Category: rituals

Fumbling

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Other people’s words about … growing up

I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. The summer before we moved, a bunch of my friends at camp were caught kissing boys behind our cabin with their T-shirts off. I didn’t even know why a girl would take her T-shirt off with a boy, but I knew it was very wrong to do so, because they all got into big trouble. I’d started going to after-school ballroom dancing lessons in New York, which was something kids from my part of Manhattan did, maintaining an Upper East Side fantasy that we all still lived in an Edith Wharton novel. At the last dance, a boy put his hand on my bottom. Again, I couldn’t understand why a boy would want to touch my bottom, but I knew I didn’t like it. But I also knew that admitting I didn’t like it — like admitting I didn’t know why a boy would want to see my chest — would make people laugh at me. So I said nothing to him, to anyone.

from ‘Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia‘
by Hadley Freeman

One of the things I loved about Hadley Freeman’s memoir Good Girls is that, as well as recounting the years during which she lived with anorexia, she also recounts her life post-anorexia, post-‘recovery’. While the story she tells of her rapid and precipitous descent into anorexia in early adolescence is vivid and poignant, it’s the rest of her story that most spoke to me — the years during which she maintained a pattern of restricted eating that wasn’t quite anorexia but also wasn’t quite wellness or sanity, the years when she lost herself to drug addiction, the years, finally, when she began to come to some kind of peace with herself.

It’s time that eating disorder narratives did this more often, I think. I said nothing … to anyone, Freeman writes in the passage above, and, elsewhere, So much of anorexia is about suppressed conversations. But I think this is as true, if not truer, of those years when a person who has survived anorexia begins to make their way back into life, those years when a person begins to try to make something of their life other than an anorexic one. (And they are years. For most people, the transition away from anorexia is long and slow and painful.) We need, in our narratives about anorexia, to engage with the whole experience, not just one part of it, the most clearly visible part. We need to tell the whole story. I hope that in the future there will be more writers like Freeman who do so.

Looking out onto Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, November 2023.

I’ll return to this theme in future posts, because there’s so much to unpack here, and because it’s one of the things I was most conscious of when I wrote my novella, Ravenous Girls. In fact, though, what most drew me to the passage I’ve quoted in today’s post is something else. Here Freeman, describing her pre-anorexic period, her pre-adolescent years, writes, I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. This is how I felt, too — at twelve years old, at thirteen, even at fourteen. I was what people kindly describe as a late bloomer, which is to say that I entered adolescence reluctantly, lingering in childhood for as long as I could, wishing that I could somehow stay a child forever. Teenage rituals, those fumbling intimacies between boys and girls that Freeman describes here, puzzled me. I knew this marked me out as different, or at least I believed that it did, and so, like Freeman, I remained quiet. I regret this quietness now. I see, looking back, that I was muting myself, retreating into a silence that wasn’t healthy or sustainable. As Freeman notes, it’s in suppressing conversations that anorexia steps in, and that was certainly true for me.

Ravenous Girls isn’t only a story about anorexia, though that’s a part of it. It’s a story about silence and muteness. Perhaps these are themes I’ll continue to explore for the rest of my life. It’s a theme that endlessly fascinates me.

For sale, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Immeasurable

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Other people’s words about … practising art alone

But you have a little secret: while you are not making Art anymore you are at least drawing every day. To tell anyone about this would be admitting there is a hole in your life, and you’d rather not say that out loud, except in therapy. But there you are, once a day, drawing the same thing over and over: that goddamned Empire State Building [which you can see from the floor-to-ceiling window in your new apartment]. You get up every morning (or afternoon, on the weekends, depending on the hangover), have a cup of coffee, sit at the card table near the window, and draw it, usually in pencil. If you have time, you’ll ink it. Sometimes, if you are running late from work, you do it at night instead, and then you add colour to the sketches, to reflect the building’s ever-changing lights. Sometimes you draw just the building and sometimes you draw the buildings around it and sometimes you draw the sky and sometimes you draw the bridge in the foreground and sometimes you draw the East River and sometimes you draw the window frame around the whole scene. You have sketchbooks full of these drawings. You could draw the same thing forever, you realise. ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and it’s not the same man’ is a thing you read once. The Empire State Building is your river. And you don’t have to leave your apartment to step in it. Art feels safe for you again, even though you know you are not getting any better at it, that the work you are making could be sold to tourists on a sidewalk outside of Central Park on a sunny Saturday and that’s about it. There’s no challenge to it, no message, just your view, on repeat. But this is all you can do, this all you have to offer, and it is just enough to make you feel special.

from ‘All Grown Up‘
by Jami Attenberg

I have conflicting responses to the passage above. In many ways, Attenberg’s narrator, Andrea, reminds me of myself, although her creative practice is art and mine is writing. I certainly know what it’s like to stop showing people the material you are creating, to keep your practice to yourself, to see it as your own little secret. And I know the feeling that comes with doing this, too, which Andrea articulates elsewhere in her narrative — that feeling that what you are doing, the material you are creating, the act of creating it, is barely scratching a feverish itch.

