birds – twenty-one words

Like breath

October 23, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walking, writingTagged Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family1 Comment

Other people’s words about … places that reside within our hearts

During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3 AM, night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them — inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge fluorescent light) there are these frogs as loud as river, grunting, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocused by the brain — nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

I have just spent a week away in Deep Creek, having been chosen as this year’s lucky winner of the Deep Creek Residency for writers. I spent that week away writing, reading, bushwalking, running, writing again, then writing some more. It was a joyous time, the rarest privilege, to be given time away simply to write.

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

In our lives, I think that there are some places, connected to some times, that are somehow magic, that come to us through luck or stealth or a great deal of planning and then reside with us forever. These places become a part of the fabric of who we are, though we may not always understand why, and what we feel, when we think of them or remember them or revisit them, is a sense of awe — a sense of connection to something deeper than we can articulate.

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Deep Creek, place of grass trees and rolling hills and shrike thrushes calling in the trees, place of kangaroos and echidnas and sheep and shingleback lizards, place of tawny frogmouths and fogs and sunshine and rain and big, big skies — Deep Creek is, anyway, one of those places for me, a place close to my heart. I have left Deep Creek now, and the hopes and dreams I went there with — that I would write copiously and productively, that the story I’m writing is worth telling, that the manuscript I’m working on might one day get published — may or may not come true, but Deep Creek is still with me and always will be. I don’t know how else to put it.

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

And this is what I love about the passage I’ve quoted above by Michael Ondaatje, the way he captures the mystery of a place, its essence; the way it has become a part of him. I have never been to the jungle that he writes of, never heard peacocks who weep weep loud into the night. But in Deep Creek I have felt what Ondaatje describes. In Deep Creek I have felt that I have found a place that will, like breath, always be with me.

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it: Thea Lim explores the commodification of art, and of our lives.
- I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be: On a related theme, Amy Stuber, on writing short stories, trying to write a novel, and then returning to short story writing. On writing what she wants to write, not what the industry tells her to write. And on growing older.
- Ethical Consumption can ultimately serve as a type of delusion or fantasy where we tell ourselves that our economic actions are righteous and that we’re doing our small part to make a difference, even in the face of underwhelming evidence: Elizabeth L Cline, exploring the problems with ethical consumerism and making the argument for returning to Consumer Activism.
- Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story: Adam Spiegelman, on heroin addiction and the aftermath.

We cannot know

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024Posted in a thought, Australian bush, birds, books, coronavirus, eating disorder recovery, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, WinterTagged Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red CoatLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … writing about life

‘We cannot know.’ If used sparingly, this is one of the strongest phrases in the biographer’s language. It reminds us that the suave study-of-a-life we are reading, for all its detail, length and footnotes, for all its factual certainties and confident hypotheses, can only be a public version of a public life, and a partial version of a private life. Biography is a collection of holes tied together with string, and nowhere more so than with the sexual and amatory life. For some there is nothing easier than understanding the sex life of someone you’ve never met, and easier still when they’re conveniently dead; or in posthumously adding another conquest to the dance card of a known Don Juan. Others simplify things by maintaining that human sexual habits have always been more or less the same, the only variables being the degree of hypocrisy and cover-up.
But sex is a world in which self-deception can so easily present itself as objective fact, and ‘brutal honesty’ is no more likely to be true than shy evasiveness or sentimental melodrama as an explanation of what really took place. Oscar Wilde may have been a ‘posing sodomite’, but such evidence as we have suggests he preferred intercrural sex, and if so was not technically a ‘sodomite’ at all. We cannot know. Sara Bernhardt was a nymphomaniac. Oh, but she was also incapable of orgasm. Until she had the problem fixed by means of an ingenious surgical implant — which is reliably attested by that ‘hysterical duplicitous gossip’ Jean Lorrain, and then recorded in the [j]ournal of Edmond de Goncourt, whose views on women were old-fashioned to say the least. We cannot know. Robert de Montesquiou was a flamboyant homosexual, except that his biographer thinks he was too coldly fastidious to indulge his Hellenic urges, while [Samuel] Pozzi’s biographer thinks he may have been impotent from around 1884, and remained so. We cannot know. Pozzi had a reputation as ‘an incorrigible seducer’, a doctor who slept with his patients, who may even have used his consultations as foreplay. He also kept all the letters he had received from women over a sexual career of half a century or more. Yet after his death, Mme Pozzi instructed her son Jean to burn them all. So we cannot know a large amount … We may speculate as long as we also admit that our speculations are novelistic, and that the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

