In this post-birthday week I’ve been enjoying some guilt-free voucher purchases, and bought a copy of Hannah Kent’s memoir Always Home, Always Homesick. It’s a compelling book unpacking her student exchange experience in Iceland in 2003 which inspired her first novel, Burial Rites. The true story of the last person executed in Iceland took hold of Hannah, not just in the writing of the novel, but in the subsequent years since the book’s publication.
What I noticed as I raced through the memoir, was my own longing as she described her decision to enrol in a creative writing course. This is a hurdle I have approached several times over my life, but like the horse that just won’t take the risk, I’m yet to vault over the jump and gallop around in a show of celebration. Of fulfilling a longing.
Not that I expect unfettered cantering around and high kicks on my trusty steed. I recognise the truth of Hannah’s description of beginning creative writing studies once back in Australia of the ” a sobering understanding that writing takes a teeth-gritting resilience above all else.” (Always Home, Always Homesick, page 170)
No sooner had I finished this book than I was tuning into an episode of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things where Martha Beck was doing a Q&A as a guest presenter. It was all about how to get more joy from life, there was another immediate, whole-body recognition for me when she advised that “if your fear and longing conflict, choose your longing. Given that I am now in my ahem- golden decade, Martha cheered me on no end as she said “your longing won’t abandon you.”
So I’m back on my horse, galloping towards the jump into creative writing studies, and this time I hope I’ll clear the fence with panache, teeth gritted in determination.
I turned 60 on Tuesday, and my birthday week culminated with a party that has been in the making for some years, in my head at least. Gatherings in my house are a somewhat vexed issue as darling husband prefers a quiet life while I’m an extrovert. Our house is small, my family and friends are numerous, so I’ve hankered for a gazebo, to manage the social overflow.
I wanted something with an apex roof. Darling husband wanted a pitched roof as it’s easier and cheaper to build. In an attempt to break this deadlock, once while he was away, I sought quotes for someone other than him to build it so I could achieve my vision. But Bunnings saved our marriage by offering a flat-pack gazebo that was exactly what I wanted. While still claiming the deadline of May would be difficult, darling husband had it up in no time. The gazebo in fact has been up since January and is now officially his idea.
And thus, I was able to hold my 60th at our house, under the gazebo. Why was that important to me? It’s the gathering of loved ones, the making of memories in our own home. The gesture of hospitality which is, well, generative. And despite all his hedging and stonewalling about the gazebo and the party, when it came down to it, darling husband delivered the speech of a lifetime that stole the show.
So the first gazebo party delivered it all. Family, friends old and new, colleagues. Delicious food, a fire and time to talk and even dance. And love, lots of love. In the quiet of the house the next day the walls still hummed with it.
I plucked this quotation from the poem Ten Thousand Flowers in Spring from the podosphere this week. I was listening to something designed to settle me down for the night. But instead, I sat bolt upright and scribbled it down. The quotation landed, whole and perfect like an egg. “One for the Sunday Blog” I said to myself.
In my well-worn theme of remembering and forgetting and remembering, this truth, that our thinking traps us, or as Tara Brach said (it was her podcast after all) we get lost in the trance of thinking. In the same episode she quotes a neuroscientist who says it takes 1.5 minutes – 1.5 minutes! for an emotion to move through our body unless we get to thinking. Thinking can trap emotions in our body for as long as we like. Like a life-time grudge, for example. So we bring the suffering on ourselves by our repetitive thoughts.
I love the idea of the 10,000 Spring flowers, I love the idea of letting the emotions move through and I love the idea getting on with some frolicking.
I hope it inspires a bit of a Sunday frolic for you too.
This week I tuned into a podcast all about memoir and journalling, just after returning from my recent Bali writing retreat. While there, I finished transcribing my 2006-2010 journal. (Procrastination about editing the memoir? How very dare you!)
Among other things, the podcast episode highlighted that journalling can sometimes be more effective than therapy. While that may or may not be true, one thing is certain. A re-read of journals can be a chance to re-acquaint yourself with the people you used to be. (Like that stranger who wanted to learn golf!) Journals can also reveal how we may have re-told experiences over the years which aren’t strictly, well, true.
Take Engagement Ring Gate. In 2008 my partner proposed in a kind of “let’s build the extension and let’s get married” sort of way. There was little certainty in his wording, and certainly no ring.
