walking – twenty-one words

A sad place

April 19, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., out & about, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walkingTagged AI, books, Childhood, despair, editing, fiction, Intimacies, novel, reading, Tove Diveletsen, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … accessing feelings

The exams are over and we’ve had the graduation party at school. Everyone cheered now that they were leaving the ‘red prison’, and I cheered loudest of all. It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions. It’s as if I’m only moved by things that come to me indirectly. I can cry when I see a picture in the newspaper of an unfortunate family that’s been evicted, but when I see the same ordinary sight in reality, it doesn’t touch me. I’m moved by poetry and lyrical prose, now as always — but the things that are described leave me completely cold. I don’t think very much of reality.

From ‘Childhood‘
By Tove Ditlevsen

Some years ago an older woman said to me that she had noticed she didn’t cry very much anymore. She said that when she was younger she had been someone who cried easily, when she was sad, when she was angry, sometimes when she was happy. But now, in her seventies, the tears didn’t well up anymore.

I remember thinking that that wouldn’t be the case for me. I remember thinking that I would always be someone who cried a lot — too much, probably, rather than not enough. I have always cried copiously and easily and very often self-piteously. I have cried at the most inappropriate times, during moments that weren’t about me at all, moments when I should have been comforting someone, not dealing with my own emotions.

Largs Bay Jetty, April 2025.

And yet here I am, mid-fifties, and it’s happening to me, too. In the passage I’ve quoted above from Tove Ditlevesen’s memoir, Ditlevsen is describing the way she felt as a teenager, but the feelings she expresses in this passage describe the way I often feel now, the way the older woman I mentioned above also expressed feeling. It’s a feeling of seeing sad things, being moved by them, being aware that I’m sad about them even, but not being able to access the sadness itself directly. When I do cry, it’s usually, like the adolescent Ditlevesen, when the feeling is being conveyed to me through another medium — a book, a film, a poem, a song.

I miss crying. Perhaps that sounds odd or self-indulgent, but I miss the feeling that came when my eyes grew hot and tears fell down my cheeks and my throat tightened and my breath snagged. I miss the feeling of being there with my sadness, right there. I miss the feeling that follows a crying bout, too, that feeling of being healed, even if only temporarily.

The world is a sad place right now. People will say in response to this that the world has always been sad for someone somewhere, and that’s true. Partly, then, I say that it’s a sad place from a place of privilege, because I’ve experienced times when it seemed that there was a lot of hope in the world, if you could only learn to access it. Still, when I think about the climate crisis, when I think about Presidents Trump and Putin and Xi Jinping and Yoon Suk Yeol, when I think about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the world seems to me a very sad place indeed. Would it help if I were able to cry about this? I don’t know. Like the adolescent Divletsen, I don’t think very much of reality.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Technology appears to extend our connection … (but) while that’s true, it can’t replace intimacy: Willow Defebaugh on loneliness and longevity.
Sure, it’s voyeuristic (or pornographic if you like), and that’s part of the fun: T M Brown explores reality TV and his curious passion for it.
Our innocence is chipped away, often gently but sometimes brutally, by what happens to us. Gradually, innocence is transformed to experience, and we begin to understand who we are, how the world is, and what matters most to us: James Bailey asks people what is the meaning of life and receives a variety of answers.
The great American biologist EO Wilson predicted that human life would not long survive the demise of the invertebrates. But he also devised a plangent term for this epoch from ancient Greek: the Eremocene, a new, isolated place. Our era is not just the human-dominated Anthropocene; it is an age of loneliness: Patrick Barkham reflects on the role of invertebrates on Earth.

Like breath

October 23, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walking, writingTagged Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family1 Comment

Other people’s words about … places that reside within our hearts

During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3 AM, night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them — inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge fluorescent light) there are these frogs as loud as river, grunting, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocused by the brain — nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

I have just spent a week away in Deep Creek, having been chosen as this year’s lucky winner of the Deep Creek Residency for writers. I spent that week away writing, reading, bushwalking, running, writing again, then writing some more. It was a joyous time, the rarest privilege, to be given time away simply to write.