from ‘The Man in the Red Coat‘
by Julian Barnes

Many years ago, my mother and I embarked together on a reading project for a year, our own little book club before book clubs were a thing. Our reading theme was American novels, and we took it in turns to pick a novel, one by one over the course of the year, which we each then assiduously read; afterwards, we caught up over coffee to talk about it. I remember this year with great fondness as a time of shared reading and conversations, conversations that began with reading and literature but moved on, as all good conversations do, to other things. Art. Love. Life.

Knotted trunk, Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

Recently we’ve begun another reading project together, one that we hope will involve some writing further down the track. As a result, my reading choices, which usually tend to fiction only, and generally to contemporary literary fiction at that, have widened. I’m reading fiction and non-fiction, works by contemporary writers and works by long-dead ones, works by women and works by men. Hence The Man in the Red Coat, which I might not otherwise have come across.

We cannot know. I’ve quoted Barnes at length here (which I hope he will forgive me for) because I love the virtuosity of this passage, the way he begins with a simple assertion, a certain truth, and then moves on in the space of a couple of paragraphs to cover themes at once intimate and specific to the period he is writing about (the Belle Epoque) but also meta-textual, concerning the art of biography itself, that collection of holes tied together with string. (What a lovely image that is.) And then, somehow, we arrive at the end of this flight of thought with another assertion, equally simple but bold, about the essence of novels and fiction.

We cannot know. Indeed.

Mangrove tree at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The photographs in this post, like the ones in my previous post, come from a recent trip I took to Darwin. I’d never been to Darwin before and was only there fleetingly on this occasion, but I fell in love with it, all of it. Darwin in the dry season: place of sunny days, rainforest-lined beaches, mangroves and vines and bush-stone curlews. When you visit somewhere new, you see things through a stranger’s eyes, which is to say that you don’t see its inner workings, its inner truth. Does that mean that you see its truth or something else, your own hypothesis of the place? We cannot know. But oh, the privilege of having the opportunity to see it anyway.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- From then on, [Hannah} Whetzel ate exactly 40 cheerios before every run, which became a team joke: Christine Yu on negative coaching and toxic team cultures and how they affect female athletes.
- As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel: Omer Bartov, Israeli-born academic and former IDF soldier, on Gaza and what he calls the logic of endless violence. In this nuanced essay, Bartov explores why, despite his deep connection to Israel, he is adamant that the war in Gaza must stop.
- I knew I was signing up for the isolation of being the only vegan at a family cookout or party, but I didn’t expect to rarely interact with other Black vegans at plant-based restaurant meetups, food festivals, and Facebook groups. I’m not alone in feeling that way: Noella Williams on why we need to decolonise veganism.
- In two days, on 6 June, I’d be forty. My head was sore with two things: a vain dread of getting older and the work I needed to do to cure the problems in my third novel. I wasn’t worried about seeing the neurologist. Not one bit. Whatever this inflammation was, medicine would wipe it out. I was glad to know the symptoms weren’t phantoms. They were glitches and they’d be cured: M J Hyland, in a piece dating back to 2012, on living with Multiple Sclerosis.
- It has been a peculiar and exasperating five years. I’m a writer. I do other things but writing feels like my main reason for being on the planet: Another writer, Mark Haddon, also on the theme of illness, this time on writing and not writing, running, heart surgery. long Covid and brain fog.
- The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose: Cat Williams explores nature and the non-binary.

