A little Of Course

Lately I’ve been making the time (no, not finding the time- when I try to find it, it is endlessly elusive, I have to MAKE it) to do some simple things. Breathing (don’t laugh, I’m doing breathwork- it’s a thing), coaxing and stretching out my wound-up muscles, taking fifteen minutes to sit quietly in the sun, designing my day so that I can have twinkling candles lit and dinner on the way in time for sunset, so that I can sneak away for a moment and drink in the last moments of the day.

To my Nan and the generations before I suppose this sounds like nonsense. Of course we would do these things. Of course you need to breathe with your whole lungs to keep the recesses fresh and clean. Of course your body works better if it actually works a little. Of course sunshine helps you to grow in more ways than just making your legs tanned. Of course the best time of day is when the light is low, delicious food smells engulf you and your nest is full of people you love most. Of course.

Yet somehow, some days, in the bustle of the hustle it’s easy to forget and forgo these little of courses, in search of a new course. Perhaps it might be something as fabulous as a new book, a new bar, a new job, or a new restaurant. Or it could be something more benign- just the rushing about in the minutiae of life- taking kids hither and popping to the supermarket thither, grabbing this or that or the other in order to tick all the boxes and have all the things.

Don’t get me wrong- these comings and goings are what makes up a life. They are the things that give meaning to our years, so long as we actually take the time to make the meaning and the memory by accepting the present of the present. With our presence. So many opportunities to receive. It’s often said that our true power lies in our ability to receive, and so that is the lesson of the simple of courses that I’ve been indulging in.

They feel so deliciously indulgent, which tells me they are something that my mind and body craves- so much so that I wonder how I ever let them slide. Yesterday I went down the slide- we have one in our own backyard, so I can’t tell you one reasonable reason for NOT sliding more often. As I slid, my scalp remembered pigtails flying behind me as I hurtled down a slide as a four year old. My skin remembered the sweet burn, as bare legs touched hot metal of slides that had baked in the sun all day. My eyes remembered looking to the sweet line of the horizon as I flew high in the air at the end, and wondered if I would ever touch the ground again. But most of all, my heart remembered the thrill of all of the slides: fast ones, slow ones, twisty ones. Ones where I crashed into some kid who had stopped at the bottom, or fell off the end, tumbling on grass or sand. Ones where I hurt myself a little, and then ran back to the ladder for another turn anyway. And best of all, it remembered the ones with the heavy-vulnerable weight of my own children in my lap. Feeling them press their backs against my chest, feeling for my safe heartbeat as they learnt to love exhilaration.

Those slides were the best ones of all.

Of course.

…From The Ashers

This is a bit weird:

It’s been so many years since I heard your laugh, yet I still know exactly how it sounds. And your voice. I know your exact inflexions. They were so unique that I guess they are like your signature. It might also be that I used to call your mobile like some kind of otherworld stalker for a bit after you died. I liked listening to your voice mail message. Hey, I said it was a bit weird.

This is also a bit weird:

Maybe it’s because you died, and I’ve captured your words in amber, preserving them forever, or maybe it’s because you taught me so many cool things about raising kids, right when I was ready to listen, that I often hear your words. That happens less these days, because so much of your wisdom was about little dudes. Your kids were only young when you died, weren’t they? They seemed older, but they were tiny little wise souls. You taught them so much. And yet, after all this time, still you are present. Not only in the echo of Meil’s laugh or in the cheeky side-edge of a grin from Kam, but in the energy you brought to the world.

There was always something restless, something new to conquer, something to do, when you were in the room. And always something to laugh at. The way your laugh would burst out of your throat always made me light up. So many of the things you found funny were irreverent or inappropriate, but that just made your laugh even funnier. Bloody hell it was hard to work with you sometimes- I’d be trying to be all professional and composed and you’d be running a circus performance over in the corner, making everyone giggle and have MORE FUN. All caps.

This is not a bit weird:

That over the years I have added your slightly wrong, slightly naughty, slightly messy but absolutely more FUN ways to my life, my work and my parenting. I’ve added a pinch when Coco is being poked and prodded with stainless steel hurty-things, and I’ve added a dash when I have to hang on to the Jesus-Bar in the car when Liam is driving (Yes, he’s driving now- can you imagine? I want to remind you of when you came to his birthday when we had the farm animals and you were blind from the growth in your skull and had to be lead by Greg- I saw the way you clutched onto his arm- but I can’t even write it without tears. Remember your cowboy boots? I do. You stomped right ’til the end my friend. We all remember the way you never let death take you- you took it. And I will always add a big dollop of that gutsy sass to my days.)

This is a bit weird:

I wonder what you would think of the world now. Would you be sitting back and taking it, or would you be out there making a difference, making everyone look up, and see the big picture? I think I know the answer to that, and I promise that we are doing our best to honour you, and keep hold of the world as you would have liked to see it.

