Paths – twenty-one words

Solace

April 9, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walking, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged Katherine Brabon, The Memory Artist4 Comments

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.

- The life of a writer is a life of rejection, but that’s OK. It’s the process that I love. I get so much joy from the work of creation, immersing myself in the craft and the research and the interesting things you discover, that publication often feels somewhat incidental: Claire Egan, on why we write even when no-one reads what we write.
- No man in my lifetime has ever done nonchalant beauty better than Pitt, certainly none of his immediate peers: Lucas Mann in an astonishing piece about Brad Pitt, peanut butter, fame, masculinity, beauty, grief for a lost sibling and what it feels like as a man to hate the body you live in.
- I bleached my conversations of Chinese: Angie Kang, in a graphic essay for the now defunct wing of Catapult magazine about the experience of growing up in the Chinese diaspora, and on how you can’t boil down Chinese culture — or indeed any culture not our own — to food, however harmless and appealing and even, yes, inclusive it may feel to do so.
- There is a woman I sometimes see at the gym. She is in her eighties and has regular private lessons with a coach, working on her press handstands. I don’t know her story, but I know her secret. There is no age limit to defying gravity. I plan to keep at it forever: Writer Rae Meadows, on finding a new passion in her fifties.
- I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post: Poet Maggie Smith on the age-old division of labour in marriages.

Please

January 20, 2023January 20, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, depression, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, summer, workTagged Oliver Mol, Train Lord7 Comments

Other people’s words about … chronic pain

I told [my parents] how that afternoon I had actually gone and seen another psychologist [for help with my chronic migraine]. I was just feeling so low and so down, and a friend had recommended her, and she could squeeze me in. I told her the pain would come and the pain would go, and that I couldn’t control it, that some days I would be fine, more than fine, ecstatic, but that other days the pain would return and I would slide into a depression so deep I could not see my way out. I told her I felt like a rat in an experiment, a rat made to drink water — sometimes the water was normal but other times the water shocked with an electricity so violent that I would swear never to drink it again, but then I would see everyone else drinks water and I would wonder why I couldn’t do that too. I told her I just wanted to drink the water. Sometimes I could, but mostly I couldn’t and I never knew when. I told her I just wanted to know why. It had been years since I’d had the initial migraine, but even now, right then, the pain had returned and I couldn’t read or write or — I told her I was sick of being an experiment, that I just wanted answers, someone to help. Then I asked her if she could help. I asked if she’d ever heard of anything like this before and then I told her please. I said, Please, I would just really appreciate it if you could help, and she just smiled and told me she’d seen it all before. Then she got out a piece of paper and a pen and told me to rewrite negative self-thoughts as positive self-thoughts. I asked her what she meant. She said, Well, you could rewrite ‘I am worthless’ as ‘I am special’; ‘I am alone’ as ‘I am loved’; ‘I am useless’ as ‘I am capable’. And then she sat back and pushed the pen and paper towards me and told me to try. I told Mum and Dad I just got up and left, then — because I knew she was just the same as everyone else — full of bullshit just like the whole world was full of bullshit. I told them it was like I was eight years old, and everyone was playing pretend.

from ‘Train Lord‘
by Oliver Mol

There was a period in my life some years ago when a headache settled over me which, despite all the cures and treatments I tried in response to it (both conventional and alternative) would not fade away. Unlike the chronic headache that Oliver Mol describes seeking treatment for in the passage above, my headache wasn’t a migraine: the pain I experienced was of a milder kind, what doctors call a tension headache. This meant that, unlike Mol, I could still function. That is to say, I could still present to the world an image of myself functioning. Unlike him, I could still read and write; I could still watch television and use computers; I could still get myself to work.

Still, the pain during that period was omnipresent. It varied in intensity: sometimes it was faint, just a light tingling sensation at the edge of my eyelids or (oddly) inside my nose; sometimes it was strong and persistent, as though someone had lodged a heavy, blunt object (a hammer? a mallet?) into the top of my head and was pressing this object — pressing and pressing it — down into my skull. Sometimes the headache made me feel dizzy and sick, and this, because of my phobia about vomiting, triggered bouts of anxiety that weakened my ability to cope with the pain. On days like that, I felt desperate. I made a mask of my face in social contexts; I disappeared from my desk at work to cry behind the closed door of a toilet cubicle; I made excuses and went home early from gatherings (or didn’t go to them at all). I felt myself, or the person I thought of as myself, slowly disintegrating.

