Sunday Blog 16, 19 December 2021 Peering at me through the screen was my counsellor who lives some 400 kilometres away. Thanks to the wonder of modern science she is available to support me. I called on her to pick up the pieces after my experience, detailed last week, when a 2018 journal entry sucker-punched …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Saved by the journal?
Sunday Blog 15, 12 December 2021 A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a funk. With the wise words of Tara Brach in my head, I thought I would seek true refuge in journalling. Not a false refuge (e.g. bingeing on Netflix, drinking wine, compulsively numbing through doing, working my way through an …
The next generation…
Sunday Blog 14, 28th November 2021 Here’s a warning – this post talks about violence against women. If this is not what you want to think about just now, please take care of yourself and scroll on. As part of my day job, I was invited to a roundtable to create a new strategy for …
Twenty years ago…
Sunday Blog 13, 21 November 2021 I moved into my new little cottage I had recently bought. Only I wasn’t sure if I was buying the cottage or it was claiming me – it had felt like home from the moment I saw it just four weeks earlier. I was making a permanent home for …
Books are replaceable…
Sunday Blog 12 – 14th November 2021 So said author and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, when talking on The Australian ABC’s Bookshelf podcast in a recent episode. It struck me as true, in a very brutal real way. “What that book has to give me, it has given me” – once the story is told, …
Rest…
Sunday Blog 11 – 7th November 2021 The night before last something very strange happened to me. I went to sleep at 8.30pm, and I awoke at 5.30am. In between, I had laid in bed all night, asleep. Eyes closed. No toilet trips. Nothing. That may be your night every night, but for me, it …
The ordinary moments…
Sunday Blog 10 – 31st October 2021 I was on the road this weekend, and my Podcast app was scrolling through to whatever was next on the playlist. It landed on a re-run of an episode I had listened to some time ago – Brene Brown’s first interview with Oprah Winfrey. As the episode unfolded …
Ram Dass Reflections
Sunday Blog 9 – 24th October 2021 Last night I was perusing one of our excellent independent bookshops, already clutching a couple of eclectic choices, when I saw a hardcover copy of Being Ram Dass. This is a memoir written not long before Ram Dass’ death in 2019, and I plucked it off the shelf, …
Re-reading The Collector
Sunday Blog 8 – 17th October 2021 Sunday night melancholy cloaks me like a miasma. I blame the 1963 book The Collector which I ploughed through over the weekend. The last time I read it was 1982 when I was 17 and finishing school – three decades later it is still a recommended reading text …
The generosity of writers
Sunday Blog 7 – 10th October 2021 If I remember correctly, I saw Michael Robotham speak at the Margaret River Writers’ Festival a few years ago – or perhaps the Perth Writer’s Festival. My memory is notoriously unreliable. For me, there’s nothing I like more than a Writers’ Festival where you can buy all sorts …