hope – Page 4 – twenty-one words

Grasp

July 17, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walking, What I love about ..., WinterTagged Anna Raverat, Signs of LifeLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … reading

After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t fully understand — with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to lighting up and the first few drags — after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with and then honing in on the exact phrase or phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next.

from ‘Signs of Life‘
by Anna Raverat

I’m not a smoker and I love reading novels far more than I do short stories or poetry, but still, I found myself smiling in recognition when I read the narrator’s description in the passage by Raverat above about her approach to reading. I experience myself, these days, as a greedy reader — greedy for beautiful words, phrases, images, moments, greedy for the fix they give me, while often the plot or theme of a novel remains distant or abstract to me.

Pathway, Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Reading has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember, though the reasons for its importance to me has varied over the years. These days, it feels like an escape for me from the world, or perhaps more accurately an escape into someone else’s world — that world they create with their words. And, like anyone addicted to their fix, I’m not about to give it up.

Little green bench (a place to read in when the warmer weather returns?)
Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Today’s reading list is exclusively about animals and pets — for all the animal-lovers out there! xo

- To have a good life — to reach the highest rung of cat-ness — cats need to go outside: Long-time readers will know that a couple of years ago I rescued a feral cat, who has now become a much-loved member of my household. Before Lizzie came along, I was, as an environmentalist, firmly of the belief that feral cats had no place in Australia, where they are not native animals and where they are responsible for killing many native bird and reptiles. But, as Carrie Arnold writes in this piece, the issue becomes so much more vexed once you have got to know a cat up close. The problem of cats, Arnold concludes, isn’t a cat problem — it’s a human problem. That’s correct, I think. But I also think that what the discussion often misses is the matter of compassion. I want to act compassionately, and compassion is not a hard and fast concept, and rescuing Lizzie was for me an act of compassion despite my environmentalist principles. As I write this, my cat Lizzie is curled up on the quilt on my bed in the space between my knees and the laptop. She’s a happy little thing, and I’m grateful for her presence in my life.
- Why, then, do we consider domestic cats to be loners?: Jonathon B Losos with another piece on cats, this time on how domesticated they may or may not be.
- The status of dogs in India now contrasts sharply with that in Western countries, where any dog found wandering outside on the street is considered stray and liable to impoundment and being killed if not retrieved or rehomed: Krithika Srinivasan and Chris Pearson discuss the free-living dogs of India and how the roots of their treatment lie in … colonialism.
- Early signs of canine anxiety can be as subtle as lip licking, yawning, or staring into the distance. It’s no wonder that many pet owners don’t notice their dogs’ distress until it takes on more problematic forms, like excessive barking and peeing indoors. Even aggressive reactions like growling and snapping at other dogs or people are likely rooted in fear: Ula Chrobak on anxiety in dogs.

Ravaging

June 19, 2023Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, WinterTagged Fat Girl Dancing, Kris Kneen1 Comment

Other people’s words about … growing older as a woman

The things they don’t tell you about menopause are multiple and ever-changing, newly horrifying with every fresh wave.

I know there are positives. Apparently you no longer care what people think about you. Apparently you have come into your power, you are a wise elder, you don’t give a shit about what anyone else might say.

Only you do. The thing no-one tells you about menopause is that you look like you don’t care because your face is set that way, because you get used to trying not to care until you imagine it is true. But you do care. It is ravaging and you do care, you really do.

from ‘Fat Girl Dancing‘
by Kris Kneen

I can’t think of a time when I didn’t care about what other people think about me. I have always been someone who cares too much about this, who compares myself with others and finds myself wanting in every way I can think of to be found wanting.

This hasn’t changed as I’ve got older. Like Kneen, I’ve heard the truisms around ageing; I’ve listened to and read the interviews in which famous older women tell their interviewer that at fifty/sixty/seventy they feel wiser/calmer/happier/more beautiful than at any previous stage in their life — and I’ve believed them. (Let it be said, I am somewhat suggestible when it comes to what other people say. It comes with the territory.)

Sunset, Taperoo Beach, June 2023.

I was thinking, when I first read Kneen’s words, about writing a post here about how we as women are objectified; about how that’s why, when we reach menopause, we feel the way Kneen describes; about how, though objectification feels odious, being silently discarded feels even worse. But this morning as I sat down to write this post, I found that what I wanted to say was something else.

