Waiting for nowhere

Ahh.. the blissful sounds of a morning at home..

birds chirping, neighbours heading for work, dishwasher gurgling.. distant cars heading for nowhere.. and thankfully today, there is also a breeze stirring and moving and cajoling cooler temperatures to play around for a while.
The heat is too much for me. It makes my brain move in mysterious ways - and I mean physically, not metaphorically. I can feel it shifting, trying to find a more comfortable spot. Slipping over this side to see if it can escape that piercing light and the stifling warmth of somnolent skies. Then, as it fails to do so, it seems to slide back over the other way, just in case it's any better over there. It makes me squirm in discomfort, snap in annoyance, and panic deep inside where no one can hear me calling.
It's exceedingly unpleasant.
So I embrace the cool breeze of this morning, the dull grey skies that carry a slight promise, with fingers crossed, of rain. My brain seems to have finally fallen asleep in  a more comfortable position; like a sleeping bear shifting enormous thoughts and jumbled words closer to the entrance of its cave in the vain hope that some of them may be allowed out to play when the first spots of water discolour the rocks and stones.
I long for the cold. For my brain to wake up and allow the rest of its dictionary to escape the clutches of the shredder. For the myriad of thoughts and sensations to form clever concoctions of long winding roads to nowhere, full of the promise of tomorrow.

Poppies, Packages and Perceptions

I had lunch today with a very special woman who I love spending time with as she reminds me to say what I think and do what I say I will. She is beautiful and clever, sensitive and perceptive.

She has also manages to inspire me and remind me why it is so good to have female friends who take you as you are, let you be yourself, actually listen and laugh at the right moments. In fact, if truth be told, I don't have many female friends because, well two reasons; one is a hang up from forced institutional company as an adolescent loner in a lonely crowd - no one person's fault, but it certainly turns you away from en masse female company for a very long time! Secondly, because I am lucky to have two or even three good female friends who I have learned to trust and grown to love.I am indeed fortunate.

I know because of the first reason, just how rare and fortunate that is.

I received a letter from another very special woman when I got home. Now I never see that woman - we did once, another age and world away, but now we write, the old fashioned way - complete with stamps and ink and gorgeous paper and specially chosen cards - but I know she's a good listener, takes me as I am, reminds me to say what I think and do what I say I will. If I border on not doing so, she will send gifts to inspire, encourage and cajole. I love seeing her scrawly, creative, chaotic writing on the envelopes and parcels in my letter box - just like I love seeing the tiny blue daisies appear on my phone letting me know that my other friend has popped her head up from being her own Constant Gardener and sent me a text.

I have another very old female friend (she's not old, but we have known each other for a good length of time -  for over 28 years!) Our correspondence and conversations can be sporadic and inconsistent but we know we are there. It can be relied upon. Trusted without talking. Absent without leaving too big a gap. Funny how it works - an acceptance hewn through experience and oft shared stories, tall and true.. Sometimes a fissure has formed but the plates move back in time and the quake is avoided. Because we both want to avoid it.

It's like having a fine old car - not looking as good on the outside anymore, gets clogged and cranky, drives you nuts or around the bend, but it's true and good and gets great mileage! (she would not be happy if she knew I'd used such a metaphor but of course she'd forgive me because that's what we do!)

So, today I received poppies and praise, sent a package and emails and then reminisced on my perceptions today and gathered that I am fortunate indeed.

13 pieces of work

Oh how did it happen that is is now 2013?
And I still haven't published any work...

In fact, 2012 was the year of my desert.. dry, hot and arid with nothing written of any import. Even the urge to immerse had drained from my mind by the end of the year..

Maybe that means I'm not a writer at all.. I haven't even read as much of others' as I would like.
The pile of books on my coffee table, floor, is steadily growing and the dusting and polishing chores are getting harder and harder to manoeuvre. James Joyce, Hitchins and several poets including Dylan Thomas are all still waiting for my attention. The Art of War always gets a brief nod to keep my strategies in the midst of workplace battling alive and current..

I received the best Christmas present segueing into the best birthday present from the wonderful Selise - a means of encouraging and inspiring so I have to do her belief justice. She must have read between the lines of my letters.. (ah, I did do SOME writing..)

Funny thing is, I have already organised and commenced planning a body of work to be ready in 12 months. Nothing like setting yourself a challenge to make sure you actually do it. (my mother always did say that I liked a challenge.. perhaps she was right after all!)

So, in order to commence, recommence and reconnect with the habit, I shall bring this blog back to life and see what happens.

See you tomorrow...

Sailing for the moon..

