Blog – PipBrennan

Post-retreat Retreat Pastiche

Sunday Blog 172 – 16th Feb 2025

“Your windows are super clean, Mum.”

It was the sixth occasion I’d flicked on the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator while driving my daughter to Perth airport. She and I had a short window of overlap time between me returning from San Francisco and her heading to Sydney so I leapt at the chance to take her to the airport. Mother-daughter time on the run. It fascinated me that this was my body’s residue from my first experience of driving on the ~~wrong~~ right side of the road.

On the whole I would declare my overseas driving efforts a modest success. 9/10 would do again. See me at the top left image posing next to the rental car, and the sign I lugged with me all the way from Australia (plus a lump of blu-tack to stick it to the dashboard.) It was my visual reminder to drive on the right, remember that left hand turns are the most dangerous, and also a starred message of encouragement, “You’ve got this!”

Once safely in San Francisco with the car returned to its rental home, it was time for me to face up to my post-retreat self-guided retreat goal. To review the whole newly combined memoir and novella manuscript forged from the magic caldron of the Carmel Retreat.

The plan was to remove the worst continuity errors and make a list of areas of development that will take time and thinking. I’m not one of those who can work on a plane, so I was determined to get through the lot before heading home. I kept a list of the scenes from the messy middle through to the end (jigsaw piece images) and was very bloody happy to tick them all off before the last night was through.

Motivation was maintained by the ongoing accountability group (see middle left and bottom left) headed by Linda Sivertsen. (That’s her and me on the bottom left, one of the last pics before I left magic Carmel). The San Francisco skyline from my remote and self-contained airBnB (top right) was enticing and eventually I cracked and went to Fisherman’s Wharf on day two for some good old fashioned touristing. I returned to the centre one more time on my last full day to sit in a trendy cafe and work alongside all the other San Franciscans before treating myself to a labyrinth walk (Scott Street Labyrinth, bottom right). 10/10 would visit San Francisco again but would stay right in the centre. Where I stayed was 45 minutes to walk to the nearest bus stop with a very long bus ride to the nearest train. (Well I actually got all the way to the bus stop but by the time I’d worked out which side of the street to wait on, the bus had sailed past and I ordered an Uber). The location was perfect for someone with a mountain of editing, in short.

One last very special feature of my post-retreat retreat was joining my favourite online yoga teacher, Jackie Casal Mahrou for a live online class. I tune in to her pre-recorded yoga classes almost every day. Have done for about a decade. I really, really wanted to attend a yoga retreat with her in 2020, but, well, Covid put an end to that. Jackie was even better live, and invited me to stay at the end of the class for a quick chat. Such a special moment!

On the long flight home, I watched a gazillion movies and felt very bloody virtuous.

Now, to re-enter Perth and my life here. Wait for the other travel gremlins to work their way out. While I think I’ve re-adjusted rather well, darling husband’s knuckles were white as he clutched the dashboard when I drove him to the local beach this morning. That’s new. We dived under the beautiful water and I emerged, yet again incredibly grateful for where I live. Holidays are awesome, returning home is heaven.

Beautiful Carmel-by-the-sea

Sunday Blog 171 – 9th Feb 2025

“Hands up if you rang your family to tell them you had no business coming to this writing retreat.”

This question was posed to us on Tuesday, the morning of the first full day of the very last Carmel Writing Retreat run by Linda Sivertsen that I have travelled so far to attend.

It wasn’t enough for me to put up one hand. I had to put up both. Well, in truth, I didn’t ring any family members. But I wanted to. It was the wrong time of day for one, and in the end, I decided I just needed to ride the waves of unpleasant feelings. I told myself that I could just gruel it out until Friday.

I turned up to the Tuesday session the next morning with my reading ready to go, convinced of its mediocre horror. When I was preparing it in my room, I was facing away from the window. I needed to focus as, for the very first time, I stitched together one scene from the novella I’ve toiled over for around eight years with one chapter from my revised memoir. As soon as this delicate piece of patchwork was done, I looked out of the window and saw an enormous rainbow. Surely a good sign?

