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.

Moss, Rocks and Rain

Because it is persistently raining in Portland, Oregon, I am realising just how extremely parched Tasmania has become, not over one dry year but over many. Dry upon dry upon dry. Houses in suburban Portland are built a little above the street and that verdant drop to the footpath is usually edged by little rock walls. There are no front fences. But what quenches me, like a dry sponge dropped into a cold mineral bath, is that those little rock walls grow moss and in some crevices they grow ferns as well.

Pause.

Ponder.

It always comes back to childhood: damp, drippy, ferny, mossy, lushy, woody, rotty childhood walks, wanders, freedoms, imaginations.

All over the Tasmania I left behind, the moss that is knitted onto the rocks is dusty and shredded, as coarse and dry as string. Makes me feel parched just thinking about it; knitted as I am around that little rock in the southern seas.

Flux

please excuse me, am caught in a rip, it's wonderful and very strange, it is all I can do to keep breathing and dreaming and not thinking too much, and it may deposit me on a yet-to-be-determined distant shoreline, but I just need you to know, that I feel very safe.

gloating and then sad

you know, I spent Saturday wandering around Melbourne - pizza, hot water in plastic bottles, stumbling pigeons, a deserted market - and I was enjoying myself, I liked that furnace, the hot jets of wind, the comraderie of a city, the lion-pride dozing beneath a kaleidescope ceiling. I had a fabulous dress on that knew what to do with itself in the wind. So achingly pathetic now, that gloating, that luxuriating. As we walked to the NGV, I was reading the tone of the sky, a fire I said, that is all, a peripheral curiosity.

tanglations

these days I am on a walking binge - but I keep on having these ridiculous hilarious tanglations that involve my sun hat, my sunglasses, my headphone chord and my bag strap - I sort of spring out of them all red faced and sweaty about five minutes later feeling very conspicuous.

my dog swam in Tamar mud yesterday chasing ducks that had mean streaks: they left the water in an easy flap as soon as she was within snapping distance.

speaking of ducks, I am slow roasting two of them for Christmas lunch.

i am also mourning a devoured zucchini seedling and having terrible bouts of procrastination cleaning and have recently discovered the joy of a few half hearted jumps on the trampoline followed by a longer rest period on its sun-hot surface.

and my little boy blushed when he met Father Christmas, fumbling with his Department Store sponsored Santa key tag and his cardboard antler headpiece as he tried to return FC's high five in good time. my heart broke a bit watching that.