rain and mountains

A couple of days ago I went for a late afternoon walk with K. It soon started raining and we ended up getting entirely drenched. We walked miles along empty dirt roads, over the bridge across the river past cow paddocks, mango trees, bamboo clumps, farm houses.  The road finally ended at a cattle grid and a gate.  We were as wet as if we’d swum in our clothes. We walked all the way back to her place chilled and  shivering. Our two children - my son, her daughter - had been delivered home from orchestra practice while we were out. They were curled on her sofa reading TinTin books. 

I had been a bit miserable earlier in the day. That diffuse grey Life is futile/ everything is too hard/may as well eat more chocolate mood that descends on me from time to time. Which dovetails with overwhelming despair about the appalling things our species does to the planet and eachother  and my fear for the future. 

After our walk I realised that my mood had  changed. The rain washed away my gloom, rinsed it off my body.

I once heard someone at a talk with a Tibetan monk ask about what to do when you are depressed. The monk said that in Tibet, a depressed person (not that they had a word for ‘depressed’) would be taken to the top of a hill or mountain, some place offering a wide view,  to put  things back in perspective. 

eulogy for broken glass

    

November 23rd

My talented friend Lesley made this glass, which got broken in a freak accident in the washing up water last night.

I’m not quite able to throw it in the bin yet. I’m going to let it sit on the window sill till I am ready to let go of it. 

It is a reminder  that life is full of  loss. Sometimes huge and life-changing loss, sometimes tiny.

A reminder also that grief  passes eventually, sometimes in a moment, sometimes after a lifetime.

Meanwhile, I’m still hangin’ on. I loved that glass. 

As Khalil Gibran said

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

And some other wise person - a Buddhist - said when you are attached to a material object, try to imagine that it is already lost or broken. Then be grateful for the time you still have it in your possession.

Yes, all this profundity sparked by a trifling incident in the kitchen sink.

About the glass itself, just a few last words before I consign its body (and my rantings) to the kitchen tidy-bin: It was one of a family of four, of which only two now survive. They were a gift from Lesley, and for a long time I had them displayed on the top shelf, along with the other look-but-don’t-touch things that were Too Nice To Use.

Then I realised I might die one day with out ever having allowed myself the pleasure of using them. I had the same routine running with a treasured set of fifties dinner plates, all different  retro-ish colours,  which I had  found at Yandina Market. I always stashed them up the back of the cupboard, and  used the ‘every day’ white ones instead. 

So I started using the  good stuff. The green and pink and blue and orange fifties plates, the hand-decorated glasses. Delighting in them.

And I guess inevitably when you use things, when you embrace them and engage with them, there is always a risk of breakage, damage, loss.  

Which must be a metaphor for something. Life, relationships, everything? 

The last drink taken from this glass was a warming sip of a lemon liqueur called Limoncello. I bought it at the local  farmers’ market, from the people who made it. It is an occasional treat and we always drink it from Lesley’s glasses. 

Well I think that was the eulogy. Cheers.

On the subject of getting loose of our attachments and what it means to be fully awake, enlightened ETC, I was listening to Jack Kornfield on my iPod early this morning as I toiled away at the gym and he quoted this:

If you can sit quietly after difficult news

If in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm

If you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy

If you can happily eat whatever is on your plate 

If you can love those around you unconditionally

If you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill

If you can always find contentment just where you are

....you are probably a DOG

which made me laugh.

Grandpa

                                             

F is doing a project for school: Write a biography of someone in your family. He is doing my grandfather, Cecil Edgar Berkman.  Grandpa died at the age of ninety seven, five years before F was born. To research the life of his great grandfather, F is going through an interview video I made of Cecil in 1993 a few months before he died.

I haven’t looked at this video ( now transferred to DVD) for many years and is a strange experience for me, sitting beside my twelve year old son in 2010, hearing again the forgotten-but-so-familiar cadences of Grandpa’s squeaky old voice. His steadiness. The way he tilts his head and  punctuates his reminiscences with ‘At any rate...’ The way his wife interrupts him, gently correcting details about who married who, or when they moved house.

I hear things I never knew, or had forgotten: My grandfather had a dog when he was a boy, a St Bernard called Carlo. My grandfather had an older brother Aubrey, who was a gambler. This Aubrey bought a ‘trotting horse’,  called ‘Warlord’, from Piccaniny. It was 14 year old Cecil’s first paid job to look after Warlord. F is taking notes, and looking older and more focused than I’ve seen him.  Black and white dog, Cecil’s friend, he writes.

Cecil was born at home, above his parent’s jewellery shop, in King St Newtown, in 1896. He remembers sitting with his siblings on the upstairs verandah watching the ‘passing parade’ of traffic. In those days it was nearly all horse-drawn. And in those days, most births were at home. This is interesting to F. because he was also born at home, three generations later, when it had become an ‘alternative’ choice. 

Cecil’s father, we learn, was a peddler, a poor Polish immigrant who sharpened scissors & knives from a kerbside cart in the streets of Sydney, and later travelled to the county with a horse and caravan selling jewellery and haberdashery. By the time Cecil, the youngest of six was born, the Berkman family had became prosperous. 

