yatra

together, alone

Today I went on a ‘yatra’, a silent  walk, with a group of about twenty people, and one dog. During our initial check-in/introductions, sitting in a circle on a grassy cliff top, almost everyone said how much they enjoyed silence, and walking and nature, and the opportunity to walk in a group. Our leader walked ahead, his partner behind the group, and we could straggle or walk briskly in between as suited us. We stopped a couple of times to sip water, eat fruit and watch the whales and dolphins from the cliff top.

I found it comforting to be freed - temporarily - from the efforts and obligations of making conversation.

We walked for two or three hours then stopped for lunch under a clump of pandanus at Flat Rock Beach. We could chat during lunch, and we all did, for a while, though it felt odd initially, after the ease  of silence. 

We talked about what we’d noticed during the walk - both the external  things (wind rippling the cliff top grasses, a red hibiscus in full flower in the coastal forest, a Brahminy Kite soaring and diving for a fish) ; and also the internal landscape - the mind’s busy-ness of thinking/trying not to think/ going in and out of being present/ observing the body, awareness of the feet making and breaking rhythmic contact with the earth.

A bit more chat - it seemed livelier because of the preceeding silence - then most of us dropped back into companionable quietness. Some of us had a swim after lunch, others  snoozed in the shade till it was time to return by the same path, back to the carpark.

Our themes for the day (from Jason Siff’s ‘Recollective Awareness’) were gentleness, acceptance and curiosity. 

remembrance of things past

Aunt Dorothy

Three weeks ago I visited my 94 year old Aunt Dorothy in a nursing home in Canberra. She is my father’s older sister - ten years older than him, though Dad has been gone almost forty years now. God, these numbers make my head spin.

Dorothy and her diplomat husband Noel were a glamorous though mostly absent fixture throughout my childhood. They and my two older cousins lived an unimaginably sophisticated overseas life of cocktail parties and sea voyages and servants in white jackets. 

All this, while we mere Antipodean mortals washed the car, and mowed the lawn on Saturday afternoon in a dull outer suburb of Melbourne. Watched the footy up at the oval, couldn’t wait till the new Myer shopping complex was finished, down by Ringwood station. 

Every year or so they would return from their posting in Paris and join us for Christmas. My brother and I would be given gifts of children’s books in French, which we couldn’t read, but treasured nonetheless. I still have “Pistache et Dame Tartine” and also a book of 60’s black-and-white photos of Paris which they gave my parents. Paris was the only place you’d really want to live.

Both Dorothy and Noel were over six feet tall. They could quote poetry in several languages and looked surprised - and yes, a little shocked, but too polite to mention it - when at thirteen I couldn’t understand Dante or Rimbaud or Shakespeare, or even complete a quote from Wordsworth... The frisson of disapproval communicated by D with a certain narrowing of eyes, a twitch of eyebrow. As a teenager I felt irritable and inadequate around them. Who cared about stupid poetry and foreign languages?

My parents went into party-mode when Dorothy and Noel were around There would be epic dramas in the kitchen over elaborate recipes from Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. Much alcohol was consumed, there was late-night singing of old Anglican hymns. Revisiting of highly amusing stories featuring themselves and all their charming little foibles. Just entre nous. Everyone adored everyone else.

My parents visited Dorothy and Noel in Paris in the mid-sixties, and had a famous holiday with them in Italy. In the early seventies, they were posted to Tehran and Uncle Noel met the Shah Of Iran. Their life was even more glamorous and exotic than in Paris. A chauffeur, A cook called Hadjii. Men in white navel jackets with gold epaulets and blue sashes. Women in evening gowns.

Old Kodachrome slides (where are they now?) show my suntanned  parents lounging by the pool in Tehran with a hovering waiter and  a desert backdrop. My sophisticated cousin in a green bikini.

Thinking about it now, I feel a little miffed at their willingness to leave us kids  at home when they went off on these jaunts. The Iran trip was to be my father’s last - he died just a few months later, before the Persian rugs they’d bought in Isfahan had even arrived in Melbourne.

And of course that time now has the romantic aura of having been the final moment of an lost era - The Ayatollah was about to sweep away all the glitter and privilege that Westerners like my aunt and uncle revelled in. 

After Tehran, they were posted to Rome. And finally, I got to visit them. We had Christmas there in 1973, my brother and mother and I. It was a year after Dad’s death. I was eighteen and it was my first taste of  travel, and of Europe. After Mum and bro. went home,  I stayed for a year, working as an au pair  - in Paris, of course, and learning French. 

Dorothy was the elegant, imperious, gracious queen of her household in Rome. Arranging flowers, or giving firm, patient instructions to the maid in Italian. Inviting me, scruffy as I was in my old jeans, to sit beside her on the brocade-covered sofa, to sip tea from fine china, or gin-and-tonic from a crystal glass. We even smoked cigarettes together in a grown-up sort of way - this was the long ago time before smoking became unfashionable. 