What I really want to say is that one of the things I have come to realise as I grow older is that the pieces of received wisdom I’ve absorbed over the years rarely work for me when I try to apply them to myself. Over and over again over the years, I’ve had to discard those generalisations — about living, about being a woman, about growing older, about finding some level of happiness or contentment or peace — and find my own truth.

At fifty-two, I certainly don’t feel that I am coming into my power, and I could not feel further from being a wise elder. But I do know that in the years that lie ahead of me, if I am lucky enough to live them, I will continue to need to find my own path through life. I will continue to need to turn away from those truisms and pieces of received wisdom about how my life should appear to me. And I will continue to need to be less suggestible. Because I do care; I really do. I always will.

Black and white, Taperoo Beach, June 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- No one can tell us what we must surrender. They can try, but, if we have options, we can form callouses over our eardrums: Amy Benson on giving up air travel to save the planet.
- When I tried to get out of bed today I simply collapsed: Ross Benjamin quoting Franz Kafka on the torments of juggling a creative life with the necessity of a day job.
- There’s only ever the same, finite amount of water churning around in our water cycle. Every drop of water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time, constantly recycled: Tim Smedley on the scarcity of water as climate change escalates and why it will cause the next pandemic.

How to write

February 4, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, summer, the sky, writingTagged Julia May Jonas, Vladimir7 Comments

Other people’s words about … writing (and shame)

The voice I wrote with felt new to me — unrestrained. For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back, pull it back, pull it back — neutralise it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that — it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.

from ‘Vladimir‘
by Julia May Jonas

There is a practice called Loving Kindness Meditation that I first encountered some years ago when I was participating in a forty-day meditation challenge that involved raising money for a particular charity by pledging to my sponsors to meditate for ten or more minutes every day for forty days. Although I tried many different kinds of meditation during those forty days, and although ultimately I didn’t keep meditating after the challenge was over, the idea behind Loving Kindness Meditation has stuck with me. Essentially, this kind of meditation is about generating, through your meditation practice, kindness and love to other people — as well as to yourself.

There’s a quote by Femi Kayode about writing that I keep close to me whenever I myself am writing. I don’t remember where I got the quote from, and I’ve tried but failed to trace it back to its source. In it, though, Kayode says:

Most of all, write in love. Love for the characters — good or bad, and the story. Love for the reader, for the craft, for humanity. An unconditional compassion for the human condition is the one true gift I believe a writer can give the world.

I thought about Kayode’s words when I came across the passage I’ve quoted at the start of this post, from Julia May Jonas’s wonderful novel Vladimir. The narrator in Vladimir is, like me, a middle-aged female writer who has had two novels published early on in her writing career but has struggled to bring out a third novel. Now, when I think about the ten years I spent between having my second novel for young adults published and submitting my third manuscript to my agent, a novel for middle-grade readers that remains as yet unpublished, what I remember most is how I wrote and rewrote the same manuscript, then wrote and rewrote it some more, all the while trying to perfect it — all the while not understanding that there is no such thing as perfect, and that the search for perfection can take you a long way away from the place you started, that place of excitement and hope.

Stormy skies over the Port River, Port Adelaide, February 2023.

I mentioned recently that I’ve now begun working on a fourth manuscript, a literary fiction novel. This time around, in an attempt to break free of the tangle of lonely perfectionism that I’d somehow found myself ensnared in during the writing of my third novel, I’ve deliberately sought feedback from readers early on in the process. Predictably, some of the feedback I’ve received has been positive, and some less so. Your writing lacks introspection, one reader said. And: We never really get to know or understand your narrator, so it’s hard to care about what happens to her.

To be honest, I was a little shocked when I got this feedback. I thought I’d been writing with great restraint; I thought I’d been ‘showing, not telling’; I thought I’d been practising the principle of ‘less is more’. All those old writing saws. But I’ve slowly come to see, as I’ve mulled this feedback over, that in writing this way I’d been falling into the same trap as Jonas’s narrator, trying to carve my words out of crystal. To neutralise my writing. To contain it. To pull it back.

And here is where I find myself returning to the idea of loving kindness and compassion that I began this post with. It’s okay to try to improve your writing, to see the flaws in it and work hard to make it better: more interesting, perhaps, or more insightful, or more moving. But trying to improve your writing isn’t the same thing as condemning it. Because what is the act of trying to neutralise your writing other than a reflection of your own self-doubt and self-hatred? What is the act of trying to contain your words and thoughts other than a reflection of the shame you feel about yourself? What is this whole painful process, other than a way of saying to yourself that your writing is not good enough? That your characters are not good enough? That you, by extension, are not good enough?

