Slowly, Slowly

Bruno's, Marysville (pre-fire)  Pic mine - free to use but please link back

Yesterday, I took the next few steps towards seeing if this creative space idea of mine - Liminal - is viable.

I created a survey (which I would love for you to fill in, if you could be ever so kind, especially if you live in Australia).  I created a Facebook page.  I already have a Twitter account.  And I sent out the first newsletter.

After all of that effort, Speedy Snail is a little exhausted today!

Unable to identify image creator - apologies

This is so how I felt this morning.

My hope was that I would at least try to do some basic yoga stretching,  some breathing, and some meditation, to start off the day right.

It's hard to do that when you can't get yourself out of bed, though, so I did the next best thing - I just stayed in bed and did it all.  Sure bed yoga entails reduced poses but it's not like I would be doing downward dog first thing in the morning anyway, so it's all good.

Starting something new - or at least dipping your toe into the idea of starting something new - is terrifying, isn't it?  It feels daunting because it's big and it's changey and we aren't very good at change.  But still, right next to the terror is excitement.  It reminds me of how often this state felt as a child and a teenager, and how as we get older it's easier to sequester ourselves away from new experiences.

Especially true for me after 15 years of chronic illness.

But the good thing about having a chronic illness is that it has forced me to confront my limitations.  I'm not very good at managing them, even after all this time.  Sometimes, if I'm extra ultra anxious, I can easily feel like pacing myself is simply not allowed, as if something outside says it is not permissible to do things your way, in your time, at your pace.

It's the insides that are making me feel like that, and what is inside is anxiety.  It's been probably the hardest symptom for me to manage in recent years and I only now feel like I'm getting on top of it again.    This racing mind has thoughts rushing through like traffic, in combination with a fatigued body, so I end up feeling sorta somethin' like this:

CC pic by Andrew

But of course, there is also something outside my own body that says that I can't go at my own pace and neither can you.  It's this stupid, childish, ridiculous, amateur culture we're all stuck with while we slowly realise we can change it.  The one that tells us to conform to it, not the other way around.  The one that does not fit us right.  Our culture is like a one-size-fits-none jumper made of scratchy wool that's 11 sizes too small that we have to wear all summer, and which has too many holes to keep us warm in winter.

Stepping outside of what you've been born into is the equivalent of that saucepan frog jumping out.  It's scary and hard to see what one day ends up being so clear.  But it's doable.  Being aware of our culture's stupidity, and that your desires to do things your way are perfectly acceptable - sane, even - makes it just that much easier.

And so the fears I have about starting up something like this with limited stamina are not so surprising in the light of the inside and the outside.  I can't start up something like this.  Why not?  Because I don't have the energy.  Well start it part-time.  But you can't start up a business part-time!  Why not?  Because it doesn't look professional.  Who says?

Good point.    But I can't do it by myself.  Then get other people on board.  I don't know where to start with that.  Well, just start.  Build it and they will come.  Was it really necessary for you to insert a corny film line?  Yes.

There are so many ways we can limit ourselves.  I'm a hardcore mistress at it.  But to be honest with you, I have absolutely NOTHING to lose in pushing to see what happens with this idea, and everything to gain.

At the very least, I will be able to say I tried.  And that's something.  

Public domain

Snails have been featuring prominently for me lately.  I wrote a short story a few weeks ago for a competition.  The winning story goes onto a wine label, which is all kinds of cool.  My story involved a woman at her daughter's wedding who is voyeuristically watching a couple of snails having sex.  Can say I don't write about the important stuff, now, can we?

1987 was 153 years ago

Or at least, it felt like it on Saturday night when I subjected my partner and myself to the last 30 minutes of Dirty Dancing.

Goodness me, what a giant field of corn, stretching far beyond what the eye can see!  So cliched!  Truly awful acting deserving three sentences running with exclamation marks!

I tried watching another movie from the 80's the other day too - Local Hero.  Unfortunately, I had to turn it off after five minutes because it was just so heavily cliched and caricatured that it seemed ridiculous, like a soap opera.

I know we watched Dirty Dancing as teenagers, and I know we were aware of the corniness of it.  But still, what a difference 30 years makes.  The intervening decades have seen the field of corn transformed into 11 giant vats of high fructose corn syrup poured over things which were vaguely acceptable back in the 80's.  It has, unfortunately, began to seem quite truly like another time and place.  A more innocent time.

Saying that makes me feel creakily ancient, like I am the door of a building first built in the 1700s.  For all the distance between now and then, the 80's may as well have been located in that century:)

Patrick still looked pretty alright in that black t-shirt, though.

(Apologies to Shawn Econo, the taker of this picture and the spermer of this adorable boy, for proving my point with this picture :)

Writing/Not Writing

Practice is meditation.  Non-practice is also meditation.  I read that quote, or something like it, in Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  What he means is that what you learn about meditation by practising is great, but that even in the space where you are not practising, even that is not wasted because there is much to learn in the not-doing.  You can see what meditation does for you by not practising it.  By experiencing the lack.