Linda explained that was a very normal reaction that retreat goers had. She let me read out first and a miracle unfolded. Blending the two books together actually bloody worked.

And just like that, I went from gruelling to walking on air. And I stayed that way for the rest of the retreat. Always aiming to be present and enjoy, and not hold on too tight when the time came for goodbye. Heck, I even got into a couple of labyrinth walks. Plus, I drove myself to and from Carmel to San Francisco and arrived in one piece.

In short, it’s been a week of huge wins.

Shedding my skin

Sunday Blog 170 – 2nd Feb 2025

It has come to my attention that the Chinese New Year 2025 kicked off 29^th January-and it’s the Year of the Wood Snake. I am a Wood Snake, indeed a woman entering her third act of her life this year.

There’s going to be some shedding.

Here’s me pictured next to a 2025 Wood Snake sign in Singapore airport on Friday 31^st January. There are a few things missing from this picture.

The furrowed brow when I realised my eSim wasn’t happy when just about to board my flight from Perth to Singapore. My absolute must-have lifeline to drive from the San Francisco airport to my hotel in Los Gatos.
The gog-wozzled look on my face when I realised I’d messed up the very detailed, explicit instructions from the Singapore transit hotel. Don’t go through passport control. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t checked in my cabin-bag sized suitcase. Why did I do that? Why? I had so much time up my sleeve at Perth airport but I made the impulsive choice so I didn’t have to lug it around at Perth airport. Doh. I had to clear immigration to get my bag, so that was the end of that booking.
The sag of resignation when I did my usual “throw money at it” response to it being 8pm and I was tired and in need of a bed. It’s just that, with it being Chinese New Year and all, it was a lot of money. I bloody well enjoyed that bath, though, in that giant, expensive room.
The slapped forehead when I realised that I’d meant to book a night’s stay in Los Gatos to meet with a friend, just an hour from San Francisco. But I’d accidentally booked in a totally different place, which was a two hours’ drive. So much for an easy breezy dinner catch-up.
The pensive hand on chin as I sat up in my giant, expensive Singapore hotel room, freshly bathed and re-energised, and booked a San Francisco hotel room so I could get a full night’s sleep after my 15 hour flight before attempting, for the very first time in my life, to drive on the right-hand side of the road.
Still pensive, I bought a new e-Sim.

Before boarding my flight to Singapore in Perth, I was feeling very complacent, a regular seasoned traveller. But journeys are always rich with teachings/ ego deaths.

I’m happy to say that after waking up very refreshed in my San Francisco hotel, I safely managed the two-hour drive to my writing retreat in Carmel. Even though when I got into the rental car, the concrete bunker parking area was an internet dead spot. And I couldn’t get the damned Apple Play to work. (Top tip-always bring a phone charger lead. If pairing fails, plugging in will always work).

And so to shedding skin. I’m here at the wonderful, magical, dream come true Carmel Writing Retreat with Linda Sivertsen to keep honing the revision of my 2014 memoir. By now the revision is so fundamental, it’s a bit like saying I’m swapping eggs, butter, flour and sugar for a fully baked cake.

And so I’ve done it. Shed the page on my website that links people to the 2014 version of my memoir. Making way for the growth in my writing skills over the last decade, and the new iteration of the memoir that’s still in progress.

And just in case you were wondering, it is still Sunday here in America, and that’s why it’s coming to you on Monday, if you’re in Perth. So there.

Meet you in the field

Sunday Blog 169 – 26th January 2025

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there.
Rumi poem

For most of this week I’ve snuck off into a log cabin to work on edits of my memoir, prior to flying out to Carmel-by-the-Sea next week for a writing retreat. I wanted to take a better draft of the memoir there to work on. A retreat before my retreat if you will. You may recall that I am now using the journal gifted to me 44 years ago for my 16th birthday for my day-to-day journalling. (You can read about it here in the Permission to be Cringeworthy blog. Lol.)

There are just a few entries from the past in this red journal with a golden sun, but mostly, it’s blank pages. When I do find an entry from the past, I end up writing to my young self, filling in the gaps, connecting the threads of myself across the decades.

