Allemande in the living room

I was thinking about slow dancing last night, and how, in the past, as an observer and sometime participant, it never made sense to me. The moving cuddle. A bit awkward. But then I met someone and we would slow dance in our living room and with that, the moving cuddle then made all the sense in the world. So it occurred to me how rare it is: to find someone with whom you make slow dancing make sense.

Turning Corners

Other signs of a new direction:

sliver's of a heart filling happiness - thinking acupuncture needles - tiny insertion points - larger dispersions of energy - sitting side by side on a slab of old wood, drinking tea, sun pressing our faces - my cat sipping water from the old tuna can - the animals lounging on the freshly mown grass - whisking home tended eggs into light and fragrant cake - being slipped two free organic bananas - clouds tossing and turning on the heat of a closer sun - from what I can tell, these tiny insertion points of happiness suggest a greater willingness to be happy. By which I mean, or I understand, happyness to be an alert contentment.

And I think the really significant moments of such a place are when you laugh alone, when you roll your eyes, alone. When you are in a gestural dialogue with your alone self. Enjoying your own company. Which is interesting because it is a very different alone space to the hours long, days long, aloneness of hermiting. I think one can become so retreated in such a space that you are not even in your own company.

(And of turning corners, does that actually suggest treading in circles?)

Stepping onto the Mat

A few days ago I crossed the water, returning to a city that, when I think of it, I cup my hands as if I were holding a moth or a butterfly. I don't want to damage those dusty wings as I transport it from the house to the garden.

I was born in that city yet never lived in it until last year. And whilst there, for nearly nine months, I think some little parts of me died and some other parts seeded.

This trip had quiet intentions. The outward expression was a three day yoga workshop. Some thoughts on yoga: how private and individual and bizarre one's relationship is to yoga practice. How my own practice of this moving meditation is an undulating passage. I now understand it as a creative practice that will frequently shift over my lifetime like cello practice, writing practice and walking my dog practice. Like all of those, it will dip and snare and run amok and yet, regardless of absence, will always be present. For, what I learn and re-learn, is that it doesn't matter. More often than not, persisting with doing what you will with some kind of intention, when you can and will and desire, causes something to happen. More often than not, the something is intangible. And yet, with enough frequency to keep you interested, whilst you're walking from one room to the next, from a glass of water to the shower, rolling up your mat, wondering whether to eat bread with peanut butter and banana or a lone apple, your brain slips along a smooth patch of thought - you reflect. Something is different. You thought your practice-head was all full of clutter and weird ordinary thoughts and yet, now that you have finished, and you are off the mat, you realise, shit, I was actually in whilst on the mat, more than I ever knew.

At the moment I am thinking of sitting meditation as a step into the core of one's mind, whilst yoga is the stepping back into one's body, head and brain included.

So, there I stepped, back onto the mat, back into my body, my brain shut up for awhile, and amongst other things, I ate salted soya beans and drank green tea on Smith Street, peeled prawns with my pal Scott, drank unfolding tea with Richard in Little Collins, and sat alone and happy in busy restaurant on a Friday night, reading whilst I stuffed my face with brown rice and tamari.

Two Tears Tip

I had an effortless swimming/flying dream this morning and then woke with an incredibly sore spine which I am pressing against a column heater. I decided to meditate in this position and curiously, in the middle of the meditation, one of the ridges of the heater located a block in the middle of the pain. When I massaged the muscle against this ridge, kind of exploring the sensation, I was startled by a kind of gaseous ball of emotion coming out of the muscle. Two tears tipped out.

Sabbath

Further transference. I have returned, in part, to an aspect of my childhood. Back then, a regular drive for our family was two hours on the highway to the capital. We would spend the weekend visiting family and friends. Visit about a hundred galleries. We often stayed with a particular couple. Friends of my parents forever.

