Category: nature

All that food

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Other people’s words about … not eating

Mae doesn’t look convinced, but she hands me another bowl, which I pass to TJ. He holds it in the space between us, locking eyes.
You didn’t take any, he says.
I took plenty, I say. I’m stuffed.
No. I watched you.
You must’ve blinked.
Then try some more.
I just told you–
Don’t be a dick, says TJ.
Boys, says Mae.
Her voice is terse enough to shut us up.
Mae holds our gaze until we’ve settled. Then she pours more wine into her coffee mug, twirling her food with a fork.
It’s been too long since we’ve been together, says Mae. Let’s make it a nice evening.
So TJ shoves the bowl of tomatoes my way. I scoop more onto my plate. Then I take bites from the spaghetti and the chicken, and it’s all delicious, and the three of us eat silently, until there’s something like a hum between us.
Is the bathroom still in the same place, I ask.
Mae points down the hallway. I don’t look at TJ when I stand. But once I’ve locked the door behind me, I turn on the faucet, and it’s maybe another five seconds before all that food leaves me.

from ‘Family Meal‘
by Bryan Washington

When I was a teenager receiving treatment for an eating disorder, people had certain fixed ideas about what kind of person was likely to experience anorexia. By ‘people’, I mean not just family and friends but doctors, psychiatrists, medical researchers. Anorexics, people thought then (because that was what we called people with anorexia in those years, anorexics, a label that many people would now object to), were generally white, middle-class, well-educated, high-achieving, likeable young women with a tendency towards perfectionism.

Perhaps, back then, this was true. Or perhaps, more likely, if you were anorexic but you happened to be male, poor, uneducated, older than twenty-five, queer, or a person of colour — or any combination of these things — then your anorexia went unrecognised. Undiagnosed. Untreated.

We know better than this now, I am thankful to say.

Fringe Lily, December 2023.

In the passage I’ve quoted above, Cam, one of the narrators of Bryan Washington’s second novel, Family Meal, is grieving the loss of his boyfriend, Kai, who died in unexpected, violent circumstances. Cam is Black and queer; he is also addicted to many things, including drugs, sex and, yes, starving himself. He is surrounded by friends who see what he is doing to himself and try to talk to him about it, try to show him that they see, and that they care, and that he doesn’t need to be alone. It takes him a long time to see this for himself, though.

Cam’s experience of struggling with food is different from mine, and that’s partly because of who each of us is — precisely because I did, after all, fit most of the anorexic stereotypes I’ve listed above — although it’s also partly because everyone’s struggle with food is, simply, different. But I am so glad, so glad, that contemporary literature that includes stories about anorexia and disordered eating has broadened to include other stories than ones like mine.

And it’s funny how, no matter what your background, no matter what your life experience, the feelings don’t change. I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself, Cam writes.

I remember feeling exactly the same.

After the rain, Flooded scrub, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Solace

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Other people’s words about … stepping outside

I went outside. Often I walked till the late hours. The sky’s was a darkness I could deal with. I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else: before and after, death and life, sea and self. Being out there — in towns where I spoke to no-one, in green deserted parks, along the edge of the gulf’s water — allowed me to turn inwards. It reflected the silence I felt in me. I wanted to be outdoors for good. Yes, I went outside.

from ‘The Memory Artist‘
by Katherine Brabon

Pasha, the narrator of Katherine Brabon’s novel The Memory Artist, is a Russian man in his mid-thirties, a writer trying to make sense of his life post-glasnost, post-perestroika. While the story in Brabon’s novel is about the effect of political repression on people, and particularly on artists, I found uncanny echoes in Pasha’s voice of my own thoughts and feelings (although not, clearly, in response to any political repression or trauma, neither of which I have experienced).

Sky and Sea, Snapper Point, April 2023.

I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else, Pasha writes, by which he means not that he wants to stop living, but that he wants to accord his own values to this life he is living. Where he finds it most possible to do this is outside, under the great arch of the sky.

It’s a similar impulse, I think, that makes running so appealing to me — running through the scrub, running on the beach, running beside the sea. It’s outside where I find some of the things I most long for in life: silence, neutrality, the sense that I could (if I went on running long enough, if I stayed outdoors long enough) dissolve.