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

In our lives, I think that there are some places, connected to some times, that are somehow magic, that come to us through luck or stealth or a great deal of planning and then reside with us forever. These places become a part of the fabric of who we are, though we may not always understand why, and what we feel, when we think of them or remember them or revisit them, is a sense of awe — a sense of connection to something deeper than we can articulate.

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Deep Creek, place of grass trees and rolling hills and shrike thrushes calling in the trees, place of kangaroos and echidnas and sheep and shingleback lizards, place of tawny frogmouths and fogs and sunshine and rain and big, big skies — Deep Creek is, anyway, one of those places for me, a place close to my heart. I have left Deep Creek now, and the hopes and dreams I went there with — that I would write copiously and productively, that the story I’m writing is worth telling, that the manuscript I’m working on might one day get published — may or may not come true, but Deep Creek is still with me and always will be. I don’t know how else to put it.

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

And this is what I love about the passage I’ve quoted above by Michael Ondaatje, the way he captures the mystery of a place, its essence; the way it has become a part of him. I have never been to the jungle that he writes of, never heard peacocks who weep weep loud into the night. But in Deep Creek I have felt what Ondaatje describes. In Deep Creek I have felt that I have found a place that will, like breath, always be with me.

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it: Thea Lim explores the commodification of art, and of our lives.
- I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be: On a related theme, Amy Stuber, on writing short stories, trying to write a novel, and then returning to short story writing. On writing what she wants to write, not what the industry tells her to write. And on growing older.
- Ethical Consumption can ultimately serve as a type of delusion or fantasy where we tell ourselves that our economic actions are righteous and that we’re doing our small part to make a difference, even in the face of underwhelming evidence: Elizabeth L Cline, exploring the problems with ethical consumerism and making the argument for returning to Consumer Activism.
- Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story: Adam Spiegelman, on heroin addiction and the aftermath.

Stay true

September 27, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged Anam, Andre Dao2 Comments

Other people’s words about … reading

When I get to our house, Lauren and Edith are both asleep. The house is dark and quiet, and warm too — the solidity of English homes is a welcome point of difference to Australia, where we were used to draughty Edwardian weatherboards — and, still buzzing with the thoughts that occurred to me on my walk home, I pour myself a tumbler of the Aldi whiskey we got on special, and, thinking of how a quiet house and a calm world allow a reader to become their book, and how, at the same time, it is the act of solitary reading that produces that quietness and the calmness, and how, at the same time, it is the reader’s desire to be a model reader, their desire for quietness and for calmness, that makes it so — thinking of that, I sit down at the dining table in the living room and try to remember the thoughts I had on my walk home — as if thoughts can be possessed, rather than experienced; as if my thoughts are a book that I can lean into, to which I can be true, and through such trueness of reading make order, quiet and calm where before there was none.

from ‘Anam‘
by Andre Dao

There are a couple of things that resonated with me in the passage I’ve quoted above from Andre Dao’s award-winning novel, Anam.

First, there’s the mention of draughty Australian houses. I thought, reading these words, of the grey, rainy winter days of my own childhood in South Australia, although unlike Dao, I grew up in a 1920s colonial-style house rather than a weatherboard one. Our house had french windows and a verandah with wrought-iron lace trimming and a terrazzo floor. The ceilings in the house were high and the walls were thick, and we had central heating, but we used it sparingly. In June and July, then, when the days were at their shortest, those rooms were cold; I remember going to bed with a hot water bottle to warm my feet on. Even in adulthood — perhaps especially in adulthood — the houses I’ve lived in have been chilly in winter, the kind of chilly that requires you to wear several layers to ward it off.

In Australia, we like to believe that we don’t experience cold weather, and to an extent that is true — but there is nothing like the internal climate of a poorly heated house to remind you that winter does exist here. It does indeed get cold.

Guinea Flower, Aldinga Scrub, September 2024.

But the main theme of this passage is reading, and the quietness and calmness we seek from it. A quiet house and a calm world — isn’t that what most of us want? How wonderful it is that reading, an activity whose seeming simplicity belies its complexity, can give this to us.

How wonderful, too, that in discussing this Dao takes us from the idea of reading books to reading our own thoughts — and how we may stay true to them.

