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Blood.

It is our life force.  It is a clever fluid that carries oxygen to our cells.  It takes our every breath, to every part of our bodies.  And then it lets us breathe out again.  In.  And out.  In.  And out.   And repeat.

Without it our cells would be gasping, asphyxiated.

And we would die.

Blood.

It looks alarming when we see it outside the precious tubes of our arterial network.  It is so bright, so vivid, and so shiny that it almost seems to have a life all of its own.  If you look at a drop of blood closely it seems somehow thick with vibrancy and hope.  A crimson lustre, full of promise and potential.

It scarlet-shouts at us: lookatme lookatme lookatme.  Full of its own importance, for it knows: without it, we would die.

Blood.

Most of us don’t think much about it.

From time to time some of it may leak out of us, in scratches and cuts and scrapes, and we wipe it efficiently away- red blots on white tissues- and discard it without a mind, for we know our clever bodies will make more and more and more.  And repeat as required.

For without it, we would die.

But sometimes people can lose more than they can make.

And sometimes, some bodies have diseases that break down the blood too quickly.

And some other people, through no fault nor folly of their own, make thousands and thousands of the ruby red discs, but those bloody little frisbees are left wanting: wrong shape, fuzzy edges or missing some parts, so the intelligence of the body sends them to the liver.  For termination.

And yet, without these biconcave saucers: they will die.

This child is one of those.

Thankfully, she doesn’t need your blood this week, but one day soon, she will.

Please, roll up your sleeve, and share some of your carmine elixir of life.  You’ll make some more, I promise.  In fact, you’ll do it without even knowing.

She, however, simply can not.

Blood stores are at a critically low level at present, so you will be hearing me parp on about this all week.

Please call 139596 to make an appointment, or visit the Red Cross Website to find a location, check your eligibility, or share this information with your friends.  

Not everyone CAN donate, so those of us who are able to, have the ability to SAVE A LIFE… I think that’s a super-power.

…Thanks and Love, From The Ashers xx

I am the world’s worst best procrastinator.  I put off everything that I can, until it becomes painfully impossible to ignore it any longer.  I create situations where I have a feeling of ‘something hanging over my head’, that gets so heavy and cumbersome that it pushes me forward and threatens to crush my lungs .  It is only then that I do it.

I did it today.

In fact I did two ‘its’.

Together, they took three and a half hours, tops.  Two things that had been squeezing the joy out of my evenings, as I would plant my lazy bum on this very comfy couch and make deals with myself about how I would get up and at least start one of them soon/next ad break/after writing this next blog/as soon as I finish this cuppa.  After sufficient time had elapsed and it would become obvious I wasn’t even going to start them, I would skulk off to bed, vowing to get up at 5am and eat the frog.

But I never ate those frogs.  And of course I never got up at 5am.

The only frogs I eat are choccy

So like I said, today I made a deal with myself that I would do just one of the maligned tasks, and then strangely, I felt so relieved and energetic after one, I did the other.  They weren’t even difficult.  And now I can breathe fully again.  Just like that.

That’s not to say that that is the end of tasks that require my attention, but having those two millstones removed has created a space and a freedom that I didn’t even realise was being so choked off.

I’m writing this blog to share my relief and elation, so that I might come back here some day, should I ever get to this level of procrastination again, and remember how wondrous it felt, to be like Nike.  I’m also writing this in case you too are putting off some reviled task, with the futile hope that it will go away.  I want you to get a sense of how BLOODY GOOD it feels once it is done.  Of how you can completely relax your shoulders.  Of how you can take your time over dinner.  Of how you can savour your evening, instead of wishing it away.

Kelly Exeter shared a tip one day: if it takes less than a minute to do, do it right now.  (I’ve changed that to two minutes).  It has lead to a life with much less clutter.  Previously I had too many jobs ‘for later’ stored up in my head.  Ten simple jobs that could be done in the moment can add up to a lot of mess.

The other thing that helped me today was to really get into the feeling of euphoria once the first job was done.  I’m trying to create a cell memory of that in my mind and body so that I can try and access it next time the old pleasure/pain strategy of putting things off until they are stressfully urgent tries to rear up.

