(tales from the birdgirl)
from ‘Conversations with friends’‘
by Sally Rooney
The image in today’s post doesn’t quite match the words, I’m afraid:
Still, it’s a pretty image, and perhaps it captures a little of the essence of Rooney’s soft spring day …
It rained all day before we went for dinner at Melissa’s. I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted.
from ‘Conversations with Friends‘
by Sally Rooney
I had to smile when I read these words. In the last years of his career, my father, who was a professor of English literature, taught an undergraduate course on poetry. Ever a traditionalist, he taught his students to appreciate the form of the poems they read as well as the words themselves.
Though I’ve never studied English literature at university level, through some mysterious form of osmosis I absorbed some of what my father was teaching his students. Through this process, I now have a passing acquaintance with terms like blank verse and iambic pentameter, and with poetry forms such as sonnets and villanelles. And I’m with my father on this: discipline is a vital ingredient in poetry writing. Where there is no recognisable form or structure to a piece of writing, there is no poem: there are just words on a page, with a few strikes of the return key employed for good measure.
Funnily enough, when I happened to mention to my father that I was writing this post, he alerted me to this piece by David Campbell in The Australian, which my mother had first pointed out to him. In it, Campbell bewails the lack of rhyme, metre and set forms in current Australian poetry. Perhaps these things will become fashionable again one day. We can only hope.
Meanwhile, do you have a favourite poem? What is it? Here are the links to some of mine (including one by David Campbell), each of which transcends the strict form in which they are written in order to produce something more than its parts:
Tea, by Jehanne Dubrow (a sonnet, and the excuse for my tea-themed photo today)
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, by Dylan Thomas (a villanelle)
On the Birth of a Son, by David Campbell (a sonnet)
The Watch, by Frances Darwin Conford (a strict rhyming system of which Campbell would most surely approve)
After Matthew left I lost the knack of sleeping. Brighton seemed unsettled and at night it was very bright … At periodic intervals throughout the day I felt that I was drowning, and it was all I could do not to fling myself to the ground and wail like a child. These feelings of panic, which in more sober moments I knew were temporary and would soon pass, were somehow intensified by the loveliness of that April. The trees were flaring into life: first the chestnut with its upraised candles and then the elm and beech. Amid this wash of green the cherry began to flower and within days the streets were filled with a flush of blossom that clogged the drains and papered the windscreens of parked cars.
from ‘To the River‘
by Olivia Laing
I continue to be fascinated with the notion of seasons, and how the idea of a season is as much a cultural and traditional one as it is a quantifiable or temporal one. Here in my part of South Australia, if you were to measure the year out using temperature and climate as your basic season markers, you might say that we begin the year in January and February with dry, glaring, windy heat. In March and April the weather is often warm and dry but the wind drops off; in May and June the days grow cold, though they remain frequently sunny and still. Somewhere around July and August, the serious clouds and rain begin; in September and October there may be both storms and patchy sun; in November and December the weather is dry and warm but variable.
That, at least, would be one way to mark out the seasons where I live.
But temperature and weather are only half the picture. Plant life and animal life have their own seasons, too. In the northern hemisphere, spring is often celebrated as a season of growth and birth, much as Laing describes it so vividly in the passage above, but here in South Australia, that season of growth is far more staggered and gradual. In late July, when the temperatures are still winter-cold, the native plants begin to flower, and the birds begin to build their nests. By November, that cycle of birth and growth has already begun to slow and drop off.
And then there are the different seasonal colours. Myself, I tend to think of July and August, in my own world, as the yellow months. So many of the native plants that flower at this time of the year have yellow blossoms: acacias, guinea flowers, groundsel flowers, punty bushes, bush peas, goodenias.
Many of the plants I’ve just named were in flower on one of my latest bushwalks, as you can see in the pictures accompanying this post. Everywhere I looked, from the tops of the trees right down to the ground, there were sprinklings of yellow.
So it was a yellow walk through a yellow world. Perhaps we should call this time of year the yellow season?
from ‘The World Without Us‘
by Mireille Juchau
This year, July was exceptionally dry in South Australia. Then August blew in and it has been bitterly cold, windy and rainy ever since.
There is a manic wind whipping through the treetops today … the sort of wind that’s somewhat unsettling and leaves me feeling a bit scratchy, Belinda Jeffery writes in her August 5 entry in her wonderful cookbook-cum-nature diary The Country Coobook. And I know what she means. In the middle week of August, I spent a week on holiday near the coast down south, and much of the time the squalls of rain were so frequent and unpredictable, there wasn’t much of a chance for me to get out.
Still, one morning mid-week the sun shone between showers and I risked a walk. I headed down a path that skirted wetlands and vineyards (on one side) and bush (on the other side) and then turned south to follow the path back into the bush.
The low-lying parts of the land along the trail had flooded. Beyond the reeds that bordered the flooded land, I saw trees with their trunks submerged, and waterbirds diving and swooping from branch to branch.
There was even a family of ducks.
If I crouched down to peek through the reeds, I could just see the green grassy banks rising above the flooded land, further within, beyond the path.