Remember near the end when you were seeing flashes of light and you thought that maybe your sight was coming back. I remember, and those flashes are the things that remind me that no matter what, there is always some light. Even if we have to make them up a little from a pathway in our brain.

You were always a bit weird, Rick, in the nicest of ways. And you shone your light bright so all the other weirdos could find you. I like your brand of weird.

Thanks for the light.

Happy Birthday Rick. Miss ya. Love ya.

…From The Ashers

Tiffany knows what I love

I guess I’m guilty: I’m in love with love.

Love hearts are my favourite symbol- I have them all around me- I love finding hearts in nature (leaves, rocks, markings from the exiting tide on the sand) and I love the word love. I even have a biz with a friend where there’s a love heart in our logo and our website is lovecwc.

Most of my favourite songs are about falling in love, being in love, unrequited love or even lost love.

Movies that hit my heart the hardest are the ones where a love is harmed.

Lately I’ve been finding the world is harder than it used to be. Mostly because I feel like there is a loss of love. Maybe not everyone is as in love with love as me. I see people being mean to each other about things that don’t really matter in the big scheme of things. I notice a shortness in some of the interactions that people have with each other based on whether someone is wearing a mask, getting a stab or standing far enough away. I don’t like it when our hearts harden, or when we choose to see the differences between us rather than the things that bind us together.

When we offer up our heart to another person we are at our most vulnerable and our most trusting. With each quivering beat we are at the mercy of another- it is our most thrilling, exciting and terrifying time. It is also our most powerful. For if we can offer up the essence of our deepest selves for scrutiny and sanctuary we can do anything. We are free.

Hearts are sensitive and soft and need to be held gently. They are also strong and courageous and true.

We have to keep our hearts well, to listen to them and respond to their wants, lest they stiffen or become sharp. The vicious edges of a heart that has been neglected can cut as clean as a shard of glass drawn along the length of a finger, throbbing to death as the life and love pulses out of it.

One day a long time ago my boy and I were talking about war. It was ANZAC Day and I was trying to explain to him why the emotion of the day always overwhelms me. Why my usually stoic lacrimal glands seep with tears for people I’ve never known in places I’ve never been. Why the Last Post causes my arm hairs to stand up like so many soldiers. He couldn’t understand it, my gentle boy, and I watched his brain tick over the thoughts one by one, trying to make sense where there is none. Finally he looked at me and said, “No one would ever go to war if everybody just remembered that everybody else has a mummy. The mummies love them. And the mummies will be really, really sad.”

My boy was right.

These days when I get dressed in the morning, my finishing touch and my fortress is my necklace. It was bought for me by my family and it whispers my favourite word, from my favourite shop. I look in the mirror as I put it on, and say quietly, “I’m just adding a little bit more love.” And then I breathe out, and think of ways that I can make my necklace come true.

I think it’s okay to be in love with love.

..From The Ashers..

…and pause…

I read a cool blog today from my friend Esyltt Graham (Vitality With Esyltt) where she spoke about the importance and power of the pause. Of stopping and sitting to just be.

I know I haven’t always been one to embrace the pause. My mind pings from one thing and pongs over to another in rapid and relentless layers. I can’t even say “in succession”, because some of the thoughts don’t even wait for the one before to be finished before they are off, racing to the next destination. Which means I can look like I’m in quiet repose, when really I’m busy with all manner of thoughts and internal conversations. I don’t think I’m alone in this, which made me think about how important the pause actually is. The lack of pause could even be the real pandemic. Or is it endemic: a condition that we know is there, but have decided we will just live along with? Do we live in some kind of symbiosis with it, perhaps even addicted to its presence- this lack of pause- until the day comes when it overtakes us and we are forced to take the time to succumb or rejuvenate?

I have created a whole slew of procedures in my world to stop the mental ping-pong. I have a five-step morning ritual that centres me, and gets me ready for the day. I have ‘day dreaming time’ in the diary, where I sit on the couch and let the pings pong at will. I set aside time every day to read. I meditate daily (sometimes for tiny snippets of respite, and others to take in the wild expanse of the unified field) and of course I love to write. Some of these things are more effective than others at creating opportunities to pause, and I guess they could sound like a lot of work, but they actually do the opposite for me. They are the things that bring me the most joy and the most delight. De light. They bring me to the light. You know that sense of fizzy fun that coaxes the edges of your mouth up into a crescent, no matter how deep that valley between your eyes is? (Fun fact: Liam once said to me on a particularly fraught day “Your valleys are deep today Mum.” Thanks kid, I’m aware.)

So yes, I can see the value of the pause. Of that ability to take a break from the busyness and the scrolling and the information overload, and to simply allow. To sip a cup of tea. To feel the warmth of the mug on your hands. To watch the dust motes dancing on the sunbeams. And perhaps to do even do a little more than a pause. To actually put in a full stop.

