Middle of the night musing

Sunday Blog 117 – 7th January 2024

Middle of the night musing

Perhaps I am strange but I love the gap in the night between my first sleep and my second. A sweet pause where I am refreshed and delivered into the deep quiet of the night. Nothing to do. A clear schedule.

Once I was told that I had an “administrative” soul and a “creative” soul. The administrative soul has enjoyed my career, watching me work hard and smash out those goals. My creative soul has waited, the quiet child at the party, watching on from the sidelines, hoping to be noticed. That I would walk over and strike up a conversation where I admitted that I did indeed want to give this writing thing a proper go.

Two years ago the quiet child roared out from the sidelines, and I quit the career. Even so, my time can get filled up with Things Other Than Writing. Like this weekend, helping clear out the family home of 65 years which has an astonishing melange of trash and treasure jumbled up together. It’s a writer’s procrastination wonderland.

Last night I was delivered into this quiet, gracious space of the middle of the night and was listening to a podcast that is non-stimulating and calming. Except the quote above from Clara Pinkola Estes electrified me. I had to pad around the darkness of the family home trying to find pen and paper to write it down.

You see, I am revising my 2014 memoir Not My Story to re-release it in 2024. It debriefs a single incident trauma I survived 22 years ago. Like all my writing projects it seems to emerge as it wants, wilful and skittish. The book is now demanding relevant quotes and this one from Clara Pinkola Estes was perfect. Wanting Something Good to come out of that trauma was an urgent, instant need. But as time has gone on and on I wonder did I listen carefully? What exactly did I hear, and is it the same message now?

Mulberry Tree

Sunday Blog 116 – 31st December 2023

The last day of year, the last Sunday blog for 2023.

Christmas day 2023 was the last one we will ever celebrate in our family home of 65 years. We had three generations make use of a jar and a notebook to write up our favourite memories from across the decades. We weren’t limited to one but I chose a mulberry tree memory.

Nearly 15 years ago I was married under the mulberry tree in a white dress. Yes, I did have some concerns about how that would all work out. Admittedly, the frock only cost $25 from a charity shop so the stakes weren’t high.

The mulberry tree was planted decades ago and was a generous producer of that sweet fruit that stains permanently. But it was the perfect backdrop for the photos and shade from the hot January sun. And so, I risked it.

At the end of the wedding festivities my groom and I made our way to a nearby hotel. His ute had been festooned with toilet rolls and streamers with a crudely written “just married” sign. I was still in my frock and high shoes when we checked in. I had some vain hopes of an upgrade to the bridal suite.

That was not forthcoming but our room was perfectly nice. When getting changed (at last) I noticed that one mulberry had found its way into my dress, but by some sweet miracle, hadn’t stained it.

David

Sunday Blog 116 – 24th December 2023

With my second-last blog for 2023 I’m sharing a nugget from a recent online writing course I did with Dani Shapiro to help re-boot my writing practice. Dani Shapiro is one of my favourite authors – she writes both fiction and non-fiction and teaches writing classes every now and then. This was an online course but one day, one day, I will attend one of her workshops in person.

Paris 1979 with siblings – me on the right

At age 14 in 1979 I had the opportunity to go to Europe with my family. Do a Tour taking in all the culture, marinade in art. Florence was one destination, and we made a pilgrimage to see Michelangelo’s statue of David. All these years later I can still recall the unfinished marble statues outside and inside the main gallery. You could see the figures, trapped and fighting to be freed by the sculptor’s touch. And then walking into the room where the exquisitely complete David statue was displayed. So much bigger than I thought it would be! And to be live, in person! To be able to walk all around David and realise with a thrill, realise that he has the string of his catapult across his back. While my parents were concerned that I was mainly looking very disengaged, even disenchanted (see Paris photo for an example), in reality I was taking it all in, deep.

So when I participated live in Dani Shapiro’s course, and watching the replay for the sessions from the wee hours, I loved what she had to say about writing. Unlike a sculptor, we don’t start with a block of marble. Michelangelo apparently said that David was already in that block of marble, and all he had to do was to free him. But as writers we have the empty page. And the empty page is nothing. A first draft however, is our block of marble.

