Sydney Road

 I love Sydney Road; there is something so homely about it, so familiar. I love that its so different from other areas of Melbourne, that I am guaranteed to hear flavours of Arabic, and eat delicious food. I love that you buy baklava, or sweets as they are known, by the kilo, and the Lebanese pizza at the A1 bakery, particularly the zataar on pita bread, is freshly baked. Even though the A1 is a big cafe, it feels like you're in a family business, its so personalised.

The A1 Bakery

 And then there are the cars. Vince Colosimo talked about how, as young men, they'd drive their polished cars up and down Sydney Road, so they could look at their reflections in the shop windows. When there's not a tram gumming up the works, you're bound to experience a dropped down, muffler-stripped shining beast of a car, roaring along on pure testosterone. 

A friend who has lived in Brunswick for years tells me there are 85 cultures represented in the area. Along with great live music, some class op-shops, bars and cafes, its a precious part of Melbourne.

Northern Rivers Winter

Home is where the hearth is, home is where the heart is, wherever I lay my hat that’s my home, and John Steinbeck said that home is “where I keep my books”.

I have found a home in Northern NSW for six weeks, and have settled right in. My clothes are packed on the shelves the owners of the house left empty for me, and my food is in a drawer emptied for me too. I’ve made an office for myself next to the fireplace; my only requirements for this home being a fireplace and nature's embrace. 

The peeling outside table has migrated inside, looking out to the northside of the deck, into the forest of tall gumtrees, bracken ferns and ubiquitous camphor laurel trees. This morning a young kookaburra alighted on the branch of a dying camphor tree, directly in the center of the big glass sliding door in front of me. Laughter, joy, they represent and remind one.

I’ve been thinking what I should write for my blog, how I should update it. I notice the writing is far more personal, introspective these Australian days, way less gritty than when I was in Africa. A little embarrassing, but tracking the journey nonetheless. There is less external tension here, at least for me, Australia is so much easier to navigate than Africa, perhaps simply because I’ve been here for over ten years and am habituated to its ways. And I'm learning about how to articulate my journey, without detailing my internal processing, which could be very tedious for readers.

I wrote in my journal a few days ago, “I couldn’t hear myself tell my story one more time. By yesterday, it was enough. The hang-dog feel of things going wrong, getting bent out of shape, even giving it the bland corporate packaging of a life having “a set-back” had started to grate on me.

Time to tell the story differently then.

A week ago, a long drive and a slow day in the country unfolded on Sunday, visiting my friends, the fabulous elders M and B, who live an hour and a half from Melbourne in dry Australian country. The magnificent old gumtrees at their gate are sentries, old ladies, observing the comings and goings of those who visit The Clan. When I returned to Melbourne at the end of the day, it occurred to me that I could simply wait, like those trees, I could be patient and wait for the seeds that I have planted to germinate. I don’t have to throw it all out in the quest for an immediate solution.

You see, as my week in Melbourne got a bit easier, I could take some distance from the incessant distress playing out in my head, the story of not having a home, not knowing which continent to live on, what work to pursue that doesn’t eat me alive. A temporary solution of three dvd’s, a packet of lollies and nine cups of rooibos tea allowed the two day headache to lift.

Images of Africa had started to rise up again. Just flashes of scenes, nothing exotic, like driving to the supermarket or the post office with my mum through Irene near Pretoria, which behind  and beside its genteel country persona sits the dryness of the exhausted grasslands, who witness the tardy creations that the humans bring to form, the second-hand shops with lurid signs, mechanics’ garages shrouded in grease and toil and the promise of emptying your wallet. Nothing built for the sake of beauty, all for function, dominance, visibility, access, nothing built to serve our delicate senses. A creeper spread its suckers all over a bulky concrete pedestrian bridge to the station, forming delicate patterns and covering over the brutality of purpose.

On the way to Pretoria, a four or six lane roadway carves a nature reserve, where late last year a small bush burst forth with clusters of pink and purple blooms, painting the rusting hills with sweeps of colour.

Amidst the brutality of Gauteng, nature seems to slip through. I wonder which plants quietly rise in the baby farms in Nigeria that my friend told me about, the places where women give birth and hand their babies over for $100 to be trafficked?