I am 1/4 of the way or so through the theory component of a Certificate III in Home and Community Care, which is to be followed by 120 hours of placement.  I'm grateful for those 120 hours but in terms of finance, the amount of time it takes to gain a certificate that will enable me to get a job that will certainly not be paying wonderfully stretches out over months and months and throws me into depression at times.  And meanwhile I'm floundering financially.  Me and finances have never been very good together.  We continue on in that vein.

The course, though it's only two days a week, feels like it's eating up a big chunk of my energy.  This week I had classes on Monday and Friday, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I went out both days, once to visit a good friend for lunch and once to meet up with my mum in the city to go to the Monet's Garden exhibition at the NGV.  So nice to get out and socialise.  But stretching it just a little.  For me.

It all caught up with me last night and I realised I was daydreaming while driving home about climbing into bed.  And so I did, while my partner cooked dinner (bliss) and stayed there for several hours.  I struggle to stop and rest.  How hard it is in a society where so many of us are seemingly addicted to the opposite?  Even though it is bad for us?  Even though it is a creepy playing to the oppression that is stifling the way we live as complete human beings.  I struggle to stop and rest because I feel guilty, even though I need to do it more than so many people I see every day who juggle kids and jobs and housework and still find time to do other things.  I struggle with the resentment I feel towards those people.  They're often the ones who if you mention fatigue-related chronic illness will say that yeah, they reckon they've got it too.  It is hard having a fatigue-related chronic illness in a fatigued society.  They can't begin to understand how far the spectrum stretches, and how well they are doing comparatively.  They think that because they're sucking it up and getting on with it, that you should too.  It doesn't, however, work like that.

If I could suck it up and get on with it, I'd have a few more bucks in the bank than I do now, believe me.  And less stress.  And more security.  And I'd be bigger in the world's eyes but smaller in my soul's because I wouldn't be looking after myself.  If we suck it up and get on with it, we keep the world's status quo, the insane version we dance to, and I'm not so sure that that's exactly the thing that doesn't need to die down to the ground, get composted, and reborn as something better.

But anyway, I digress.  I am nattering on with my usual frustrations of time management/energy management/money management because I feel like even though I make many lovely and varied efforts to keep my head above water, just keeping up the current level is a struggle.  And the frustrating thing is that I'm feeling smaller, and I know that it's because I'm not swimming in the ponds that give me energy, the creative ones.  Because they're the easy ones to put aside.  Because writing when you're aching is possible - and you forget about the aches - but getting to writing when you're aching is harder than it already is.  And anyone who has a regular creative practice knows that strange space where you are resistive to doing the very thing that you know once you climb enfolds you like a mother and opens up the minutes.

I read an article a few days ago where a writer was recommending that you have 40 submissions on the go at any one time - eight pieces, sent out to nine different markets.  That's great in theory.  I have about four things out awaiting reply at the moment.  One of them I received yesterday - another no.  I am thickening up ever so slightly, getting used to the ongoing nos.  Many editors are kind, and they make sure that they tell you that whilst they enjoyed the read/it was original/thought-provoking that they don't think it's quite for their publication.  And so on you go.

But the thought of having 40 submissions on the go is a crazy one to me at the moment.  It's about nine steps ahead of the stage I'm at now.  Because having that many submissions means that you've put time aside to spend researching markets and sending your stuff out.  It's quite a time-consuming process.  And that is on top of actually writing.  And I haven't been regularly writing.

But you know what I've found?  Where years ago I used to get scared, worried that the well will dry up, what I have learned in the process of not-writing is ... well, how much I've learned and grown in the times that I do write.  I know, with the comfort that comes from experience, that getting into the habit of morning pages for a bit - Julia Cameron's practice of writing (preferably first thing in the morning) several pages by hand of whatever the hell comes into your head, and throwing it away afterwards - opens it all up, that a few days of feeling grindy and grinchy and what-the-hell-is-there-to-write-about-ey are alleviated rather quickly until I fall into that space where I feel that I will never be able to write about all I wish to even if I had seven lifetimes over.

I trust the space is there.  Which is a comfort, when I'm feeling put out that I simply don't have enough petrol tickets to get there after the "concerns of life" are met.  Or not, as the case may be :)

Half Full AND Half Empty

Today, NaBloPoMo poses the question, Is the proverbial glass half empty or half full?

My personal proverbial glass is not static.  It moves as if it's liquid, like I'm constantly glassblowing it.

I imagine the DSM-IV and the DSM-V would probably have a few different pharmaceuticals for that floppiness, to stabilise the ship.  But I don't think the ship is meant to be stabilised in that fashion.  A bridge is built so that it sways.  It is the in-built sway which gives it its strength.  It's learning to lean into the curves that is the beginning of wisdom, not trying to straighten them out so that every road is a ruler.