It has re-invigorated my editing process and reminded me of the value of re-writing. My statue of David is not quite yet forthcoming (lol) but I live in hope!

The long goodbye

Sunday Blog 115 – 17th December 2023

This is my fifth blog on the 1910 novel Howards End because-well-I maintain it has something important to say about many things. And today I’m pondering the long goodbye to my family home. What better than to review what Mrs Wilcox had to say about her family home, Howards End? She even married someone she knew was, well, limited, because he had the means to save her beloved home.

There’s maybe a month, maybe three weeks until we will have to clear out completely 65 years of belongings from the house. Way back in 2020, I hand-wrote a piece, wondering if the last days of my family home were upon us, and I transcribed it into a blog in 2021. And here we are, 2023. We squeezed out three full years after my father died in the house in October 2020, as he so desperately wanted to. It wasn’t the place he was born, but it was the place he spent most of his life. He bought the house in the 1960s, aged 31 and for the next 60 years, the house was his ongoing, absorbing, beloved project.

Here is an early image taken by mum in the 1960s as she watches him teetering on very minimal scaffolding, his feet in thongs/ flip-flops. She wanted a picture for the children because she was sure he would plummet to his death. He didn’t and undertook many more equally bold projects around the house.

In the city where I live, the custom is to drag out goodbyes at the end of an evening. Sometimes the conversations at the car can last longer than the entire discussions over dinner.

I can’t stand that. I like a quick farewell. Rip the bandaid off. Into the car. Disappear into the departure gate at the airport. Drop someone off and wait until you’ve pulled away from the kerb to cry.

But here we are with a bittersweet, very last festive season in the family home. An almost unbearable number of times to feel the homeliness of the rooms. Smell the water on the garden, which conjures up the long-gone pepper tree where hours and hours would disappear in play. See the plates and cups and chattels of childhood. The different selves I once was around each corner.

Tomorrow I may only feel relief that the ongoing task of keeping this crumbling old wreck is coming to an end. That its hideous carpets, old wallpaper and kitchen cupboards will be removed or spruced up. But today I am leaning in to the bittersweet sorrow.

Your loved ones are not OK

Sunday Blog 114 – 10th December 2023

So often I said this in the last few years – if I could ignite a community movement, it would be to remind people to visit their frail aged loved ones. Now I come to write this, I’m choked by my confusion, mired in my own hesitations. I sound impossibly self-righteous, tedious. What would I know, really? Aren’t families profoundly complex and shouldn’t I butt out, desist? Is this post the equivalent of patting someone’s pregnant belly without their consent? Or asking a new mother when she’s having her next baby?

But. Only this. In Australia where I live, we have set up our aged care system so there is no possibility of front-line staff being able to provide for our loved ones’ every needs. No matter how kind, caring, skilled, dedicated they are.

And really, it’s not their job. They provide personal care, including washing, dressing, feeding and cleaning up after our frail people. Somehow, we equate this in our mind with the full picture of caring. But this work is complementary to the care that only loved ones can provide. Family, or chosen family.

Remember how during Covid everything suddenly had to stop? Only caring couldn’t stop. Didn’t stop. We undervalue caring, even though it is vital.

As Rosalyn Carter, American writer, activist and humanitarian (and former First Lady) put it;

There are only four kinds of people in the world.

Those who have been caregivers.

Those who are currently caregivers.

Those who will be caregivers, and

Those who will need a caregiver.

Rosalyn Carter

She died on my mum’s 97th birthday just a few weeks ago. I didn’t know this until I checked the wording and origin of the quote. So it’s a sign I need to post this, that someone needs to hear this. Your loved ones need company, someone who remembers them in their fullness of humanity, before they were frail. So if you’ve been thinking about it, just do it. They will be glad, but perhaps you will be enriched and uplifted too.

Vale Dawnie

Sunday Blog 113 – 3rd December 2023

This is a visual tribute dedicated to a beautiful visual artist, Dawn Meader. Tuesday this week she was laid to rest in a moving funeral service. Just one year ago, in her sixtieth year on this earth, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She didn’t fight cancer – she invited it in for cups of tea, loved on it, refused to believe it would take her so soon. 

