Awake Again

This is the second day in a row I've woken up at the 6.30am mark. I think the rain woke me up. It's still sultry, thundery, rainy weather. Stormy weather.

I am thinking I will probably go back to bed at some point, but for now I'm content to sit here online, drinking tea, feeling cosy, contemplating my book on my bedside table (a bit of T Austin-Sparks; has been a long time since I've read any theological stuff and I found it good and necessary to have a long break. Even so, a little goes a long way, these days.

My house has a flat roof, and I think the rain sounds louder than it really is outside. But that's okay. If you're gonna have rain, you may as well have it belting. Just like if you're gonna have music, you may as well have it loud.

It shows how little it rains here in Melbourne when it becomes a defining characteristic of my day. I forget how cosy it feels to be inside while it's pelting outside (and I remind myself that those five foot high weeds growing monstrously around the side of the house shall be much easier to pull out now the earth is wet). I feel pleased that my day is being defined for me by external forces like the weather. It gives me a childlike feeling somehow, a security feeling (is this just me?). Today I am content to stay home, to do some writing (and some weeding, if the rain stops). I am most pleased because I was going to wash Craig today but the rain has done it instead (I still have Craig; Mocca's plaster is off but he's not able to drive for another couple of weeks, so me and the sexy black beast have a bit more time together before Olive the Skanky Mitsubishi returns to my life with her rust, her McDonald's wrappers, her skankiness, to remind me that I don't really care anyway about material items :).

I am enjoying the rain this morning in a way only the seasonally affectively disordered can, knowing that it's not winter and that it shall not discombobulate me because today's forecast is for 31 degrees celcius. Tomorrow is going to be 37, which is just ludicrous for this time of year.

I did some more centering prayer yesterday afternoon and it never ceases to amaze me how it turns me from a bumbling occasional stresshead (it's in the genes, unfortunately) to a calm Zenlike creature full of contentment and Mona Lisa smiles. Really. It's amazing. And my lifeline. It makes me feel the way that writing and God do ... and all three of those things of course are tied up in each other. How beautiful you are, o Mysterious One.

I am now the proud owner of The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and The Writer's Life by Annie Dillard (both being prepared to head my way from the good ol' US of A on Monday). Has anyone here read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Dillard? Oh to be able write about nature the way she does, with such immediacy. It really was wonderful and deserving of its popularity. The image of that exploding frog is impinged on my mind forever (in a horrible way unfortunately). But the way she unflinchingly recounted it just captured all of the angst of living in a fallen world. And made me think that it's only when you a have a vision of another world that you can face this one unflinchingly in all its ugliness.