But this is especially true for me lately because how that proverbial glass appears on any given day is determined by what is happening in my body.   I try to listen to what my body needs in order to do what it does - heal, magically, with the right ingredients.  But sometimes taking the very ingredients your body needs can make you feel temporarily worse before you feel better.  Sometimes stopping what you are doing because it is making you feel worse is the very worst thing that you could do.  But then sometimes it's the best.  And sometimes it's hard to know the difference.

In the times when I am laid low, through healing crises, bodily malfunctions, or through simple colds and flus, the glass can be as empty and as dry as if it had always lived its life in the desert and the only time it is filled  is when it's caked up with dead, dry sand that is threatening to submerge it entirely.

But those times pass.  Just like the good times must pass too.  When my ship is on a more even keel, and the seas are calm, then that glass does seem half full.  There is something within me that returns to optimism, and joy, when I feel well, like one of those babies' toys that are weighted in the base so that they never topple for good.  Beauty siren-calls me back, and possibility, and simply the lack of suffering.  But when wellbeing hits, it is its own reward.  It's remembering when those times hit that bad times will return again, and not being averse to that, which puts the extra weight in my bottom and wind in my sails, to mix a couple of metaphors.  It's not the absence of those bad times that makes for good times.  But it's so easy to forget this.

When I think of the collective glass, the world I live in and take my part in, and whether it's half-empty or half-full, it becomes more complicated.  I know that the times we are living in now are dark, and the way we are living may possibly destroy the very earth that we depend upon.  We are knowledgeable but unbelievably stupid, and allowing ourselves to be led by the nose by corruption that leaks out of all of the institutions we have depended upon in the past.  There is much to be depressed about in this insane world, and it's here that it is tempting to see the glass as half empty, and that human stupidity and ignorance will be our downfall for good.

But maybe not for good.  I like to look at the march of time not as linear, in the stupid and boring way that is our Western inheritance, but as circular.  That is a much wiser way to look at it.  I read this the other day about traditional Hindu conceptions of the passing of cultural time:

... the Iron Age is the last in the great cycle.  It begins with the Golden Age, a period of great stability and very slow change, in which the wise are recognized, and rule.  In the Silver Age, things are changing more, though still slowly.  In the Bronze Age, change is faster, people are turning more outwards, "doing" more.  Finally, in the Iron Age, which is the shortest of the four, change becomes more and more rapid, the wise long ago ceased to have any say in the form of our outer life, and we all become more and more materialistic.  It ends in self-destruction, but from the flames arises the phoenix of the next Golden Age.

(Tilo Ulbricht, 'A thousand roots: an introduction to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,' Parabola magazine

I love this recycling and composting view of the degeneration that comes at certain periods of time :)  How very wise.  Whatever comes up must go down. But then, whatever goes down must come up.  And so in this instance, when I look at the way the Western civilisation works now, knowing that it is not sustainable for us or for the earth, the most positive way to view the future is to go right through the most negative, and to see that our current way of living must destroy itself.

Paradox.  The seeds of the new are in the midst of the old and will sprout, just the way they do after fire.  And that's a beautiful thing, and it's both glass-half-full and glass-half-empty all at the same time.

Which are perhaps the most beautiful moments of all.

WDs and NWDs

There are two kinds of days - Work Days (WDs) and Non-Work Days (NWDs).  Today is an NWD.

(You could perhaps get an NWD mixed up with a WMD, but for a couple of differences:  (1) NWDs exist.  And (2) while WMDs are destructive implements designed to wield havoc upon your enemies, NWDs are beacons of constructivity whose most destructive implement is a pen or a pair of scissors and which wield joy and pleasure upon me (and the enemies which exist in my own soul, but that's another story and not this one).

When your waxing and waning energy levels are once again on the rise and Speedy Snail (see below, in my double-paged art journal entry, click to enlarge) is functioning in an upright position, then NWDs also become an exercise in comparison.  Cleaning the toilet becomes an enjoyable task because (a) you're not working and (b) you got here.  Physical issues over the last 13 years have meant that there have been more days than you could count where you would have liked to have cleaned the toilet but it would have to wait till tomorrow.  And even though cleaning the toilet uber quickly loses its lustre, even this version of chopping wood and drawing water becomes a pleasure simply by dint of the fact that you don't do it nearly enough because you keep running out of time (or energy).

Clock time is a pain in the arse at the best of ... well, times.  You just don't like each other very much no matter what day it is.  On WDs it marches relentlessly slowly while you're working, and your concentration levels being all over the place as they are you retaliate by  skyving off work and going and looking at Facebook instead.  Which, unsurprisingly, means that you're working at 11 pm some nights, berating yourself for once again not having the physical wherewithal to be able to focus, damn it.