For it is in the stopping and the sitting and the space between the notes, that the true symphony of our life is played out. Perhaps it is in these pauses- these narrow crannies between one task and the next- that if we tune in our ears, and open our hearts we will see the thing we are looking for, find the light that we most yearn to bask in. It the stops we might have the mysteries of the universe revealed to us, or maybe we will just get clear on what to cook for dinner, but I have a feeling that there is something just there, just on the other side, that would love to show its shy little face, if we can just stop long enough to glimpse its presence.

Maybe the pauses are where the meaning lives.

What do you do to pause? Is there anything in your pauses?

…From The Ashers…

This time of the year the air gets too heavy to blow around all willy nilly and Septemberish, and some days I wonder if I’m breathing oxygen, or growing gills like Aquaman. I wake at 5am with the light and the heat, menopausal beadlets starting to form anywhere that skin touches skin- between boobs, at the backs of knees, between fingers. The mornings are hazy with the smoke of faraway fires and salt and the water attached to the air. Always the water.

This part of Queensland is impossible to inhabit if you don’t like moist. The word that sends distasteful shivers to napes of necks of women the world over, is our way of being for the next couple of months or so. And with it, the moist brings a smell. She smell that has become my smell of summer. 

Back in the olden days of my childhood, summer used to smell of holidays that stretched out like the Princess Highway mixed with Sunnyboys and chlorine and the hot wet concrete we would lay on, lizardlike to warm ourselves after a swim. 

Then in the less olden days of my teen-age, summer smelt of coconut oil basting crispy skin and lemon juice bleaching our hair, with a whiff of tobacco and a scratch of a Redhead from someone’s Mum’s stolen cigarettes. It smelt of furtive kisses and sweaty palms and wetsuits drying and the sharp acetic zest of resin as someone fixed a ding in their board.

In the modern era of my 20s, summer smells were a fetid mix of fresh beer and stale beer and tap beer and the tang of tins, mixed with the fusty cheese from last night’s pizza, still soaking into the cardboard box. All of that rolled into a smell of potential and enthusiasm as holiday jobs shifted into looming careers and those uni smells became things of the past.

In my early 30s summer smelt like home, as I exhaled into the arms of the safest man in the world, and inhaled security blended with promise of a future unexpected. The smells of proper coffee and dry-hot Melbourne tar, of salt from the bay mixed with the fumes of industriousness became the smell of all of my now summers.

Summer now is made up of frangipani and sugar cane, of distant ginger and those stupid little white flowers that wink from glossy hedges and make me sneeze. There’s a sensation of salt and heaviness, until the sky finally cracks and we bring out the stormbeers, cleansing the balconies and making way for the smell of the indolent days of sunshine. The smell is laced with sandy zinc cream and wet dogs and soggy towels and love. Always love. 

The best smell of all. 

The Shitcat isn’t dead (again).

On Tuesday morning there was quite the commotion at Asher HQ, as the MASSIVE horsedog who is agisted next door and who is, how shall we say it, not a cat person, pulled his owner over and dragged her over our driveway like cheese on a grater, to chase Woofa the Shitcat. (Who was most likely lying supine and flashing her derrière at him.) The owner came running at me, screaming, “My dog just killed your cat.”

So I calmed down the sobbing jockey whilst I looked for a trail of blood, tiny cat bones and general destruction in the direction of #deadcat. None. And no deadcat to be seen.

Except said cat was nowhere to be found. Strange behaviour for a dead cat indeed.

As if in response to the mayhem and maiming, the heavens opened up, and we had what Queenslanders call “a drop of rain”. The type of rain that makes you glad you are wearing a bra. And waterproof mascara. And you have sandbags in your garage that your Mum made you get from council once, when they were going for free (I case of floods. No we don’t live near a river. But: free.)

I searched and searched through the deluge for #deadcat for at least two minutes, before deciding the lack of blood spatter meant she was without harm or without a trace (I’ve watched the shows, I know how this stuff rolls) and it was time to do what all good cat owners do: wait, call “pusspusspuss” in that high pitched voice that cats universally love loathe, wait, shake the dry food pellets, wait.

By and by, the thing that all cat owners know about happened: #deadcat reappeared. Bedraggled and a bit skittish, but decidedly #alivecat. No sign of blood or eviscerated entrails or shards of bones chewed by the jaws of megalodog. Nothing.

She stared at me for a beat, did one cross sounding miaow, demanded food and then started licking her puckered area. Definitely not dead today.

The overall casualty count was: two skinned knees (The Meg owner), one wet t-shirt that was winning NO competitions this day (cat owner), one heart on the verge of infarction (cat owner).

I know one day #alivecat will be #deadcat, but my goodness it’s hard to believe that supershitcat will ever meet her maker. And she sure knows how to burst my corpuscles. We do love you Woofa, but can you hold off on the near death action for awhile?

The vet said ‘cats like this’ often live into their twenties. Pass me the smelling salts.