So during the last week in Preston, in the north of Melbourne, I slept on a single mattress on the floor of my good friend K’s spare room, my generous, quiet friend. I looked forward to leaving for  Byron Bay's soft light and vegetation bursting out of its skin, to stay in this house which I rented in a fit of burnout and distress about what my life had become.  I was trying to take steps to get myself out of the therapeutic work I've been doing, counselling and running workshops, but whilst in Melbourne, I met with two people from a program that is helping me with my finances, and it became clear that I need to keep working. That there is no magic cure. That there is sensible, responsible, and that loving what you do and doing what you love is something you build into, grow into. My plan is to use the time in Byron to write, to spend some time taking care of admin – tax, creating new business opportunities, setting income generating activities up, and to walk on the beach. I’m so fortunate to be here in Australia and to be supported in getting my survival stuff in order.

So what are the blessings of my circumstances? I perceive suffering and hardship in not having a home, but I get to have intimate conversations with my friends, lots of closeness, not have to take full responsibility for the lease or the house, I get to be free and move around a lot. And I get space .. lots of it.

Off Chapel St, Prahran, Melbourne

One of my favourite buildings in Swanston St, Melbourne

Today is Saturday in my beloved Mullumbimby, home of six weeks. A rarity, it has no traffic light and only recently got a traffic circle.  Slow and colourful, it is a haven for old hippies and freaks, spaced out meditators and rainbow people. There are a few old farmers too, and a fusty RSL that no doubt has cheap beer and some kind of schnitzel.

I am impressed with myself for this gift of six weeks of rural bliss - impressed as my default position is "workaholic". I can’t tell you how lovely the house is; the smell of the western cedar they used to build it, the orange, lemon and grapefruit trees dripping fruit, the vegetable garden sprouting a variety of lettuces. How much I enjoy the rhythm of setting the fire, scrunching old newspaper, gathering kindling, lighting and tending it, carting wood around and finally sinking back into the beanbag to watch the patterns in the flames.

M came to deliver firewood yesterday, 1.6 cubic meters to be precise, or a ute-load. I stayed to talk with him whilst he unloaded it, threw the chunks of ironbark off the back of the vehicle. His shins were scarred, knees too. He gave me detailed advice on how to build a fire, how to make a good one, the kindling and its different sizes, that it needs air, and that a glass of red should accompany the process so that you can be still and keep an eye on the embers forming.

I bought a new axe yesterday, a little one, a tomahawk I believe its called, so that I can split the logs into kindling. I tried this morning, and it feels far too brutal for me and the wood is so hard. I'm out of touch with that rugged side of me, that loves working the land, brush-cutting, mowing, mulching. I’m feeling delicate, and I need a man to do this work. Perhaps my ex, perhaps a new friend, lets see who comes into my life who would love to yield the axe!

So now I have space to write, space to ponder and meditate, space to walk on the beach which is ten minutes drive away. Its lovely and quiet, and we’re due for some serious weather in the next few days, a lot of rain and possibly flooding. I have supplies ready – kindling, firelighters, food, matches, wine, books, music.

And the good news is that there is a possibility of funding for the project in South Africa. Now, it is a matter of deciding whether or not I want to pursue it.Its something to weigh up, as I feel into what I would like my life to be, not what I think it should be.

I’ll leave it at that, and close with a picture of my desk, up here in Mullumbimby, NSW.

An unexpected salute to Marianne Williamson

30^th May 2011

I am looking for someone to share the depths of life with, not necessarily the minutae of shoes, socks, electricity bills, political commentary. It’s the deeper love I’m thinking of, shared over a cup of tea, after a rapture of entry and outlandish longing, a gate opening beyond its own spectrum, a love never glimpsed but who made its name familiar by the persistent calling it echoed in the night, the early morning mussed up sheets, the afternoons of heart-stopping surges. Power surges who cry, who am I not to love? Who am I not to breathe sharp breath at the sight of four dolphins hurtling down a wave, perfectly aligned? Who am I not to heed the message I requested of the sea eagle, not to sing the song that issues, pouring from my lips? Who am I not to belong, to claim the earth of my red hot homeland, to feel the stillness of time stopping on a beach that holds my secret heart so dear?

Who am I not to claim the unknown, the messiness so exquisitely crafted into foundations for divinity, ordinary divine presence in the greens of the Japanese weeds along the beach, wedgewood blue of the skies that frame the gulls, the crows, pair of butterflies?

Who am I not to love, to extend my friendship, to let my curiosity out on a lead to sniff around your ankles, lick your face like a Jack Russell who never knew any inhibitions?

