Mywholeself

o it is raining. and in this house the rain falls out of the gutters and crashes onto the concrete path outside this room (the one with cello and piano and printer and spare mattress and filing cabinet and many unpacked cardboard boxes) and that acoustic plumps up my spirit. Mywholeself.

Listing and Listing

One of the gauges in my life is the presence of 'listing'. And I was about to say, 'not that drifting to one side list', but actually . . .

Listing, the art of making a list, is present in my life when I am listing in other ways.

I pause, and imagine myself as a little boat on the ocean, try and feel where the weight is, what is creating the list (to one side) and I find that it is in two spaces of my little boat: beneath the mast, a deep pull down, from masthead to the ocean floor, and beyond that, to the core of the earth (that hot churny nucleus). It is gravity, it is skull to pelivis, it is beneficial to be aware of this weight. The other weight is in the stern of my little boat. It is the weight of sorrow and fear and confusion. It pulls the boat back deep into the waves and the prow tilts awkwardly out of the water, sniffing the heavens. A vision of a panicked and tethered horse; its neck outreaching as if it is freely galloping, flighting away.

Naturally, with time, this weight will shift to the prow and the little boat will plunge me into my future. But then there are the other unbidden currents. The life currents. The wave that shoves one's prow into the future regardless of bottom heavy-ness. Today for instance, a job interview.

So, I was talking of lists, because I was going to resort to managing this need to write by creating one, but actually, I didn't need to in the end.

Sleepers and the sleep

The cat arranged itself on her lap and started up its motor, an uneven circular gurgle. It pressed its warm belly into her own and laid its head in the crook of her arm - her hands wrote at the table before them both. They settled in for a mornings work at the desk.

That night, their sleep was undermined by the sounds of a constant toil as new sleepers were laid on the railway tracks at the end of their street. It was not a nosiy undertaking. It was the murmuring work of the night. Some persistent, repetitive process that grazed through their dreams. Towards the end of the procedure a train must have used the adjacent tracks, and it and the vehicle used to re-place the sleepers, tooted at each other a formal work code or some dark morning joke between the drivers?

NB

• the traps that information technology/corporations will set
  
• no pasting bills (on these walls!)
• everything is afterthoughted at the moment
  
• copying one's own writing, word for word, holding sentences by halves and quarters between one document screen to the next, is illuminating
  
• and shadow-y
  
• I am learning how to write again, in a new domestic setting and, unexpectedly, I think this virtual space, as unsatisfying as it is in many ways (decor, house rules etc), this space might be the motivator . . . as legitimised by the aviator.
  

Cetacea on Westgarth

And then a woman on her bike, her small boy on his own and quite close to her right flank, and three pebbles dropped into my clear happy brain as I crossed the road with my dog ahead: 'whale and calf'. It took me some time to understand the association that threw those 'Woolfian' discs through my brain. At first I was a little mortified at my linking a woman with 'whale' (as big as a whale?), and with 'calf' (what a cow!), despite their correctness in zoological nomenclature, but then it occurred to me: the shape a body makes on a bike as seen from some hovering eye, the position and proximity of the boy to his mother, and also, more enigmatically, their motion: a slow glide through air (water) and wind resistance (current).

experiment

Koan

So I didn't burn the journals.
But it isn't off the cards.
And on the cards?
A house 75% packed.
A pause in proceedings.
A bathroom progressing.
A woman pottering at her own speed
doing her own (house) maintenance.
The cards are in the air - high - ozone level -
who knows how they shall land?
I am convinced that by the time the bathroom is completed
I will know the answer.
It is my koan. The whole bloody house is my koan.

Enlightening/lightening

I am editing - again.

Yesterday, I filled up a recycling bin with my undergraduate degree, every boardmeeting note I made over 7 years and every bill I have paid since 2002.

My Dad gave me a kind of permission to arrange my photos so that the past does not hurt as much to look at, 'chuck em out if they make you feel like shit'. The relief!

Confessions: I have kept every letter that has ever been sent to me. I hoard ephemera. The strangest stuff.

And that pile of my journals going back fifteen years - to burn or not to burn? The catharsis urge is so strong at the moment I could just about do it without a qualm.

Do you dare me?

I dare myself.

Incidentally, I turned thirty a few days ago. I think it is a rare thing, but at this birth commemoration I feel like I fit my age.

Thirty feels like a blessed relief: exciting, funny, blessed relief.

Riches

things that currently occupy me: lap top purchasing, house rebuilding, garden tidying, residency planning, birthday contemplating, second hand bathroom window, a winter jacket, travel insurance claim, italian revising, Patrick White, cello students, centrelink negotiations, masks, food, house paint, enormous recycling bins, impatience, impatience, impatience, and a new kind of loneliness.

it is a rich year this one.