“Of course there was no income tax in those days” puts in my step-grandmother on the video. “That’s right” agrees Grandpa, meditatively. Like those were the Good Old  Days. The days when anyone could work hard and get rich. He used to work in his parents’ shop after school. 

When I was a child my grandfather was like Santa Claus - he lavished my brother and me with gifts and treats and icecreams and trips to the circus, Luna Park, the Pantomime. 

Later, when I was a uni student and into my early twenties  I rejected him as ‘capitalist pig’ and a right winger. Fortunately he lived long enough for me to tell him what a wonderful grandfather he was and how much I cherish the childhood memories.

I mention to Felix that Cecil would have had his bar mitzvah in about 1908, when he was twelve, probably at the Newtown synagogue, where his father was the treasurer. A couple of kids in F’s class have just had their bar mitzvahs.

My grandfather married for the first time when he was twenty three. Soon after the wedding  his young wife died in the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic  that reached Australia in 1919. His older sister Ruby also died in the epidemic. 

...And so on. Next installment tonight after school. ( He marries his first wife's cousin, my mother is born...) So many lives, loves, deaths, so many stories, all teeming past.

garden haiku

i search 

for garden haiku

kookaburra laughs

'gorgeous', 'beautiful'

we say, though

the book says

'common'

                                            *********************************************

why does the bamboo

bend like that?

 - Ah!

(she who left her winter skin across the bouganvillea by the door)

up and down

November 3rd

With the laptop in the favourite cafe. I always feel like I’m having a little holiday when I sit in this place with the huge ponciana tree sheltering the outdoor tables. The whole place half-outside really, another tree growing right up inside through the ceiling, and a resident water dragon often seen scuttling between tables or among the foliage just outside the open window next to me. Life in Mullumbimby always feels good when I come here. They play funky music ( Jack Johnson right now, Marvin Gaye), I like the look of the other customers. And it feels cosy to come here alone. 

This Saturday we have finally invited some friends over for a very belated house-warming celebration. We have been here about fifteen months now. Not long, still feels a bit not-quite-real. Still feel a bit confused about  where ‘home’ is. Melbourne, where all the oldest friends are?  Or the old Queensland  beach house, where I feel so fully myself, and so connected with the memory of  my mother and with the ocean?

Meanwhile, life is here and I’m sitting in the cafe and I am about to go off to a meeting with fellow Gestalt Therapists, a group supervision session, something I always enjoy. I’m sane and cheerful this week. Going to gym every morning. Just started a new writing course - new batch of students came on Monday morn. 

Poor old D is a bit down. Sometimes seems like we have a seesaw relationship.  He lies on his bed in the middle of the afternoon. Drinks red wine in the evening, then regrets it the next day.  I think he needs a project. In fact he is about to embark on building a pergola, so that will probably cheer him up. 

The other day at M’s gallery opening, someone - an acquaintance-  asked D how he was, and D said “Oh you know, up and down” which I thought was an absolutely fair enough response. But the person who’d asked him looked nonplussed. I guess he expected the formulaic ‘Good thanks mate’.

Are we not all ‘up and down’ at least to some extent? I certainly am. Some of us have bigger ups and downs/ mood swings than others. But aren’t we are all ( to state the obvious)  somewhere on the continuum bipolar-wise ?  To have no moods or emotions would be like having no weather - unimaginable...

                            Anyway. Talking of mood-swings, both personal  and macro, I am still reflecting on Melbourne After The Rain. The gardens bursting with life and colour ; and the amazing greenery in Central Victoria. At G&B’s place near Castlemaine the transformation was utterly miraculous. 

                           In the fifteen years I’ve been visiting them there, there has been pretty much a perpetual drought. Constant fear of bushfires. It’s a               dry climate anyway and most of the topsoil is long-gone, the earth ravaged by the Gold Rush of the 1850’s. It’s a land of searing summer heat, biting winter cold, a landscape of gravelly greys and browns.

Now, it is a different place. The dam, usually half empty, with  brown muddy water is now a glorious shining blue lake. The stony ground - how can this be? - is suddenly carpeted in green grass. And there is a stream, tinkling through what now feels like a meadow. There are wildflowers  - purple, yellow, white, red - popping up in the forest where they must have been waiting dormant for so long. B and I lie on our backs on the soft grass and marvel at all of this. The power of water. Yes, she answers to my question, it does feel like everyone’s moods have changed too. The coming of the rain has lifted peoples spirits, softened their emotions.  

the drought breaks

I got  back yesterday from eight days in Melbourne & Central Victoria. 

First morning  there I wrote:

Familiar Melbourne, my old home town. Big City where I lived for thirty five years. You brought the good weather with you, they say. I left torrential rain up north, arrived  to crystal blue. Actually that isn’t quite true. There is always a haziness  nowadays, not the pure blue sky of my childhood. 

