 for a while. But the most amazing thing happened: ladybirds took over the country. Really, they did. There was a ladybird plague. They were everywhere. I wondered whether it was my childhood memory inflating the numbers or whether there really was a plague, so I looked it up. The BBC says that insect boffins estimated the number at 23.65 billion! Nope, that’s not a typo. You can read about it here.

I’ve been thinking about why we like ladybirds but hate cockroaches. It’s to do with the shape and the spots, isn’t it? Ladybirds are rounded and cute and pretty. They’re cartoon‑like. We like their bright colours and patterns. They cheer us up.

To escape the heat this week, I went to the National Gallery to look at Yayoi Kusama’s infinity room, which is like being surrounded by a giant ladybird. It’s a patterned room in hot yellow, with black dots. In the middle is a mirrored box reflecting the walls and ceiling back at you. It’s fun and disconcerting at the same time because it plays tricks with your brain.

When you walk up the steps and peer through a little window in the mirrored box, you see the most wonderful thing: bright yellow pumpkins with black spots reflected to infinity.

Kids and adults alike were queuing to see these gorgeous, quirky pumpkins. As soon as I’d had my turn at looking through the little window, I wanted to go straight back to do it again. It’s truly delightful. It’s called The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens and it’s been bought by the gallery, which hopefully means it’s on display permanently. After I’d seen it, the 42-degree day outside seemed pale by comparison.

Weather gods be thanked, it’s cooler today and predicted to be that way for the rest of the week. We’ll all have a chance to catch up on sleep and get our energy back. I can stop looking at pictures of Sweden. I hope the cool change has made it to your house too. But even if you don’t need an air-conditioned art gallery to escape to, go and see the ladybird pumpkins!

 

 

 

 

Shoelaces

Do you meditate? Wait! Come back! I’m not about to go all esoteric on you. Let me ask a different question: do you have a tendency to catastrophise? I do. Catastrophising, thinking that something terrible will happen, is perfectly understandable. It usually develops because something terrible has happened, or perhaps there’s been a run of terribleness. The fight or flight response starts working overtime and the parasympathetic nervous system, the bit that calms us down, seems to go on holiday.

Here’s an example. A friend and her little dog came to visit. We left the dog in the house while we went for a swim. Then we came back for a cuppa and a nice chat. Everyone, the dog included, had a lovely time. But when they left, I went into the kitchen and realised with horror that a blob of ant bait that had been on the benchtop was no longer there.

My first thought was: “I’ve killed the dog!” She’s a little dog but she can jump very high. While we’d been swimming she’d patrolled the kitchen and sniffed out the honey smell of the ant bait. Then she’d jumped up, stuck out her tongue at just the right moment and slurped up the honeyed poison, ants ‘n all.

I rang my friend. No answer. I sent a text. No answer. I waited for what seemed like ages, then I rang again. Still no answer. So here’s what I thought: “The dog’s had a seizure in the car on the way home and they’ve gone straight to the vet. That’s why she’s not answering the phone.” Are you laughing? I hope so.

My friend rang about an hour later. “I was cooking dinner,” she said. “I didn’t hear the phone.” She rang the vet and found out that the bait wasn’t poisonous to dogs but might cause a bit of an upset tummy. Ms Dog, meanwhile, happily scoffed her dinner then ate my friend’s daughter’s dental guard for dessert.

I think it might be time to chill, don’t you?!

I used to own a sweatshirt that said “overthink everything” and I wore it around the house all winter. I bought it because it made me laugh but also it was a reminder to stop overthinking. Meditation helped. It gave me a way to step back and consider what was happening, rather than reacting instantly. Unfortunately, after a while I forgot to keep doing it. I stopped meditating and the overthinking/catastrophising came back.

Everyone’s an expert on meditation and mindfulness these days. It can be annoying, when you’re really strung out and busy, to hear yet another person telling you to meditate or be mindful. “I haven’t got time. I can’t do it right. It’s boring. I can’t empty my mind.” These are the things we all tell ourselves, even when we’ve meditated before and know that it works.

Since I started meditating again, I’ve been wondering: what is this thing called meditation?  You don’t have to sit cross-legged on a cushion to do it; you can be walking or lying down or staring out of the window.  It’s not really about emptying your mind either, although that’s lovely when it happens.

Here’s what I think it boils down to, the essence of meditation:

• Stillness
• Concentration
• Noticing
• Contentment

In the mornings, as I’ve been tying my shoelaces, getting ready to go out for a walk, it’s dawned on me that I’ve been completely focused. I’ve noticed everything about the action of shoelace tying: the colour of my shoes, the texture of the laces, the feeling of tying them. I’ve been meditating while tying my shoelaces!

Of course, once you start telling yourself in your mind how great it is—Hey! Look! I’m meditating! Whoo-hoo!—then you’ve broken the spell. You’re thinking again. But even those few minutes of seeing and not thinking are precious. They set you up for the whole day. You go into a meditative state at other times when you aren’t even trying to meditate.