In contrast to WDs, clock time in NWDs develops bipolar mania and flies.  Already it's 1.30 and what have you done today?  You've cooked breakfast and you've attended to some health matters, and you've done some prewriting, partially cleaned the bathroom, and done lots of work in your head about the creative nonfiction pieces you have brewing on the backburners.  But no matter how busy it feels in your head, it never looks as accomplished in your physical environment as it feels from inside your noggin.  There is more going on inside your head than there is energy inside your body.  This is the adrenally challenged, copperheaded land of Speedy Snail, where the mind is racing with creativity while the body, in various forms, lags behind.

Not too far behind lately, however.  Because the energy is rising, and you suspect it's rising to levels of stability you have not seen for decades.  You do not imagine you are going to be in this land forever.  But whatever land you find yourself in next,  you know this:  time (unless it's kairos of course) and its stupid, boring linearity will surely not be a friend of yours there either.

Stealing Like an Artist

Whilst stealing time from work the other day, I came upon this adorable post:

How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me).

I like this: "I think the more that writing is made into a physical process, the better it is. You can feel the ink on paper. You can spread writing all over your desk and sort through it. You can lay it all out where you can look at it."

I wrote a few blog posts standing up last week, the way Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Lewis Carroll all used to write.  It was an interesting experience.  It was unintentional.  The only reason I didn't have my arse packed into the chair was because I was in the process of moving house and there was no chair.

Writing standing up felt like the ideas were able to flow better.  I think I shall try it out more often, while trying to remain mindless of how silly I feel because of how strange I must look.  Because ooh, geez, the more we go on in life, the less we are free to move in ways that may seem silly.  Kids have it right;  think of the ways they fling themselves around, make weird faces, do stuff with their hands and feet, jump up and down on the spot, just because.

I keep coming upon these things that I want to do involving movement, and I look so stupid when I do them.  Weird yoga asanas where I stick my tongue out and splay my fingers out.  Yoga pranayams (breathing exercises) where I'm breathing in and out really fast.  In the nocturnal hours a few days ago, I amused my partner by stomping my feet in my sleep in the middle of an anxious dream.

I am thinking a lot lately about the body in this strange, awful, beautiful age we live in where they are so superfluous to what we do so much of the time.  So many jobs now involve us sitting disembodied in front of computer screens.  As if we are just these giant heads of thought, removed from our bodies.  Too much computer work is a disembodying experience.

There is this idea that still gets about within certain spiritual disciplines.  It masquerades as an uber-spiritual conception that the body is just this thing to overcome on your way to enlightenment, a base beast.  But the body is what links us to the earth, and if we abuse one, we abuse the other.  The body is a "living vehicle" as Anodea Judith describes it.  I spent the first half of my life ignoring it and its limitations, stuffing away its memories.  In the second half of my life, I am slowly learning to treat it with the respect it and those memories deserve (but oh, dessert, how thou dost stumble me).

Just as you cannot transcend your ego until you have one that is vaguely functional to begin with, neither can you easily transcend your body for spiritual benefit when it is sick or stiff, neglected or overlooked.

Another thing I like, too, from that post I linked to above, though it challenges me: "A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time allotted. I work a 9-5 and I get about as as much art done now as I did when I worked part-time."

This challenges me because right now, I have been working part-time yet on certain days it expands out like foam to something closer to full-time.  But because I get paid by the word for my main client, I'm doing the same amount of work for the same amount of pay, regardless of the time it takes.  But I stop during the day because I'm bored, and so I go and read blogs or read things that interest me.

My creative practice has dried up recently, as moving-house anxieties have gutsed their way into my energies.  Giving time and space to the things that I delight in doing is a bit of an ongoing struggle for me.  And so I take solace in the fact that Parkinson's law applies not only to work and to bureaucracies, but to anything, really.  It reminds me that time is bubbly.  The amount you spend on something does not always equate to what you get out of it.  This works both ways.  Small, grabbed moments can yield wonderful things.

Those moments are not the same as making space and time each day to devote to that which is very important but is not urgent.  But in the leaner times, the grabbed moment can yield up its beauty:  20 minutes snatched and you fall into a vast field.  A reminder that time may click its way round the clock in equal measure, but the way we walk through that it is not particularly linear at all.

The Shifting Width of Time

I am rather sick of everything at the moment. Perhaps it is just the August blues, I'm not sure. But everything feels sort of tight and constricted.

It amazes me when I'm feeling like this how different time feels. Everything feels so small and flat and too close together. I have three days off ahead of me and it feels too small. Tuesday looms big even though there is a Saturday, Sunday and a Monday before it. Three whole days!