Sharing words from Patrick.. time to think I think

Patrick wrote.. and I responded.
I thought I'd share both.. with full citing apologies and plagaristic begging for forgiveness from Patrick.. (you can discover his wonderful thinking and writing and talent from my followers list..)

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Vale, Judith Adams

It seems that this is happening more often lately.


People who I've briefly encountered or felt affected by have passed away. Each time the news strikes, I'm for a moment dumbfounded by the need and desire for some reaction. What reaction, though, can ever be adequate or original enough to justify its utterance? There's something so very banal, after all, about the platitudes of 'RIP', or 'Vale', or...


What's there to evoke but shock, silence, and dumbfoundedness?


I realize that by writing this I am, in effect, negating my own argument: not because I have found something that is an adequate response, but rather because the utterance of such banal sentiments and platitudes and utterances are all that are left to say. In this sense, it isn't the words themselves that offers meaning, but rather the articulation of the words in the first place betrays the struggle to offer it meaning.


My only way of responding to the death of Judith Adams - a Liberal Senator for Western Australia - is to recall my encounters with her at Parliament House. I've mentioned before that I worked there as a waiter in the Members Club, so I don't need to recount that here (though I just did).


I remember, however, observing one night that Senator Adams was wearing a wig, and that her walk was slower than usual. It wasn't un-obvious what was wrong, for only a few weeks before my mother had begun a course of radiotherapy for her own breast cancer, and had come home with a few choice wigs of her own.


The nights that I saw Senator Adams at Parliament House - whenever she'd come up - intermingle with that tense and often pitiful time in my own home, where my mother's breast cancer left her tired, weak, depressed, and brittle. I recall my mother eating bowls of porridge for dinner - the only thing she could keep down - and am struck by the recollection and way that Senator Adams only touched the dessert buffet - the same thing: small portions of sweets were the only food she could keep down.


I spoke to her one night, properly - and by that I mean that I stood and she stood and we talked as people, not as a waiter and a customer.


I asked her how she was.


Tired, was the simple response. Between flights to WA and Canberra, between the work as a Senator, between the demands of her own body and the world around her, the most of her that was left was, of course, tired.


I tried to tell her, feebly, that I understood, somewhat. I told her about my mother.


Senator Adams was, as always, warm and personable and sympathetic and understanding, even as she was afflicted herself.


My mother, by then - two years after the diagnosis - had finished her course of radiotherapy, had abandoned the wig, and was eating more than porridge at dinner times.


But the thing I remember now is that each time I saw Senator Adams after that night we spoke was her constant question: 'Hows your mother doing?'


It was a simple reminder each time not only of the widespread and recurring curse of breast cancer, but also the delicate connections between people.


Senator Judith Adams was, simply from my small encounters with her, a person who was warm, understanding, giving, and unfailingly lovely. Her ability and will to remember such a thing about me and my mother - the random guy in the restaurant at Parliament House - when she was a Senator of the geographically largest state in the country, with all the demands on her time and mind that that exerted, with a brutal and callous disease ravaging her body - that she was able and willing, despite that, to reach out and keep that connection says a great deal about the person she was.


I didn't know her well, but the encounter and small platitudes that I can offer hopefully betray the shock and sadness that I feel at news of her passing.


Condolences to her family and colleagues.

1 comments:

CatherineApr 2, 2012 05:24 AM

Ahh.. glad you wrote this.

I too, was very saddened.

I was so worried for your mother at that time.

I was so worried about you.

I was also very worried about my own mother - but I didn't have the understanding then that comes from the extensive public reporting and explaining that occurs now. And the grabbing of grief from celebrities..

People used to cross the street so they didn't have to speak to my mother once her diagnosis was known. Worse when her breast was removed. What kind of woman could she be now, after all.. shocking. Unforgiveable.

Understandable. Now that I know more.

Then she undertook a lifetime (well, the rest of hers) dedication to speaking about it and walking for it.(I have her T shirts to prove it!!) She made a diffferncce to many.. cleaners, shop keepers, farmers wives, young mothers.. even waiters!
The Queen of Everything I used to call her, but secretly proudly..

People are so afraid (again, understandably) of cancer. It is a shattered mirror, a shard of fear into their own uncertainty and fragility.

I am not at all surprised that this wonderful woman remembered you - and your mother. In the midst of the madness and chaos of public life, the dinners and the h"ors d"ouvres of secret corridors, its the baked beans on toast, the creme brulee and the genuine smile that would have helped her keep her hair on and the smile on her secret face.

Thank you for writing of this.. and for your acknowledgements of that beyond our every day.