It was the moment when I was admitted to the adult world, the golden circle.  And there was always plenty to chat about with Dorothy - art, literature, history, and of course our own, infinitely fascinating family. I was willing to overlook the little barbs. 

I stayed with them several times during that year. They were family, and they approved of me. I basked.

Retired to un-glamorous Canberra, late ‘70s

If I met Dorothy for the first time now, it would be hard to believe all this. She is a stooped old woman in a grey cardigan with a receding fuzz of white hair, who sometimes remembers who I am, sometimes not. She’s almost blind, and doesn’t hear well. She is softer, more benign than she was. Smiles lovingly at me, and at her daughter who is visiting from Paris. (Having grown up there, my cousin married a Frenchman, and stayed)

Our Canberra luncheon outing the other day involved helping her into her jacket, and  manipulating the walking frame, then the wheel chair, out of the nursing home and into the car, and then out of the car, then a ramp into the lovely Beaver Gallery cafe in Deakin.

D sips white wine with lunch, and is reminded dreamily  of the Villa Rossini near Rome, and that day we ate melanzone. Her accents - French, Italian still impeccable, cherished. And the day at the Bois De Boulogne, My Dear!  All so Proustian! She read him in French, of course. Her daughter and I both admit sheepishly  to having only started, quite a long time ago on  Au Recherche du Temps Perdu....

With her daughter, three weeks ago at the nursing home. The painting of the bridge over the Seine has been with her for more than fifty years. 

Spring ginko

My third Cloudcatchers’ haiku ginko - autumn, winter, now spring.

We meet at a picnic table by the lake - eight or nine of us. Average age 65-70. I feel like a young spunk.

Several of the women have brought home-made biscuits in plastic lunch boxes. We all have our sun hats. They chat about a funeral and about who won various haiku competitions.

Their conversation is threaded-through with quoted, memorised haiku -  their own, eachothers’. Like small cherished objects, handed around.

We have an hour to wander about in silence gathering sensory data for haiku. Trying to engage the non-visual senses ( I close my eyes, suddenly notice the cool water-smelling breeze, birdsong, distant traffic)

surf club kiosk

The wide  ti-tree lake, fringed with paperbark is pale grey, peaceful. Across the road, the ocean beach is hot and harsh and loud. I spend a moment standing in the sand by the surf club, then retreat back to the banksia-shaded lakeside where willy wagtails flutter on the grass in dappled light. 

There is an elderly man in a motorised wheel chair parked by the lake. I’m aware of him in my peripheral vision several metres away as I watch six cute ducklings swimming and preening and shaking their feathers.  As if they’re in a chldren’s song.

I’m hoping for inspiration, something simple yet profound. Then I’m just watching the ducklings

'They were born right over there', the white-haired man volunteers, pointing to a shady place near the water’s edge about six weeks ago. I know every bird that lives around this lake. And the lizards too - have you seen the lizards?’ 

A moment later a water dragon scuttles onto a branch overhanging the water.

‘What are you writing in your book?’, he asks ‘I’m as deaf as a post  - you’ll have to write your answer for me.’

He comes here every day, he loves this place. He radiates some sort of happiness, just to be here. 

could i envy

the stillness

of an old deaf man in a wheelchair?

lake edge 

duck gobbles

at ripples in clouds

shall i sit and wait

for haiku

- or go searching? 

tuesday

day lillies everywhere

red pawpaw, summertime breakfast

green tea

school goes back today 

grey heron

floats ahead of us

down the driveway

bus stop, 8.15 a.m.  

car door clunk

bye!

he’s off into the big wide world

with his hoodie and his backpack

spring morning by the laundry door

- a hundred floating white star flowers 

tissue shredded in the washing machine

 - a hundred white specks 

on black shirt

Three loads of washing, a good drying day.

work

bills paid

- incoming tide of paper,

pushed back

for now

phone chat with Jenny

she says “ I don’t know how you do it”

I say “I’ve been a neurotic mess”

We laugh

roof creaks in the midday heat

parsley’s gone to seed

after school

his saxophone lesson

while I cook green curry

and listen...

teacher says

“the best way to thank me is to practise”

daylight saving 

dinner outside

in late afternoon light

three of us,

the family 

dishes washed

to Hilltop Hoods, Lonely Island

fierce kid music

(‘don’t listen to the rude bit mum’) 

putting out compost

by moonlight

-scent of lemon blossom

difficult customer, me

(low point of an otherwise pleasant day)

They’ll probably use their recording of my call for ‘training purposes’ : How to handle a cranky old woman who doesn't want to pay her bill and tries to rile you up with a whole lot of political/environmental ant-capitalist  hogwash.

I promised myself a while back never to do this again - get stroppy with the poor phone-answering wage slave employees, of the corporate entities which seem to rule our lives nowadays - Telstra, Optus et al. 