I hadn’t known until then how much my sense of myself as a social creature, and as a socially worthy creature, was predicated on an assumption of my good health. I’ve since learned that this is an experience common to people experiencing chronic pain or illness, but I didn’t know that then.

Aldinga Scrub, summer flooding, January 2023.

Mol’s migraine lasted ten months initially (although later it returned for another few months). My headache faded away around the two-year mark. I still don’t know why, really — whether the cure was due to something I did, or to one of the treatments I tried, or simply to plain luck. Sometimes it returns, settling over me for a day, or a few days, or a week, or a few weeks — but eventually it leaves again. And because of this, because the pattern has changed, because I know now, or at least allow myself to assume, that the pain is only temporary, I have learned simply to wait it out when it visits. To let it run its course.

And yet. That word: temporary. And then I told her please, Mol writes, and that’s what it feels like, even now, when I’m in the midst of a long headache: a prayer to someone, anyone, to make sure that the pain is only temporary, that it won’t take over again the way it did for those two years. Because once you’ve felt it, you never forget it: the way pain changes you, the way it writes itself on you, the way it renders you powerless. The way it robs you of yourself.

This, I think, is what Mol’s psychologist failed to see. Perhaps the worst thing, when you are experiencing chronic pain or illness, is the sense of betrayal that accompanies your pain. You feel, first, as though your body has betrayed you, this body you have been lucky enough never really to have thought about before, which until now has performed for you mostly without pain or grievance; and then, second, as though the people around you — the ‘experts’ you have consulted — have betrayed you, too, with their so-called treatments and cures, with the promises they make you, with the money they take from you, all to no end; and then, third, as though the world itself has betrayed you, in its refusal to operate in a way that is manageable or meaningful for you in your pain.

If, in the end, you are lucky enough to get relief from your pain, what you never quite forget is that when you were in pain, you changed. You no longer knew yourself. You became a person who said, Please.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- The truth is that writing a novel is often a long, crude, insecure business with a dubious outcome. You can spend years and years not sure of what you’re doing, writing something that in the end may not be great, and that perhaps no one will read. No one may read it even if it is great: Suzanne Berne, in a wonderful piece on why novelists write novels and why readers read them. As both a writer and a reader, I find what she has to say here illuminating and encouraging.
- None of the trappings of literary success — which can be quick, and flashy, and very exciting — can substitute for the (singular, difficult, slow, and at times unbearable) work of writing: On a related theme, Carmen Maria Machado on writing for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of success.
- Bio-based plastics are problematic for a variety of reasons: Matt Simon on the problem of replacing the fossil fuel industry with the bioplastics industry — and why, in the end, instead of replacing one product with another, we need to stop producing altogether.
- I felt stuck and couldn’t shake off the black, crushing feeling: Eric Kim on depression, solitude, beautiful boys and lobster tails.

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.

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.

Revelation

July 10, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, depression, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walking, Winter, writingTagged bushwalking, conversation2 Comments

Other people’s words about … secrets

‘Philip,’ [his mother Rose] said. ‘There are things I could tell you.’
‘Tell them,’ Philip said.
‘No.’
‘Why not? I’m prepared.’
She turned, looked at [Philip’s father Owen] slumped on the sofa. ‘Because I don’t believe that just because something’s a secret it therefore by definition has to be revealed,’ Rose said. ‘Keeping certain secrets secret is important to — the general balance of life, the common utility.’
From ‘The Lost Language of Cranes‘
by David Leavitt

I have always been fascinated by people like Philip’s mother Rose in the passage above: people who keep their own counsel. I have a tendency to do the opposite — to over-share, to talk to people for advice, to feel guilty if the life I lead isn’t entirely transparent. I’m not sure why. I may just be wired that way, but I suspect that years of therapy during adolescence and early adulthood ingrained this way of being in me. When you are used to talking things through with someone on a weekly basis, it can feel odd — unsafe, even — once you stop.

