happiness attack

This morning the Bruns market was on, it being the first Saturday of the month. Over our coffees and Thai coconut cakes, I said to D, ‘I’m so glad we live here’ 

The high tide river was glittering green. We bought vegetable and flowers and had little chats with stall holders and acquaintances. A gaggle of adolescent girls from F’s class were running about giggling, one of them with a goldfish in a plastic bag full of water. 

And then the moment when I heard the music. They are a local duo who turn up around the place - sound a bit like the Gypsy Kings. It’s music that goes straight to my soul. I suddenly wanted to dance. 

This guy sings in Spanish, so passionately you feel he might rip his heart right out of his chest any minute, or fall down sobbing.  All the women waiting at the coffee stall were saying, I wanna marry him! His partner  who plays fabulous flamenco guitar is the perfect contrast : deadpan-soulful, with a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth. I bought their CD.

F  spent the arvo at E’s place, after soccer. E was here last night too. They are like a pair of puppy dogs, all legs and arms. Wrestling with eachother, kicking a balls, plunking a guitar, flopping about, consuming mountains of rice bubbles and pasta. Making a mess.

A peaceful domestic afternoon getting the laundry done and the house in order. I even spent 15 minutes lazing in a deck chair in the mild autumn sunshine doing nothing. Later D showed me a couple of You Tubes of early Dusty Springfield. Dressed like Doris Day, and sounding like Aretha Franklin. Later, looking like a sort of wonderful drag queen. God, the woman could sing! I knew every single lyric. And was right back there with the emotional intensity of my adolescence.

I went and picked F up at dinnertime. As we drove home a delicate crescent moon hung in the dusk sky over the silhouette of our little pointy mountain. We were listening to Jack Johnson on the car stereo. I said ‘I’m having a happiness attack’

Next challenge: work out how to link You Tube to blog. If you wanna hear Dusty, try this & see if it works..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5LS---oX7Y&feature=related

lost friends - the Russian Princess

I always thought of Ludmilla as  the Russian Princess, although she probably thought of herself  more as a humble  gardener. We met in Tennant Creek in 1988, in a shade house where we were propagating vegetable seedlings. We were volunteers with a local Aboriginal organisation that helped people return to their  traditional homelands.

Ludi and I and the rest of the our raggle taggle crew went out to remote Aboriginal communities with  our seedlings and set up vegetable gardens. Under the guidance of our intrepid leader. We planted windbreaks and mango trees and installed watering systems. We banged star pickets into the ground, struggled with fencing wire  and hauled things around in the midday sun. Like mad dogs and Englishmen.

The Central Australian sun in a dry and cloudless sky, a dark blue sky,  a dark red earth. I was surprised to learn that the desert sand is fertile, full of minerals. Just needs water. I also discovered out there in that  dreamy empty heat-shimmering land that planting trees feels like one of the few really good, pure  acts. 

Much cleaner than the school-teaching I did in the N.T, which was always an uncomfortable job, trying  to impose a whitefella  template over someone elses culture. 

A big difference was that we had been invited by the communities to come out and do the land management work. As it was called. When you thought about how long Aboriginal people had lived as nomads, it was not surprising that they needed some clues from us on how to live the ‘settled’ existence now imposed on them. 

So we - Ludmilla and I and a couple of German WOOFAs, a French guy, and assorted hippy types from Northern NSW sweated happily in the midday sun. Slept in swags around campfires - nights were cold. We star-gazed and drank billie tea and smoked rollies.

Back in town we cooked up big meals in the wok, and sat around and got stoned. Tennant Creek was a hard, gritty town. The telegraph poles were all metal  because there were no big trees for miles around. And if there had been, the termites would have reduced them to dust. I never cried a single tear in Tennant - it would have felt like wasting water. 

Ludmilla had been growing things for a long time. Her home was in the rainforest in Northern NSW. Her hands held the plants tenderly, firmly . She said a little blessing while patting down the earth around newly planted baby trees.

A year or so later, when we had both left the Territory I visited her in her  secret place of rainforest and waterfalls and clear pools, nestled under a misty  blue escarpment. I was on the run from...oh it’s a long story, but anyway, I found refuge in the forest with Ludmilla for a few weeks.

She and a former partner had been seventies refugees from the city.  They bought their big piece of  land for a song, with a group of friends.  Then hacked away acres of  lantana, gathered recycled timber, old windows, bathtubs, and doorknobs, and cobbled together an airy homemade tree-house and a simple life close to nature. They smoked dope, raised a child, and regenerated the rainforest felled by earlier generations of farmers.