What gives me the right to keep it all safe when what I see is so utterly imperfect. Sure I can feel unloved or rejected when he replies to my elaborate txt with a greyscale  “ok”.  But today I saw a pod of dolphins splashing close to the shore, the sea eagle flew really low so I could discern his detail, and the terns threw themselves at the water with divebomb enthusiasm, and I am alive, curious about how this illusion works, nervous about participating in a medicine circle, silently inspired by a matrix of healing in the job I get paid to do.

Who am I not to simply melt, and let it all wash away, let it all be loose, and forgiving, and pray-hope that I haven’t done too much harm.

“Park off,” she cried, so I did, right next to the Goddess, as we waited for the kings to arrive.

Sunday 29th May 2011

It's that line other people have written about, spoken about in many a therapy session, I’m sure. That line that’s a tightrope, the edge of an abyss, a cliff, the river below raging, one's existence irrelevant in its flow.

This morning I woke up and asked my angel to embrace me, and take me back to sleep. It was too early, there were too many thoughts lurking, waiting for airtime, waiting for their place to occupy and energise in the mess of the mind.  Sleep approached, that delicious feeling, the surge and cocoon of those chemicals, the precursor to slumber, but they didn’t subside, didn’t settle in and take me to some other reality of dreams which may be neither here, nor there.

I thought of the man I’d recently had breakfast with, and how I could contact him today and suggest a coffee, a beach stroll/loll, a drink, even though I don’t drink these days. And then I thought of a glass of deep, earthy red, a fulsome Shiraz or Cabernet and how that would be nice, how that might even be nice for breakfast. Like those days long ago when I would wake up and resolve to have nothing to do with the world, no contact with humanity and proceed to smoke a joint all to myself and settle into the delicious high, hidden and veiled, anonymous and unavailable, how easy that was, how it soothed me.

But I am in my friends’ spare bedroom this morning, their five year old daughter goofing around, screeching and blaring inanities, and yes she’s loveable and a precious little thing, but on the edge of this line I am so quiet, and so needy, so hungry, that I don’t have it to give her.

I miss my flat, my eagle’s nest with my books and art and things, my kitchen full of delicious comfort and my sewing machine and fabrics. I don’t know what happened, how I uprooted like that, how I ripped it all up and landed here, without a plan, without a trace. People keep asking where I live and my answer comes out that I’m a nomad, looking for a home, spoilt for choice. I think I’m breaking all the rules, all the sensible lines of what I should be doing, doing to create: a life, abundance, a relationship. Perhaps my life has been a series of misguided decisions – like giving up my apartment in a gesture of welcoming another in – it was a house-for-one, and I thought I could affect the alchemy of life by stepping out of that nest and making myself available. 

My flat in South Yarra

This line, this edge, is so weary, so overused. Deep footprints worn into the grey rock, scuffed into the viewing platform where many before and after me have contemplated the jump, only to wearily turn back to their tired lives, deep breath in as we approach yet another excavation.

“Don’t you learn anything from the work you teach?” someone asked me yesterday. Deep transformational processing and This is where I land, This is where I hesitantly stand.

Lets face it. I’m not doing well. The astrologer said to wait until mid-July, that it’s a terrible time up until then and nothing would be clear until earliest mid June. Even here in the Shire, I feel like I do not belong. My psychologist friend says she and I share the pattern of estrangement, a perception of never belonging. Last night, surrounded by people, who mainly talk about themselves, I felt alone, disconnected, unbelonging.

Today, I feel tired, a bit more uplifted after writing, a bit more able to connect. But I still miss my flat, my privacy, and the touch of a beloved who wants me. 

Wollumbin, Rainmaker, from McAuley's Lane, Myocum

Rules for visitors to the Highveld Park Post Office

Rules for train passengers in Cape Town

She described the feeling as being like a polar bear on a small island of ice, everything melting away around her. There was no apparent panic, only the sense that everything she had held in high value was losing its colour, losing its grasp, losing its ability to dazzle.

The only unclaimed prizes in the treasure hunt of life which still stroked the strings of her heart, still retained soft hues of appealing colour, were the possibility of love and art; the infinite possibility of moving through this life, this passage, with another, and the necessity to create beauty so that the subtler truths, which are the important truths, not submerge in a mire of spreadsheets, appointments, public transport and marketing bombardment.

What a life it had been. The twenties were glamorous and harrowing; money, drugs,  entertainment, death and sex. The thirties were introspective, seizing on maps and doggedly travelling in the identified direction, only to melt down and resurrect financially, vocationally, more than a few times.