Memories, mostly food and scent: B&H's smoked inside the house. Massive jars full of roasted cashews. She is Sri Lankan. Curries. Rice with cashews and sultanas and spices. A large bowl brimming with nuts and a nutcracker. Hazelnuts. Brazil nuts. Almonds. Walnuts. My nut-love suddenly explained.

So, twenty years later I have returned. I am staying with her again and am startled to find these icons of memory remain, although these days, she sits on her tiny back porch amongst the potted herbs to smoke her B&H in the sun. The door open so she can continue our conversations. The smoke drifts in. The nuts. A pantry with armageddon-preparation quantities of food. She has an elaborate collection of chocolate. She is also a diabetic. And conversation. Strange overlaps of experience. She advises. Philosophises. Observes.

The sabbatical continues. And I am so grateful for where it is taking me.

Flying and Landing

Something a bit momentous happened to me whilst I was dismantling my parent's garden. It crept up on me how bizarre it actually was; I was initially more interested in the emotional/psychological metaphors inherent in gardening but anyway. The old mirror bush project. I had a certain grip on the bush/tree and was pulling on it. It had been partly dismembered and I was hoping that a good tug would pop it over the threshold. That was the idea. Instead, comedy and parrallell universe transference. The twiggery I held broke and because I had my whole body weight hanging off this twiggery and there was a bit of momentum going on, I did not land flat on my back. This would have meant landing on grass. No. Rather, I did a combination of running and falling backwards and there was the flash through me: 'fuck - pain - shit'. Just so you know, there were many obstacles behind me. A concrete step, a concrete path. Pot plants. Other weird debris of my parents. So, expecting pain, big pain was fairly logical of me, even at the speed I was travelling. However, next thing I know ('fuck - pain - shit'), I was sitting in a canvas director's chair. Which sounds as if I slipped dimensions. And actually, it was probably was something not far off that. I was safely sitting in a canvas director's chair, high as a kite on shock and pissing myself laughing.

Dismantling is good for you

How funny, how unusual, and yet so pertinent:

I signed myself out of the 'dash' and then, this immediate internal voice, 'no no no, I have more to say, I have things to tell, the light is dipping over the valley, and I love this sunroom that is not mine, I love being a visitor in my childhood home, and this morning was an anger all confused and undirected and then I set to the garden with a pick axe, the pitch fork, the secateurs, the saw, my hands, and I dismantled! The main project was an old and filthy mirror bush that draped and slunk and was quite huge. So we took it out. It was heavy, dicey, brutal work and at the end, it felt as if we were unravelling a very complicated knot of old energy. Now, we open the back door and are startled by all the light in the backgarden, by the sharp edges of the studios, by the spaciousness. It's wonderful. I adore this kind of work. It feels healthy. Brain healthy. Cleansing. Brain cleansing. So I feel good now. I feel really good. When you are fulfilled by so little, life is pretty bloody satisfying!'

Tipsy or Straight?

How facinating that there is a new diagnostic tool in the medical/psychiatric field: as patients take balance tests, they have a tiny probe placed in their ear to measure their brainwave fluctuations. The developers of this tool are working on the link between balance issues, depression and schizophrenia amongst other neural disorders.

It struck a distinct body memory within me of some very rocky years. Literally, rocky on my feet and rocky in my psyche. My place on the earth, when I walked, was precarious. I have a pair of shoes that I wore through this time and they exacerbated the problem immensely. They are a very narrow shoe and the sole does not meet the edge of the upper level, so the sensation is similar to walking on ice-skates. Except, the sole was thick enough to inspire trust and carelessness and it was fine to trust, until you rushed a foot step, your foot slid within the shoe and you realised how close your were to the edge of the sole: an unbearable tip into a twisted ankle. It's a pity. They are very pretty shoes.

Poor balance and depression - I know it - makes sense to me.

For the moment

sitting in my parents sunroom, looking across the valley and hills that lie beyond a line of oak trees on the turn - am shuffling towards decision - it is so quiet here and still - for the moment

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.