Ludmilla spoke softly, trod lightly, sat reading by candlelight inside a mosquito net. There was no electricity. When I returned to Melbourne after this I was struck by just how huge my ( what we now call) carbon footprint was. So much energy used, keeping warm, staying up late, sloshing around hot water. 

Ludi was in her garden paradise every day and I was her willing apprentice, planting pawpaws, weeding the vegies. She’d been an early convert to permaculture and was old mates with Bill Mollison, who lived nearby. She knew all the gossip, but was discreet.

She  had a teenaged or early twenties son, who I met once or twice. He came and went and seemed a bit lost. She never spoke of his father except to say that he was “no longer in this world” 

Later, she lived in Melbourne for a while, studying ceramics, and earning some money. She worked at a residential facility for people with mental illness, a tough job. I drove from the other side of town to see her. Ludmilla  looked lacklustre and vulnerable in the city, away from her natural habitat. 

We went for a holiday together, to Tasmania, hitchhiking and bushwalking. Cradle Mountain, Lake StClair, camping on freezing cold earth. Warm climate girls, marvelling at the strange Tasmanian plants. She dreamed of one day returning to find her ancestors in Russia. I could picture her in  a tinkling sleigh, in snow. She was a nature - spirit with  the face of a Russian aristocrat.

When did we lose touch? Must be fifteen years ago  or more now. She went back to her Garden of Eden. I continued  my inner city life in Melbourne. I still have a ceramic bowl she gave me, with her name - Ludi - signed on the base

shooting the breeze

I met the Cloudcatchers this morning down in the park by the creek, for the Autumn Gingko. It felt more like winter. About twelve of us, in our raincoats, with our notebooks stood around in the picnic shelter. Mild-mannered, mostly middle-aged and older folk. 

Introductions, friendliness...Relaxing, to be with older people sometimes: everyone’s long ago given up trying to be cool... Rain was plick-placking intermittently on the corrugated iron roof after a recent  downpour. 

A woman made a brief formal acknowledgement of traditional indigenous owners of the land. Then chief Cloudcatcher ( & award-winning haiku writer) Quendryth explained, for the benefit of us newies, what we do on a gingko. Which is: spend a while mooching around in the vicinity, taking note of images  & other sensory data. In silence. (Q is about four feet tall, a retired school teacher, in a bright red jacket. I bet her students loved her.)

After collecting our data, we gather back to the picnic shelter table, spend a little more time cobbling together  rough drafts of  haiku. Then we share our new-born half-formed poems, reading in turns  around the 

table

waiting for haiku

raindrops fall

on my words

pen poised 

i stand

before the tree 

tyre on rope 

hangs empty

over winter river

dead tree roots

cling to air

where creek bank used to be

old man

pauses by

empty playground

creek reflections

- raindrops ripple circles

in clouds

suburban creek

murmurs  memory

of wildness

Afterwards we adjourn to the terrace of the Bangalow Hotel for lunch, some glasses of wine, and gentle conversations about art and nature and literature. The two blokes sitting opposite me have the look of old survivors. One has a marked limp and walks with a stick; the other is pallid and quite elderly - but someone tells him he's looking better than he was. Two old poets, it seems.

The woman sitting next to me is a poet too, from Nimbin. She and the man across the table are passing a paper  napkin back and forth between them, writing alternating couplets of a nonsense verse. 

The elderly poet - I’m trying to imagine what he looked like younger, has bright, kind eyes - says he has some cause for optimism. Nature writing is on the rise, he says. He writes the name of a  nature writing blog on a piece of lined paper, in a spidery script, and presses it into my hand as we leave an hour later.  

He says his father started the Salvation Army citadel in Mullum. The other poet’s father jumped off a slow-moving freight train in Casino to start a new life, or escape from an old one. Or was it Newcastle? These people have space in their lives for yarns and musings and poetry. How sweet, how calming to my frenzied mind to drop into the world of the Cloudcatchers for a moment.

arrows of desire

The Royal Wedding, I know, it’s already so last week. We hadn’t intended to watch, but...what a great show it turned out to be.

All those funny hats the women wore. Like see-through dinner plates on the side of their heads. And Princess Beatrice’s wacko antlers. And the way the royal chappies in their military garb took their hats and white gloves off on entering the cathedral. All that ritualistic British class stuff, all that saluting and  waving.

I’m in the middle of reading ‘Wolf Hall’, a gruelling Booker prize-winning novel set in the court of Henry VIII. The stuffy Westminster Abbey cardinals in their gold and scarlet robes looked straight out of the sixteenth century.

And some of the dreary words they said sounded that way too. Marriage being like the marriage between Christ and The Church. Our Father, Our Lord, I had vaguely  imagined that the church might have updated itself by now.

