(tales from the birdgirl)
from ‘The World Without Us‘
by Mireille Juchau
I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby.
from To the River
by Olivia Laing
Haunted by waters. Isn’t that a beautiful phrase?
Though the words I’ve quoted above are about a river rather than the sea, still, they ring true for me. For most of my adult life — except for the two or three years I spent in my early twenties, travelling and working abroad — I have chosen to live within walking distance of the sea. In my late twenties and thirties, as I’ve mentioned before, I lived in a series of share households: different houses every eighteen months or so, different housemates. But each of those houses was close to the sea.
These days, I live in a house just a few minutes’ walk to the beach. Open a window, and you can hear waves rolling onto shore. Step onto the front porch, and you’ll smell seaweed drying out beyond the water’s reach — a damp, bleached, faintly rotten smell. Look around indoors, and you’ll see drifts of sand piling up in the corners.
The sea surrounds me. It’s how I make sense of things. It’s how I feel at ease.
There’s another phrase I love in the words above: susceptible to beauty.
Like anyone else, I have good days and bad days. There are days when I feel at home, here on this earth: when my skin feels comfortable beneath the layers of my clothes, and the warmth of the sun feels kind and good. And there are days when the world seems vast, alien, spinning, remote. What gets me through those latter kinds of day are tiny moments of beauty, out there by the water: pinpricks of sunlight sparkling on the tips of waves, like sequins on a piece of cloth; clouds chasing across the horizon, billowing and grey; a cluster of yellow flowers growing in the dip of a dune, petals cupped to reflect the light.
I took the photographs you see here late one August afternoon, just a few weeks ago. Sitting at my desk, working at my computer, I felt hemmed in suddenly: by streets and footpaths, by fences and cement driveways, by the sound of my neighbour hawking up sputum in his bathroom. The longing to get away from all of that was so strong it felt akin to starving. I felt hollow through and through.
I shut down my computer, stepped outside, and walked down the road to the sea.
Five minutes later there I was, standing on the sand, looking out at the water and the sky. It was close to sunset and I wandered a while along the shore, released at last: from work and worry and words. And I saw something, then, that I don’t know how to describe, though I’ll try: I saw spring coming. The air had a certain quality to it — a softness, perhaps, after the steely bleakness of winter. I thought that if I reached out with my hand I might touch that beautiful softness. It seemed possible, just for a moment.
Looking at the photographs now, I don’t see what I did then. Perhaps you don’t, either. But I know that I saw it, all the same. It was one of those moments — those tiny moments of beauty — to which I, like Olivia Laing, am susceptible.
I am grateful for those moments, is what I’m trying to say. They give me a kind of gladness. They bring me home.
Sometimes, in mid-summer, when the wind is easterly,
the sea looks like a sheet of blue silk
unfurling over the sand.
The longest day of the year has just passed.
One night this week, before the sun set, I wandered down to the beach.
It was the end of the fifth day in a row over 40 degrees Celsius.
It was a still, sultry evening,
the skies stormy,
but the sea shining like a mirror.
It’s a beautiful world.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Rebecca xo
Since my last post on roses,
I’ve started glimpsing them wherever I go.
Outside the entrance to my office, there’s a bed of low-lying roses.
They catch my eye as I walk through the automatic glass doors on my way in to work.
So I sneak down to soak up their beauty again in my morning tea-break.
After rain, the petals and leaves hang heavy, glistening.
And it feels to me like a moment of stolen beauty.
Coming alive for the first time to the beauty of something
that has always been around you
is one of life’s greatest joys.
Native plants and vegetation are my passion.
(We all know that.)
So you won’t be surprised when I say I haven’t always been the hugest fan of roses.
They’re not native to Australia.
Sometimes they seem overblown to me, and showy — blowsy, even.
But once a year, the rose bushes outside a library I visit frequently put on quite a show.
Somehow, these roses please even my curmudgeonly spirit.
They are, simply, quite lovely.
They bring joy, not just into my day …
but into my very soul.
I think I’m slowly joining the rose-lover’s world …
Don’t turn your head.
Keep looking at the bandaged place.
This is where the light enters you.
This quote is attributed to Rumi.
His words give me hope:
I like to think they might even be true.
Emetophobia has governed my life, with a fluctuating intensity of tyranny, for some thirty-five years. Nothing — not the thousands of psychotherapy appointments I’ve sat through, not the dozens of medications I’ve taken, not the hypnosis I underwent when I was eighteen, not the stomach viruses I’ve contracted and withstood without vomiting — has succeeded in stamping it out …
From ‘My age of anxiety’
by Scott Stossel
Sometimes, no cure exists for our ills.
We learn — slowly, painfully — to co-exist with them:
We learn to strive for grace.
♦
Note: Click on the following link if you want to know more about emetophobia. And for a review of the book I’ve quoted from, and more insight into anxiety as well as emetophobia, see Sally Satel’s article from The Millions.
twenty-one words 