Somedays you can rule the world, make new content, slay the day, hustle and flow and GSD. Other days you don’t. On the days that are other, it can feel like you’re wading through softened butter- too soft to slide over, and too sludgey to swim through. So you trudge along, with slips and falls and easier bits and then the dogged trudging again. You know that forward momentum is what you need, in fact it’s the only thing that will get you through the mire, but sometimes you just want to lay down and rest. The butter would probably feel nice, wouldn’t it?

Somedays you wake up with energy and verve, and other days you would rather just hide under the doona and wait for the day to pass without it asking anything of you. Which is fine if that other day is a Sunday with no commitments, but if it’s a work day, and a school day and a you have to be a Mum day, then someone is going to pull the doona back and find you at some stage, no matter how stealthily and silently you hide away.

If this is the someday that you feel inspired to do all of the things: yippee. Go do them.

If this is an other day for you, then this is your reminder that you don’t have to butter up or hide from the world: you are allowed to take the day. You don’t have to be productive and perfectly put together every day. You just have to be true to you. And the only way to know what you wants, and maybe even needs, is to take some time to ask yourself. To sit quietly and listen to the beat of your heart and see what song plays today. It might be different to the one you were secretly hoping to dance to, but just like when the Wedding DJ plays True Colours when you were hoping for She Bop (and who doesn’t love a good She Bop? *leery winky face*) you can still swing it if you let the rhythm flow.

So this is your permission to do whatever day you want. Dance if you like, sing if you’re in the mood, or just quietly enjoy the music.

Tomorrow’s song will be different.

…From The Ashers

PS Sorry if you just found out that your twelve year old self used to dance around the loungeroom to a song about solo female pleasure. But if you did: go you good thing. Bop on.

…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. 

What is your favourite smell (and why?)

..From The Ashers