Sometimes, when I’m inside going about my day — working, sleeping, eating, showering — I remind myself that the sky is just a few steps away, literally at my feet. It feels to me like the very definition of solace.

Sun and shadow, Aldinga Beach, April 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

An apology of sorts: today’s list is lengthy, I know, but it’s been a while since I last posted here, and meanwhile I’ve been enjoying my online reading! I hope you will dip in and out of the list below and find something that you enjoy.

Roar

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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.

How to go on

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Other people’s words about … hard work

He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge. His own job involved the careful freighting of materials onto the platform where the crane rested on the water. There were times when he thought he’d get sick from the motion of the barge, the constant shifting underfoot. There were times when his hands hurt from lifting and pushing and turning, tightening the straps until they wouldn’t give, tightening them until it seemed impossible that anyone would ever be able to set them loose again. Days when his back ached and his stomach hurt and his hair was peppered with grit, when his eyes burned, and his nose burned from the stench of oil and of the river, which was dying a slow, choked death via a series of minor diversions. But then, on bright winter days, he’d look up and see the geese tracking across the sky, moving up there free as air, and he’d think that there was something beautiful left in the world. And he could go on like that, as long as there was something beautiful left in the world.

From ‘Filthy Animals‘

by Brandon Taylor

I work in a call centre, an office job, unlike Brandon Taylor’s character Hartjes in the passage above. It’s not a physically demanding job. Even so, there are days when my head aches from breathing in stale, recycled office air, when my hips ache from sitting too long, when my voice croaks from talking for hours on the phone, when my stomach hurts from choking down my emotion after a difficult phone call. In the end, just like Hartjes, I feel my job in my body.



Neighbourhood frangipani tree, Taperoo, April 2022.


What grabs me most in the passage above is the river, in all its symbolism, dying its slow, choked death. Like Hartjes, I find myself looking up from my day, seeking the sky, seeking the air, seeking a glimpse of beauty and wonder.

That brief hint of beauty. That brief reminder of how to carry on.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Still here

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Other people’s words about … the safety of books

I walk from the museum to the train and take it downtown where I get off and go to a coffee shop I used to go to before I worked full time. I was in grad school for six years — English literature, mid- to late-twentieth century, British and American, forgotten or actively discarded female writers: Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Lucia Berlin. There was a time when I thought giving books to other people — showing them their richness, their quiet, secret, temporary safety — could be a useful way to spend one’s life. I spent another five years as a part-time adjunct, waitress, admin assistant. Once, for six months, I wrote quizzes to accompany the bad books put out by an education corporation, but I was fired because I couldn’t keep my sentences short enough.

From ‘Want‘

by Lynn Steger Strong

It’s been a while since I posted here, for which I apologise. In the last few months I’ve moved house, lost my car in a car crash and sprained my ankle. In addition (and somewhat unexpectedly), the house I bought and moved into had no running water beyond a garden tap, and the sale of the house I moved out of fell through three days before settlement.



In the garden (1).

But I’m still here in the new house, still alive, still breathing. And Lizzie, the little cat who appeared in my garden at the old house two years ago, is with me, too. Though she still won’t allow human touch, she has managed the move quite splendidly so far. On the advice of the cat rescue organisation who helped me trap her and move her into the new house, I’m keeping her indoors for several weeks before attempting to allow her back outside. I hope that when I do open the door for her into the garden she’ll choose to stay with me.

I hope, I hope, I hope.



In the garden (2).

When I moved into my old house, there were no trees and the garden was a bare patch of ground covered with a pervasive weed called caltrop (three-corner jacks). I pulled out all the caltrop and then planted trees and watched them grow. When Lizzie arrived years later, she sat beneath the trees or wandered down the path beneath them from one end of the garden to the other. In the end, though I often think of myself as an indoor person, as someone who lives more richly in my inner world than the outer world, I found it far harder to leave those trees, that garden, than I did to leave the house itself.

