Making Magic

Someone posted a quote on Facebook the other day which said:

What did YOU do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?  Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits - Carl Jung

My response was that I read Enid Blyton books.  Which made me wonder whether that meant I should pursue reading, writing, or alcoholism.

Alcoholism ~ This has simply not been accomplishable with the state of my liver in recent years.  I did have a bourbon and coke the other night, though, I must say.  It was nice.  That was while I was at the rebadged Oakleigh-Carnegie RSL, morphed into the Caravan Music Club, where Rebecca Barnard and Billy Miller led a group of mostly middle-aged women in a singalong.  And yeah, it was a bit daggy, and yeah I had that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where to look while I was singing, and yeah some of the stuff was excruciatingly awful, but it was fun!

So no, even with my less-toxic liver, I don't think I'm ever going to be an alcoholic, somehow.  I grew up with one of those, and it's not a particularly palatable way to spend your time or to own your shit.  However, the occasional drink or three would be really nice;  the thought of being able to hoe into a bottle of the red that the old man has stored under the house this summer is a nice one.  We'll see.

Reading ~ I snuck A.S. Byatt's Possession out of the bookcase the other day.  It's been sitting there for months, ever since I spotted it in the Carnegie Salvos store that Mum and I were floffing around in after eating dumplings a few doors down just for the hell of it one day.

(That's two mentions of Carnegie in one post, which is really strange, because I never go to Carnegie.  But I digresseth.)

I was sneaking Possession out of the bookcase and away from the prying eyes of the part of myself that gets really shitted off when I procrastinate reading the piled-up anthropology stuff that I have sitting there, and instead climb into bed and read fiction.  But she saw, unfortunately, because I have not managed to develop any real dissociative personality disorder traits so far (but you never know what may happen in the future).  And anyway, she loves reading fiction as well, and it didn't take long for her to come around and ignore for a while longer the piled-up Anthropology readings I have to do over the next month.

I really am enjoying my Anthropology subjects.  It's fascinating stuff, a lot of it, and right up my alley.  But sheesh, I'm sick of uni and can't wait till it's finished for the year and I can read the stuff I want to read.  And write the stuff I want to write.

Writing ~ I really feel like I am missing a limb when I don't get to write non-academic stuff.  I have been procrastinating working this afternoon, and instead writing this post, and turning my mind toward what I would like to have a stab at for the Australia Nature Writing Prize.  I really have no idea.  And of course, every time I turn my mind to writing something new, I always feel like I will never be able to come up with anything at all.  Indeed, in the past, that feeling has been enough in and of itself to flabbergast me into going and watching something stupid on the telly.  But these days, I'm much more okay with that empty space that opens up whenever I begin to ponder a new writing subject.  It doesn't feel like a void that I could fall into, the way it used to.  It feels an expectant pulse of possibility instead.  Even though I have not a clue about whether I'm going to be able to come up with anything.

But still, there's been enough times now where I have experienced for myself nature's abhorrence of a vacuum to realise that making space might feel a little uncomfortable, but it's making magic, and that out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field.  It's a quantum field.  And Rumi is there, along with everything else.  Including a million and one possibilities, several of which will begin suggesting themselves to me over the next days and weeks, if I remember to keep an eye out for the times when they pop up, seemingly out of nowhere.