Calmer waters, the Port River, Port Adelaide, February 2023.

In the end, what I’ve learned from all of this over the last few weeks (or perhaps over the last ten years) — what I’ve learned from Jonas’s words, and from the words of those people who were kind enough to read my manuscript and give me feedback, and from, finally, the words of Kayode — is that writing, any kind of writing, can’t come from a place of shame.

If, as a writer, you ask your readers to care about your characters, then you have to allow yourself to care about your characters, too. You have to write from a place of compassion. You have to write — yes — in love.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- So that’s what it’s come down to. I have two college degrees, nearly thirty years in academia, have published thirteen books in five languages, co-written two television movies, and can’t afford to replace a washing machine. Welcome to the new American middle class. We have the finest doctors, nurses, techs in the world. The American health care system can save your life, as it has mine, repeatedly. And in doing so, it sucks up everything around you. It saves your life, but can leave you with little left to live it: Steven Womack, on writing, cancer, the American medical system, the publishing industry and climate change, among other things. Towards the end of this essay, Womack tells us that 64% of cancer patients in America declare bankruptcy. If that’s not an indictment of the US medical system, I don’t know what is. And yet, novelist to the last, Womack keeps writing …
- One year ago my brother was killed by a tree: Elisha Cooper on how to honour a dead sibling.
- Some days, the hardest thing to do is to forgive myself for being myself: Devin Kelly’s writing, which I’ve provided links to in the past, never fails to astonish me. Here, in one of his earlier pieces, he writes about running, writing, shame and joy. Mostly, in the saddest kind of way, about joy.
- But solitary is not the opposite of social; it’s the opposite of gregarious: Danielle Clode on koalas and how we may be mistaken about their preference for solitude.
- There’s another quote I keep on my desktop by the poet Amanda Gorman, yet another quote for which I have lost the source, in which she writes, I think if I could go back in time and give myself a message, it would be to reiterate that my value as an artist doesn’t come from how much I create. I think that mind-set is yoked to capitalism. Being an artist is about how and why you touch people’s lives, even if it’s one person. Even if that’s yourself, in the process of art-making. Vanessa Zoltan takes up a similar theme in her piece about NaNoWriMo, or National Writing Month. Zoltan writes: Writing a bad novel is a belief that something doesn’t have to be ‘productive’ in order for it to be worthwhile. It is a belief that you being you is, in and of itself, a worthy thing. It’s faith that even if it never turns into anything but itself, it was worth the time and practice of writing the thing anyway. I’ve always been faintly horrified by NaNoWriMo, but maybe I should reconsider. It is, Zoltan writes, nothing less than an act of resistance against capitalism.

Speak

January 8, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, depression, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native flowers, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, summer, walking, writingTagged Jen Beagin, Vacuum in the Dark1 Comment

Other people’s words about … despair

She sat across from him. For some reason, he removed his glasses and set them on the gold table. His naked eyes were as dark as the burnished leather they sat on and held a startling amount of despair. The effect struck her as indecent, as if he’d disrobed. ‘Put your glasses back on,’ she wanted to tell him. ‘For God’s sake.’

from ‘Vacuum in the Dark‘
by Jen Beagin

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the things people say to each other and the things they don’t. And about subtext, which is not quite the same thing but is part of it all the same.

Over the last couple of years, having written and submitted a middle-grade fiction manuscript to my agent which has as yet to find a home with a publisher, I’ve been writing a literary fiction manuscript. I haven’t mentioned this here till now, in part because my writing in that area is still so new and tentative, and in part because when I say the words, ‘I am writing a literary fiction manuscript’, all I hear is my own internal mocking laughter.

You? says the voice in head, that little internalised voice. How could you possibly presume to have something to say in the literary fiction field? How could you assume that much writing talent of yourself? That much wisdom?

Bracken fern, light and shadow, January 2023.

It’s impossible to say whether what I’m writing will ever be something complete, let alone publishable. That’s the risk any writer takes, whether they have had previous books published, as I have, or not. But what I am writing about in that manuscript is in part what Jen Beagin describes so beautifully in the passage I’ve quoted above: our unwillingness to witness each other’s despair. Our inability to talk about it or bring it to light. Our constant need to reassure each other with upbeat, optimistic conversation and good cheer.