Unrequited

May 30, 2024Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, birds, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, Other people's words about ..., out & about, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I talk about when I talk about running, writingTagged Cursed Bread, Sophie MackintoshLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … a woman’s desire

The meat was ready, steaming, when I lifted the lid of the pot. As I sliced it up I pictured meeting the ambassador in the hotel room. First, he will open the door and clasp me in his arms, I decided, putting a plate in front of my husband. He will kiss the hollow of my throat very softly, and then he will gaze upon me, I decided, like he did today, but with much more tenderness. I cut my potatoes up into tiny pieces. My husband chewed and chewed, with the mouth that never kissed me. He will lay me down on the soft white bed and undo the buttons slowly, I decided. He will kiss my eyelids. I will place my hands on his smooth back, I decided as I chewed. I will clutch him to me but not too hard, not like a drowning person. The light will be dim. The bedding will be spotless. He will tell me that he has seen what nobody else has ever noticed. He will say, ‘It’s you I’ve wanted all along, Elodie. I see you, Elodie. You. You.’

from ‘Cursed Bread‘
by Sophie Mackintosh

I came back to Elodie’s story again today, having quoted from it once before. Elodie’s story continues to compel me — her longing for her husband to desire her, to see her, oh, to want her. Though Elodie is young and has her life ahead of her, I wonder whether the feelings and desires she expresses in her narrative, those feelings and desires that in her tiny village community are so forbidden, are a little like those an older woman might feel, a woman my age, on realising that the desires she once thought might be realised are now out of reach.

I wonder.

Largs Bay Jetty, May 2024.

I’ve spent the last few weeks quietly. Post-Covid, I still feel tired. It’s a funny kind of tiredness, not so much a feeling of lethargy as a feeling of being tissue-thin, emotionally and physically. I don’t know how else to describe it. Still, I’ve been walking and reading and even writing (a little), and I had a quiet moment of celebration a couple of weeks ago when I saw ten hooded plovers at Aldinga Beach.

Yes, ten. I have never seen so many before, and I walked home feeling quietly jubilant.

Bracken fern, May 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- You see, just because she can’t articulate her desires, doesn’t mean she doesn’t yearn for something more: On the topic of desire, here is Mesha Maren on quiet women who are filled with longing.
- But the land where we pitched our tent is no longer there. It’s somewhere in the North Sea: Rachel Keenan on her disappearing town. (Okay, I confess this story particularly got to me as someone who is employed by local government and has previously worked in positions in both state and federal governments. If you read it, you will see why.)
- Novel writing is such a personal and idiosyncratic thing, and there’s rarely a good reason to do it apart from fulfilling some serious internal nagging: Ladette Randolph interviews Carolyn Kuebler, whose words about writing — why she writes, how she writes — seem to me some of the wisest I have stumbled across.
- [Antimicrobial resistance as an] issue is ‘more acute’ than climate change: Kat Lay on how the Covid pandemic may have been relatively minor, as far as pandemics and illnesses go, as we look into the future.

Roar

September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, blogging, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, What I love about ..., WinterTagged Jennifer Down, Pulse Points2 Comments

Other people’s words about … country and city life

Ramesh was used to the sounds of the suburbs. He never noticed barking dogs or level crossings. On the train to work every morning he turned up the volume of his audiobook so it was louder than other passengers’ mobile phone conversations. But [tonight he was in] the country [and it] roared. He could hear the air move in the trees. He had grown up in Croydon, moved to Glasgow at seventeen, back to London at twenty-three, then Sydney at thirty-six. As a child he’d stood outside his parents’ bedroom listening to his father’s whistling snore. He liked living in places where he could hear others alive. He reached for his phone where it sat charging. For an instant he saw his hands illuminated in the bluish light of its screen. He set his rain sound app to the setting called ‘Harbour Storm’.

‘What are you doing?’ Henry croaked. His face was pressed to the pillow. ‘You don’t need that tonight.’

Ramesh opened his mouth to argue, then he heard the rain outside, like gunfire on the corrugated iron roof.

from ‘Pulse Points‘
by Jennifer Down

I love this passage, not because I’m in accordance with Ramesh, but for the opposite reason. I love the ‘roar’ of the country. I spend most of my time living in a house in the suburbs. It’s close to the beach, which I love, but it’s even closer to the railway line, a line that trains zip up and down every half an hour from five in the morning until midnight.

Sunset, early August 2022.

I don’t mind the sound of trains, actually — as suburban sounds go, I find it vaguely comforting — but when I leave my house to stay outside the city, to visit Aldinga Scrub or to camp in Yorke Peninsula, I feel a knot inside my chest of which I wasn’t even aware releasing itself.