And this, I’ve discovered in this week of editing, is what’s important to me. Once I thought I would write to effect social change. But really, what I want to do is connect. Me with myself. My reader to themselves. Us to each other.

It’s Australia Day today, and this is a day for disconnection, especially on the socials. For our First Nations people, this is the date when colonisation began in the east and eventually spread across the nation. #NotADateToCelebrate. Even our mainstream media notes that some people spend Australia Day attending reflection events, and that’s what I did. It wasn’t a protest, nor was it a celebration. It was a time for sharing culture, for truth telling, for showing up to hear just a fraction of what stolen generation survivors have experienced. To imagine, just for a moment, what it would be like to have your own child taken from you.

Perhaps it’s a phase, but I’ve currently lost my taste for protest, for activism. I find myself unwilling to engage in any kind of debate that makes me right and you wrong. That leads to disconnection.

So in that field, beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, beyond social media and its economic model to engender and encourage arguments between us, I’ll meet you there.

Calculating anniversaries

Sunday Blog 168 – 19th January 2025

Is it just me that gets confused each and every year about which anniversary I’m celebrating? It’s the same conundrum every time January rolls around, and darling husband usually knocks off a year of wedded bliss.

“The year you get married is year zero,” he’ll say, and that almost makes sense.

“But if we got married in January 2009, that means we’ve been married sixteen years, right?”

Eventually we settle on sixteen years married, which is just as well, as I’ve already done the fifteenth wedding anniversary in 2024 (crystal, as in I bought a crystal-ly kind of photo frame for our wedding anniversary last year – see pic, bottom right.)

Like many couples, we’ve been together a lot longer than we’ve been married. During the service, our celebrant told a story. (Apologies for the hetero language.)

“In ancient China they believed that the Gods tie a red string around the ankles of a Man and Woman who will one day be Husband and Wife. As the years pass, the red strong becomes shorter and shorter until they are united. I believe that this is indeed true in Pip and Paul’s case — destiny really did have a hand in their meeting. It may perhaps have been rather a long string…”

Our wedding anniversary is five days after my parents’ who celebrated their wedding on a scorching day in January 1957 (see pic top left.) They’d been married for 63 years when the picture of them was taken at their granddaughter’s wedding (see pic in the middle). That was the last year of their marriage, as he died in October of that year.

Does that mean we stop counting at 63, or do we think of it as their 68th wedding anniversary, now both of them are gone?

I don’t have any answers, just more questions, really.

Cherry-picking from religion

Sunday Blog 167 – 12th January 2025

At the tender age of 14, my family’s tightly woven Catholic framework that had swaddled and coddled me loosened. The impetus for this was my eldest sister joining the Orange People. As I puzzled through all the culty aspects of the Rajneshees, I suddenly realised that the brand of Catholicism I’d been raised in was, in fact, a cult.

By age 19, my faith had unravelled to the point I deliberately bought a bacon double cheeseburger deluxe (remember those?) from a fast-food outlet on a Good Friday. It was a powerful, if humorous, repudiation of my childhood faith. Together with my sister, I munched on its greasy goodness with relish. We laughed and laughed as we ate, but I’m sure it wasn’t just me secretly checking for lightning bolts from the sky. Meat on a Friday was always a no-no, but Good Friday? Sheesh.

As an angry young ex-Catholic, I boldly declared my new views and thinking. As the scale of sexual abuse in the Catholic church emerged, my justification was complete. But under the conviction and bravado, there was a deep sense of loss. I missed the quiet time each Sunday, sitting with others and sitting with myself. The belonging. The rituals. But it was and is clear to me that religion room is a locked door that I never want to re-open.

Over the years, I’ve mitigated that loss as best I can. I drew a line separating religion and spirituality. The former I associate with power and control while the latter is a direct, personal, mystical relationship with Higher Power/God/dess. I immersed in yoga nearly 30 years ago and learned, among other things, the vitally important fact that you don’t have to listen to or believe your thoughts. Taking responsibility for my choices and consequences was in. Feeling like a slut-shamed extra rib was out. Certainty and black and white thinking was out, puzzling paradoxes and grey were in.

