What I love about … – twenty-one words

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.

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.

Chasing clouds

June 25, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about running, WinterTagged despair, gratitude, running, solace2 Comments

Other people’s words about … getting lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like that thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

As I write this, I’m between my first and second [Covid] shots. I miss everyone I know and don’t know. Yet I’ve caught myself fearing that things will go back to normal too soon, and I won’t be ready: Elissa Gabbert in an essay on Covid and loneliness in all its contrariness.

[Benji the blue heeler]’s gaze is polite but frank. It is the look of someone utterly at ease in his own fur, confident that wherever he goes, everyone will be thrilled to see him: Madeleine Aggeler in a light-hearted look at why canines are the latest celebrities.

Chasing clouds

May 20, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged COVID-19, despair, gratitude, mental health, running, solace3 Comments

Other people’s words about … running

Once he warmed up, once the tension was gone, once the sweat had properly broken and his breathing was rhythmically heavy and every twinge of stiffness and pain from previous workouts had been obliterated by adrenaline and endorphins, when all of that had happened, there was almost nowhere on earth he’d rather be, even on up-and-down back roads with no shoulder or, as now, on the old railroad path too crowded with entitled cyclists or groups of power-walking mums in their pastel tops and self-crimped hair.

For forty-five minutes, or an hour, or an hour and a half, the world was his, and he was alone in it. Blissfully, wonderfully, almost sacredly alone.

From ‘Release’
by Patrick Ness

One of the things I think I most love about running is that the act itself is so full of mysterious contradictions. For example, it’s hard work, and yet I look forward to it as a luxurious treat, in much the same way I look forward to eating an oversized piece of decadent chocolate cake. Similarly, when I’m running I feel as though I’m moving purposefully forward, following a path to something new. And yet it’s obvious that, unless your plan when you set out is to run away and never return, any run is circular, ending right back where it began.

Even the sense that I am on my own when I run — blissfully, wonderfully, almost sacredly alone, as Patrick Ness puts it in the excerpt above — is unreliable. I am never alone when I run. I run on roads, on shared paths, on trails, on beaches. There are always others inhabiting the space with me, running or walking or cycling or just sitting on a bench enjoying the view (like the views you see in the photographs I took for this post). Running, even for a lone runner like me, is an entirely communal activity.

Another contradiction: sometimes, when I feel unwell — headachey, perhaps, or queasy or tired or sleep-deprived — I know that from the moment I step outside those symptoms will leave me for the duration of my run. Probably, I’ll feel unwell again afterwards; running isn’t ever, in my experience, a cure. But for those fifteen or thirty or forty-five minutes when my feet are drumming the ground in the old, familiar rhythm, I know I’ll be symptom-free.

I have no explanation for this. It’s just part and parcel of this beloved thing I know as running.

Maybe that’s why running appeals to so many different kinds of people — because the concept itself, what it involves, what it means, is so flexible, so all-encompassing. Some of us run to lose weight; some of us run to get fit; some of us run to break records; some of us run to find joy. Whatever the reason, those of us who are physically lucky enough to be able to consider running for the long term, in whatever fashion we can manage, have one thing in common.

We know it makes us feel like a better version of ourselves.

Lately I’ve been reading …

‘I don’t feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body,’ Jess tells a butch buddy, before her transition. ‘I just feel trapped’: Eliza Koestelanetz Schrader, on embracing butch in a post-pandemic world.

During the pandemic I have had less and less of a body, and my physical life has increasingly taken place in my head: Marie Mutsuki Mockett, on learning to reinhabit her body after her mother’s illness and death.

‘I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these’ (John Steinbeck): Stacey Swann, on taking encouragement from sharing her ‘writerly self-doubt’, ‘whiny pessimism and overwrought fears’ with a great writer.