I can't stand feeling like this. I can't stand feeling like I am living in the middle of a dying society. That sounds dramatic but take a look around and tell me how often you see anyone laughing in the streets, or even smiling. This world is so heavy, it kills me. Everybody reading this post is amongst the richest people in the world, who have occasion if desired to entertain themselves mindlessly, and how often in an average week do we all feel the transcendence? God, how long? How long how long how long how long? Or is this it? Just an inexorable slow slide down? Is that how it ends for us?

Forgive me my doom and gloom. But I don't get told no nice stories. I just get told what I need to buy. I say to myself that I know better, that I tell myself good stories on the inside. And it helps. But they say that the brain doesn't even recognise the difference between something real and something imagined. Something as flexible and childlike as that surely listens and takes on board the dumb culture stories even if it knows that they are empty. Somewhere, somehow.

I need a campfire and a storeyteller.

Okay, then. I feel dead but I'm going off to do life-affirming things that my inner psychotic flatpack bitch says seem just a little bit too fun and that therefore maybe there's a rule against them. Things like playing with some clay, playing some music, cooking something, watching some footy, watching a movie, doing some yoga, walking my dog, maybe catching up with my mum and my cousin tomorrow, going to impro on Sunday night. I don't even feel like doing any of those things because none of them seem like they will be enjoyable because right now I feel dead. This is how I feel after a week of typing shit about pointless court cases and living in a country that keeps consuming its own head and whingeing about the climate and insisting we live in an economy that must keep growing and which never tells me anything about myself that is transcendent. What about God?

Sigh. So I feel drained and dislodged from living in this fucked-up place. I hate it. But I just know from too many occasions that I will go off into the playroom and start messing about with whatever I'm doing in there, and the slowdown will start somehow. I could not believe with my own soul that such heaven and such hell can exist in the exact same day for one person depending on what thoughts are going through their head. It sort of dumbfounds me.

So anyway, even though things seem rather glum, I'm trying to ignore those feelings and not give them the weight they are screaming at me to give them. They are, after all, shifting perceptions. When I'm swimming in the silk, enfolded within a song, riding the sunlight, things can seem very different very quickly.

Could do with a bonk, though. Seriously, they say it's like riding a bike. Is that true? Cos it's been a long time ...

Kairos Space and Kairos Time

"In moments of mystical illumination we may experience, in a few chronological seconds, years of transfigured love ... Time is to be treasured, worked with, never ignored. As the astrophysicists understand time now, it is not like a river, flowing in one direction, but more like a tree, with great branches and smaller limbs and twigs which may make it possible for us to move from one branch to another, as did Jesus and Moses and Elijah, as did St Andrew and St Francis when they talked with each other in that light of love which transcends all restrictions of time."

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections in Faith and Art


Time as a tree - it's the only way it makes sense :)

Madeleine is waxing lyrical in reference to this painting by El Greco, of Andrew and Francis traversing the times and the spaces to converse with each other. She believed such things were possible. God only knows what she's believing now she's crossed over the river :)

The spaces feel thin today, now, swimming in kairos time. Anything seems possible to me, even though it is 400 million degrees celcius and I could fry eggs on the lounge room floor of my house when I get home on days like this. Tomorrow is going to be 41 celcius, the day after 40, the day after 40. I be sleeping in the lounge room all this week with the aircon on. Apologies to the ozone layer.

If my dog knew he was going to the beach in an hour, such joy would make all his molecules explode.

I think that's why dogs can't see into the future. Occasionally I feel like the veil parts, and I can, just down the road, just for a moment ~ not the actualities, but the possibilities, the infinite possibilities that are truer than boredom and smallness ~ and it throws me into these little mini paroxysms such as you are seeing displayed before you today.

Madeleine L'Engle always sends me into this state. She understood the paroxysms too, I think. She believed crazy things, too.

When we become too rational and logical, and can't believe in crazy flights of fancy that children believe easily and wholeheartedly, in dreams that present themselves to you and ask you to fulfill them, in time travel, in hope, in streams flowing in the desert, then we are quite possibly insane :)

We are seated with Christ in the heavenlies.

O Impermanence!

by Betty Fritsch, seen over at Barbara's

Standing in my evening vestibule
wrapped in fading light
I push Chronos out the door firmly.
Your time is up, I say
as I usher in my dear friend Kairos,
pulling her into a welcoming embrace.

Goodbye clock time,
tick-as-you-must time,
Hello grace time,
Swirling-spirals-of-sense time.
Set-my-heart-free time is
past due today.

Come in!
I know you cannot stay long
and I so yearn
to spend some moments wisely
in your comforting company.

Advise me,
Hour of wisdom's beginning.
Impart your secrets of forgiveness,
Drench me with your sacred silence.
Remind me of my own steadfast spirit!

Reveal my task for this hour,
And then be on your way,
dear friend!
Move swiftly as I long
to clothe myself in your certainty,
to detain you forever as my faithful guide.

But alas, even you must be surrendered!