Lizzie, August 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Mine is not, I think, a rare journey. We used to be called midlist, we writers who win prizes and get great reviews but don’t sell in large numbers. I’m not sure trade publishers even use that term anymore. They’re not really interested in middling sellers. No matter the thrill and attention out of the gate, if we don’t make that transition from promising debut to big seller, trade publishing loses interest: Having had a novella published myself by a small publisher myself late last year, I was interested to read this piece by Rilla Askew, on being published by a small press after earlier publications with a trade publisher.
- And indeed, when Shane calls escorting ‘the most exhilarating thing I’d done in my life’, it feels like she’s admitting to something forbidden: Sascha Cohen explores Charlotte Shane’s memoir of her life as a prostitute. This is an interesting read, although I was disappointed not to see a reference to Australian Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, which explores similar transgressive territory. (Spoiler alert: Holden, like Shane, enjoyed working as a prostitute and often liked her male clients.)
- All this automation could make us reconsider what we like about the manual aspects of writing. It’s a bit like the challenge photography presented to drawing and painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it didn’t eliminate these techniques, but it did make people rethink what they wanted from them: Simon Reader reviews two new books that suggest that we can protect our writing from AI by practising ‘structured chaos’.
- In these countries, where olive cultivation can be traced back thousands of years, the loss of olive groves is akin to losing a culture as well as vital income: Daphne Chouliaraki Milner explores the effect of climate change on the world’s olive growers.

Becoming

March 10, 2024Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, walkingTagged Anne Enright, The Wren5 Comments

Other people’s words about … leaving home

Much as I love my mother, much as I love that fabulous fridge, the free heating, the coffee grinder with whole, organic beans, much as I love reading on the sofa while she shifts and grunts over her Sudoku, I really did need to get away.

Meanwhile, some oozing, inner self knew what I was doing when I loaded up the boot of her car and broke her heart. When I made my mother drive me across town to a damp room in a run-down street, whose only attraction was the fact that she was not in it. I was going to fall apart. I had been so good, I had done all the things. Now, I wanted to sleep under a hedge and wake to the rain.

I also wanted to move out of this crap, overpriced town but I had not figured out where to go yet, so I was in a house in Ballybough that belonged to someone’s dead granny, first of all with Lily and, when she left for London, with her friend Stuart and one other randomer in the box room. Every time I went online, I found light-flooded interiors with potted plants the size of our kitchen. Outside, the red-brick streets were starting to look curated and I was just flicking through a life that wasn’t mine. Just flicking through.

from ‘The Wren, The Wren‘
by Anne Enright

I remember going away, leaving my childhood home, like the narrator in the passage above, Nell, does when she leaves her mother Carmel. I found it harder to break away than Nell and so I bought a plane ticket and flew overseas, because that was the only way I could make myself leave —- it required money; it required fear; it required loneliness; it required a non-refundable, one-way plane ticket to the other side of the world. I am not speaking figuratively here. As soon as I was on that plane, I felt afraid but I could not jump out —- that’s the thing about planes; you can’t jump out —- and so I went on flying away, leaving home (although, like Nell, I grew up and came home again eventually).

Path to the beach, Silver Sands, March 2024.

Last year I turned fifty-three and yet the stories that most move me, the books I most often read, are still, even now, about young people coming of age —- or if not young people, then people at moments in their lives when they become bigger or older or wiser or sadder, when they become in essence someone new, which is after all another form of coming of age. Perhaps what I mean is that I love stories of becoming.

Being fifty-three is a time when you come of age in another way. It is, you know, especially for women. I am right in the throes of that now, my last coming of age, perhaps.

It’s funny in some ways, because all the things I taught myself to do when I was younger, all the things I taught myself to do in order to grow up and look after myself and find a way of moving through the world with more ease (which is perhaps the very definition of finding a way to grow up) no longer work, not at fifty-three. My coping mechanisms, that is to say, are no longer effectual at helping me to cope — not because they no longer work, I don’t think, but because I simply can’t do them anymore.

Crooked tree and seat, The Washpool, March 2024.

For example.

You teach yourself to be intimate with other people -— a man you love, a friend you adore, another friend you trust. You teach yourself to be fit and strong. You teach yourself to drink a little wine every now and then, because it helps you to relax. You teach yourself to be okay with solitude. You teach yourself these things -— I taught myself these things -— but now these things, most of them, are slowly becoming inaccessible to me, simply by virtue of the fact that I am fifty-three. And fifty-three, I am finding, says no to these things. Physically, I mean. It says no.