Engagement Ring Gate has been one of our go-to squabbles. I asserted that I had wanted an engagement ring, but in fact, what my journal pages revealed was this. Many women had said to me if they had their time over again, they would skip the engagement ring and get diamonds in the wedding band. So that’s what I chose, and that’s what I got.
And yet I still whinged.
My journal pages gifted me a sharp lesson in practising gratitude rather than carping about the past. Accepting what is and moving forward.
Darling husband cautiously received my belated apology for EngagementRing Gate, and has only joked about it once. So far.
If so, that’s what my Mum cast over my life, leaving a trail of constructive kindness and unconditional acceptance.
Not to mention whimsical remnants of 1940s teen slang such as “I’m all gog-wozzled” when she was overwhelmed, confused, tired, temporarily deranged. With six children under the age of eight, she often was.
I shared Mum with five siblings, numerous nieces and nephews, grand-children and great-grandchildren, cousins, great-nieces and nephews, friends – the list goes on. And her long, bright shadow shone on us all.
Happy first heavenly Mother’s Day Mum. We sure do miss you down here.
Why does travel cast such a spell over me? Each time I travel, I imagine that this time, I’ll understand the mystery at last. Is the answer held in my body? The night before I travel I always remind myself that “it’s my last night in my own bed.” And I conjure images of where I will sleep that night.
My collection of cells that is my body walks up the ramp to the plane, off at the other end, to gather up the baggage and bundle myself into a taxi. And then here are my collection of cells, out of the taxi, into the hotel room, into my temporary bed. Overnight, my cells coalesce, a switch is thrown and I catch up with where I am.
This week I’m staying at gorgeous Nalini Resort in Amed in Bali, and I tell myself the trick about travelling to beautiful places is to be here while you’re here.
Don’t miss a moment of the bright morning light, the cool depths of the pool, all white tiles and turquoise water. The gentle trickle of the infinity pool as the water reaches the edge and laps over. The pavilion in the centre of the pool you get to by a narrow bridge to seek the precious early morning shade. The pair of triangle pillow cushion daybeds laid out in welcome on the pavilion, flanking the small idiosyncratic table which still holds the imprint of the hands that made it. A place to rest the journal and scratch out some words, every now and then looking up. There, two large leaves landed on the ground, divorced from their tree, curved up at edge and seesawing on the pool tiles in the wind. And through it all the endless call of the sea. Waves splash on the shore, now gently, now a thud, and then the glittering clatter of the stones, tumbled and tumbled and tumbled in the backwash of the wave.
Breath in, travel. Breath out, arrive. Breath in, be here. Breathe out, be here. Be ready to leave graciously when the time comes. Despite what I tell myself this will be more difficult than usual. I mean, look at this place.
In the interests of getting ready for my next writing retreat and editing sprint in Bali next week, I’ve been dipping back into relevant journals. Much like the girl in the image, I’ve noticed my instinct as a writer is to water ski over the top of emotions, without lingering on anything painful.
When that happens, I turn back to my journals. They are sporadic. Sometimes there are pages and pages written on one day, or other times just one paragraph. Then nothing for weeks and months. I use my journals to work through the latest unholy mess I’ve gotten myself into. Or more likely, the same mess that shows up again and again because, well, I have the same habits.
Memoir and journals feed each other, so I tell myself as I pore back through the years. After re-discovering myself on the journal pages up until 2006 (I what? wanted to take golf lessons? Who is that stranger?) I found a gap between 2006 and 2009. I told myself I didn’t mind, it was for the best, but whooped with joy when I finally located the missing journal!
I had to go down to South Beach to celebrate. There, six jet skis were roaring about the bay, zipping through the water and over anything that looked remotely like depth and complication, whooping and calling out to each other, slicing the water like butter.
As a life-long learner I’m always signed up to some course or other, and last week I formally graduated from a pilot one-year course for people like me who’ve been a consumer representative for some time. Called CREST – Consumer Representative Education Support and Training, it was designed to support experienced representatives to become more involved in research. Worth one unit of a Graduate Certificate, the course was a mix of online learning modules and a research project. See the mini-graduation photo above, on the left.
When the CREST course started in January of 2024, the sale of Mum’s home of six decades had just settled, with her irrevocably housed in a residential aged care facility. As a family, we’d set ourselves the goal of her having a visit from someone every day, and in almost a year, there was only one day we missed. See photo above, on the right. I’d decided to do my CREST assignment on resident and families as lived experience representatives in aged care facilities. I’d even been along to a meeting at Mum’s facility about food, but was quite disappointed once I got there as there was no actual sampling. We were just talking about food and what menus people wanted.