Gnarled trunk, early July 2022.

I like Rose’s matter-of-fact statement that secrets don’t have to be revealed. Sometimes, when I am uncertain about a course of action or a decision I have to make, I think of the oath that I’m told doctors must take: ‘First, do no harm.’ I find this oath, applied to life in general, one of the most useful creeds I know.

And so I find myself thinking that Rose may be right. If keeping a secret doesn’t harm anyone, then why feel compelled to reveal it? Why not learn to live in silence with one’s own truths?

Waterways, early July 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I finally understood, I think, that I keep running because it is the most concrete and effective way for me to feel alive, or at least the one way I know. In other words, I run because I’m afraid of dying: Andrea Marcolongo, on why she loves running (yes, another writer who loves running!).
- It’s never about mastery. That’s what I love about swimming. In the water, I’m always partially enabled, never certain, always at risk. If meditation requires an exploration of impermanence, swimming-meditation activates transience on the skin. Its embodied teaching flashes me into a fragile, tangible, barely hopeful body. It’s the best way I know to understand being a physical form in an unstable world: Still on the topic of movement, Steve Mentz’s love for swimming feels akin to my love for running. Though propelling your body through water is a different thing entirely from propelling it through the air, the sense of rhythm, coupled with a feeling of exertion that reminds us of our physical fraility, is much the same.
- The average individual in the top 10 percent of global earners —- and with the current Euro-to-dollar exchange rate, if you earn more than $39,100 a year, you qualify —- causes about 31 metric tons of annual carbon emissions each: Jag Bhalla on why technological innovation will not save the planet.
- We are creatures of tropical jungles as much as the savannah: Patrick Roberts on why we need to rethink our belief that we (humans) came from the savannah.
- We have always loved and loathed cats: Egill Bjarnason on the vexed issue of cats. I used to be one of those people who categorically believed that feral cats must be destroyed to prevent them from destroying the natural environment. Then Lizzie arrived in my life. She was feral and starving and living in my garden when I first encountered her. Since then, I have fed her, had her desexed, taken her with me when I moved house, introduced her to indoor life … and found myself surprised and moved by the joy and laughter she brings to my household. Bjarnason’s article raises all these topics and more — it’s fascinating reading.

Only connect: One moment apart

February 17, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, the sea, writingTagged coronavirusLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … connection

‘We should probably go back [to the party].’
‘We?’ Lionel shook his head. ‘You can do whatever you want. I think I’ll hang out here for a while.’
Charles sighed then. There, [standing] resting his cheek against the wall, he looked a little helpless. Lionel mirrored him, turning, resting his cheek against the cool plaster.
‘You mind if I hang?’
‘Suit yourself. Not my house,’ Lionel said, but then he saw it. Relief. Charles was shy too.
‘Okay, tough guy.’
Lionel felt their breathing sync. The eye contact had reached the point of being ridiculous, but it wasn’t uncomfortable or uneasy. Lionel wasn’t even sure if they were seeing each other anymore. His own eyes had gone slightly crossed, and Charles broke up into blurry segments. But they were in another moment apart. They had returned to their own tempo, just the two of them. Lionel felt free of other people’s expectations for how he should act and be. He felt free of his expectations for himself.
It was like kindness, as simple as that.
From ‘Filthy Animals‘
by Brandon Taylor

In my last post a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about not having the words to describe the life I live now, the life so many of us live now. And that hasn’t changed. I’m still feeling quiet, still waiting things out. In a sense, I think the whole world is in a waiting phase right now as we move into the third year of the coronavirus pandemic.

I feel as though I’m waiting myself out, too, until things make more sense again.

Port Adelaide, February 2022.

Meantime, moments like the one Brandon Taylor describes in the passage I’ve quoted above continue to bring me succour. As Taylor tells it, this is a moment passing between two people, a moment of wordless understanding. Whatever happens next to Charles and Lionel, we know that they will be richer for this moment they have shared.

When I read about moments like this, I feel richer, too.