I don’t know if this new strategy will be the end of a lifetime of procrastination and cramming, but stranger things have happened.

I’ll let you know.

What are you putting off?

Will you start it today?

…From The Ashers xx

Thinking of my big hearted friend, today.

Happy Birthday Hayls.

I will play Green Spandex thirty seven times, and probably have a cry.  (I’m already crying.)

Things I would rather be doing:

Choosing you a present.

Talking to you on the phone, or even better, in person.

Discussing what the birthday celebrations are gonna be.

Doing some Jump Dancing.

Teasing your husband because he got you something weird (That of course, you loved. Because: also weird.).

Agreeing with you that your best gift would be to have Ricki here to share the day with you.  If only you could have that.

Shit, I’d even give you a cuddle.

I don’t like this game.

I didn’t like the cancer game either.  I kept on wishing for it to be over so we could get on with our real plans.  I think John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”  The same goes for death, I guess.  I remember you saying once, about someone who had died, and who’s loved ones were consoling themselves with the stories about how they had “had a good life” and that they “died on their own terms”, that they were still dead, and dead for a long time.

It is long.

And yet it’s not even a year.

It feels like a lifetime and a minute.

I don’t know what is worse.

I just bloody miss ya.

…From The Ashers xx

I have a confession to make.

The kids and I started doing a hybrid-style yoga thingy that I made up a few weeks ago, in an effort to counteract all the forward head carriage that I am worrying and worrying about in children these days.  All the devices.  All the gaming.  And all of that four or five kilograms of cranium sitting forward of it’s optimal position.  Putting all that strain of the anterior structures.  Messing with optimal neural function.

It’s my latest thing, this anterior head thing, so I decided to start in my own home, and get the kids yoga-ed up.

The first thing I found out (after noticing that I am, in fact, quite shit at yoga) is that I can’t touch my toes.

I know.  The shame of it.  The smug little chiro doesn’t have normal range of motion of the lumbar spine.  Great.

Flash forward a few weeks and the Evil Geniuses have long since grown tired of this early morning yoga-ish idea of mine, but I can’t let it go.  So today I was out on my balcony in the drizzling Sunrise cool, when an extraordinary thing happened.  I was doing my modified Sun Salute, and by modified, I mean the only bit of it I can remember from ten and a half years ago when I did some pregnancy yoga classes.  Back when my mind was still intact, and I could in fact, touch my hands on the ground.

I was looking out towards the beach, observing the grey sky, and trying to be at one with nature.  To expand my mind, but not to engage in any thoughts.  To be at peace.

In reality I was making a list of the tasks of the day, wishing the clouds and the winter away, and thinking how, yes I was doing a kind of yoga thing, but that it wasn’t enough.  That ten minutes a day didn’t really cut it.  That these meagre stretches weren’t enough to reverse a decade of bodily neglect.  That I wasn’t stretching enough, meditating enough, doing enough, being enough.  That I had too much to do today and I wouldn’t get it all done because I didn’t have enough time, enough energy, enough ambition.

It didn’t matter that these ten minutes were ten more than I did a few weeks ago, I still judged myself unkindly and harshly, because I wasn’t enough.  I wondered if I would ever be enough.  Have enough.  Do enough.

And it got me to thinking and sifting through all of the internal dialogue to find all of the times in my life when I have said, “Good on you, you have done all that you could, and that is enough.”  There weren’t many times.

So as I stretched those contracted hamstrings, I started to stretch those neural pathways that keep me in stuck in place, the ones that belie that no matter how much I do, it just won’t be enough.  I breathed deeply into the tight muscles and the tight mind, and said out loud.  “I am enough.”

And as I did, my fingertips brushed the tiny, fine hairs on my toes.  Almost, almost, almost touching my toes for the first time in many years.

I looked up, just in time to see the sun break through the silver clouds.

Today is a new day.

A new reality.

And I am enough.

Are you enough?  What stops you from feeling enough?

…From The Ashers xx

So many blogs about Robin Williams today.  So many heartfelt sentiments.  So much discussion about suicide and depression and speaking out about our emotions.  So much, that I don’t feel like I have much to offer as a unique perspective, but somehow I feel want to say something, to mark this strange day.

