just in case you were wondering

A few years go by

New journey, new home, new roles, many new experiences and a rainbow or two … stay tuned as this blog continues to reflect and ‘Leila’ is finally published.

It’s cold .. need a beach!

  

Can emergence be planned?

Light bulbs are not going off, it is cold and my brain is sluggish. I would rather be at the beach. It’s hard being in the wintry southern hemisphere when friends are in balmy northern hemisphere places. I check through photo albums looking for flash of insight while lingering longingly at the beaches. O dear – go with it – emergence says think beach, toes in sand, sun on skin, goggles and snorkel on. Alchemy will be back one day.

.PS. It’s cold – how is hat? Remember, the hat. Well, it fell off today, somewhere on the street. I took it off to feel a shimmer of thin sun and dropped it – how does that happen.

PPS. Beaches I have loved – PNG, Broome, Fiji Islands, South Gippsland.

What is it about Paris I

It must be a Musing Monday for me to even venture this question and “Magic” was the answer when I asked at my favourite hat and jewellery shop, owned by women who are delightfully chic and encourage me in my Parisian adventures.

Paris is magic.  I live by my senses there as I do nowhere else. I am happy in Paris as nowhere else. Moments are memories sinking deep beneath my skin. I sit and drink it all in with a smile as wide as Mona Lisa’s. I am satisfied here as nowhere else and satisfied is a magical place to be.

Soft warm sun; a colour palette that delights; simple foods filling me with respect and awe. A language of struggle but I find help along the way; gentle encounters are everywhere and the crazy encounters delight and linger.  I never feel lonely in Paris; the space between things holds me as if the beauty stretches, as if beauty holds of us together. Beauty is the misty air, the blue of the door, the flow of the Seine. The curve of the cobble, the spread of the butter, the crack of the bread. In Paris I drink the in-between. In Paris I am nourished as nowhere else. I live simply, being simply me.

Why I dwell in the green

 You ask me why I dwell in the green mountains / I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care / as the peach blossom flows downstream and is gone into the unknown.

Conversation in the mountain by Li Bai (AD 701-762): Poem spotted in the National Gallery of Victoria.

Photos of my version of dwelling in the Australian green, taken while lingering in the grass in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne looking up and looking along; at Narara Ecovillage, Central Coast NSW and an Impressionist favourite from the Art Gallery of NSW.

Monet refuses the operation

extract from “Monet refuses the operation” by Lisa Mueller; the lilies of Giverny; lamps in London.

Doctor, you say, there are no haloes / around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration /caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish / the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon / does not exist and sky and water,

…

I will not return to a universe / of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children / of one great continent.

The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, / becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water / becomes lilac and mauve and yellow …

 

 

Two roads in a wood

 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

by Robert Frost

In a rubberized bag …

There is a theme emerging – travel, wandering, musing, poems – scattered thoughts and images – best summed up as luggage and overflowing baggage. And I am reminded of Journeys of Simplicity, a (very) charming book by Philip Harnden, noting the packing lists of different travellers on their journeys e.g. John Muir, a Civil War activist, on his thousand mile walk to the Gulf in the late 1800s, packed lightly. I am not known for this!

    In a rubberized bag   

    comb / brush /  towel /  soap

    change of undercothing / copy of Burn’s poems

    Milton’s paradise Lost /  Wood’s Botany  /  small New Testament

     journal /  map / a plant press

Now that is light – though I wonder if he should have packed a copy of ‘When there is no doctor, or dentist’! He travels light but not as light as those among us who wish to live like a leaf on the water. Philip says that, only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. I may need to ditch upwards of 20 kilos from my bag.

I missed my blog

Work called, life called – I had little time for my blog. Only a handful of days but I noticed and I missed it. My writing journey craves connection. In blogging, we tell stories together. As Brenda Walker muses, the “storyteller doesn’t have a monopoly on the exercise of the imagination; the reader is a storyteller in waiting.” A blog is our conversation.  In blogging we are all makers and as “makers shape into being ..” (Alberto Manguel).

I am a pilgrim searching for connection and “the world is the text I write on my skin”, says Vandana Shiva.

We make, we write and read. Reading, says Brenda Walker, “is a temporary loosening of the ego, when we read we move away from ourselves. .. we dissolve, just a little: we’re pleasurably lost”.

I have missed being lost and away from my moorings, floating in the flow.

My blogging lamp is brought to you from a special time in Le Marais, Paris and the street art was on a pavement just outside the door.

On the road again