Aldinga Beach, February 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I will always write, no matter what. I can’t not write. I also maintain a deep-seated desire to share my work with readers. And buried beneath this desire is my fear that my stories are only relevant if they’re published. The anxiety is rooted in a mix of writerly ego and a fear of mortality. After all, if I didn’t want to be read, I’d just write in a journal: Anjali Enjetion provides my only link today, writing a lovely piece on stepping off the publishing treadmill. It’s possible, though, she writes, that absent the pressures of capitalism and commerce, writing books with no intention of publishing them might liberate my storytelling in ways I’ve never considered. I read this and savoured it and read it again.

Wordless

January 28, 2022May 31, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, summerTagged coronavirus, the writing life5 Comments

Other people’s words about … the things we say

All that talking, years of reading: There was a time I thought that all language might contain something of value, but most of life is flat and boring and the things we say are too. Or maybe it’s that most of life is so much stranger than language is able to make room for, so we say the same dead things and hope maybe the who and how of what is said can make it into what we mean.
From ‘Want‘
by Lynn Steger Strong

I’ve been posting less and frequently on my blog over the last few months, I know. And it’s not, as you might think, because I have become more active on other (more instant) social media, though I can see the appeal of posting photographs (excluding selfies) on Instagram.

Spring flowers, Aldinga Scrub, 2021.

In fact my quietness on this blog is more to do with the fact that most of life is so much stranger than language is able to make room for, as Lynn Steger Strong puts it so wonderfully in the passage I’ve quoted above. The Covid-19 pandemic, now entering its third year globally, has left me feeling, in the truest part of me, wordless. I am surviving, for which I am grateful. I am getting on with my life. But I don’t know how to put that into words very well, or at least not in the form of a blog post. I enjoy blogging, and I like my space in the blogosphere, so I hope that this phase will pass. But in the meantime … here I am, not finding the language I need to say what I want to say.

Pathway, Aldinga Scrub, 2022.

Another reason for my quietness on this blog is that I’ve been doing a different kind of writing in my spare time recently, which is to say I’ve started writing fiction again. As I mentioned in my previous post, last year I submitted the manuscript of a middle-grade novel to my agent, who is currently trying to find a publisher for it. (No luck yet.) And now, somehow, I find myself writing a novel for adults. I don’t know whether any of the fiction I’ve written since the beginning of the pandemic will ultimately be publishable, but somehow, entirely unexpectedly, it seems that I’ve found the courage to try again, and because of that very unexpectedness, I’m allowing myself to honour my courage for now and see what happens.

Life continues, albeit quietly and unexpectedly, I suppose is what I’m saying. Sometimes I have the words for it and can compose a blog post about it and sometimes I don’t. But I will keep trying. That’s a promise.

Wordless, 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I try to be patient, perpetually astonished, forever open to surprise: Emily Alexander interviews seven writers about their day jobs.
I had a really frightening loneliness that felt fundamental to who I was, like it had maybe been in my body for as long as I’d been alive: Danielle Tcholakian on getting sober and learning to live with yourself.
The freedom to be happy … restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy: Heather Lanier on rearing a child with a disability and the American narrative of happiness that she strives not to employ.

Still here

November 27, 2021April 23, 2022Posted in blogging, books, favourite quotes, hope, life, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, Running, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I talk about when I talk about running, writingTagged coronavirus, running3 Comments

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

September 26, 2021September 26, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I talk about when I talk about running, Winter, workTagged coronavirus2 Comments

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

September 9, 2021April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walking, Winter, work, writingTagged COVID-19, nature2 Comments

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 …

With each new agent, each foray into the dangerous business of hope and each corresponding bevy of rejections … I found myself shrinking a little bit more, until one day the me I thought I was had completely disappeared: David Hollander on learning to surrender your expectations (and your ego) as a writer.

As climate change pushes rodent and sand fly habitat northward, scientists caution that in the future, an increasing number of U.S. residents could be exposed to different varieties of the flesh-eating parasite (the spread of Leishmaniasis and other flesh-eating bacteria): Agostini Petrini reminds us that Covid-19 isn’t the only contagion with zoonotic causes threatening us now and in the near future.

When your book is on submission, there’s a pressure of silence till you know the end, a secret you keep, assuming there will be a time when you can recount the story of how it all worked out: Danielle Lazarin on hope and despair in the writing life.