The parasympathetic nervous system comes back from its holiday, packs the fight or flight response into a suitcase and puts it on top of the wardrobe until it’s needed. The big stuff seems less exhausting and the little stuff seems even more significant. Best of all, at any moment, out of the blue, you can find yourself wrapped in a warm blanket of contentment. Even when you’re just tying your shoelaces.

Dropping out

Well, tippety top o’ the mornin’ to you! Welcome to a brand-sparkling-new year!

What are your plans? What do you hope for? What will you let go of? What will you do differently? Me? I’m dropping out for a little while, and I’m very excited about it.

Ages ago, all the way back in 2018, a friend and I decided to have a chat on the phone. This is a bigger deal than you might think, because so often the connection drops out. She lives in the Blue Mountains and I live in Canberra, a distance of about four hours by road.

Canberra, I should point out, is the capital city of our splendid nation, so you would expect it to have good telecommunications. The Blue Mountains are two hours west of Sydney, Australia’s largest city. Ditto on the communications expectations. But there was a lot of fiddle-faddling before we could actually talk. I had to restart my phone a couple of times and walk upstairs. She had to drive her car to a certain spot. Then, if we stood perfectly still and the wind kept blowing from a particular direction, we could have a chat.

This is not a post about Australia’s questionable telecommunications infrastructure (although the argument that we just don’t have the demand/population to warrant the same level of service as other countries is wearing a bit thin). I mention it because of something profound that my friend said later in our conversation.

We caught up on what we’d been doing. I blahhed on about something I needed to get out of my head. And when I said, “So I’m just going to work and paying the bills, but the question is: why?” my friend said this:

I guess sometimes the meaning drops out for a while.

I love that sentence. It gets to the heart of everything—not only that we need meaning in our lives but that life is cyclical and ever changing. What’s happening now is not going to be happening forever. Something that you thought was lost will come back. Or something else will take its place.

If you’re distracted by things that drive you crazy because they take up all your time and they’re not important to you, you can change that. You can move the important things into the centre of your life and make them your focus. You can even drop out for a while to concentrate on your dreams, on doing the things that make you happy and give your life meaning.

So I’m dropping out to do just that: no going into the office for a whole five weeks! I’ll be here at home, working on my dreams. I wish you a very happy new year, but you know, don’t you, that any day can be the start of a new year? Good. I thought you did.

Write the book, dance the dance, start the business, enrol in the course, buy the ticket and get on the plane. Move the unimportant things aside for a while. Drop out if you need to. Keep those dreams in sight!

Have a zip-a-dee-doo-dah year.

 

(P.S. Time travel happened with this post! I wrote it on 1 January 2019 in Australia and as soon as I hit “publish” it travelled back through time and got published on 31 December 2018 somewhere across the dateline. Weird, but also kind of cool…)

 

Small moments of quiet joy

For obvious reasons, this year I’ve been thinking a lot about how you can be here one day and gone the next. All your stories go with you, all the words you thought and said. All the places you went to, the experiences you had. All your love, your hopes, your frustrations and disappointments. Your big life, which, hopefully, you’ve lived well and loved living. All that goes with you when you go.

Often at the end of the year we ask ourselves where the time went: “The year’s flown by! How can it be December already? I can’t believe it!” But some years are different; you feel every day of every month as it ticks by. Some years a big life event sweeps in and lays waste to everything in its path. Sometimes you see the cyclone coming. I remember thinking in January, “So this is what the year will be about,” and knowing that I could do nothing to stop it.

It’s been a year of strong emotion and change, and it’s not over yet. The changes keep coming. The strong emotion rides in when you least expect it. Even this week I’ve wanted to burn bridges, really torch them, and walk away to start again. But, despite all that, there have been moments, small, quiet moments, that have led to a feeling of pure joy. Here are some of them from the last little while.

The soft chorus of small brown birds, high and sweet, before the dawn breaks.

A bowl of cherries eaten slowly at dawn, while outside the night moves quietly away and the day sidles in wearing a dress of palest grey.

A walk in the cork oak forest, late season snow in the wind but warm slivers of sunlight filtering through the branches.

Watching a friend glide along the pavement on his bike in the rain, one hand on the handlebars, the other holding an umbrella aloft to keep his peach-coloured shirt dry, no helmet on his head, big grin on his face, because he’s on his way to dance class.

The rain bird, unseen, real name unknown, who sings a mournful one-note song just before it rains. And he’s always right.

Rain. Rain on the roof. Rain on your face. Rain in the soil, right down to the roots. Rain. May we have more of it.

Slow yoga at home; no pushing, no striving, no comparing, just a quiet inward focus on the tight spots that need attention.

Watching and learning from a much-loved dog who’s lost a leg but shows only resilience, stoicism and an unreserved lust for life because—look, humans!—there’s so much to sniff and chase and point at no matter how many legs you’ve got.

The monster tomato plant growing in the courtyard with such vigour that I’m expecting tomatoes for Christmas, in complete contrast to last year’s tomato adventure.

A long, relaxed, chatty lunch with good friends and funny teenagers at a country pub.

A fat, scruffy white pony being led down the street by a man of the same description.

Making something; transforming a skein of wool from a tangle of red spaghetti into a pretty scarf.

Rereading a favourite book after 30 years and realising that you understand it so much more deeply now because you’ve lived it.