Sounds I love when I am away from the city: the dull roar of the ocean at the end of the road (yes, another roar). The whistle of a hot wind through the trees. A frogmouth letting out its low, persistent, booming call at dusk. A shrike thrush singing. A magpie warbling. Frogs croaking. Insects clicking in the grass. And, yes, like Ramesh, the rain drumming on the roof.

Still, the photo accompanying my post today, like so many of my photos on this blog these days, comes from the suburban beach at the end of the street I live on. The sand is being eroded away and there are car parks dotted along the coast line and on most weekends a food truck selling hot donuts sets up shop during daylight hours.

But it’s still the beach. It’s still wide and beautiful and open and … The sea still roars.

Lately I’ve been reading …

It’s a lengthy list today, because I’ve been reading far more than I’ve been posting. But I hope you find something interesting below.

- There is an extremely pale woman with purple-black stains on her fingertips, and one poor soul who is writhing in agony with abdominal pain but nobody can understand the language he is speaking: Maggie O’Farrell on the unexpected long-term side effects of Covid.
- I’m shocked by how quickly people have normalized the pandemic and our governments’ response to it—how easily they write off those lockdown months as a period when ‘nothing happened’, when in fact the unthinkable happened: Claire Pollard, also writing about Covid-19, in her case about bearing witness, or why we should write about what is happening now.
- Publisher’s Marketplace, the industry website that logs book deals, is doing away with the women’s fiction category, finally. Fiction will be commercial, or it will be literary, or it will reside in a genre category that doesn’t make such explicit assumptions about gender: Cara Blue Adams on Melissa Banks, women’s fiction, and why it’s not all chick lit. I haven’t read Banks yet, but I will, now I’ve read Adams’s article.
- Writing is an attempt to keep it together: Ella Risbridger, in a wonderful, thoughtful piece on memoir, fiction, love, loss, pain and writing.
- In the ocean’s shadowy twilight zone, between 600 and 800 metres beneath the surface, there are fish that gaze upwards through their transparent heads with eyes like mesmerising emerald orbs: Helen Scales on the wonderful barreleye fish.
- I take it for granted that books are good for us: David L Ulin on the virtues and joys of reading.

What lies beneath

April 26, 2021Posted in anxiety, Autumn, birds, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, Running, sea quotes, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, the sea, the sky, walking, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged running2 Comments

Other people’s words about the sea

Sometimes the whole sea looks like a mirror of beaten silver, though it’s too turbulent to hold many reflections; it’s the bay that carries a reflected sky on its surface. On the most beautiful days, there are no words for the colours of San Francisco Bay and the sky above it. Sometimes the water reflects a heaven that is both grey and gold, and the water is blue, is green, is silver, is a mirror of that grey and gold, catching the warmth and cold of colours in its ripples, is all and none of them, is something more subtle than the language we have. Sometimes a bird dives into the mirror of the water, vanishing into its own reflection, and the reflective surface makes it impossible to see what lies beneath.

From ‘Recollections of My Non-Existence’
by Rebecca Solnit

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post for this blog, for which I apologise. Sometimes, life has a way of getting in the way. Sometimes, there just isn’t much to say.

Still, Rebecca Solnit’s words about the sea make me think of walking and running by my own sea, so far from hers, on the other side of the world. In the weeks since I last wrote a blog post, summer has faded away and autumn has arrived, and the sea has transformed itself from deep blue …

… to a wondrous, pearly, rippled blue …

… to spun silver.

Time passes, and the world turns, and that is how it should be. May the world keep turning for you, too.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I was so used to getting the door slammed in my face, it seemed absurd that I might decline to walk through this one that was finally open to me: Lilly Dancyger on having the courage to seek the right publisher for her book.
Readers are likely to find other ways to get their news: Diana Bossio, on the power of Facebook to control the news. This is an out-of-date article now, since Facebook is no longer blocking Australians’ access to the news, but it’s worth thinking about, all the same. Is Australia the only nation fighting Facebook’s control of the way that news is relaid? And if so, why? I am not in favour of Facebook having a monopoly over the way Australians (or others) access the news, but I am also deeply suspicious of our Prime Minister’s support of Rupert Murdoch. The matter is more complicated than it seems …

Milestone

August 5, 2020April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, life, native coastal vegetation, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about running, WinterTagged running4 Comments

Other people’s words about … why they run

You know, I have run all my life. From fights and bars and women and any number of tricky situations. I run to think and I run to not think. I ran even when I was drinking. Often, I would leave bars and run into the night, just keep going until the exhaustion or sheer drunkenness stopped me. I don’t run in groups or on teams, I don’t run in events or with friends. I don’t run for charity. I don’t run for fitness — I ran even when I was fat or when I smoked. I run for the same thing I have always run for. The solitude and the independence of spirit. The feeling of freedom. When I was in my early teens I read Alan Silitoe’s short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ and had my psyche explained to me.