Now the forties. Left-over longings for children and family surface like old photographs packed away for some future purpose. Every intimate situation infused with the disappointment that the longing exists within, and may not be met without. The endless baggage dragged into relationships by suitors – children, divorce, separation, disappointment, resentment, financial decimation, homes stripped of their anchors, bitter ex wives, resentful ex husbands. And then the inflammatory trend on the dating websites of people claiming to have ‘no baggage’, or requiring prospects to also have ‘no baggage’.

When I bring this all right back to myself, I’m grateful for the ability to move one day at a time, and surprised that there is little panic in my seemingly intractable situation.

Last year in October I uprooted from my magnificent Melbourne life, packed up my eagle’s nest apartment with the spectacular city view next to the Botanic Gardens, and put my boxes of books and clothing into my friend’s S Kilda ceiling.   

Off to Africa I went, to set up my life there, to be close to my family and put in motion The Enterprise Powerhouse, a program to develop entrepreneurs in low socio-economic areas, which I’d been nurturing for a year.

I was welcomed back with warmth and interest: why would I come back here, to this place falling apart at the seams, the president taking his fifth wife, infrastructure collapsing under gross negligence and incompetence, corruption so rife that its become the norm. Why would I come back to the next African disaster?

Over and over again I said, “I just missed it. I missed my home, my country.” Every day, like an officer in the field I was out there, meeting, researching, running workshops, promoting, talking, talking, talking. Stuck in traffic, dodging potholes, feeding on Talk Radio 702, the most astute current affairs station available. 

Plugged in to the pounding, relentless energy of Jozi, gold mining, acid mine draingage, gansters’ paradise.  I loved the debate, the engagement in a new democracy, the ferocity of civil society in trying to hold leaders accountable, or people trying to hold onto what they've got. I love the connecting, the slow conversations, incredible art, ambition, humour, playfulness. I was drained by the absence of beauty in the urban landscape and the endless grey traffic jams.

I got The Enterprise Powerhouse to a respectable place, partnering with a social enterprise in Ivory Park and a high end corporate training facility in Woodmead, so secured a venue, some investment and community support. We pitched the idea to a multinational, but haven’t heard back from them. My feeling is they won’t invest, that the program is, perhaps, too bulky.

I came to Australia at the end of March as I had some contract work booked, and discovered I was completely burned out and in a career crisis. I felt incompetent, lacking skills and weary of humanity. I didn’t want to hear another person’s outpouring of complaint, grief or despair. Ironically, another project I’d been working addressed vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue. Whatever I put into the world is what I need, it seems.

Australia opened its big, wide dusty arms and took me in. First my magnificent women friends in Melbourne, and then my colleagues. We were educated in non-violent communication in our annual team training weekend, and it was there that I shared my distress about my career, and my fear about letting go of it. What emerged was that I long for some ease; a break from the hard work and bullish commitment that has me setting high expectations and loyally expending my energy in moving towards them. A life of ease. What a thought. What a very odd concept.

I started dreaming of a log cabin in Canada, in the Kootenays in BC, remote as you can get, with a dog and a fireplace. The hunger for big wide open spaces kicked in, huge nature with weather and beauty as it should be. Fortunately, I had some free time in the Byron Shire, on the north coast of New South Wales. So I went to the beach. A lot. I walked every day on Brunswick Beach, a pristine, long beach with bush to one side where I know snakes live, and ocean stretching east. In the sun, in the rain I walked into a squall and felt myself embraced by the wildness of nature, so grateful for it. Sea eagles glided above me, circling, sometimes in pairs, always a sign.

I’ve been back and forward to the shire a few times to teach the workshops and take time in nature. Last time a friend and I took a long drive to the Border Ranges National Park to pay our respects to some 2000 year old Arctic Beech Trees.  My time there is suffused with nature, and a different set of friends who all have rich spiritual lives, expressed many ways including music, massage, shamanic work, belly-dancing, food, gardens and luscious homes, creating beauty.

A couple of times I’ve had some good loving with male friends, and now, I am ready to deeply connect with my man. I won’t be having any more causal liaisons – it leaves me quite disappointed, and often feeling somewhat used, as the encounters are about intimacy and not creating relationship. I’m grateful to these men for helping me get to this place, finally, where I really value my love and intimate offering, and want to engage only with someone who is available, respectful and caring. Hmmmm...

 

Brunswick Beach

Border Ranges National Park

Majestic Arctic Beech Trees