Waking Life

Thanks to Jon at Something Else, I have been watching part of another movie this evening. In 2008 movie-watching mode - that's on YouTube, in chunks. Hell, I'm not even watching it in consecutive order. But I'm kinda getting the gist of it anyway.

Anyone else remember this movie? Slipped right by me when it came out in 2001, but I was in CFS land and my whole life was slipping right through my hands back then. Those days turned out nothing like I had planned.

Anyway, this is kinda interesting. Who needs drugs when you have philosophy, huh? (I'm also thinking of how close genius and insanity are, and it's been something I've been thinking about all week, and I must say this is pretty trippy - and I don't know how much sense it actually makes - but gee, I love fascinating concepts :) I don't need them to be real necessarily, I just need them to be possible in all possible worlds. That's enough to float my boat ;) But having said that, this is something akin to the way I look at it all :)

What time are you?

I have been uncommonly busy today, vacuuming and cleaning showers and toilets and mirrors and all of that shit off the floor in the playroom that's been sitting there since I took a photo of it back some time in November. I have Febrezed rugs and the couch (who I have named Keanu, as in, "I lay on Keanu and absently stroked his back while watching bearded men in jerkins on the television"), cleaned grouting, and done other mindless dull crap because tomorrow is gonna be hot hot hot and Monday is gonna be hot hot hot and I don't want to be houseworking in 35 degree heat (by the way, don't you love the word "jerkin"? It sounds a bit naughty, doesn't it).

And yes, I also took out some time to rest and relax, like I said, and went to Savers, which is like an intensive farming version of an opportunity shop, with branches in Australia, Canada and the US. It's massive. It's also much more expensive than, for example, the one St Bartholomews runs with Dulcie and Gretel behind the counter selling stuff that's a bit smelly. This one moves stock through pretty quickly, and there isn't too much crap there. Which is why I managed to spend 50 bucks there. 50 bloody bucks. That's crazy. That's eating into my "Going to Rosebank Retreat" fund right there. Shit. 50 bucks. But out of that, I got two skirts and five tops and a giant big ceramic bowl that Lester is now drinking out of (he's gone up in the world; the whole time we've been here he has been unceremoniously drinking out of a bucket. Ceramic that's cream coloured to match the benches is a much better look :) And so I'm tired now from all my gallivanting and doing so much in one day. I'm not used to this pace!

So what better thing to do but to digress and do mindless quizzes like What Time Of the Day Are You? (I was hoping it would tell me I was 11 Past 11, 'cause seriously, I notice that it's 11 past 11 WAY too many times in a week for it to be coincidence, and I have no idea why I am noticing it. I remember someone somewhere saying it was Universal Something Or Other Time, someone else on a forum said that they always stop and pray at that time.

But I like wasting all of my 11 Past 11'ses. I just notice, Oh look, it's 11 Past 11 again! and then I start singing the song called 11 Past 11 that featured in The Young Ones. And that's about it, really. Maybe one day I will stand before God and he will say, "I kept reminding you that it was 11 past 11 and you just kept blowing me off". If so, I apologise in advance, Papa. You'll have to give me a bit more of an idea what you want me to do, because I'm a bit thick, and before I know it it's 12 past 11 and I'm continuing on doing whatever I was doing at 10 past 11. So I'm sorry. But as you can see below, timetables aren't my thing.

I think I've sucked in too much vacuum cleaner dust. I'm going a bit insane. It's time for beddy byes (and anyway, Jennifer and I share the same brain frequency, and it's probably getting close to her getting up, and she's planning on cleaning her shower, and I don't want to be wasting any of the frequency rabbitting on about inconsequential shit 'cause it's past midnight and I always rave at this time of the night i think it's time to go to bed now dont you okay then goodnight or goodmorning as the case may be good afternoon and good evening while im here just to cover all bases okay i really am going away now bye)

You are late-sleepy relaxation, the half-awake moment when you realize it's morning, but you don't have to get up, because there's no place you have to be. You are that cozy spot under the covers where everything feels temporarily perfect, even if you know you'll eventually have to wiggle out and start the day. Maybe you're the artistic type, who doesn't function well on a normal schedule. Sleep's important to you, and you like the freedom of sleeping as late as you want (especially since that is closely related to the freedom to stay up as late as you want). You like to roll out of bed, put on some comfy clothes, and get a laid back start to the day. If not everything on your list gets accomplished, no worries. Your only priority is having no priorities ? you just want to take things at a slow, mellow pace.

Living the life I love ...

Womb by Snuffkin

If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

- John O'Donohoe

I woke this morning feeling daunted at the housework I have before me this weekend. My customary habit is to write my morning pages with my first cup of tea, three pages of longhand which have become a snazzy little tool for getting out what is floating around in my head trying to stress me, get it concretised before my eyes where I can do something about it when the time is right.