Cracked mud, March 2024.

So I look down the tunnel of my fifties and I see what every other fifty-year-old before me has seen, no doubt. And I do not feel, no matter what decision I make, as though I am growing bigger or wiser or sadder or in any way newer. I am growing older, definitely. There is that.

But then there are books like The Wren, The Wren. Because I lied a little when I said that all the coping mechanisms I taught myself as a younger woman no longer work for me. One of them still does. I read. I read. I read.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Within the strictures of neoliberal capitalism, one of the few ways we can now relate to the old-fashioned concept of morality and being ‘a good person’ is through our brand and speech, where we spend our money, the businesses and causes we align with, and how we present ourselves to others. We don’t have commandments, only hashtags: Ahona Guha explores the ethics of using social media to protest the violence in Gaza (or not). This clear, thoughtful essay is less about whether we should speak up or not than it is about what it means to speak up or not, why we use social media, what social media means to us and how we can use ethical principles to guide us in our lives.
- Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time: Peter Holley explores why a wild animal will always be … a wild animal.
- Women and racial and ethnic minorities are 20 to 30 percent more likely than White men to experience a misdiagnosis: Liz Szabo explores the biases and prejudices that cause medical misdiagnosis. For reasons that may be clear from the content of my post, I find this article particularly relevant right now.
- ‘I reject the world’: Oh, Sinead. Jonno Revance looks at the legacy of Sinead O’Connor, a woman ahead of her time.

Grasp

July 17, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walking, What I love about ..., WinterTagged Anna Raverat, Signs of LifeLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … reading

After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t fully understand — with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to lighting up and the first few drags — after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with and then honing in on the exact phrase or phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next.

from ‘Signs of Life‘
by Anna Raverat

I’m not a smoker and I love reading novels far more than I do short stories or poetry, but still, I found myself smiling in recognition when I read the narrator’s description in the passage by Raverat above about her approach to reading. I experience myself, these days, as a greedy reader — greedy for beautiful words, phrases, images, moments, greedy for the fix they give me, while often the plot or theme of a novel remains distant or abstract to me.

Pathway, Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Reading has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember, though the reasons for its importance to me has varied over the years. These days, it feels like an escape for me from the world, or perhaps more accurately an escape into someone else’s world — that world they create with their words. And, like anyone addicted to their fix, I’m not about to give it up.

Little green bench (a place to read in when the warmer weather returns?)
Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Today’s reading list is exclusively about animals and pets — for all the animal-lovers out there! xo

- To have a good life — to reach the highest rung of cat-ness — cats need to go outside: Long-time readers will know that a couple of years ago I rescued a feral cat, who has now become a much-loved member of my household. Before Lizzie came along, I was, as an environmentalist, firmly of the belief that feral cats had no place in Australia, where they are not native animals and where they are responsible for killing many native bird and reptiles. But, as Carrie Arnold writes in this piece, the issue becomes so much more vexed once you have got to know a cat up close. The problem of cats, Arnold concludes, isn’t a cat problem — it’s a human problem. That’s correct, I think. But I also think that what the discussion often misses is the matter of compassion. I want to act compassionately, and compassion is not a hard and fast concept, and rescuing Lizzie was for me an act of compassion despite my environmentalist principles. As I write this, my cat Lizzie is curled up on the quilt on my bed in the space between my knees and the laptop. She’s a happy little thing, and I’m grateful for her presence in my life.
- Why, then, do we consider domestic cats to be loners?: Jonathon B Losos with another piece on cats, this time on how domesticated they may or may not be.
- The status of dogs in India now contrasts sharply with that in Western countries, where any dog found wandering outside on the street is considered stray and liable to impoundment and being killed if not retrieved or rehomed: Krithika Srinivasan and Chris Pearson discuss the free-living dogs of India and how the roots of their treatment lie in … colonialism.
- Early signs of canine anxiety can be as subtle as lip licking, yawning, or staring into the distance. It’s no wonder that many pet owners don’t notice their dogs’ distress until it takes on more problematic forms, like excessive barking and peeing indoors. Even aggressive reactions like growling and snapping at other dogs or people are likely rooted in fear: Ula Chrobak on anxiety in dogs.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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?