Once I’d walked far enough south, I turned west, deep into the bush, where there were no more floods, and where yellow blossom dotted the landscape (more about which in an upcoming post). But even as I walked, the sky darkened and the temperature dropped.
I made it home just before the next burst of rain …
From ‘Between a Wolf and a Dog‘
by Georgia Blain
I don’t have any photographs to accompany this post because I still haven’t yet managed to get the hang of the craft of night-time photography. But isn’t that a wonderful image of the sea at night? — that great black heaving beast, sighing and rolling. It makes me want to go for a night-time walk on the beach right now …
From ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle‘
by Shirley Jackson
He wasn’t a big man anymore. He wouldn’t be famous, like he’d dreamed as a kid, teaching himself to sign his name in all curved letters so he would be prepared to autograph a football. He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe.
from ‘The Mothers‘
by Brit Bennett
Each year, as the number of years I’ve lived on this planet grows, I feel my own life shrink in the scheme of things. And to my own surprise, I have come to find this process, in the words of the protagonist in the passage I’ve quoted above, comforting and safe rather than depressing.
Call it ageing …
… or perspective …
… or necessity.
Whatever it is — this passage to smallness, this losing yourself within the bigness of the world — can feel downright joyful, you know?
Note:
I’m not the only blogger who likes to reflect on their birthdays. I loved this post from Nicole from Eat this Poem , who reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Bight’ each year on her birthday. I had not come across this poem before and am so grateful Nicole has drawn my attention to it. It’s a beautiful poem, definitely worth reading each year (if not more often)!
Here, town finished, and countryside began. You crossed over, from pavements and shops, towards copses and streams, and meadows full of grazing cows. The streets and the fields seemed to push at each other, the city trying to sprawl further out and the fields resisting. The planners and architects and merchants would obviously win. What force had buttercups and earthworms and cabbages against the need of human beings for dwelling places, against developers’ chances to make money? Alive as a strange creature in an aquarium, the city stretched out its tentacles, grew and swelled, gobbling the pastures and hedgerows that lay in its path. Fields were bought, and new rows of houses built, and then the process repeated.
from ‘The Walworth Beauty‘
by Michèle Roberts
I first started visiting and spending time in Aldinga Beach almost twenty years ago, when it was still — just, almost — a country town. Ever since then, the city has been creeping up on it. Sometimes I think the encroaching suburbs are like an oil spill, seeping down the slopes of the hills from the north, all the way into the Scrub. And so, though the rural world at Aldinga Beach is very different from the nineteenth-century English one Michèle Roberts describes in the passage above, still her words seem apposite.
But the Scrub is still alive and I still make time to go there on days off, and whenever I’m wandering there, I feel hope. I took the pictures in today’s post one morning in late July. Though the sky was grey and the temperature was chilly, the first breath of spring had wafted over the Scrub, as I hope you’ll see below.
In flower that morning were flame heath bushes …
… and …
… grass trees.
I saw the first shy showing …
… of guinea flowers:
There were green shoots everywhere …
… after the recent rains.
And there were other plants budding, too. Like this:
And this:
And this:
In the southwest corner of the Scrub, where the land slopes down towards the coast, the kangaroos were snoozing …
… although they weren’t best pleased when I disturbed them:
Further on, I caught a flash of gold from the corner of my eye. It was a golden whistler darting about the branches of a tree beside the sandy path.
Whistlers don’t sing at this time of the year, but their plumage is as glorious as ever (though unfortunately faintly blurred in my photos):
So, yes, the tentacles of the city are reaching out in South Australia.
But still, the last remnants of the pre-urbanised world like Aldinga Scrub live on.
From ‘Hope Farm‘
by Peggy Frew
I’ve been out and about a lot again recently, on foot and on my bike. The photos in today’s post are from a stroll down south a few weeks ago, on one of the last days of June, before the winter rains began — finally, belatedly — to fall.
On this particular walk, I passed through an area where the bushland borders some new housing developments. Before those houses were built, the land had already been denuded of its natural vegetation: it was farmland for years, and then, when the land was sold off, it grew into bare, grassy paddocks.
And yet.
Despite the impact that humans have had on that land, still, as I walked over it, I swear I got a hint of Peggy Frew’s great, porous hide beneath my feet …
My Top 10 Tips for Health and Wellbeing
- Listen to your body
- Keep moving
- Get plenty of sleep
- Read the small print
- Eat out less; cook at home more
- Reconnect with nature
- Reduce your stress
- Appreciate the simple things
- Share the love
- Be grateful
from ‘Feel Good Good‘
by Valli Little
I am fascinated by other people’s tips for living well. I like Valli Little’s suggestions above, which are simple and practical, and come from years of experience.
My own strategies for living well vary, depending on my mood, but here are my current top ten:
1. Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. And some cake.
2. Move — however you can, whatever your physical limitations.
3. Step outside.
4. Read books.
5. Spend time with people you love. Let them know you love them.
6. Know that happiness and sadness are like the clouds and the wind. They blow in. They blow out.
7. Practise gratitude for how things are. Don’t fret about how they could be.
8. Enjoy solitude. Know that you can survive loneliness.
9. Cultivate humility.
10. Find things …
… that make your heart sing.
twenty-one words 