The first two pages, I could feel the tension in my body. The aching shoulders that reminded me I've missed my latest chiro visit. The familiar sense of churning thoughts swirling around on a mental washing machine cycle (the washing machine agitates on that cycle, does it not?) My thoughts wandered, distracted, restless, thirsty, daunted by whether I could get done what I had set before myself.

I had decided, because housework is so tasteless to me, that I would do it all today, in one fell swoop, leaving me the rest of the weekend to "live the life I love", which involves some writing, some reading of uni stuff, catching up with friends and family, watching a movie. This was my Plan A. Plan B, if today failed, was to spread the housework out over the next three days, doing the majority of it today and Monday, with a break inbetween tomorrow to catch my cuz, her kids, and my Mum.

I guess I'm a bit of an "all or nothing" girl at times, inclined to a bit of black and white thinking, and it seemed like the right approach. And yet what seems right to me sometimes in my head, feels entirely wrong to me in my body, if I will listen ... and I tell you what, dudes, I am discovering that the more I listen to these other parts of myself, the parts I have resisted, the more they are speaking. It feels like as I am becoming a safer place for myself to inhabit, the parts of myself that are young in their years, the artistic parts, the self-nurturing parts, are increasingly growing up into themselves, speaking a bit louder, heady with the oxygen they're getting to breathe.

As soon as I decided that even though Plan A was the ideal, it wasn't achievable, my body relaxed. It was palpable. Suddenly, the rest of the day opened up to me - the visit I plan to the op-shop (I love buying secondhand clothes, and anyway, they're about all I can afford these days :), the breakfast I plan to cook, the time I am going to take to stop and have breaks and have some fun in-between the work, and writing my customary Saturday morning blog post, the one I enjoy the most.
My parents have returned from a holiday in Western Australia. My Mum mentioned the fields and fields of wheat - the main export of the state after mining, apparently - and how few trees there are in the wheat fields. Well, paddocks with no trees may be unattractive to the eye, but how can you plant and harvest seed in a time-managed way in giant machinery when there are damn trees in the way? It's just not feasible.

Problem is, it's also not feasible to have productive land without the trees that keep the ecology intact, and encourage the formation of rain clouds. I don't know how that happens exactly, but more trees produce more rain. And so productivity in the short term leads to less productivity in the long term. It's a losing deal. But it's the way our economy runs. Work harder. Yield more.
Shopping at the Victoria Market might be full of colour, sensory delight, and good produce, but it's time wasting. Shopping in the supermarket is more convenient and can be slotted in in less time. As long as I want aisle upon aisle of unfood - processed stuff that has no life. Paradoxically, even though I don't want to live out of an intensive farming paradigm, working out of my own rhythms causes a bit of inner resistance. It's those old tapes playing again, plus the culture informing me that working at this pace is not "enough". This rhythm doesn't feel like "their" way of doing things - whoever "they" are. I don't think it's coincidence that I have had floating around in my head a vague paranoid unease that my landlord will be looking over my shoulder, inspecting how much I am getting done, finding my way of doing things wanting. I think I have had this feeling in some measure for as long as I can remember, that my rhythms are not somehow "right", my way of doing things don't measure up.

Another paradox - as soon as I have acknowledged that this is the pace I need to go at, not at top speed, those insinuating inner voices making my landlord into some kind of Inspector of Housework have largely disappeared.
Here is the rub: I can see clearly the impositions the capitalist culture places on me, the rhythms it tries to force me into (which are really no rhythms at all, no ebb and flow, but clock-card punching, no light and dark but a 24 hour period lit flourescently) and I have abdicated from that way of living life imposed on me from outside. But there is also required an abdication from imposition from within. And that feels 100 times more liberating, to begin to be able to say no to the oh-so-rational-and-logical voices inside me have also been stealing my vitality, my creativity, my crafting of a life of light and shade, ebb and flow, rhythm and rest, of Saturday mornings leisurely crafting a blog post even though a busy day looms ahead. A life of paradox. The only life I really want to live. The life I love.

Happy Saturday, bloggers.

Let There Be Light - Please!

The lessons are coming thick and fast these days, but then so are the soft landings. Indeed, they seem to be everywhere I look now. God's reminder that he is my soft landing. Friends, certain colours, a tree, the golden light at 8pm as the sun is winding down its act. The rain softly falling this morning and the air cooler, after several days dry and hot weather - my favourite sort.

I love rainy overcast days in the middle of summer. The smell the earth yields up. We must come from dust - that smell is something kinda orgiastic to me. Earth. Reminds me of myself. I could eat it ... but it tastes so bad :)

I love rainy days in the middle of summer ... except it's not the middle of summer. It's screaming towards the end. The local football team has started up its training in the oval a street over from me. Their yells for the ball reach me in my yard. My own football team has started up their preseason, a scrappy win in a game not even a fan could love. There is no sign of any yellow or orange leaves - we still have Indian summer to go yet - but Autumn is coming. It's on the wind. I feel whispers of it, memories from years past, in the coolness of the day. My Northern American and European friends begin hopefully whispering desires for Spring.