But I lost it today. Back from holidays, sifting through the mail, there’s an overdue notice from Unity Water. They say I owe them $436.42, and that they are charging me 11%, compounding daily. For supplying water to the beach house for six months. I don’t know what to be more furious about : the outrageous amount, when we are such frugal water-users; the fact that I never got an original bill; or that this is after almost twenty years of punctual bill-paying. And isn’t it direct debited anyway?

I have to say that Leanne, the customer service officer or whatever they’re called, who is unlucky enough to get me on the other end of the line, is a pretty smooth operator. She patiently explains that water charges used to be part of council rates, but aren’t any more. 

And yes, I am correct - council rates have not been reduced accordingly, but actually increased since then. She says The Queensland Government decided to outsource water supply, and to make us pay. Unity sent me the required paperwork last year. I don’t tell her that I probably chucked it straight in the bin. 

And No, she does not think it at all  wrong that a private company now makes a profit from supplying citizens with such a basic need as water, and from charging interest, even on a bill never recieved. Nor is she concerned with the fact that, as it turns out, only $34 of my bill is even for actual water. The rest is all ‘infrastructure’, sewerage and  water ‘processing’ She thinks Unity are doing a good job. 

Of course you just work there, you don’t make these decisions, Can I talk to your supervisor?  Pathetic, cliched bleats of the powerless consumer. I can’t get a rise out of her. She’s enjoying humiliating me. I’m a fool. Just shut up and pay. 

But it is  depressing that our god-given water should now be commodified and sold to us. Back in the old days it wasn’t like this.  Do you reckon that’s fair? Leanne thinks it’s entirely fair. And tells me I’d still have to pay for the infrastructure, even if I did install a big rainwater tank.  

No alternative is there? I whimper, as she crisply  extracts my email address so she can send me the forms for my bank account details.

too much of everything

sunday October 9th

Back from two weeks of school hols spent up the coast. A rather exhausting holiday, though there were many delightful moments too. Can you have too many good times? I think so. Too many nice people, too many lively dinners and lunches and breakfasts and conversations. 

We had two different families at the beach house, staying with us from Victoria (September hols up here are always popular with the Southerners). All of them much-loved old friends and their children. We went walking on the beach and through the National Park and through the rainforest and down to the waterfall. We canoed up the river, played ukuleles, sang songs, chatted about our lives, rolled about laughing playing charades after dinner, sat round a fire with kids toasting marshmallows. 

We parents got sentimental watching our gorgeous long-legged suddenly-teenagers playing volleyball together. The photos show us all having a wonderful time. 

Seems ridiculous to complain of such an abundance of blessings. Yet somehow in the midst of it all, I yearned for a moment of solitude, of quiet and reflective time. I felt wobbly, a bit off-centre. Like I needed to withdraw into a quiet inner cave for a while, instead of being so out there, hospitable, engaging with everyone.

We went up a day before the end of term for Michael’s farewell event  - funeral/ memorial service. It was held in the ampitheatre beside the lake in the botanical gardens on a fine spring day. 

D and I joined with a small gospel choir at the beginning to sing Shine On Me. A sweet and tearful moment as Z , now a widow - what a strange new word for her - sang with us. 

Then a succession of people got up to speak, sing, play musical instruments, tell stories. Michael’s daughter A played the flute, and recited ‘Do Not Go Gentle’, by Dylan Thomas, who was Welsh like Michael. 

We heard about M’s intense working life in drug and alcohol rehab. People we'd never met made their tributes. One of his old patients, an ex-addict with an amazing voice had everyone almost in tears singing ‘Amazing Grace’.  Then a young GP - Michael’s local doctor for the last decade -  spoke of their lively debates about modern and alternative medicine. 

D spoke about how affirming it felt  as a younger man to have the approval and love of an older man, which brought more tears. We heard a recording of an old skit from The Goon Show - a favourite of Michael’s - which made everyone laugh.

After - I want to say ‘the show’ rather than ‘the service’ or ‘the funeral’ - we had lunch in the shelter by the lake, a place where, over the years, many of us had been for various picnics and kids’ birthday parties.

The wake, back at the house, was quite a party. When we finally got home to the beach house late that night, the first of our Melbourne visitors had already settled in there. I’d barely had time to get their beds together - the house was still half packed up after being painted. There were boxes of stuff in the corridor, and paintings waiting to be re-hung stacked against walls.  

I guess that’s part of why the time up there felt so full-on. No time to even get the house in order, let alone to reflect on Michael’s death, or on anything much. Too much sociability. Much as I loved hanging out with everyone. 

Today, second-last day of the school hols, we are home. All three of us have been peacefully pottering about, barely even speaking to eachother. Unpacking, messing around on the ukulele, pulling a few weeds out of the garden, flicking through the newspaper, doing a bit of laundry. I can feel myself  coming back together. I’m even looking forward to the rhythms of term-time routine.