Dawn was a fun-loving, visionary artist who used her talents not just to create stunning artwork. She also taught women to access their inner artist, their creativity. She gifted us with the potential to forge our own creative path, scattered magic over her students, which rippled out for so many of us. I wanted to reflect on the magic she brought into my life, and I know many others have magic stories of their own.

1/3 Getting unstuck with Art with Dawn Meader

Dawn’s classes were an intoxicating blend of music, chanting, meditation and putting pastel to the page. She was so playful, funny and vital, it was impossible to resist her encouragement. I came to Dawn as a stuck writer, and the very first pastel drawing she got me to do unloosed all the creative knots within me. I did many more, my favourite being on the top right, the representation of my book, and all the books to come. Most of our artworks with Dawnie were enormous – see my Gold Woman actually in the back of the car like a passenger.

2/3 Bali

Then there was the 2014 trip to Bali, where Dawn kindly allowed me to bring my 14-year-old daughter and held the space of women plus teen with grace and aplomb. Ten years later, my daughter face-timed me, trying to find the beautiful studio we had worked at and stayed in for the Bali retreat. I was busy searching my computer for the documents Dawnie sent about the trip and discovered the name just as my girl had found the place. I have a screen-shot the moment. It felt so like Dawnie magic.

3/3 Ongoing Dawnie magic

In 2014, we made a sandcastle at South Beach – a large-bottomed Queen Victoria. To shrieks of laughter and yet more buckets of wet sand, we forged this beauty under Dawnie’s direction. I was utterly exhausted by the end, but Dawn the artist made sure we pushed through until we had her just so. 

I stopped going to art classes regularly, as my writing practice was well-established. Then on Christmas of 2021, my daughter and I each bought one of Dawnie’s gorgeous 2022 calendars with an image of her artwork for each month. We wrapped it up and gifted it to each other, more laughing once we understood what had happened in the madness and mayhem of present unwrapping. I’ve written on the cover of mine, documenting that little big of magic, and that 2022 was the year Dawnie was diagnosed.

On Tuesday the beautiful memorial service started and ended with us all chanting “Hu” – like “Om” but designed to uplift you and help you see the magic in the everyday. We began each class with the Hu chant and I was right back in class, about to tackle another life-size artwork with Dawnie. The sound. The vibration. I joined in when I could stop crying long enough to sing, to meld with the voices of pure love. I thought about how many women whose creativity was unearthed or released through her workshops. Cried a bit more.

And I haven’t even discussed her art properly. So divine. A print of one of Dawnie’s exquisite paintings hangs above my writing desk. I always think it is a self-portrait of her flying over Queensland, where she lived at the time she painted this.

She was a gifted artist who chose to teach, to share her magic with students over the decades.

Fly high beautiful Dawnie, you rare and special soul.

Can you relate?

Sunday Blog 112 – 26 November 2023

It’s the end of November and time to review my monthly goals, only to see my November goal “regular writing practice” mock me from the page. I was going to do my version of NaNoWriMo. In case you are not familiar with the abbreviation “NaNoWriMo”, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It began in 1999 by setting the communal, audacious, hairy goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel project over the month of November. That equates to 1,666 (recurring) words each day. 

My cut-down version of NaNoWriMo only asked me to look at my memoir project for as little as 15 minutes every day. I didn’t even attain this modest goal, unless “regular” means achieving this one week out of four. Not the last time I looked.

I know from bitter experience that leaving a work alone for too long requires enormous energy, repeatedly, to get the flywheel rolling again. And so this, my 112th blog, two straight years of Sunday blogging is part-excuse note, part kick myself up the bum.

Yes, life can be difficult, and it’s not every month that your mother transitions from home into aged care. Yes, life can be busy, especially when one enjoys putting on fun but time-consuming events in the local neighbourhood. But still. Writers write. That’s it.

I’m back on the horse today at a new Shut Up and Write group. There’s nothing for it but a re-set.

Here’s to getting back to a good canter soon. Here’s to staying true to our dreams.