From ‘Riding the Elephant’
by Craig Ferguson

I haven’t been able to run for several months now, due to a niggling ankle/tendon injury that I’m still trying to work out how to fix. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), when I came across Craig Ferguson’s words about running recently, which I’ve quoted above, they struck such a chord within me that I couldn’t let them go.

Reflective

I turned fifty this past weekend. Like most people I know who have turned fifty ahead of me, the milestone left me feeling even more introspective and reflective and wistful (or maudlin? self-absorbed?) than I usually do.

And the niggling ankle injury certainly didn’t help.

Fading beauty

So here is a metaphor for you: today, I went for a ride on my bike. I stopped to take the photograph below, because it was such a lovely, sun-dappled, shady spot, and because I already had the caption for the photograph planned. It was: ‘Who knows what lies around the next turn?’ This seemed apt, since the road I was cycling along made a literal turn, and since, at fifty, I’m also at a metaphorical turning point.

But then, after I’d taken the photograph and got back on my bike, I actually did cycle around the turn … and got repeatedly swooped by a magpie all the rest of the way down the road.

There’s a lesson in that somewhere, if you’re fifty and feeling maudlin and introspective, right?

Round the bend

But back to Craig Ferguson and the point of this post. I run for the same thing I have always run for, he writes. The solitude and the independence of spirit. The feeling of freedom.

And (oh my goodness, yes): I run to think and I run to not think.

These are the reasons I run, too, and the reasons I hope I’ll run again, one day. Is that a vain hope? Perhaps. But the fifty-year-old in me has learned that hope is worth clinging to, because, against all logic, hope keeps you real. It keeps you true.

Mantra

August 2, 2020Posted in a thought, anxiety, birds, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walking, What I love about ..., Winter, writingTagged reading2 Comments

Other people’s words about … language

I watched them walk down the steps, [and then I] turned around in the hallway, and heard myself say, ‘I’m so lonely’. It shook me because this sentence had become an involuntary verbal tic. I seldom realised I was saying it or perhaps didn’t know that I was speaking the words out loud. I had started to experience this unbidden mantra even while I was still married, mumbling it before sleep, in the bathroom, or even at the grocery store, but it had become more pronounced in the last year. My father had it with my mother’s name. While he was sitting alone in a chair, before he dozed off, and later, in his room at the nursing home, he would utter Marit over and over. He did it sometimes when she was within hearing distance. If she answered the call, he seemed not to know that he had spoken. That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed.

From ‘The Sorrows of an American’
by Siri Hustvedt

Have you ever had the same experience as Siri Hustvedt’s narrator Erik describes having in the passage I’ve quoted above — the experience, I mean, of a single phrase that comes to you frequently and (often) unbidden?

Threshold between sky and sea

Until I read this passage, I thought I was alone in this experience, although the phrase that comes to me is not the same phrase as Erik’s phrase. This phrase, my phrase, sometimes comes to me when I’m awake; and it sometimes comes to me when I’m drifting off to sleep; and it sometimes comes to me when I have a pen in my hand and am writing. The phrase, my phrase, is so familiar to me that it has written itself into my very sense of self.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the feeling I have when the words come to me is so strong, and so familiar, that it has formed itself into words.

Threshold between bird and world

As I’ve said many times before, I read to find accord with other people whom I will never meet in real life — either the writers themeselves, or the characters whom they create in their writing. Books are words, but they are more than words: their words cross a threshold between words and lived experience.

That, as Hustvedt herself puts it, is the strangeness of language. And, I would add, of life in this world.