Melbourne's front gardens are bursting with colour. Plants I had forgotten about  in the nearly sixteen years since I left. Daisies and lavender and roses and lilac and that bright blue bush  and those bright purple poker shaped things. Everything radiant and fragrant after the long-awaited rains, the long cold winter, and now the spring sunshine. There is a faint dusty smell of the plane trees in their bright green October foliage. I remember this time of year, those bright green shoots after the interminable Melbourne winter, when the trees are bare and bleak for months on end. 

I have been bleak and grey myself, these last weeks. A bit mad really. Stressed is the term, I guess. I was so upset about...all sorts of relatively minor things that triggered major reactions. Dukkha, suffering. I have a giant cold sore erupting on my lip. Like a neon sign flashing ‘stress’

But now I am in dear old Melbourne and feeling sane again, thank God. 

This morning after Deb went off to work at 7.30 a.m. I went for a walk around her neighbourhood, along the railway line, up one of the plane tree-lined streets full of spring flower gardens, to a place I never visited  before: Darebin Parklands.

I felt like I was in the bush. I found myself by a creek, sitting on a rock by a small waterfall, watching a black and white cormorant perched on a log sticking out of the water. It had its wings spread to dry in the sun. The cool air smelt fresh as lemons. Until a few months back, when the rain came, I suppose this place was dusty and dry. Now it’s full of life. 

I thought of something my friend S said last week. He lives by a gorgeous rainforest, but was talking about the idea of moving south, because, he said ‘I’m not really a rainforest person - the country I love is eucalypt forest’.

At the time, sitting in his kitchen,  I thought, ‘Not me. Give me palm trees and deep green and whip birds calling through the shady caverns of the rainforest. Even more, give me beach, rolling breakers. Or the ochre and purple landscape of Central Australia’

I’ve always felt a bit oppressed by drab grey eucalypts. They evoke memories of outer suburban childhood, and dull family picnics, overcast Melbourne weekends.

But this morning I suddenly felt something different, that comforting feeling of deep familiarity. A bit like how I felt chatting with Deb last night - we have known each other almost forty years.

I could feel my battered spirits reviving as I walked through the parklands. Like the earth reviving after the long drought. The grass was glittery with early morning dew. That special kind of silence of rock and gum tree was seeping into me. Out somewhere at the distant perimeter of the parklands, the rising tide ocean sound of morning traffic , punctuated by occasional sirens and screeches. All so familiar.  

                                                       

                                                         

A week later, I’ve had my fill of conversations and city-business and  I’m ready to go home to my little family & the village in the green hills. As the plane swings in low over the sea and across the coast to land at Coolangatta, I look down on violet jacaranda trees glowing  among dark moist greenery and palm trees, red roofs, turquoise backyard pools. And I feel glad to be home, back in the subtropics where I belong. For now, at least. 

weather patterns

Holidays over. First day back at school. It feels like winter again. Ugg boots, doonas and radiators all pulled out of the cupboard where I stashed them prematurely during that blast of summer heat a few weeks back. Did those sweltering days really happen or did we just imagine them? Internal weather also has been grey and  overcast since return from the beach. 

When J turned up this morning for marimba group and said “How are you?”, my answer was ‘”I’m crap!” “Yeah, me too!” she said and we both laughed and that was the beginning of feeling better. 

I put the roses she brought me in a vase. They are the lovely home-grown sort, imperfect, assorted sizes and colours, with big mean thorns, and glorious old-fashioned perfume: a thing of beauty in the midst of domestic chaos. 

We are in the middle of getting the deck sanded and re-coated. I had hoped it would be done when we got back from holidays but because of the interminable rain, the final coat is still not on and all the outdoor furniture is shoved inside. Plus the coffee table and lamp are pulled away from the wall and the carpet rolled back because we had a flood of water inside yesterday in that corner. 

So I am living in mess. I think of myself as an orderly, even a slightly  obsessive person,  domestically. But right now I am averting my eyes from it all. I’ve even let the washing up accumulate today. It’s a sort of  experiment in laziness. 

Anyway J and I had tea and cake and agreed about how we hate the school day grind, harrying our kids off in the morning. We also laughed about  how  crazy we get with our husband/partner. And how fast it can all change. Yep I say, I can be feeling like I just can't stay in the relationship a moment longer, then an hour later he’s playing the ukulele, jamming with our son on the clarinet, and all is sweet and harmonious in our happy little household. 

Plus he’s made me  roll around laughing by phoning up on the mobile last night pretending to be a Vietnamese chef called Ling and telling me he will be serving Vietnamese ricepaper rolls for dinner. Which he does, and they are delicious. J and I agreed that  we seem to be pretty much stuck with our respective blokes after all these years, and that you just have to let it all go past like the weather. After a while you recognise the familiar weather patterns. 

Then we all played marimbas - an African piece -  and the black cloud that had been hanging around me since getting back from hols was blown away. Someone told me the other day (no kidding) about some form of therapy called ‘Pleasant Activity Therapy’ (PAT?) Well marimbas and a good chat and a laugh does it for me. 

This is a picture of a rainbow after a storm when we were up  at the beach house last week.