Woo-woo curious

Sunday Blog 111 – 19th November 2023

 Buckle up because this Sunday blog is going woo-woo (definition “dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural, or unscientific”)

I’m pretty sure my Dad would not love the real estate agent’s description of our family home as “a renovator’s delight”, but, well, it is. That the real estate agent chose not to include any indoor images would also have wounded his pride.

He is not here to see this-he passed three years ago, and he died in his bedroom just as he had wanted to. When his body was taken away, we lined up in the driveway and applauded. What an innings. More than six decades of pouring his heart and soul into this home on his kingdom, a quarter acre block. Each decade was a new project, his version of improvement. He was more of a finisher than a perfectionist, and not always in a good way. But still.

This is a liminal time between putting the family home on the market and the final day of being able to access the house. Time where we can still make a few memories.

I don’t love liminal spaces no matter how good they are for my spiritual and emotional growth. So I have been filling my ears with podcasts and content to help with this strange, joyously-sad and sadly-joyous time. An interview with poet Andrea Gibson on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast drew me in. Among many other things, Andrea talked about her Grandma’s Faye’s thimbles she inherited. She puts these on her fingers as she types up her poems, and they’re creating together. Andrea’s take on this is that “almost all art is made by the dead” and this just felt so true.

Her Grandma Faye communicated to Andrea “that the people who are living don’t know that we’re not only still with them, but we’re more with them than we were before.”

And I am going to stay woo-woo curious, allowing in these hopeful ideas about what happens when we die.

It comforts me, gives me hope. And right now, I need it all, every last speck.

Ugg Boots

Sunday Blog 110 – 12th November 2023

The scale of the task is almost hypnotising. Clearing out a family home of more than 65 years. We are so lucky we still have Mum. And that we still have some time to do the clear out, it’s not a mad rush. But still. So. Much. To. Do.

Wikipedia will tell you Ugg boots originated from Australia, they are made of sheepskin with a synthetic sole and were favoured by surfers in the 1960s. They were apparently deemed ugly by the originator’s wife, hence the name. By 1979 when I was 14, Ugg boots had reached our household too. Even though we were generally speaking an anti-surfing, anti-sports kind of family.

My pair had a fetching yellow and brown braid sewn along the back at the back and I loved them hard. Photographic documentation of every family occasion was my mother’s obsession. And so here are some of us lined up on the house’s brick driveway for the obligatory birthday shot where I modelled my Ugg boots with pride. How I loved the crisp newness of my padded waistcoat teamed with the ubiquitous jeans and now, Ugg boots.

I must have loved those Ugg boots hard, because eventually holes appeared at the big toe of each boot. While I can’t be sure now, I think Mum offered to mend them. And so they disappeared to the bottom of the cupboard, where they lay, unmolested for more than four decades.

Just when I thought I had breathed in the last of the choking dust that accompanies neglected items at the bottom of the cupboard, these emerged. Still with their holes at the toe.

Out to the brick driveway I marched, which is still there just as it was in 1979. A photo for posterity. Just for a moment I peer into the photo, trace the face of me at 14, the year I would go to Europe, have my horizons obliterated and re-made in new form.

And then, it’s back to it.

You don’t remember me

Sunday Blog 109 – 5th November 2023

Yesterday I had the opportunity to refresh the creative well, responding to flash prompts. Here is one I felt the urge to share – flash memoir from the blur of recent hospital visits

“You don’t remember me, do you?” She called to me across the room. Once. Twice. But  I was focussed on mum. The medication rounds, waiting like a cat to pounce on the doctor-mouse whenever she ventured in mum’s room.

Three days earlier I’d wheeled mum in, followed the orange line to the lift. The first floor.

When can we find our way out of here again, doctor?

Mum is now Betty 2, because the other woman she’s sharing a room with is also Betty. A rag of a curtain separates the beds and pretends it can muffle sound.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Betty 1 called again. This time I trill.

“Of course!” Betty 1 smiles and relaxes.

But Betty 1’s husband whips his head around the curtain and glares at me.

“You don’t know her, do you?”

“No” I admit. Betty 1’s face falls. I don’t know Betty 1, and now, neither does she.