Something changed for me about a year ago, though, after which I began tentatively showing people something I’d written — a few people, a very few people. This gave me the courage to do more with that particular piece of writing, and as a result I’m not in the same place anymore as Andrea, although all I can say about that for now is that I do have a piece of writing coming out later this year — a small piece, but a piece nonetheless — and I will tell you more when I can.

Reeds in the marsh, The Washpool, July 2023.

But even if things hadn’t changed for me, I suspect that I’d still finding myself wanting to argue with Andrea as much as I’d find myself wanting to agree with her. Because the thing that I learned during those years of writing alone, writing unseen, was that there is a value to creating something — art, literature, whatever — that has nothing to do with other people’s opinions, nothing to do with productivity or acclaim or results. What I learned (very slowly, very painfully) is that creating just your view, on repeat can in fact teach you something; it can take you somewhere new in your work. You may not be able to measure the work you create in private; you may not be able to quantify it. But when did art become something we need to measure and quantify, anyway? When did it become an outcome, a product?

I believe, although it’s taken me years to come to this understanding, that the practice of creating has its own value. The work you do as you create something, that feeling you get as you practise it of reaching out, of bringing something into the world, is an act of connection and hope. This is valuable. This is meaningful. And it can — it can — be enough.

Lately I’ve been reading …

It’s a long list today, as I try to catch up on some of my reading over the last few months. I hope you’ll enjoy one or two of the pieces I’ve listed here.

Solace

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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.

Replenish

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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 …

Only connect: Those small moments

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Other people’s words about connection

Paul sat alongside Julian on the kitchen floor. There was a long moment that they didn’t touch, or even look at each other. Paul could feel them staring at the same patch of wall, the scar … in the yellow paint. When Paul breached the distance he expected Julian to recoil, but he didn’t. Paul had barely touched his arm when Julian collapsed against him. He lay with his head on Paul’s lap, hardly making a sound but for the scattered rhythm of his breathing.

From ‘These Violent Delights’
by Micah Nemerever

Here in Australia, while countries all over the rest of the world have spent the last few months steadily vaccinating their populations against Covid-19, our population has remained largely unvaccinated. But now, with the kind of predictability that it seems only our political leaders were unable to predict, the Delta strain of Covid-19 has arrived on our shores. And because, without vaccination, lockdown is the only form of protection we have against the virus, we are — state by state — moving into lockdown once again, as the new strain of infection spreads. South Australia, where I live, went into a strict seven-day lockdown at 6pm on Tuesday night. The lockdown will be extended if the outbreak continues to grow, which is what has happened in New South Wales and Victoria.

Right now, I’m working from home. I’m lucky to be in the kind of work where this is possible, I know, but that’s the best I can say about the situation. Lockdowns are funny things, aren’t they? They do funny things to your mind, to your thinking. Maybe they lock your mind down, too?


Turn your back. Look away.

Anyway, in my spare time during lockdown I am reading, reading, reading. (Also writing a little, too, but that’s another story.) The libraries are closed but I have enough books from my last trip to my local library to tide me over, at least for now. And so I’m reading stories that transport me to other places and times, sentences that move me to laughter and tears, words that depict small moments of connection, like the moment between Julian and Paul in the passage above.

Everyone has their own way of coping, I know. Me? When things are tough, I collapse into books the way Julian collapses into Paul. I can think of far worse ways to collapse.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Chasing clouds

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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 …

Only connect: The secrets of the universe

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Other people’s words about connection

I placed my hand on the back of his neck. I pulled him toward me. And kissed him. I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him. And he kept kissing me back.
We laughed and we talked and looked up at the stars.
‘I wished it was raining,’ he said.
‘I don’t need the rain, ‘I said. ‘I need you.’
He traced his name on my back. I traced my name on his.
All this time.

From ‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’
by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I am a sucker for a love story that moves me. The older I get, the more what I mean when I talk about ‘a love story that moves me’ is ‘a love story that makes me weep’.

It’s taken me years to work out why this is. It is not because I am not loved. It is not because I do not love in return. It is because the love stories that make me weep are about a moment — or moments — of connection.


Big sky.