Dancing with my fellow tangueros three nights a week. Strangers only six weeks ago, now we step apart at the end of each dance and smile in amazement at the heartfelt connection. I had no idea that it was possible to fall in love with a dance.

Witnessing waterlily bedtime on the pond, petals folding up as the sun slides down the sky.

Tracking the rain curtain on the hills. As it drifts closer, a rainbow appears, brilliant, blazing, ephemeral. I blink and it’s gone.

See you next year.

 

PS The giant kewpie doll in the photo above has lived an interesting life. She was featured in the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. You can read about her here: https://collection.maas.museum/object/10743

She’s resided in the small town of Bungendore, outside the antique shop, for some years, but now she’s for sale! If you need a giant kewpie in your life, you can buy her here: https://villageantiquesbungendore.weebly.com/

I’d love to bring her home but my garden is very small and she’d block the light. Also, the residents association would vote me off the island.

Big sky days

“To the south of Canberra runs a highway that goes down through a country as haunting as it is colourful. The Monaro road to Cooma and the Alps exemplifies many characteristics of outback Australia and points to the past as much as to the future. Therein, perhaps, lies its greatest charm.”

So said the Sydney Mail in 1935. While I agree with that description, what I like most about travelling the road to Cooma is the sky. It’s so BIG. Yes, the landscape is haunting and subtly beautiful, but the sky is magnificent. Looking at that sky is like taking a deep breath and realising that you’ve been shallow breathing for too long. So you spread your arms wide and fill your lungs all the way up.

To the south of Canberra runs a highway that goes down through a country as haunting as it is colourful. The Monaro road to Cooma and the Alps exemplifies many characteristics of outback Australia and points to the past as much as to the future. Therein, perhaps, lies its greatest charm. A painter’s road it is, to

The town of Cooma sits in a very interesting spot geographically. You can turn left just before it,  head off across the starkness of the Monaro plain and then down the wooded mountain to the Bega Valley and the sea. That’s one of my favourite road trips. If you feel like skiing in winter or alpine walking in summer, you can go straight through town and be in the Snowy Mountains in an hour. Or you can turn right and find yourself in apple-growing country, with hot springs and caves thrown in for good measure. I’m starting to sound like someone who works in the tourist bureau. 

I went to Cooma recently with a friend who used to live there, and we didn’t go left or right or straight through to somewhere else. We had a nice day in the town instead. I enjoyed seeing it through a local’s eyes, saying hello to people in the street and chatting in the shops. We started with coffee at the pretty Courtyard Cafe and Flower Pantry, which is very Country Style magazine. I often wish my life was a bit more Country Style. A more fitting magazine title, unfortunately, would probably be Suburban Bewilderment. Do you think there’s a market for that?

We went to my three favourite shops in town: the camping shop (I rarely go camping but I like to think that I will go again one day and I like looking at the stuff I might need), the hardware/kitchen/garden shop (paint, pans and plants in one place—what more can you ask for?) and birdsnest. Birdsnest is a brilliant idea and it sells very nice frocks. It started life as a little clothes shop on the main street but is now also an online business employing more than a hundred people. If you’re looking for ways to build a business in a country town, it’s a great example to follow. And did I mention the nice frocks?

 

From the architecture on the main street, it’s clear that Cooma’s been a service town for the region for a long time. It doesn’t have the moneyed feel of some country towns but nor does it have that slightly desperate, closing-down sale feeling of others. It feels like a place that’s comfortable in its own skin. There’s an interesting mix of people: farmers, business owners, and engineers from all over the world who’ve come to work for Snowy Hydro. Also, the ducks in the park are very friendly.

If you need a crocheted echidna or emu tea cosy, the tourist information centre can help you:

It also had all the information I need for the next visit to the Snowy Mountains, the one where I’m planning to turn right and eat apples and swim in the hot springs:

A new discovery that will have to be added to my list of three (now four) must-visit shops was the little antique shop on the main street. It had a delightfully quirky mix of china and glassware and clothes and books. I was very restrained, but I did buy two beautiful books, both of which appear to have been written in the 1930s and, strangely, both of which are about a boys’ school set on a hill. I had to buy them because of the covers and because of the language: “Unspeakable bounder! I say, there’s going to be a ruction! Do buck up!”

Then I found this:

“Jezebel!” exclaimed the man at the counter when I went to pay.
“How could I not buy it?!” I said.
“I’ll put her between the boys,” said the man as he handed me the books.
“I’m sure that’s where she prefers to be,” I said.

After all that excitement, my friend and I were hungry, so we went for lunch at Rose’s restaurant, which serves up Lebanese home cooking. I highly recommend it. It’s not in an obvious spot, so you need to be a local to find it or you need to read about it in a blog post. There’s even a bellydancer (but not at lunchtime).

“Down along the highway we swung.  Sheep dotted the pastures and some cattle and many moundy hills there were, with gaunt ranges enclosing us — light and colour everywhere.”

That’s the Sydney Mail again, perfectly describing our drive home: light and colour everywhere and, over it all, that beautiful big sky. Thank goodness for country towns and big sky days.