I love Autumn. Melbourne in Autumn is a sensory delight, especially for an arboreal delighter. Colour explosions. Warmth and coolness. A return to jeans, boots. Autumn in and of itself is a delicious season.

But Autumn means Winter is next. And I dread it. I can't help it. I know that the march towards June equals disrupted days. As the light shortens, my nights lengthen. Every year the same. My summer habit of waking at 8am or 8.30am becomes something I have to strive for, accomplishable only by light therapy for an hour every day. Oh, for a correctly functioning body clock :)

But dreading the onset of Winter in February is sad even by my SAD standards. If that is the measuring stick, then why not dread bad times snap bang in the middle of euphoria? Where does it end? And what a waste that is, dreading the inevitable. I'm sitting out too high on the minutes of the day. Immersed in them, forgetful of myself, I don't think about what is coming tomorrow. Today has enough joys of its own. Worrying about tomorrow's sufferings, I miss today's joys.

I knew much more then than I do now

The present moment is beginning to unfold itself as something far deeper and broader than I ever thought possible. It's like something I knew once, unlearned, and am now relearning once again. In many ways, I knew more when I was a child than I know now. Children know the value of the Now. But it's in an experiential way - they don't know any different, so how could they articulate this?

Swimming in the present is like having a protective coating around you of losing yourself in the moment. Paradox. Losing your life to save it. The alternative is sitting out lightly on top of each moment. There are reasons for this. We learn self-protection. We learn that being immersed in the moment can mean that we get taken unawares by things out of our control. Problem is, sitting out too lightly on the surface of the present means that not only do we miss the deeper rumblings of God but we are easy prey for the past and the future to come pick us up in their talons and deposit us, further down or further back from where we are right now. The only reality. Now. The only place where we can make a difference. The only place where God is. The only real place of safety that we have.

Sitting out too lightly on top of the present, approaching unpleasantnesses loom bigger, casting longer shadows. Compare that to your experience as a child. Say you're at school this morning knowing that this afternoon you have to go and have a vaccination. Each time you think of the approaching doom, it fills you with dread. But still, as the day unfolds, you can't help but just throw yourself into the now that is here now, and you forgot the approaching doom. Until suddenly it's 15 minutes to go, and your teacher rounds you up to herd you off to the Injection Room of Doom. Before that you were oblivious, immersed in the playing of a game, giving yourself to it in a way you haven't unlearned how to do yet, so that when the teacher's voice pierces into your consciousness you're rocked with the jolt all over again. Sometimes as adults we forget how piercing it is living close to the ground.

I think this is the seed of our beginning to learn to sit out on the surface of things, a fear, a wariness of the buffettings of childhood that are the penalty for Now immersion. We think sitting up out there means that we won't get as many nasty surprises because we are forearmed. We can see the future stretched out before us, and we have a better chance of knowing when the bad things are coming. But we don't. Sitting up out here is very windy, and we get pecked with the crows of fear much more than we get shocked with the jolts of remembrance further down below. Down there, hidden in the earth, we learn communion with Him, learn that He didn't resist the jolts and calamities, that trying to arm ourselves against them is not done by arming ourselves with fear. To do so, we unwittingly cast our love and wonder and mystery aside in our quest for ultimate safety. We can't have both. We never could.

Happy Saturday.

Do Not Despise The Day of Small Beginnings

Really, it doesn't take much to get going. Just a whole shitload of discipline. But after that, very quickly, the snowballing effect starts happening.

So it goes like this: sit down and do some centering prayer. Mmmm, noice! Feel the spaciousness start. Feel the mind wander. That's okay. Come back to the centre (Maranatha). "Look" at God for a while. Isn't he beautiful. He's got it all under control. Feel the mind wander. That's okay. Come back to the centre (Maranatha). Mmm, noice! Etcetera. Keep doing this for 20 minutes. Amazing how quickly the time goes.

Next: go into your study, or office, or writing room, or whatever you want to call it. Sit down at table. Light four candles. Admire candlelight. Start writing something about candlelight. Extend to two paragraphs. Remember glimmer of story idea had on train the other night on the way home. Decide to incorporate into story. Hey look - while you weren't looking, you started writing a story!

Get up and get online.

Oh well, don't despise the day of small beginnings. And resist not evil. Even your own. Which means, don't get on a big giant egofest about what a pathetic worm you are. Just accept that you are an internet junkie. Just laugh at the fact that on a day where you weren't going to be online you managed 4 posts. Don't think about how pathetic aforesaid comment is. Just incorporate it into your day of small beginnings of one hour duration.

It's an hour more than I did yesterday