Threshold between night and day

Unlovely

May 29, 2020April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, birds, blogging, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, workTagged coronavirus, pandemic2 Comments

Other people’s words about … the view from the kitchen window

The kitchen window [of the railroad flat] looked into the gray courtyard where, on better days, there would be lines of clothes baking in the sun, although the floor of the deep courtyard, even in the prettiest weather, was a junkyard and a jungle. There were rats and bedsprings and broken crates. A tangle of city-bred vegetation: a sickly tree, black vines, a long-abandoned attempt at a garden.

From ‘The Ninth Hour’
by Alice McDermott

The world can seem very unlovely sometimes, can’t it? Sometimes the unloveliness is of the kind described in the passage above, which comes from poverty and dereliction and is visible from your kitchen window. And sometimes it comes from a more spiritual kind of unloveliness: a human lack of grace.

Shafts of sunlight

There are times when I fret and rail at the unloveliness, times when it is all I can see. And there are other times — for the space of a breath, or a second, or a minute, or an hour — when I am overwhelmed by the loveliness that surrounds me, both within people and without.

Oystercatchers on the reef

I had a week of annual leave from work last week, which I spent by the beach. The weather was dank and damp and (yes) somewhat unlovely, and, at least partly in response, my mood veered up and down erratically.

Autumn in the vineyards

But then, over the week, because I’m on a pause in my running at the moment, I found myself seeking out my bike again, taking myself for long, hypnotic rides along the coast, through hills and paddocks and vineyards. And all around me, amidst the dampness and dankness, there were moments of loveliness, some of which you can see pictured in today’s post.

Rainclouds over the hills

Sometimes, I think, you just have to take moments of loveliness like this and carry them with you, through the unloveliness. Sometimes it’s all you can do.

Lately I’ve been reading …

… [F]or those steeped in the belief that great calamity should not, cannot, be our lot —- or that, if we work hard enough or try hard enough or hope hard enough or are good or inventive enough, we might be able to outfox it — it can be a relief to admit our folly and rejoin the species, which is defined, as are all forms of life, by a terrible and precious precarity, to which some bodies need no reintroduction: Maggie Nelson, on finding moments of calm during a pandemic.

… It felt almost like we had travelled back to a pre-pandemic past — except that version is a fantasy that no longer exists: Isabella Kwai on Australia’s ‘escape’ from the pandemic and what living in the post-pandemic world really means.

… If I’ve realized anything, it’s that everyone has an extremely specific experience of this time of coronavirus: Stacy Ladenburger, offering her response to the post-pandemic world (and a delicious-looking herby pea soup recipe as well!).

Bright lights

May 10, 2020May 15, 2020Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, birds, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the sea, the skyTagged coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic4 Comments

Other people’s words about … living small

His approach, enjoying small spots of nature every day rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape, made sense to me. Big trips were the glaciers, cruise ships to Madagascar, the Verdon Gorge, the Cliffs of Moher, walking on the moon. Small trips were city parks with abraded grass, the occasional foray to the lake-woods of Ontario, a dirt pile. Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel — with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers — just seemed so, well, grandiose.The drive to go bigger and further just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture.

I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.

From ‘Birds Art Life Death’
by Kyo Maclear

This week marks a new phase in the COVID-19 pandemic, as the world begins to open up again, economically. Here in South Australia, several restrictions will be lifted from 11 May. Cafes will reopen for outdoor eating; travel within the state (to holiday houses and campgrounds) will be encouraged; libraries will open their doors to patrons; swimming pools and community halls will be available for public use once more. All of these reopenings are accompanied by regulations that we could never have imagined prior to the pandemic, most of which are to do with the amount of people gathering in any one spot, and the distance they must keep between each other. But still, even with those rules in place for the foreseeable future, it’s clear that the lockdown is easing slowly.

And I am glad — glad that so few people are ill and dying here now in South Australia; glad that people whose livelihoods have been threatened by the closures of their businesses can now have a chance to make a living again; glad that people who have felt isolated and lonely during lockdown can go out into the world again and reconnect.

But also, I find myself feeling a little sad as the quiet time comes to an end.

Cafe life during the pandemic: the not-so-bright lights

Because, like Kyo Maclear, I, too, on the whole, like smallness. I don’t mean that I like illness or poverty or death — of course not. I don’t mean, either, that I can’t see how incredibly fortunate I’ve been (so far) during this pandemic, given that my health, and the health of all the people I love, remains intact. Given that I still have a job and an income.