To say thank you to a man who spoke to me as a young person in Dead Poet’s Society and Good Will Hunting.  Who brought me those stories at a time when they were just what I needed to hear.

A man, who it appears was wracked with internal conflict I know nothing about.  It seems to me, that might be just how it is when people are fighting their own internal battles.  When they try to explain, it just sounds like gibberish.

I hope that one day soon, that won’t be the case.

RIP Robin.

…From The Ashers xx

...she shivered with anticipation as she realised that he wasn’t getting ready to play gently in her lady-garden, but that she was about to be punished, with a spanking…

Nah, just kidding.  We aren’t going to be talking about spankings but spanxings.  There isn’t much I won’t do for you RRs (well, maybe except for spankings), so I have done the research, and I’m back here with the report.  Don’t ever say I don’t tackle the big issues for y’all.

It all came about when I was shopping for a new outfit for THAT TALK, and the excellent chicks at Country Road were giving me the big ups, telling me how gorgeous I looked in this outfit, how cute I looked in that, and no, my bum did not look big in the other.  So big were the ups, that it came as quite a shock when I poured my all of my adipose tissue into a saucy little number that my new best friends said I would look so hot in, and they all stood back and said, “Hmmm.”

Looks were exchanged.

I could see there was something that someone needed to tell me, but I had no idea what it could be, when I was looking sooo hot.

At last, amidst nudgings and throat clearing, the speaker was chosen.

“Ummm.  I think you just need the right underwear.”

I craned my neck around (which I will admit made my chin to neck region look very taut and took years off my profile), to see the dreaded VPL.  I was already wearing the ‘right’ underwear.  Seamless.  Flimsy.  In fact, my best no-line knickers were apparently making lines, or more like, those little accent thingies (cedillas?), as they rolled in and out my undulating derriere.

Like this ~~~~~~~~~~

Interesting, but strangely, not really the look I was after.

So what was this mysterious, and so far elusive ‘right underwear’?

“You need Spanx,” by stylish new friends said, “Get thee to Myer immediately.”

And so without further ado, I did as I was bid, and found myself at the mercy of a matronly type who peered at my flabby bits and hanging down blobs, over her spectacles, grabbing here, pinching there.  Not since that fateful day in the gym when the trainer used the callipers on what he euphemistically called my ‘skin folds’ and deemed me to be 33% composed of fat*, had my tuckshop arms, upper thighs, back and muffin-top undergone so many nips.  With many “Hmmmms” and a few “Ahhhhs” she stepped back and had a really long look at me, eyes travelling up and down my body.  I’ve felt more comfortable trying to jump the queue to a nightclub and letting the bouncer cop an eyeful.

“Okay, you need these and maybe this”, she said, handling me some bike shorts and a singlet in that fetching shade of beige reserved for medical apparel.  I held them up.  Yes, definitely medical, in fact, they looked Paediatric size.  “Go on,” the matriarch said, “go and squeeze yourself into them.  Let me know if you need… mumble help.”  I swear she said Vaseline.  I think she was smirking.

I won’t bore you with the hot and sweaty pushing and pulling and stretching and breathing-in details, but it came to pass that I purchased these:

for research purposes…

They cost almost as much as the dress, which still hasn’t been worn, because the very day I was putting it on as quickly as possible to avoid anyone in my house walking in and seeing the horror that is my post-menopausal life, Nathan walked in.  And Nathan saw.

Saw me in all my latex-clad beauty.

He took one look, laughed, and left the room sniggering, but not without saying over his shoulder, “Nice Tour de Noosa shorts.”  I thought a pretty good swear in my head that ends with ‘off’ and thought other vengeful thoughts about how much marital bliss I would penalise him for, for that comment.

And then I looked down and my nude-coloured, shiny, bulging thighs.

I think I might be the one who isn’t getting any.

Have you been Spanxed yet?  What do you think about ‘shapewear’?

*I shit you not, 33 PER CENT!!  What the?  I weigh around 57kgs, and 33% of that is fat.  That’s around 20kgs of FAT.  By the look on the trainer’s face, that is quite a lot.

…From the Ashers xx