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.

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.

asparagus

my asparagus seeds have sprouted: miniature asparagus are very cute. Wee threads heading for the sun.

One's Own Room

damn
where to start?
So it must be about 2 months without home internet access now, have not had a single missed heartbeat over this severance. That surprises me. I use my friend's computer. About once a fortnight. I have stopped writing emails to him because it feels too weird sitting at his computer writing emails to him. Sorry KPS. The other person who lives in this house doesn't actually know that I am currently in his house using their internet. He is in his own room in his own deep workbrain.

Some pretty major shifting has been going on.
I have a studio.
I have a room that has a window so low to the floor that it makes me feel like Alice.
It used to be my bedroom years ago. Then it became Q's when he started escaping out of his bedroom window. Then I brain flipped, retrieved my tape measurer and found that my bed could actually fit in my writing room - become quite literally a bed room. A den. I adore it so much.
And just as thrilling is this new room that now contains my creative arms - cellos, cello bows, computer, art work, art materials - all that crap that has been scattered all over the house, now in one room.
And meanwhile I am very slowly (killing DMB with my slowness) painting my living area white, stark, fresh white, white-out of brick arch, wooden window frames, the lot.
Damn I am having such a great time.
I am even going for runs/jogs again.
And doing yoga every week - yoga mat rolled out on studio floor. o that word. studio. totally delicious.
And the dormant seed of cello playing has recently begun to sprout. Playing for myself. Playing scales and exercises and thinking about ringing H to see if she would like to hook up for some practice.
So that is the synopsis. For now. And also, this morning I nearly fell over in the school yard because I recognised the new yardsman - he was the yardsman when I was at primary school. And my son's teacher: she taught my cousins nearly 30 years ago in a classroom beside my own pre-kinder class.

morning school run

every week day, a short walk to deposit my son into the school system - there are two sets of lights to cross, a pack of children, a pack of parents, you get to know each other from the slightest pieces of information flicked into the air to keep the social momentum up.

This morning, J's mum was delighted because her pregnant belly has finally taken a definite pregnant shape. She was so happy. And on the way home, F's mum confesses she is really nervous because she is on her way to the airport to meet 'a man' for the first time, as in, she met him on the internet two months ago. He is an accountant from Melbourne. He would have come earlier if it weren't for the busyness of the end of the financial year. I told her she looked hot.

Sometimes this much is more than enough.

things to clip it all together with

The children were playing a myriad ball games on the wet bitumen. Their admonishments and directions and exclamations were a kind of music: rhythmical, disjointed, sequenced, logical, patterned and always, an endless disintegration of sound into the wet air.

Am really tired, I slept on high alert last night, knowing that my car was unlocked but too apathetic to get out of bed and lock the damn thing - ridiculous scenario. Eventually woke from a dream where I rode an unwieldy bike along an arcade and into a crowded book shop and became stuck in the aisles. It was light hearted and comic though which was appreciated after a spate of dreams in which infant humans and animals were injured and I was implicated.

of sleep and mouse shit

Further to space clearing, I have moved my bed twice in the past week. Apparently, beds must be as far away from the door as possible but also have a good view of it for optimum reaction time etc etc. To add to this delicate balance, it is a strange fact that I am really sensitive to which direction my head is pointing. Definitely cannot be pointing south, I feel so odd in that position, literally as if I am sleeping on my head. I like west or east for sleeping directions.

The first new site was a disaster. Even though I was the same distance from the window as the previous site of a couple of years, in which I slept both very well and very badly, I was especially wakeful and aware of my close position to the front of the house and thus, the street.

The second and current site is tucked into the back corner of the room, a position that I had always been wary of because of its proximity to the built-in wardrobe. However, is it indeed the site in which I have had the most consistent fulfilling sleep in a long time? Yes, it is.

Unfortunately, good sleep did not prevent me from rolling a mice poo over my tongue yesterday evening. I made myself the first hot chocolate I have had in many years. I drank it. I enjoyed it. I was probably a little smug about how much I was drinking it and enjoying it and in the last swig, a crumb caught on my tongue, and as I rolled it towards my fingers I thought to myself, please, please don't let that be a mouse poo on my tongue and unfortunately, it was.

No matter how much boiling water I drank, or how much raw carrot and celery that I energetically crunched immediately afterwards, I could not, actually, I cannot, forget the sensation, the shape, of that mouse poo on my tongue.

weekend squiggles

This squiggle of light appeared on my writing room wall one morning earlier this year. It has never returned.

I have had: cold symptoms sequencing in reverse to the norm, a meeting with a lady who can teach me Reiki, a quiet weekend, unusual bedtime reading material; motivation to do yet another purge and sort of my belongings, space clearing, rearranging the placement of my bed etc. I watched Mansfield Park and liked some occasions of its cinematography, ate apples and pasta strewn with tabasco sauce, circuited the gorge and didn't go to meditation.

I'm It!

Brita is my cousin. We talk well together. Have an understanding. And she tagged me.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago I was living in North Hobart in a terribly old dark share house. Apparently it was once a notorious public house. It was on the corner of a major intersection. I had to bend my head to walk down a small tunnel to my bedroom. I had my 19^th birthday party there. My friend Scott climbed onto the roof of the lighting shop next door and plucked out the sequins of their gaudy signage. He spelt out LSD. Everyone used to comment on it for months after. In the end, I fell in love and hardly stayed there ever again. I was studying cello and english literature and drinking lots of red wine.

Five things to do today

Drive my son and a friend to St Peters Pass, retrieve my son’s bike from back of a friends car, print out a short story, keep warm warm and kick this cold’s arse, and later creep into the casino to hear Jeff Lang.

Three favourite snacks

Slice of pumpernickel with butter and jam

Bowl of pasta with parmesan and butter

An apple and a little brown paper bag of roasted mixed nuts

Four places you have lived

I have lived on two islands all of my life, I have lived in strange disjointed share houses each with one unusual, misplaced room that no one knew what to do with, I have lived in a four room cottage with four other people, a tiger snake and a rabbit, I have lived in a salubrious suburb in the only house that had a fire bath in the back garden made from tip-shop finds.

Five things you would purchase if you were a billionaire

I would buy a home with lots of remnant native vegetation and a separate studio, look after my loved ones and the balance would be divided into three: cultural, social and environmental donations.

Six people I want to know more about

This is the one where I seriously question my distinct lack of curiosity . . . the woman who has the wonderful pink sunroom with white chalk scribbles all over it and a wisteria vine drenching its window, the two sisters who walk this city incessantly, always in skirts, with matching vinyl handbags and wonderful wild hair, the story of the three men who have bought the house down the road and are renovating it as a group project, my great-grandmother who was born in England and adopted into a South African family, and the whereabouts and circumstances of my other great-grandmother’s disappearance with her only son c.1910.

And I shall tag: Danae Sinclair, Lingo Franko, Fuffenscheit, Idiom Zero