Eight months into the course, in August 2024, Mum died after breaking her hip. Since walking behind her coffin out of the facility, sobbing and carrying the protea the funeral company had given me, I haven’t been back inside a residential aged care facility. But I carried on with the by now very melancholy project right through until submitting the final assignment in January 2025.
When it came time for me to leave the graduation ceremony, despite feeling confident that this time I’d conquered the giant sprawl of Curtin campus, I couldn’t find my car. I wandered around and around, clutching a takeaway container of snacks, leftovers from the generously catered event that had been pressed upon me. A kind volunteer about to start his shift on Curtin Community radio took pity on me as I walked past him for the third time. He offered to drive me around as I clicked my fob, looking for my car’s lights to blink kindly at me.
It seemed a perfect metaphor for how I’ve evolved as a lived experience representative. At the heart of this work is a life-changing experience of illness, injury, trauma, disorder, disability. A carer representative is someone who cares for someone going through any of the above.
For me, becoming a mother in 1998 was a life-defining experience that kicked off my consumer representative journey. Nothing bad happened. I just wanted to access the evidence-based model of midwifery-led care in a family birthing centre with access to a birthing pool. If I’d been having my baby in Sydney at the time that would have been quite normal, but it was not how things rolled in 1990s Perth.
When my daughter was three, another life-defining event of surviving a home invasion saw me pivot to victim support advocacy. The frustrations inherent in this work meant I drifted back to health advocacy, back to maternity care and women’s health, and over time, to a systemic advocacy role that spanned every conceivable area of health.
After the nice radio volunteer and I had toiled around four different Curtin car parks, my car finally answered my distress call and its lights flashed in a car park I could have sworn I’d never been to in my life. I thanked the volunteer profusely, tried to offer him the snacks as a thank you, which he declined. I walked to my car with as much dignity as I could muster, carer and a consumer representative graduate, and someone who should always catch an Uber to Curtin.
My new red collapsible e-bike is a beast, even on level 1. Zooms forward with a spurt as I scrabble for the pedals, jam on the brakes, turn it back to zero to co-ordinate my errant feet. Endless opportunities to look foolish at fifty-nine on this machine, but if my mother’s death has taught me nothing else, I know there is only now, and joy lies at the edge of comfort. I settle, push off safely, the thrill of cycling descends.
It’s a direct echo of the electric shock of joy when I first rode a bike in my childhood. There was just one bike in the holiday house between six children, and somehow I missed my turn learning to ride. I’d get astride the bike, push down on the pedal and feel the moment of freedom, wind in my hair, the body pushing forward and then stop with just one revolution of the wheels. Then I’d come to a stop and just be the girl who couldn’t ride a bike yet.
But one holiday the front lawn was spongy and deep, I was astride the bike, one foot on the pedal ready to take off as I had done so many times, pretending I could ride. Now the other foot sought and found the pedal. My gut felt a punch as the thrill of success overcame me. A new knowing entered by muscles and the rest of the holiday was an immersion in the thrill and practice of riding a bike.
Now I smile as I ride, teeth dry from the wind. Some of the people I pass smile back at me.
It would seem that there are consequences to removing my head from the sand of world politics. Much greater effort is required to ensure that my spirits remain buoyant in these interesting, interesting times.
So today I returned to the scene of my undergraduate degree. I left this beautiful, beautiful campus 38 years ago to make my way into the adult working world. I don’t venture here too often but today a Storyfest event was convened here which included presentations, panel discussions, workshops with a radical inclusion and diversity focus.
In the essay writing workshop I attended, this quote from Virginia Woolf surfaced. I wanted to include it in the Sunday Blog not just because it allows me to use the semi-colon (they are not at all in literary fashion any more) but also because the quote itself is a balm to my battered soul.
Creativity and writing are about communication. Not rhetoric, lies and propaganda. Not siloed realities engineered by social media platforms. But communicating, soul to soul. The point of writing is to communicate and share our truth. It is health and happiness to genuinely connect. So after a week with two writing rejections, one missed deadline and way, way too much Trump, I’ve taken Sunday off to sit in the glorious gardens of UWA and marinade in the words of Virginia Woolf. We’ve got to keep on writing, creating and connecting.