Oh, connection. I had planned in this post to theorise about why I — like so many other people, I suspect — feel so disconnected right now from other people and from the natural world around me. I’d planned to talk about the coronavirus pandemic. About the climate change crisis. About violence and discrimination against people who are not white or male or middle-class or heterosexual or young. And about what it feels like, as a non-married, non-childbearing, non-career-driven woman to turn fifty-one in this year, 2021.

But in the end I decided against writing about those things — partly because I’ve talked about them in previous posts over the years, and partly because most of these things are common topics of conversation right now, and I don’t think I have any new ideas to contribute.


Meeting place.

What I have decided to do instead is to start a new occasional series on this blog called — in the spirit of EM Forster, whose words in 1910 in Howard’s End seem more prescient than ever — Only connect!. In this series, I will be quoting passages that are in one way or another about those moments of connection that move me so deeply. Mostly, I suspect, that means the quotes in this series, like the passage I’ve quoted above from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s beautiful novel for young adults about two Mexican-American boys who fall in love with each other in the 1980s, will be about love and intimacy. But there are other forms of connection that move me, too, and I will quote passages about them here, too.

Years ago, when I first wrote the blurb on my About the Words page of this blog, this is what I wrote: [This blog is] about my love for words, particularly other people’s words, and how they speak to me. Words can make us laugh, cry, think, hope, dream, rage —- but they have no meaning unless they are shared. I see now that what I was saying when I wrote that blurb was that words are a form of connection. And so I hope, in bringing this new series of posts to you that you, too, feel a moment of connection — with the words I’ve quoted, with the writer who wrote them, with me, too, perhaps.


A pot of tea and a book.

PS The photographs that dot this post come from a recent trip I took to Yorke Peninsula, where I spent the week reading, walking, eating, sleeping. I had no access to mobile phone coverage, or to emails, or to the internet. Strangely, it did not feel as though I was disconnected at all. Rather, it felt as though I was reconnecting — with the world around me, and with the natural rhythms of life. And that, perhaps, is the truest kind of connection of all.

Lately I’ve been reading …

2021

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Other people’s words about … rest, and solitude

She lay down a lot — it became an activity, a way to pass the time. She lay down on the couch, reading. She lay down on the bed and, while the sky changed out the windows, was overcome by memories. She lay down on the dock and listened to the ever-changing motion of the water …

She ate only what was for sale at the farm stand … and scrambled or fried eggs and toast — it seemed like too much work to cook meat or fish, even to make a salad. At night she listened to the radio and drank wine …

She made herself take a daily walk. Once she walked partway around the lake on the path in the woods. Through the treillage of the trees she had glimpses of the expensive summer homes, some of them silent, apparently not yet opened. But at others, she could hear the shrieks of children playing. The next day, toward the end of the afternoon, it was adult voices that floated over to her from an elegant old house, the clink of ice in glasses, the laughter of the cocktail hour. It was hard to come back to the cottage after that, hard to feel her solitude.

From ‘Monogamy’
by Sue Miller

I hadn’t planned to write another post this year, thinking that the words in my last post were enough to finish my blogging year with. But, perhaps like everyone else alive today, I’ve gone on thinking about this past year, 2020. Even for me — one of the lucky people who hasn’t been affected in any material way by the pandemic, beyond being a witness to the tragedies it has inflicted worldwide — this has been a strange year.

In the passage above, Sue Miller is describing the passage through grief that Annie, the protagonist of the novel, takes in the weeks immediately after the death of her much-loved husband, Graham. Annie’s passage, even in these first early weeks, isn’t easy; even the rest and solitude she seeks in the summer cottage she and Graham bought together early in their marriage are troubled.

It strikes me that Miller’s description of a woman seeking solitude and rest as a salve for her grief is a description that transcends Annie’s particular situation. How do you feel, in the wake of 2020? Do you, too, feel filled with grief?

Peaceful, dappled light.

I have grown a little tired of the voices clamouring their joy at the prospect of the arrival of 2021. I don’t believe that the clicking over of the clock from 11.59 pm on 31 December to 12.00 am on 1 January heralds a miraculous change in the world’s fortunes. I see a long, troubled passage ahead of us across the globe, in many spheres, including public health, politics and the environment.

But I do believe, like Annie, in the healing power of rest and solitude, however difficult it may be to come back to that solitude, however hard it may be to feel it. I believe that compassion and change come from considered thought and contemplation. I believe that we have to seek peace in our hearts before we can see it reflected in the world.

And so, along with my wishes to you for a merry Christmas and holiday season and a happy new year, I wish you, too, some time to find peace. And I hope, if you find that peace, that you stoke it and kindle it inside yourself. I hope you bring it back with you into the world, so that change — real change — can begin.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Milestone

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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.

Through my own eyes

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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