F, aged 12, was gasping in horror and disgust at every patriarchal utterance Our Father, Our Lord  

The really strange thing is we, his parents told him to hush, because we wanted to hear. Especially the gorgeous choirs. D and I even sang along with‘Jerusalem’ Having been educated at Anglican schools we both knew every one of William Blake’s stirring words. Arrows of desire, chariots of fire...

F looked incredulous, but was about to be even more appalled when his cynical/ pagan /Buddhisty (not to mention republican)  parents started to  drone along with The Lord’s Prayer.

As a kid I thought it was ‘hello’d be thy name and forgive us our trespassers, and none of it made the slightest bit of sense and no-one bothered to explain any of it , and we said it every day in school assembly.

Long-forgotten, yet so familiar and comfortable. And probably the closest we ever came to some sort of spiritual connection.

Well I’ve clearly been successful in my  parental campaign to counter all the patriarchal  Male God crap F used to hear  from his  old  teacher. But I also feel a sense of loss, that he doesn’t know Jerusalem, or the Lord’s Prayer. Like most of his contemporaries he has little sense of the Christian foundations that underpin our culture, for better or (more often) worse.

Of course some righteous people damned the whole wedding circus as a ridiculous waste of money, shameful when so many in the world are suffering. Yes, I can easily go there, the perpetual guilt. Then again, if we waited till everyone was happy before we ever allowed ourselves to celebrate...

And I actually agreed with one of the church guys - the Archbisop of London, I think - who spoke about marrige as a symbol of hope, of new beginning. There are times when we need to celebrate collectively, not just in our little seperate nuclear units - Birth, death, marriage, the things that connect us all. The archbishop also seemed realistic about the challenges of marriage. And spoke of a ‘generous’, rather than a ‘punishing’ God.

( For decades I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word God - so overlaid with Big Bossy Bloke In The Sky connotations. It was Goddess, Great Spirit, All That Is...)

The slowness of the whole thing was sort of restful - the great unedited chunks of nothing much happening, cars approaching, cameras fixed on the empty balcony waiting for the royals to appear. Almost meditative it was, in this era of everything too thick and fast. 

And at the centre of the elaborate theatrical pageant - a young couple who looked as if they actually do like eachother a lot, and seem to know what they’re doing.

death of the tyrant

Will we never learn?

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that"

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I felt sad and empty when I heard the news that they'd finally hunted down and killed Bin Laden. It was disturbing to hear the jubilant crowd celebrating, even sanctifing his murder. It was scarey to hear the smug self-congratulating politicians. Sad to think how dumb and violent we are, how we never seem to learn...(sigh)

"An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind" - Gandhi. 

broccoli spinach mizuna

The bloke I bought the seedlings from at the market thismorning said they were all things that would grow locally at his time of the year. He doesn’t sell anything else. We talked about basil - ours is still going strong, we had pesto last night for dinner - but everything is slowing down now. 

Yes he says,  just a week or so ago Mother Nature suddenly put the brakes on. It’s a relief really. Before that it was a constant challenge to keep up with how fast everything was growing.

He tells me that some of the big-scale  commercial growers have a real problem with things growing too fast . They spray them with something to slow them down. And at other times with things to speed them up. To keep a steady supply.

Have I already talked about how everything is too damned fast? I’m sure to have.

I welcome the slowness of the coming winter season.

another reality

We often go out for dinner on Friday night, just the three of us. One of our favourite occasional places is the dining room of the local Ex-Services Club. In our little hippy town of funky cafes and intellectual coffee drinkers (and even a sophisticated French restaurant) stepping into the Ex-Services is  like  entering into some other reality. 

It’s The Old Mullum, the small town of rural working people, of retired diary and sugarcane farmers. The Club is full of folk who I never ever see on the street or in the healthfood shop or the deli or the IGA. Elderly red-faced blokes with beer guts who wear long white socks with their neatly belted Bermuda shorts. Their plump, permed wives in floral dresses with pearls and cardigans.

I always feel at The Ex-Services like I’m somewhere else entirely, which gives me a pleasant, exotic feeling. As if I’m a traveller, a drop-in perhaps, to some strange out-west town in the middle of a long road trip.

As we head past the front desk, we glimpse the garish colours of the rowdy bar with its pokies and blaring tv screens and meat-tray raffles. 

But the dining room is sedate: brightly lit, with white paper table cloths and a neat vase of plastic flowers on each table. F particularly likes  the moving 3D waterfall picture behind the counter. He gets fish’n chips, his dad gets a steak, I get a prawn-avocado cocktail, which is delicious and somehow 1970’s appropriate. 

that wonderful pub carpet