I am not by nature a cheerful person. Nor am I an optimist. Nor am I a skilled conversationalist. At fifty-two, I still find myself getting midway through a conversation with another person, only to realise that I have revealed too much of myself: my fears, my doubts, my sadnesses. (Actually, ‘I still find myself’ is the wrong way to put this; in fact, the right way to put this would be, ‘I increasingly find myself’.) Maybe this isn’t evident to the person I’m talking to, or maybe it is. I’m never sure. But I often feel like the man Beagin describes in the passage above: glasses off, the truth in my eyes revealed. This is not a comfortable place to find myself.

But increasingly I believe in the importance of confronting the secrets we see in other people’s eyes. I believe in meeting those secrets head-on. I believe in talking about them. Perhaps what I am saying here is that secrets don’t have to be the subtext to the conversations we have with other people: they can be the essence of our conversations. They can be where we meet.

Common everlasting flowers, January 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I’ve been a writer for a long time. So has he. Until this summer, he was unquestionably the more publicly prominent one: Isabel Kaplan on what happens when a female writer becomes (potentially) more successful than the male writer who is her partner.
- Sometimes I don’t go to screenings because I always leave feeling lonely because I don’t know anyone and I feel keenly out of place. But I want to go to more things, but I don’t know who to invite because I hate imposing on people, or having to explain my tendency toward melancholy and how it’s fine but sometimes it’ not fine but also sometimes it’s totally desirable: I love Brandon Taylor’s novels and recently I’ve been reading his substack newsletter. I love his slant on loneliness and melancholy in this piece.
- Yes, please do enlighten me: Rebecca Solnit, discussing Greta Thunberg’s famous recent ‘small dick’ tweet, on the link between climate change denial and toxic masculinity.

A question

October 29, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, spring, staying humble, staying trueTagged All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews2 Comments

Other people’s words about … therapy

My scores and answers [on the psychology questionnaires] indicated, among other things, [the therapist] had said, a lack of excitement about the future. Sleeping a great deal or sleeping very little. An ongoing melancholy.
My laughter burbled up again, helpless, irrepressible. It was the first time I had been this disrespectful to a grown-up.
If you ‘cured me’ of all of these, I told her, I don’t even know who I would be. It would be like getting lobotomised. I would not recognise myself.
Setting the clipboard down, I thanked her, still chuckling lightly. Walked out.
What the questionnaires had not asked that might have been useful to me:
Do you wake up each day for yourself or for someone else?
Do you believe your life to be your own?

from ‘All This Could Be Different‘
by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I’ve written before about how, many years ago now, I quit therapy. I’d been seeing a therapist for many years, but I’d come to the conclusion I couldn’t see him anymore. That therapist — I still remember him with great respect and affection, and I still remember my last session with him with great rage. I think my rage had been growing for some time, and I think, if I am honest with myself, that it was as much about what I felt my life might look like post-therapy than it was about the therapist himself, or about any failure I accused him of that day. Nonetheless, I did accuse him.

I told my therapist that day that I left each session with him feeling sadder than I did when I arrived. I told him that I was tired of the words ‘recovery’ and ‘cure’ when they were used in reference to my sadness. I told him, repeatedly, that this language we used in our sessions, which was the language of illness, made no sense in the context of my sadness. I told him that I didn’t want to speak this language anymore. And I left.

In my time I have filled out many questionnaires like the ones that the therapist in All This Could Be Different asks the narrator, Sneha, to fill out. And like Sneha, I’ve been given labels to use about myself as a result of the findings from those questionnaires. Ultimately, though, it’s the stuff I feel that isn’t diagnosable that is the hardest to sort through. To live with.

What would therapy be like if the first questions our therapists asked us — the questions our therapists repeated to us at every session — were Sneha’s two questions? What would life be like if those were the two questions we asked the people we love when we were worried about them? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve been trying to have that kind of therapy, that kind of conversation, all my life.

Tell me, do you wake up each day for yourself or for someone else? Do you believe your life to be your own? And what does it mean if your answer to both of those questions was ‘no’?