Do what you love (if you can)

January 9, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged anxiety, bushfires, climate change, running, solaceLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … running, and life

I turned in the manuscript in September. I stopped seeing friends and only showered on days I ran and they weren’t even good runs. They were short, stuttering attempts that maxed out at 2 miles. I found no joy in them. They no longer served a purpose — not even a dark one … I set out on runs hoping I’d feel that soaring feeling from the year before, but it never came. I’d run, then walk. Sometimes I sat down. Once I lay down on a pile of leaves in the park. I didn’t care if I scared another toddler or his mother. I was too tired to move on, and stood up only after I was almost run over by a landscaper on a lawn mower bagging leaves.

From ‘Running: A Love Story’
by Jen A. Miller

I started running again recently, after a long time of not running (months, even). Just as Jen Miller describes in the passage above, my attempts right now are slow and stuttering, although the reason for this in my case isn’t heartbreak or depression, as it was for Miller, but rather the need to come back slowly and tentatively, as I regain my strength after an injury, which turned out to be peroneal tendonitis. (Sort of.) (But that’s a story for another day, perhaps.)

At the moment, I’m obediently doing run/walk intervals, just as my physiotherapist instructed me to. It’s not the same as running in one, delightful, uninterrupted trance, but I’m finding it joyful, all the same.

Following my path.

Running is many things to many people, as the plethora of books on the subject (ranging from how-to instruction manuals through to memoirs about how running helped heal someone’s grief or mental illness) will confirm. When I first started running three years ago, I devoured those books, seeking tips on technique (for which they were sometimes useful and sometimes not) and kindred spirits (which I sometimes found and sometimes didn’t).

But to be perfectly honest, I’ve grown tired of reading other runners’ thoughts on running. I’m tired of being exhorted to include speed runs and hill runs each week. I’m tired of being told, repeatedly, that unless I enter a race, I’ll never improve my PR. (Or is PB? I always forget. Is there a difference? If there is, I don’t understand it.) I’m tired of reading that running is a social activity, best done with friends. And I’m very, very tired of being told that, in order to prevent myself from getting injured, there is only one way to run (for example, barefoot running. Or forefoot striking. Or running very slowly. Or running a minimum of 180 steps per minute. Or running every day. Or ensuring that you never run two days in a row. Or practising yoga. Or focusing on strength-training. Or stretching before running. Or never stretching at all. Or running on an empty stomach. Or ensuring that you fuel up correctly before you run. Etc. Etc. Etc.)

Because what I’ve realised during my time away is that I don’t run to keep fit, or to challenge myself, or to keep my weight down. Nor do I run so that I can call myself an athlete, or to get faster, or to reduce my anxiety. I don’t even run, as some writers do, in the hope that I’ll get better at writing.

Sometimes, I admit, running helps with some of those things. But sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t run far, and I don’t run fast, but I’ll still keep running, anyway, for as long as I can, if I get the choice.

In the end, I run because I like running, and that’s enough for me.

Reflections along the way.

Lately I’ve been reading …

… Bushfire recovery stories: I’m cheating a little here, since this link will take you to videos rather than an essay or an article. But these stories are on a subject very dear to my heart, and I hope you will find them as moving and meaningful as I did.
… Much of modernist architecture can be understood as a consequence of the fear of disease, a desire to eradicate dark rooms and dusty corners where bacteria lurk: A fascinating look at how COVID-19 may make us reshape our architecture.

Milestone

August 5, 2020April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, life, native coastal vegetation, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about running, WinterTagged running4 Comments

Other people’s words about … why they run

You know, I have run all my life. From fights and bars and women and any number of tricky situations. I run to think and I run to not think. I ran even when I was drinking. Often, I would leave bars and run into the night, just keep going until the exhaustion or sheer drunkenness stopped me. I don’t run in groups or on teams, I don’t run in events or with friends. I don’t run for charity. I don’t run for fitness — I ran even when I was fat or when I smoked. I run for the same thing I have always run for. The solitude and the independence of spirit. The feeling of freedom. When I was in my early teens I read Alan Silitoe’s short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ and had my psyche explained to me.

