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.

A question

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

Other people’s words about … therapy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Replenish

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

Other people’s words about … being alone

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

from ‘Cold Enough for Snow‘
by Jessica Au

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

Garden pickings (1), October 2022.

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

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

Truly: why not?

Garden pickings (2), October 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Roar

September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, blogging, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, What I love about ..., WinterTagged Jennifer Down, Pulse Points2 Comments

Other people’s words about … country and city life

Ramesh was used to the sounds of the suburbs. He never noticed barking dogs or level crossings. On the train to work every morning he turned up the volume of his audiobook so it was louder than other passengers’ mobile phone conversations. But [tonight he was in] the country [and it] roared. He could hear the air move in the trees. He had grown up in Croydon, moved to Glasgow at seventeen, back to London at twenty-three, then Sydney at thirty-six. As a child he’d stood outside his parents’ bedroom listening to his father’s whistling snore. He liked living in places where he could hear others alive. He reached for his phone where it sat charging. For an instant he saw his hands illuminated in the bluish light of its screen. He set his rain sound app to the setting called ‘Harbour Storm’.

‘What are you doing?’ Henry croaked. His face was pressed to the pillow. ‘You don’t need that tonight.’

Ramesh opened his mouth to argue, then he heard the rain outside, like gunfire on the corrugated iron roof.

from ‘Pulse Points‘
by Jennifer Down

I love this passage, not because I’m in accordance with Ramesh, but for the opposite reason. I love the ‘roar’ of the country. I spend most of my time living in a house in the suburbs. It’s close to the beach, which I love, but it’s even closer to the railway line, a line that trains zip up and down every half an hour from five in the morning until midnight.

Sunset, early August 2022.

I don’t mind the sound of trains, actually — as suburban sounds go, I find it vaguely comforting — but when I leave my house to stay outside the city, to visit Aldinga Scrub or to camp in Yorke Peninsula, I feel a knot inside my chest of which I wasn’t even aware releasing itself.

Sounds I love when I am away from the city: the dull roar of the ocean at the end of the road (yes, another roar). The whistle of a hot wind through the trees. A frogmouth letting out its low, persistent, booming call at dusk. A shrike thrush singing. A magpie warbling. Frogs croaking. Insects clicking in the grass. And, yes, like Ramesh, the rain drumming on the roof.

Still, the photo accompanying my post today, like so many of my photos on this blog these days, comes from the suburban beach at the end of the street I live on. The sand is being eroded away and there are car parks dotted along the coast line and on most weekends a food truck selling hot donuts sets up shop during daylight hours.

But it’s still the beach. It’s still wide and beautiful and open and … The sea still roars.

Lately I’ve been reading …

It’s a lengthy list today, because I’ve been reading far more than I’ve been posting. But I hope you find something interesting below.

- There is an extremely pale woman with purple-black stains on her fingertips, and one poor soul who is writhing in agony with abdominal pain but nobody can understand the language he is speaking: Maggie O’Farrell on the unexpected long-term side effects of Covid.
- I’m shocked by how quickly people have normalized the pandemic and our governments’ response to it—how easily they write off those lockdown months as a period when ‘nothing happened’, when in fact the unthinkable happened: Claire Pollard, also writing about Covid-19, in her case about bearing witness, or why we should write about what is happening now.
- Publisher’s Marketplace, the industry website that logs book deals, is doing away with the women’s fiction category, finally. Fiction will be commercial, or it will be literary, or it will reside in a genre category that doesn’t make such explicit assumptions about gender: Cara Blue Adams on Melissa Banks, women’s fiction, and why it’s not all chick lit. I haven’t read Banks yet, but I will, now I’ve read Adams’s article.
- Writing is an attempt to keep it together: Ella Risbridger, in a wonderful, thoughtful piece on memoir, fiction, love, loss, pain and writing.
- In the ocean’s shadowy twilight zone, between 600 and 800 metres beneath the surface, there are fish that gaze upwards through their transparent heads with eyes like mesmerising emerald orbs: Helen Scales on the wonderful barreleye fish.
- I take it for granted that books are good for us: David L Ulin on the virtues and joys of reading.

Only [dis]connect

August 4, 2022September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, WinterTagged Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl5 Comments

Other people’s words about … beauty

I wondered if a more complex language like [my mother’s native language] Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.

Jenny asked the question so simply — ‘Okay, what do you want to talk about?’ — and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans — which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty? — when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. ‘So — what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, it was fine.’

from Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier

I thought of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? when I read the passage above. In Beautiful World, Rooney’s characters variously mourn the loss of the sense they used to have that they were moving through a beautiful world, or they lament the ugliness of the everyday world, or they remark upon what Rooney calls a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.

Sunset, early July 2022.

I think this is what Kyuoung Frazier’s narrator is getting at. She wants to tell Jenny about the beautiful world she sees all around her — but Jenny, like everyone else in the narrator’s life, either doesn’t want to hear what she has to say or doesn’t know how to hear it.

Some years ago when I was going through a difficult patch, a friend of mine offered to exchange a daily photograph with me via text message. ‘We’ll just send each other a picture of something we see,’ she said. ‘Something we like. Something that makes us smile. We’ll share our pictures, and it’ll be a way to reach out. To say hello.’

Dune flowers, early July 2022.

We ended up exchanging daily photographs for over a year, and it was a way to say hello, but it was also so much more. What I loved most about our exchange, beyond the sense of connection it gave me with another human being, was the knowledge that we were each finding something beautiful in our day and then sharing it with someone else. Passing the beauty on.