But still, for the longest time — for as long as I can remember, in fact — I have felt out of tune with what Maclear calls the overreaching at the heart of Western culture. Over and over in my life, I have sought smallness over largeness; quietness over noise; scarcity over plenitude; closeness over distance; solitude over the throng. Often, this pursuit has felt less like a choice to me than a compulsion or a duty. Often, it has felt very lonely.

During the lockdown, though, as life has shrunk and quietened, as the crowds have thinned and ebbed away, I have seen my instincts and compulsions aligning themselves with the changing world around me. And in this quieter, smaller world, I have felt something inside of me loosen and release. I have felt, for once, at peace.

Through a window: looking up and out to the light

In the society I live in, a Western society like Maclear’s, we are encouraged to spend big, to think big. To live big. In tandem, we are encouraged to ignore the damage that results from doing so — the damage to the environment we live in, and the damage to the quiet places within ourselves, to the truths we feel in the smallness of our own hearts.

Coronavirus has affected the world on a global scale: its effects have been enormous, and they will be long-lasting. And yet, how perverse would it be, to borrow a word from Maclear, if what we take away from this catastrophe is a desire to live smaller, to aim tiny? How audacious? How — dare I say it — wonderful?

Deserted beach: this beautiful light

Lately I’ve been reading …

…Seven spectacular libraries you can explore from your living room: Claire Voon on wandering the stacks and smelling old books without leaving your house.

… Recovery doesn’t reside in avoiding triggers, or even in avoiding relapse. It resides in being triggered and greeting the experience with a little more strength and resilience than you did the last time: The wonderful Gena Hamshaw on how living in lockdown can trigger old symptoms of mental illness, and how it is still possible to live through a time like this with grace.

… Saving lives in the short term by shielding the healthcare system and flattening the curve of infections is obviously a vital goal. However, it cannot be the only one: Silvia Camporesi, a bioethicist, on the ethics of prioritising some lives over others and on the long-term effects of a blanket response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beside the point

April 26, 2020April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, birds, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beachTagged coronavirus, COVID-194 Comments

Other people’s words about … the world we live in

In the past few months [my eight-year-old son] Jack has become exasperated with my talking back to the radio. ‘You have to cheer up,’ he’ll say … And so I’ve been trying to keep most of my feelings about the news to myself. I’m grateful for the trust and sanguinity Jack displays these days, which makes me feel I’ve done something right. It’s only that, as the world seems to become an increasingly dangerous place, I wonder if happiness is the point. Maybe passion, something that can keep you satisfied inside your own head, independent of other people, is going to be worth more in Jack’s lifetime.

From ‘Lost and Wanted’
by Nell Freudenberger

The novel I’ve quoted from in today’s blog post was published in 2019, meaning that Freudenberger wrote it well before the coronavirus pandemic began. And here, in fact, when Freudenberger’s Boston-based narrator Helen mentions the world becoming an increasingly dangerous place, she is, in the context of the paragraphs that precede this passage, referring not to public health but to politics. Specifically, she is talking about the election of Donald Trump, and about the effect his policies have had on her and her world.

Still, Helen’s words ring eerily true to me in the world of 2020, this post-pandemic world. What is it that keeps us going when happiness is either inaccessible or beside the point? Is it passion, as Helen suggests? I’m not sure, but I do like the idea of finding something that can keep you satisfied inside your own head, independent of other people.

So tell me: what keeps you satisfied inside your own head? I’m curious. I’d love to know.

Lately I’ve been reading …

…The country is suffering because no one knows how to look after the fire anymore: A review of, and an excerpt from, Indigenous fire management practitioner Victor Steffensen’s book Fire Country, published by Hardie Grant.

… Our president has called this a war. This is not war, but worse than war: André Aciman on the aftermath of the pandemic, and what the future might look like.

… None of us traveled to this pandemic; the pandemic traveled to us. Though the impulse is much the same: gather our strength, journey hour by hour, and one day, know we will reach its end: Shobha Rao, with a Buddhist’s perspective on birdsong and how, metaphorically, to travel through these quiet streets of the COVID-19 world.