Lately I’ve been reading …

- In part two of Little Women, Jo observes that there is a ‘strange, transparent look about [Beth’s face], as if the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribably pathetic beauty’: Like many girls, I read Little Women and mourned Beth’s death and thought of her as the perfect woman. In this article, Carmen Maria Machado explores Lizzie Alcott, the real Alcott on whom Louisa May Alcott based the character Beth — and mourns the loss of her to moralising Victorian fiction.
- Capitalism has taught us that we can seemingly have whatever we want and so we use plants like paint, as a cheap and easy splash of decoration, while ignoring their actual needs and growing them in places they aren’t suited: Alys Fowler on the recent drought in the northern hemisphere, and on how to garden to protect our trees.
- I thought I’d blown it. I thought I’d done something wrong, that I was wrong, in some permanent and irreparable way: Michael Bourne on failing as a writer — again and again — and why that’s just a part of the process. Bourne’s words don’t just apply to writing, though. They apply to life.
- Today, pygmy seahorses still aren’t as well known as their larger seahorse cousins: Richard Smith on the fascinating lives of pygmy seahorses, who range in size from 1 to just over 2 cm.

Replenish

October 18, 2022Posted in ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, rituals, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walking, What I love about ...Tagged Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au1 Comment

Other people’s words about … being alone

As the train left the station, I felt a sense of relief. I wanted to walk in the woods and among the trees. I wanted not to speak to anyone, only to see and hear, to feel lonely.

from ‘Cold Enough for Snow‘
by Jessica Au

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about solitude and loneliness, about participating socially and withdrawing. Though popular scientists and the mainstream media continue to exhort us to maintain our social connections as we age, both for the health of our brain and for our psychological wellbeing, I have come to believe that it’s just as important to be comfortable in your own skin as it is to be comfortable in a social context.

Garden pickings (1), October 2022.

Some years ago a friend said to me that what she admired most in me was that I am a person who has a rich inner life. I have often thought about her words and what they might mean. I tend to think of myself as introverted and shy, a social choker, and I often find myself wanting because of this. But the truth is that when I let go of my expectations of myself as a social creature, I am happy wandering the avenues of my mind.

I think that’s why I find such accord with Jessica Au’s words in the passage I’ve quoted above. What if loneliness wasn’t just a negative version of solitude? Why not embrace it for itself? In fact, why not seek replenishment from it?

Truly: why not?

Garden pickings (2), October 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- [There is a] difference between love that makes me feel happy and love that makes me feel possible: Carrie Jenkins, in a fascinating piece on romantic love, polyamoury and internet trolling. I’m not sure which part of this piece I found more moving, Jenkins’s exploration of what she now calls ‘sad love’ or her mention, almost in passing, of how the commentary on social media can eviscerate someone. Food for thought.
- It has long been held that humans are social creatures, and mental health experts are quick to warn against the debilitating effects of loneliness. But weighted against this are numerous stories of those who have discovered great solace in the solitary life: Talking of loneliness, here’s Chris Wheatley, with a reading list about people leading solitary lifestyles.
- What I thought of, reading this, was the friend I no longer have. I’m not attempting to claim Pedersen’s and Hsu’s grief as my own; my friend didn’t die, and I don’t mourn him. But our friendship did, and I mourn that: Dan Kois on platonic friendship between men, with some words about friendship that ring true for me, too, as a woman.

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.

Mysterious

May 27, 2022Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, 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 sea, the skyTagged ageing, anxiety, books, conversation2 Comments

Other people’s words about … ageing (yes, again, but bear with me …)

I was not a happy or a healthy young person. I had chronic asthma exacerbated by smoking; I was unfit; my diet was ordinary. ‘Orphaned’ by 29, I spent most of my 20s and 30s in grief. I was deeply anxious with little confidence, my fretful neediness causing relationship problems. For many of those years, I cried every week.
The day I turned 50, I felt a mysterious surge of what I could only think of as power. A deep optimism, energy and peacefulness took up space inside me. Give or take a few crises since, it hasn’t really left. In my mid-50s, I’m physically and emotionally stronger, healthier, more calmly loved and loving, more productive, more organised, smarter, wealthier and exponentially happier than I ever was in my youth. In the past four years I’ve really cried about three times, on one occasion because a good friend died.
From ‘The Luminous Solution‘
by Charlotte Wood

In my last blog post I talked about how a feeling of invisibility is something many women complain of experiencing as they grow older — and about how that feeling of invisibility doesn’t have to be (only) a negative experience. I talked about how feeling invisible can confer a certain grace and dignity to the way we live our lives.

It was my mother who reminded me subsequently of Charlotte Wood’s words about ageing. I have heard other women in their fifties and sixties express similar things and while so far I can’t say I share their feelings or their experiences, I find a certain comfort in their words. In my early fifties, I am, unlike Wood, neither more energetic nor healthier than I was as a younger woman; nor am I more productive or smarter. And I certainly don’t cry any less frequently.