My new house is bigger than the last one, and still within walking distance of the beach, but once again there are no trees. So I’m back to planting trees again, back to watching them grow.



Still within walking distance.

In the midst of it all, as the pandemic continues, as South Australia finally opens its borders to the rest of the world, I’ve also submitted a manuscript to my literary agent and written the first draft of another one. The manuscript I submitted to my agent is doing the rounds and has so far been rejected by six publishers, and I don’t know if it will ever be published. And the other manuscript, the first draft of which I’ve just completed — well, it’s still very much a first draft. It has a long, long way to go, many more drafts, before it will tell the story I want it to tell.

But both as a reader and as a writer, I still believe, like Lynn Steger Strong’s narrator in the passage I’ve quoted above, that giving books to other people — showing them their richness, their quiet, secret, temporary safety — [can] be a useful way to spend one’s life. After all this time, all these years, reading and writing still enrich my days and fill my life with purpose.

I’m still here. I hope you are, too.

Stumble

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Other people’s words about … being an adult

I’ve joked all my life about my complete incapacity with money. Nothing has made me more anxious than dealing with finances. Trying to do my accounts caused a fog in my brain, a feeling near panic. I sensed, with the same primitive instincts that locate danger, that money is something that invalidates me, that cancels me out. I was afraid of it, afraid of its mysterious mechanisms. I loathed it, and yet it ruled my life …

Before I was in my fifties, I had no idea, until an accountant added it up, how much I earned in a year. I couldn’t read my financial records and I didn’t possess the smallest notion of what to do if I did. To me, all these things were as punitive and arbitrary as the love of God, which passeth all understanding.

From ‘Monsters: A Reckoning‘

by Alison Croggon

For the last few years I have lived with a similar sense of incapacity at the edges of my awareness to the one that Alison Croggon describes in the passage above. My incapacity is partly, like Croggon’s, about financial matters: though I finally learned to manage to file my tax return in my early thirties, for example, I have yet to come to terms with superannuation and all its requirements. (I make flippant jokes to friends about how I plan to live in a tent after retirement. And then I say: ‘Besides, what’s retirement, anyway? I’ll have to keep working to pay my bills till the day I die.’)

But that fog in my brain that Croggon describes descends on me in other areas, too. I have been aware since my late twenties that I had lost, or couldn’t locate, several crucial documents of identity — my birth certificate, my Australian citizenship certificate. I stumbled along without these documents, managing to get by using my passport instead, until, around the time I began to avoid getting in planes, I let my passport lapse, too, until it no longer qualified as a document that could establish my identity.

And still, even then, I put off applying for a replacement birth certificate or citizenship certificate. I was terrified that I would find once I started the application process that I wouldn’t qualify for those documents anymore. I was terrified I would no longer be able to prove that I am who I am. (Whoever that is.) I was terrified, in other words, that the application process would, as Croggon puts it, cancel me out.



Fog at Deep Creek.

I have lived my life like this for years. Decades, even. But in the space of the last three weeks — and I apologise for the clumsiness of the segue here, but it is all I can muster — in addition to re-establishing my identity and regaining my papers, I have bought a house and I have sold a house. Somewhere in those last three weeks I have also walked through a doorway out into the sunshine — a real, physical doorway, I mean, not a metaphorical one — and rolled my ankle, possibly tearing a ligament (still trying to figure that out). As a result of this I find myself now, quite literally, limping and stumbling through my days.



After the fog cleared.

I apologised earlier for the clumsiness of my segue, but the clumsiness I was referring to, though not intentional, was hardly coincidental. Though it shames me to say this, I find it impossible to talk with any grace or even with any sense of safe passage about the things I have been doing recently: proving my identity, applying for home loans, buying and selling and moving house. They are things that most people have to do at some point in their lives in our society, I know, but going through them makes me feel sick enough, my stomach churning, my head spinning. Talking about it, writing about it, processing it is too much. That fog in the brain again.

It takes a certain level of privilege to be in the position I am in, to have got through my life the way I have till now: no questions to answer, no endless need to prove who I am. The colour of my skin, the family I am part of, the certainty that I am lucky enough to feel about my gender and sexuality, the generation I was born into — all of these things have allowed me, and will continue to allow me, to choose to make myself powerless in the ways I have chosen to till now.