Can I cherry-pick from other faiths? I’ve often wondered. This week, tuning in to Rangan Chatterjee’s interview with Alain de Bottom about happiness and fulfilment, I was plunged right back into the loss I once felt as I listened to a keen description of what I missed;

Religions are giant machines designed to help people to cope with the weakness of their impulse to do what they think is right, but lose sight of at critical moments… They’re machines for repeating things.

As someone who’s had the chance to visit Europe and stand in awe in the giant medieval cathedrals, I nodded my head as he said religions “are alive to the kind of sensory nature of human beings… using things like architecture, music, art, fashion, design, the visual realm to instil a message which might drain away.”

We remember and forget, remember and forget.

Yes, I concluded as I listened. Not only can we cherry-pick, but we should cherry-pick. I can join other yogis at least once a week to create shared quiet time. At home I can listen to Tara Brach’s discourses over and over (with the same Dad jokes that I somehow always find amusing). Seek out gatherings with people to enjoy a meal. Take the opportunities to mark festivals and occasions.

Let the ongoing, discerning cherry-picking roll!

Incomplete list

Sunday Blog 166 – 5th January 2025

Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Byron Katie

I spent the in between New Year space listening to Edith Eger’s memoir The Choice mainly because I thought it would provide my key to all mythologies I talked about in my last blog. It didn’t exactly-it was a gripping, beautifully written memoir more than boiled down list of hard-won wisdom. But to have such a powerful, wonderfully written testimonial from an Auschwitz survivor with nine decades of life to reflect and consider – that was a compelling if challenging start to the year.

In between listening to talking books, (Make Change That Lasts by my new favourite Rangan Chatterjee was an easier listen), I leafed through my luscious new lemon 2025 planner. It got me thinking about not just goals and habits but beliefs. The insights to live by (if you will) – guard rails to make more skilful decisions. And what is our life today but the cumulation of our decisions in the past?

But I can only create an incomplete list of insights to live by. Partly because they arrive like excitable, welcome house guests, seem very familiar, and how could I ever forget them? And then they go, and I forget them. Forget and remember, forget and remember.

Also, because as I said last week, these kind of lists, a fantabulous key to all mythologies is always going to be elusive. But this is more a list of what seems compelling, right now. So here goes…

Taking responsibility for our own ~~stupid~~ decisions is the one and only way through to freedom. (Damn) It seems so compelling to blame external circumstances, and certainly we do need some time to feel sorry for ourselves and have our wounds witnessed. But if we are stuck at blaming others and circumstances, that guarantees getting stuck in the pain. As Byron Katie says “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you.” There’s a lesson in there somewhere and when you get that lesson you may be lucky enough to progress to the next lesson.
Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Or as Edith Eger says, victimisation occurs (such as the horrors she survived) but victimhood is optional. Her perspective on this as an Auschwitz survivor are compelling.
Nobody rides for free. Pain is inevitable (see point 2) and ongoing (see point 1)
Thoughts are real, but they’re not true. Our thinking causes our suffering. (It’s so terrible that this happened to me. Why me?) When we change our thinking we adjust how we suffer. When we can ask where’s the lesson? The door to freedom is close.
Feelings gotta be felt. With the right support, we can feel the powerful feelings of our traumas. And we can heal. (see point 2)

Right, off my soapbox for today. But if you have a favourite insight, I’d love to hear it.

In between the years

Sunday Blog 165 – 29th December 2024 (I checked the date twice lol)

This in-between Christmas and New Year time is one of my favourites of the year. I love how quickly the days melt away. How I have to check my calendar more than once to verify which day I’m on. It’s a time to reflect on last year and then crack open the new year planner. Mmm. Stationery.

So first, to reflection. The pages of my 2024 planner reveal a mixed picture. Some weeks I filled out my week-to-a-page planner with appointments, goals and habit tracking. Sometimes I didn’t. Weeks at a time actually, and that’s a first for me. Plus, I also didn’t do the three, six and nine month check in with my 2024 goals. And it showed.

My major goal was to finish editing my memoir. While I’ve worked hard on it over 2024, the revision is MAJOR. So I’ve made strong progress, but I didn’t finish.