From ‘Riding the Elephant’
by Craig Ferguson

I haven’t been able to run for several months now, due to a niggling ankle/tendon injury that I’m still trying to work out how to fix. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), when I came across Craig Ferguson’s words about running recently, which I’ve quoted above, they struck such a chord within me that I couldn’t let them go.

Reflective

I turned fifty this past weekend. Like most people I know who have turned fifty ahead of me, the milestone left me feeling even more introspective and reflective and wistful (or maudlin? self-absorbed?) than I usually do.

And the niggling ankle injury certainly didn’t help.

Fading beauty

So here is a metaphor for you: today, I went for a ride on my bike. I stopped to take the photograph below, because it was such a lovely, sun-dappled, shady spot, and because I already had the caption for the photograph planned. It was: ‘Who knows what lies around the next turn?’ This seemed apt, since the road I was cycling along made a literal turn, and since, at fifty, I’m also at a metaphorical turning point.

But then, after I’d taken the photograph and got back on my bike, I actually did cycle around the turn … and got repeatedly swooped by a magpie all the rest of the way down the road.

There’s a lesson in that somewhere, if you’re fifty and feeling maudlin and introspective, right?

Round the bend

But back to Craig Ferguson and the point of this post. I run for the same thing I have always run for, he writes. The solitude and the independence of spirit. The feeling of freedom.

And (oh my goodness, yes): I run to think and I run to not think.

These are the reasons I run, too, and the reasons I hope I’ll run again, one day. Is that a vain hope? Perhaps. But the fifty-year-old in me has learned that hope is worth clinging to, because, against all logic, hope keeps you real. It keeps you true.

Mantra

August 2, 2020Posted in a thought, anxiety, birds, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walking, What I love about ..., Winter, writingTagged reading2 Comments

Other people’s words about … language

I watched them walk down the steps, [and then I] turned around in the hallway, and heard myself say, ‘I’m so lonely’. It shook me because this sentence had become an involuntary verbal tic. I seldom realised I was saying it or perhaps didn’t know that I was speaking the words out loud. I had started to experience this unbidden mantra even while I was still married, mumbling it before sleep, in the bathroom, or even at the grocery store, but it had become more pronounced in the last year. My father had it with my mother’s name. While he was sitting alone in a chair, before he dozed off, and later, in his room at the nursing home, he would utter Marit over and over. He did it sometimes when she was within hearing distance. If she answered the call, he seemed not to know that he had spoken. That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed.

From ‘The Sorrows of an American’
by Siri Hustvedt

Have you ever had the same experience as Siri Hustvedt’s narrator Erik describes having in the passage I’ve quoted above — the experience, I mean, of a single phrase that comes to you frequently and (often) unbidden?

Threshold between sky and sea

Until I read this passage, I thought I was alone in this experience, although the phrase that comes to me is not the same phrase as Erik’s phrase. This phrase, my phrase, sometimes comes to me when I’m awake; and it sometimes comes to me when I’m drifting off to sleep; and it sometimes comes to me when I have a pen in my hand and am writing. The phrase, my phrase, is so familiar to me that it has written itself into my very sense of self.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the feeling I have when the words come to me is so strong, and so familiar, that it has formed itself into words.

Threshold between bird and world

As I’ve said many times before, I read to find accord with other people whom I will never meet in real life — either the writers themeselves, or the characters whom they create in their writing. Books are words, but they are more than words: their words cross a threshold between words and lived experience.

That, as Hustvedt herself puts it, is the strangeness of language. And, I would add, of life in this world.

Threshold between night and day

Through my own eyes

June 8, 2020April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, Australian bush, Autumn, books, coronavirus, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, resilience, rituals, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, What I love about ..., WinterTagged coronavirus1 Comment

Other people’s words about … the seasons

I arrived in England on a grey March day in 2009. The Underground journey from Heathrow to Mile End took me through the western boroughs of London: tiled roofs and chimney pots in neat rows and the clouds as dark as oyster shells, rain falling from them in a barely perceptible mist. The city was exactly as I had expected to find it. Over the next weeks, daffodils bloomed, people started shedding their heavy coats, and my walk to work became greener by the day. Spring was arriving.