Deep Creek reflections.

And yet. That doesn’t mean the terror isn’t real. It doesn’t mean the choices I’ve made haven’t felt instinctive, primitive, inevitable; it doesn’t mean they haven’t felt like choices at all. It doesn’t mean I won’t keep limping through the days, wondering when I will be able to walk — or maybe, one day, even run? — again.

Lately I’ve been reading …

  • Through the Window: Rather than a number of articles, today I’m sending you this link instead, the Griffith Review‘s wonderful series of essays about the experience of living through the coronavirus pandemic. If you are interested in any kind of coronavirus chronicles, I can highly recommend any of the essays on this list.

Legacy

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Other people’s words about … a beached whale

For as long as there have been humans, the whale has been a portentous animal. A whale warrants pause — be it for amazement, or for mourning. Its appearance and its disappearance are significant. On the beach, an individual whale’s [beaching and] death may not prove ‘global’ in the way of its body powering down abruptly, like a switch being flicked, but, in a different sense, the deaths of whales today are global. The decline of a sperm whale — [its belly, when dissected post-mortem,] filled with sheeting and ropes, plant-pots and hosepipes — belongs to a class of environmental threat that, over the past few decades, has become dispersed across entire ocean systems, taking on transhemispheric proportions. This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control, but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception, and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.

From ‘Fathoms‘

by Rebecca Giggs

If you want to read only one book about climate change, and if you want that book to be one whose narrative ranges from the scientific to the literary to the philosophical to the emotional, and if you want it to be a book that explores metaphors and symbols right alongside facts and evidence, then Rebecca Giggs’s book is the one I’d encourage you to read. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, Giggs writes of climate change. But if you read her book you will come closer to understanding.

Vista.

 

I’ve been quiet here on my blog recently, mostly because it’s hard to know what to say right now. The global pandemic continues. So does the climate emergency. And so, too, does my own little life, which I continue to pass by walking on the beach, by showing up to work, by writing a book that I hope one day will be published, by (maybe) moving house, and by growing older but not necessarily any wiser.

The pictures in today’s post come from a holiday I took last month in Deep Creek, a national park in the heart of the Fleurieu Peninsula. In my next post, I’ll feature more photos from the same part of the world, a part of the world so beautiful it’s hard not to feel your heart break with wonder and awe as you move through it.



Grasstree world.

Transhemispheric. That’s not a word I’ve come across before, but it’s an apt one to use if you’re trying to comprehend the size of humanity’s impact on the natural environment. I thought about that, too, while I was in Deep Creek. I thought and thought and thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Treasure your beautiful world

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Wild Geese (a poem by Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

It was the wonderful Gena Hemshaw who introduced me to Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wild Geese’, and I have loved it ever since. Like Gena, I’ve found that the poem comforts me in times when the thoughts in my head are loud and tangled. And like Oliver herself, I’ve sought comfort in nature for many years. Looking up at the sky and down at the ground and out to the horizon reminds me of my place in the world. It heals me, if only temporarily.



Light on water.

 

But how true are Oliver’s words these days? How much longer can we find solace in nature if by nature what we mean is the way things are naturally, the way things have always been and the way they always will be?

It is impossible to ignore the discussion scientists and environmentalists are now having across the world about the climate crisis, the climate emergency. (That is, it’s impossible to ignore unless — and forgive me for saying this, but I will say it anyway — unless you are a white, male, middle-aged politician who thinks only about getting re-elected for another term of leadership.) It is impossible, too, to ignore the evidence of it as we go about our days. Wildfires, polar ice melt, rising land and sea temperatures, coral bleaching, floods, not to mention pandemics — here they all are, right in front of our faces.

These days when I read Mary Oliver’s words I feel despair rise thick in my throat.



Clouds above water.

 

I work very hard to inject a positive note in the posts on this blog. I don’t intend this to be a site for depression and maudlin pondering. But I cannot find a positive note to interject here when it comes to our changing natural environment.