Aside from goals, reflecting on 2024 was a tearful exercise. January was when I had the melancholy task of project managing the sale of the family home of 65 years. It was a year I swapped out the certainty of being a health advocate (my day job for more than 25 years) for the nuance and confusion of being a carer. By August we lost our beautiful Mum at the grand age of 97.

So 2024 was always going to be a hit and miss year in terms of goals. It got me thinking beyond goals and habits to wisdoms to live my life by. A kind of key to all mythologies of how to live life. I started working on this but it turned into an unwieldy octopus of a blog. I’ll tackle that in 2025.

For now, I’ll post my 2025 vision board, done yesterday in a wonderful 2025 visioning workshop with my yoga teacher. It’s almost but not quite complete. There’s quite a lot of travel, starting with a February 2025 trip to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California to attend a writing retreat. I’ve had my eye on this for more than a decade. On Christmas day I got a text there’d been a cancellation and I didn’t have to think twice. The answer was yes.

What’s on your 2025 list? Hoping you’re enjoying this in between time.

One more selfie

Sunday Blog 164 – 22nd December 2024

“I’ll go if you go,” we’d both said. The Christmas party at my mother’s residential aged care home was like all the events. Kindly meant, organised with care. Riven to the core with loss on the part of the residents, anticipatory grief on the part of the families and the mental absence of those with dementia.

“I’ll wheel you away the moment you want to,” I promised, after I’d worked out that getting stuck at the event was one of Mum’s resistance points to attending. Even in the drastically simplified living environment of her aged care resident room, Mum managed to find new things to be anxious about. Most of her meals she took in her room, and having an empty table for the dinner tray to be delivered was another emerging phobia. I could see her looking around vainly – she was largely blind by then – to make sure it was clear.

On this occasion I did convince her to attend the Christmas party, a long-table lunch. I noticed how little I wanted to engage with others, I just wanted to focus on Mum and her comfort. I managed desultory chit-chat with the woman to my left, Mum spoke to the resident on her right. I didn’t think there would be enough time to build a connection, and I was right. I never saw her again.

“Let’s take a selfie, Bet.” As always, she smiled her beautiful smile, even though we both wanted to be anywhere but there.

I wheeled Bet back as soon as we could decently excuse ourselves after dessert.

Mum lasted so much longer in the residential aged care facility than we’d thought – making it right through to August. But she never really connected with other residents.

Recently, I woke from a vivid dream from my second round of sleep. That sleep after 5am where I can awake feeling more groggy and less refreshed than when I first awoke. There was Mum in my dream. She was like she was in her late 80s – still spry, still getting on a plane every now and again to visit her son in Sydney or maybe get on a cruise ship.

It took me a little while to realise it was her in the dream, and then I said; “I can get one more selfie!”

She didn’t look at the camera, every time I tried to take one, she was looking at me, and then I woke up and thought, “You wouldn’t want her back, suffering like she was, for one more selfie.”

But still, feeling her loss keenly this first Christmas without her.

Wordle Mini-lament

Sunday Blog 163 – 15th December 2024

Up until this week I could’ve told you how many days ago I landed in India. 50. That was the day I missed Wordle by losing five hours and several layers of my stomach lining through the stress of actually flying there there. (You may recall the muffed visa, missed flight, nice man at Delhi airport putting me in a wheelchair and rushing me to my closing flight).

After unpacking and settling into my Rishikesh room I opened up the Wordle app. It whirred uncertainly for a while with the weak Indian internet. The circle of death stopped eventually, but the app told me I had a streak of zero. I shook my phone in despair, but it was immutable. In desperation, I did Wordle from the day before from the archive, just in case it magically reinstated my tally. It didn’t. By missing a day, I lost my impressive streak of around 120.

This week, I busted again. One of those easy words with way too many options broke my streak of 50. But it was a light and easy loss.

A little time to dwell on witnessing the Wordle wound. Reflecting that victimisation occurs (the person putting together the Wordle for 13th December choosing a word with way too many options) but victimhood is optional (linking the loss of my Wordle streak with my self-worth.)

India has already taught me about the perils of ego-driven reliance on Wordle streaks.

And so I am valiantly moving on.