And yet. The words optimism and peacefulness resonate deeply with me. I have fewer expectations of life than I did in my twenties and thirties — less hope, perhaps, but also, strangely, more joy.

Optimism, peacefulness, hope, joy. These are all invisible things. Maybe that’s what makes them feel so profound.

Shining sea, Late May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- When I’m alone, I can work or lie facedown and cry and no one knows the difference; no one is alarmed by my grief or astonished by my joy: Seema Reza extolling the virtues of solitude and the way it allows you to be, simply, yourself.
- So here’s what sends cold fear through those who study the global food system: Dan Saladino in a chilling piece about why the global food system may be on the verge of collapse, much like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008 — and for many of the same reasons.
- I used to love the city because I thought of myself as a people watcher. But I realise that I just enjoy watching —- people, plants, animals. Noticing is a gateway drug to writing: Naheed Phiroze Patel on tending creativity until it blooms.
- We praise the canonical authors for their imagination, so why does the plot of each of their works sound the same? Off the Fence magazine has some fun with the classics.

Spectrum

May 14, 2022May 14, 2022Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the sea, the sky, workTagged anxiety, mental healthLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … being invisible

Sandra is the contrail of light left on the back of the eye by the sun. Like so much of Muriel’s life she is invisible. Muriel thinks that there is some dignity in that, yet it leaves a life so immaterial it may be erased in a blink.
From ‘On Swift Horses‘
by Shannon Pufahl

The older we get, the more invisible we feel, or so the story goes — particularly if you are a woman. I think it’s natural to feel some grief in response to this. For so many of us, it can feel as though we are losing something — our sex appeal, perhaps, or our looks, or our matriarchal role in the family, or our authority in the workforce.

Ragged sky, May 2022.

When I was a younger woman I was proud of how articulate I was. I was fluent with words, both spoken and written, and I felt that people were listening to me, hearing me, because of this. As the years pass, though, I feel this less and less. Moving from early to middle age and beyond feels to me like a process of being muted. That’s not the same thing as feeling invisible, I know, but it’s clearly on the same spectrum.

But I like Shannon Pufahl’s perspective on invisibility, particularly invisibility of the female kind. I like the way she weighs up both the dignity and the immateriality of an invisible life, its grace and its insignificance. It seems to me a metaphor for everything that we think of when we talk of a person’s life: the sorrow of it. The joy.

Ragged sea, May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

More than one-third of us recover fully with no special treatment whatever, and many others with a variety of treatments and approaches: Joanne Greenberg on why she fictionalised her experience of mental illness and why there is more hope for recovery than you might think.

I think it’s more helpful to say that eating disorders are about coping; they are in effect a survival mechanism we have had to develop ourselves when nobody came to ‘save’ us: Nataliya Deleva, in another piece about recovery from mental illness (this time in the form of an eating disorder), offers a very different perspective on the same theme.

Only connect: Reunion

May 8, 2022Posted in a thought, Australian bush, Autumn, books, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged despair, Only connect!, solaceLeave a comment

Other people’s words about connection

Maude cranes around to look and Cormac looks too, close enough to see them, all quite young and glacially made up with one man of height and handsomeness towering over the rest and another, a man to the tall one’s left, cocking his head and nodding in Cormac’s direction meaningfully.
It is Senan. Cormac waves …
He hasn’t seen Senan in person for months and yet his vision still telescopes in, urgent and unreconstructed, so that Cormac sees and knows again he loves him with a scratchy passion that returns as reliably as a rash. It is not a nostalgic feeling and casts no shadow, existing always in a self-sustaining now.
How acute it is: immediate deja vu.
From ‘We Were Young‘
by Niamh Campbell

I love this passage from Niahm Campbell about a man reuniting with someone he loves after the two of them have spent some time apart. Cormack, the character in Campbell’s novel, seems unable to commit to one person, whether man or woman; he moves from one relationship or liaison to another. But as a backdrop to all his attempts to remain unfettered there is his love for Senan, a man who is smart enough, perhaps, to keep himself unavailable and therefore always desirable and lovable.

Sunlight and trees, April 2022.

Who hasn’t at some time in their life loved someone who was unavailable? Or, moving beyond relationships and intimacy, who hasn’t wanted something that was eternally just out of reach?