From ‘The Little Library Year’
by Kate Young

In ‘The Little Library Year’, a follow-up cookbook to her first cookbook, ‘The Little Library Cookbook’, Kate Young celebrates England and its seasons. Having been born in England myself, and having spent a year living there when I was nine and another year when I was fourteen, as well as having made several return visits in the first couple of decades of my adult life, I understand the joy Young finds in noting the distinctions between each of the seasons in England: the astonishing green of new growth in spring; the long, balmy days of summer; the crisp mornings and falling leaves of autumn; the bleak, dark, short days of winter.

First week of June: Groundsel flowers on the dune

But unlike Young, I feel more attuned to the seasons in my adopted home country, Australia, which I moved to when I was three years old: the country I will, by choice, live in for the rest of my life. The statement that the seasons are less distinct here — a statement that Young is not the first person to make, let me hasten to add — troubles me. The seasons here are only less distinct if you choose to see them through Western/European eyes. If you see them through Australian eyes, and particularly through the eyes of a person indigenous to, or acutely at home with, this country, you will observe seasons that are very distinct from each other, though not in the same way as they are in England.

Last weeks of May: Grasstree in flower

I’ve written a little on this before, here. While I don’t wish to repeat myself, and while I certainly don’t wish to criticise a fellow Australian writer (whose writing, and recipes, I love), I think it’s important to maintain an awareness of the lens through which we see and experience the world we live in. What we expect to see can so easily colour what we actually see.

Last week of May: High tide

This year, 2020, began in Australia with a fiercely hot summer that culminated in horrific bushfires, the kind that we have never experienced before, the kind that create their own weather system, their own tragic season of burning and death. Since then, the bushfires have gone out, at least for now, and the seasons have moved on. Here in South Australia, the heat has cooled, the days have shortened, rain has fallen, grass has turned green once more, and — particularly in the last week or so — frosts have bloomed over the land overnight.

First week of June: Winter sea under the jetty

This year, in the enforced shutdown of the coronavirus pandemic, in a time when human activity has been quieter than usual, I have found myself even more aware than I usually am of the cycle of the days, the weeks, the months, the passing of the year. March, April, May and June have all been months that have been different from each other, in both subtle and distinctive ways, whether through a change in temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind direction, or the height of the sun and the moon.

First week of June: Still waters

Young writes: Throughout my first year [in England] — gloriously bright and beautiful spring, the blisteringly hot and heavy summer, the night that the leaves started to fall from the trees — I found it impossible not to be changed by the seasons. I, too, here in Australia, find it impossible not to be changed by the seasons. I am grateful to see them, and to document them with photographs like the ones that dot today’s post.

I try, always, to move through the world — my world, the one I live in — seeing it as it is. It is a lifelong project, and one I will never grow tired of.

First week of June: Lizzy the garden cat, soaking up the winter sun

Take note

August 18, 2019April 23, 2022Posted in anxiety, Australian bush, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, nature, out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, the freelance life, the sky, walking, What I love about ..., Winter, workTagged resilience2 Comments

Other people’s words about … gratitude

I am so glad to still be here. Every day, I do my best to see the colours. I take note. I breathe them in.

From ‘How it Feels to Float’
by Helena Fox

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I know. I want you all to know that I have been thinking of you, and I have been thinking of posting. There just hasn’t been room inside my head to get to it.

The first groundsel flowers of the season
(Spring is coming)

But when I read Helena Fox’s words in the Acknowledgments section at the back of her wonderful novel for young adults, How it Feels to Float, I wanted to pass them on. Because no matter how crammed my head — my brain, my mind — feels at the moment, I, too, do my best to see the colours, to breathe them in.

Blue winter sky

The photographs in today’s post come from a walk I took a few weeks back. I hadn’t walked that path for a while, and I haven’t walked it since, but those moments were precious. I am still breathing them in.

Last rays