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.

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.