Maybe we should all share more beauty. Maybe it doesn’t matter if beauty is fleeting and makes us feel fragile. Maybe that’s exactly why we should keep on sharing it.

Before sunset, early July 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I feel like I’m 22 again. Just absolutely and utterly lost: Carmen Maria Machado on writing, loss, depression, anxiety … and being older than twenty-two.
- James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which was initially ridiculed as ‘New Age’ nonsense, now makes up the basis of much of climate science: Helena Horton on the life of Lovelock, who died recently at the age of 103.
- In The Last Walk, Jessica Pierce writes, ‘When we commit to owning an animal, we must commit all the way to the bitter end, as in a marriage’: Keshia Naran Badalge on seeing her beloved dog Shandi through to her death. I have to confess that ultimately I found Badalge’s piece troubling, and I would love to know what you think about it. Badalge says she thought of Shandi as her sister, but this was a ‘sister’ whom Badalge abandoned for ten years while she went off to live her own life in another country. Is that love? How much does one old dog have to forgive? What do you think?
- Part of our confusion today is tied to a belief that happiness and personal growth should organise all of our decisions about relationships, which is a relatively recent disposition in Western societies: Joshua Coleman on why the pursuit of happiness above all else is not always the best resolution when you feel you are struggling in a relationship, why our fervour for ‘happiness hacks’ (my term, not his) may be misplaced, and why Durkheim had a point.

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.

Mysterious

May 27, 2022Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the sea, the skyTagged ageing, anxiety, books, conversation2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shining sea, Late May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Only connect: Reunion

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

Other people’s words about connection

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

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

Sunlight and trees, April 2022.

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

Grasstree, May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve learned not to fear those little one-and-a-half moments of boredom: Ashley Moor on why deleting her Instagram account changed her life for the better.

It was not who he was —- I now see our striking differences, how often we fought, the way we tore open old wounds, our ruthlessness with each other — but rather a belief I had absorbed during our time together, that I was worthy of no one else’s love: Sanae Lemoine on heartbreak and chocolate cake.

Hope for Planet Earth: The citizen’s guide to climate change: A curated reading list on climate change.

I had no words for what I was going through. I felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck no one else had experienced, and I was afraid of infecting other people with my newfound darkness. I continued to hide it even as I longed for someone to see it, save me from it: Amanda Bestor-Siegal on the wordlessness of grief.

A very ugly future: Oliver Milman on why investment in primary pandemic prevention, not in vaccinations, is the way forwards as the likelihood of further pandemics due to climate change increases.

How to go on

April 17, 2022Posted in anxiety, Autumn, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., workTagged moments of beauty2 Comments

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 …

He was telling me how he liked writing, but he had a real block because it never came out on the page how it felt in his mind, and he just couldn’t stand the gap between the two: Aimee Bender on writing by the seat of your pants.

If Miocene Earth had the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as we have currently, why aren’t we living in the same conditions? It’s a matter of time lags: there’s a delay as the climate equilibrates with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The planet will eventually catch up. A Miocene climate is coming. It’s like seeing the flash of a far-off explosion, but the shockwave hasn’t yet reached us: Mark Bullock on how the human body will experience global warming.

We can never entirely escape from human-centric narratives of nature; they have always been our primary means of interpreting and coming to terms with the landscapes in which we find ourselves: Richard Smyth on why nature writing must not descend into poetic self-absorption.

Absolution

April 6, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, books, depression, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the sky, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged anxiety, despair, mental health3 Comments

Other people’s words about … being loved

We were sitting on a cushioned bench [in the pub]. Eddie had one thick thigh crossed over the other, and he was wagging his right foot gently. He was wearing beautiful Italian brogues and talking to the man next to him, laughing at something a little too loudly, and then suddenly he turned to me, rested his hand on my leg and asked softly was I okay.
‘You okay there, pet? Can I get you something?’
It was there in the tone. I knew that I was loved as I had never been before. I don’t mean that Eddie loved me with remarkable passion or insight. I don’t mean that I felt most fully myself with him. I mean that, in the strangest way, I felt forgiven. For as long as I could remember there’d been a vague disquiet in me, as if I lived in the shadow of some humiliation whose particulars I could not recall. Until Eddie, until he absolved me, I hadn’t known there was any other way to feel.
From ‘When Light is Like Water‘
by Molly McCloskey

In the last few years I’ve noticed that when I’m reading a book or watching a movie the two kinds of scenes that most move me are those where two people connect for the first time (mostly, though not always, through falling in love) and those where someone forgives someone else.

Both kinds of scenes make me cry. I’m still not sure whether my tears come from a place of catharsis or from a place of yearning.

Port Adelaide, early April 2022.

I particularly love how Molly McCloskey’s narrator, Rachel, elucidates her experience of falling in love with her first husband in the passage above: how she moves away from romance to something gentler, and kinder, and deeper.

Like Rachel, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live with a sense that I was inherently wrong, flawed, in need of forgiveness. I sense that my experience is a relatively common one, but I also sense that in me the feeling is perhaps particularly strong.

Aldinga wetlands, April 2022.

How to manage anxiety: Be kind. Be curious. I read these words somewhere once. I remind myself of them from time to time. In their simplicity and compassion, they are helpful. What McCloskey’s narrator Rachel understands in the passage above is that kindness is inherent in true love. I think that’s why her words move me so much.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I felt a wasteland of sorrow. Too much of my own life had been spent wondering if what was wrong with me was a deficiency of character: Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness.

It’s the rhythm, I say defensively: Sarah Moss on why she likes to knit and run.