I can only urge you, each and every one of you, myself included, to read Oliver’s poem often, to experience the feelings that arise in you as you read it, and to do what you can, in whatever way you can, to treasure this beautiful world while we still have it. Meanwhile the world goes on, Oliver says, but does it anymore?



Dying light.

 

Lately I’ve been reading …

Chasing clouds

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Other people’s words about … getting lost

I said earlier that I have no special running talents. In fact, I have one: getting lost.

No-one gets lost like I do. It’s not just a running thing. It’s a getting lost thing.

I’ve been lost when running, walking, driving, cycling, sailing, using public transport, even (once) taking a taxi, on at least three continents, since I first ventured out into the world as an unaccompanied teenager. I’ve temporarily abandoned a car in Milton Keynes, and once phoned [my wife] Clare from the outskirts of Northampton to warn her that I might not find my way home for days. I’ve never been lost on a running track (yet), but I have been lost indoors — not just temporarily disoriented, but properly, sit-down-and-cry-and-wait-to-die lost — on a disastrous visit to the Birmingham branch of Ikea.

From ‘Running Free’
by Richard Askwith

I am someone who gets lost as easily as Richard Askwith. I live in Australia, not England, so I’ve never got lost in Milton Keynes or Northampton, but I have certainly been to the Adelaide branch of Ikea and experienced that sense of utter lostness that he so delightfully describes as sit-down-and-cry-and-wait-to-die lost. (Though, actually, I would call that particular kind of ‘lost’ an Ikea thing rather than a getting lost thing. Just saying … )


Dune’s counterpane:
How can you ever feel lost when these are the things you see along your way?

I don’t just get lost physically, either. I frequently feel lost in a metaphorical sense, too. I admire anyone who seems to know (or who feels as though they know) where they are going in life. I don’t. I never have. The older I get, the more strongly I become aware of my inner sense of lostness.

Often, this innate sense of lostness feels like a burden. But not always. Because the thing about setting off towards one place and ending up somewhere else entirely, somewhere you hadn’t planned on and don’t recognise at all, is that you get the chance to explore.


Lizzie the garden cat:
A lost cat, but also a found one.

I’m talking metaphorically here again, of course. But the older I get, the more strongly I also come to understand the importance of being willing to explore, willing to wander, willing to wonder. And sometimes, in hopeful moments, I see many years of exploring and wandering and wondering ahead of me.

I like that thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Perspective

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Other people’s words about … the way we look at things

In the sky [above the garden] a plane glints, tiny as a metal cracker toy, and draws a roar reduced to a whisper after it, as it follows the flight path over Bexford Hill towards distant Heathrow. There’s always a plane up there if you look, near or far, visible or only betrayed by a line of vapour, but always moving westwards … It’s as if the aeroplanes were part of the mechanism of the garden; a necessary part. As if this tidy patch of lawn surrounded by its fence, with its brilliant blossoms too many to count and its coiled yellow hose, together formed the bottom half of a machine of bliss, which required for its complete working the dome of sky above, and for the furthest component of its clockwork the timekeeping planes on their celestial track. Patiently they tick from east to west. Or perhaps they are joined to the sky, and it is the sky that is moving, a blue sphere studded with occasional silver that cranks around, and around, and around.

From ‘Light Perpetual’
by Francis Spufford

I love the way Francis Spufford, in the passage above, turns on its head the way we usually look at a place that is deeply familiar to us to create a whole new way of looking at it.

Sometimes maybe that’s all we need, right? A new perspective.

One day this week: A blue world.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been busy editing and working and making, meanwhile, small decisions about the way I plan to work from now on. I say they were small decisions and they were, really, but in some ways — the best ways — they have transformed the way I feel about how I live my daily life.

Over the years I’ve read a great deal about the benefits of cognitive behavioural therapy, which in essence is a therapy that aims to help a person change the way they think so that they can overcome their own particular mental obstacles.


Another day the same week: A grey world.

But I’ve never found much resonance in cognitive therapy. For me, it’s less about changing the way I think about things than it is about changing the way I see things.

Semantics, you think? Maybe. But it works for me.

Lately I’ve been reading …