Mostly Up

[sigh]

2009-08-17T21:31:00.003+10:00

I have been thinking and thinking about this blog and I think it's time to stop posting to it now... This is an unusual turn of events for me because if you remember I set it up as one of my New Year Projects, and as such it was intended to run for a whole year. But in a way it's served its purpose already, which was to set me off on a path to trying to be happier and also, I suppose, trying to cope better with life. And guess what! It seems to have succeeded. Whether I am delusional about this I don't know but I'm feeling positive and optimistic about it, and that for me is a sea-change.

So there you go. Mostly Up has mostly gone now, and although I probably won't consign it to deletion hell yet, I am unlikely to post to it now. If you want to follow what I'm up to, try Double Elephant, which is about my art, Lookout31 which will be about building our house, or Rhubarb & Ella which will (soon!) be about my on-line Etsy shop. See you there!

Happiness is...

2009-07-25T14:50:00.003+10:00

Beautiful cold-climate flowers photographed at the Sturt Winter School at Frensham in Mittagong the other week. These are the sort of flowers I grew in the UK but can't grow in sub-tropical Coffs Harbour, so it was lovely to find them in the Frensham grounds. The garden was laid out by Edna Walling, a doyenne of garden design in Australia, and for UK garden design history buffs it was very reminiscent of the Lutyens/Jekyll style.

Dreaming Spires

2009-06-24T20:38:00.004+10:00

Oxford skyline, photo by David Iliff

Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring/The tender purple spray on copse and briers!/And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,/She needs not June for beauty's heightening

Thomas Arnold, Thyrsis

I received my copy of Oxford magazine in the post today and found myself reading a small article noting the death of John Fenton, a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and one of my former tutors. It saddened me to realise that I hadn't known he'd died - back in December - for he was a lovely man and interesting, although we weren't close.

Elsewhere in the magazine I found other memories: Zoe Rahman, with whose older sister Sophie I went to school (notable because Bishop Luffa Comprehensive in Chichester, UK, isn't otherwise renowned for its former students as far as I'm aware...), and interviews with famous Oxford alumni such as Baroness Susan Greenwood (St Hilda's College), Dame Ann Leslie and Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones (both Lady Margaret Hall - my old college). The articles were all about breaking down gender stereotypes and how going to Oxford contributed to these women's lives, but what was lovely was to hear that it wasn't all about academic success. The experience of going to Oxford did indeed give them access to "an extraordinarily privileged quality of education" but it was about more than that: "I think I did a lot of growing up" (Pauline Neville-Jones).

I did a Bachelors degree in Theology simply because I'd had to take Religious Education as an A Level subject as my school wouldn't let me study any of my other choices (Biology or Geography). I had been labelled as in the 'Arts & Humanities' category and couldn't, therefore, trespass on anything remotely scientific. Yet I had to find a third subject for my exams in addition to Art and English Literature so I chose RE, my RE teacher had been to Lady Margaret Hall and it was she who encouraged me to sit the Oxford Entrance Examination... probably more because she thought it would improve my academic performance in the subject than because she thought it was feasible I would be offered a place! All I actually wanted to do was to go to Art School and I had a place at Central St Martin's School of Art in London picked out, but I think I had done a sort of deal with my parents whereby if I was offered a university place to study an academic degree I would... otherwise I'd go for art. In the end I was offered places at five different universities to do Theology, turned them all down including Oxford, and was finally persuaded by my mother (an all night talking session, according to family legend) to take up the Oxford place because I could 'always return to art later' if it proved to be what I really wanted to do.

I was so lucky, in so many ways. I was the first person in my family to achieve tertiary education, which was a milestone in itself. Both my parents are easily capable of the necessary academic skills but neither had the opportunity: my father lacked the encouragement and the cash, and my mother lacked the chance because she was a girl and would get married so in the meantime she was allowed to go to Secretarial School. I had the encouragement and the opportunity, but I was in a woeful state when I got to Oxford. I'd been so traumatised in secondary school that I was suicidal and terrified, and I made a pact with myself that if I didn't manage to make friends in the first term I could always kill myself over the Christmas holidays... Ironically my tactic for overcoming my terror at going somewhere new and meeting lots of strangers solved the problem for me: I took a kettle and some mugs with me and operated a sort of open-house for fellow undergraduates in need of tea, and I took off my glasses which meant I could see no-one clearly and consequently smiled inanely for the whole of my first term which apparently endeared me to everyone. Success!

I've been thinking about Oxford a lot recently, wondering if I can manage to spend the first Friday of my UK trip there as my alma mater offers alumni accommodation in college and a seat at the Senior table for dinner. Reading the articles while darling daughter was swimming this afternoon made me feel so nostalgic. I feel very tenderly towards my 18-year old self, equipped with two pairs of blue jeans, two men's lambswool V-neck jumpers, a pair of purple suede Doc Marten boots and a red china tea service, who turned up on that first weekend at Oxford and tentatively set herself up in a surprisingly large room in Deneke East wing in LMH. I still have my Bodleian library card and a photo of this 'other' self, shockingly young and naive. A few months later I was rowing for the College, working for the student Samaritans service and potting shots on the pool tables of Oxford's Working Men's Clubs. I did very little work and was lucky to get out with the Second Class degree that I managed, but I had a fantastic time and I loved my subject. What more could I have asked for?

Winter Festival

2009-06-19T22:54:00.005+10:00

This evening we attended darling daughter's school for their Winter Festival. In the middle of our third winter season in Australia it does actually feel like winter for a change, even though I think there will always be a part of me that ridicules the idea that I want to wear boots and two pairs of socks in 15° C! It's equally ridiculous that the temperature is around 30° C at Christmas... but I guess there's nothing to be done except acclimatise, and that is what I appear to be doing.

The teachers worked very hard to make beautiful spirals of foliage and flowers on the classroom floors, and the children managed almost an hour of silence as each in turn collected and lit a small lantern and walked in order of age through the spiral, placing their lanterns at intervals. We adults sat in the dark, watching them as they walked through the ceremony, marvelling at how little they talked and how beautiful it was.

The start of the evening was a procession of all the children in the school with lanterns they'd made, walking from one end of the school buildings to the other, singing as they went. Returning to their own classrooms they strung their lanterns up and then we all watched some very skilful flame-throwing. I was amused to see that the female in the trio was none other than Sally, a woman who joined the school's Board at the same time as me. There's a world of difference between Sally (efficient, organised, professional and fun in our long Board meetings) and Sally the flamethrower, hoola-hooping with a ring of fire and nonchalantly rotating a flaming ball around her body and along her arms... I'll look at her differently next time we sit down and consider the previous meetings' minutes, I can tell you!

It was a lovely evening, if a little bit long. Darling daughter is asleep as I write this and husband and I are packing for his departure to Europe early tomorrow morning. I can't help feeling a little bereft in anticipation of his absence, but I'm thinking positive, I have a full diary while he's away and I am gearing myself up for some serious WORK.

Selfishness

2009-06-18T17:18:00.005+10:00

Everyone in the family is ill at the moment except for me, which is a very rare state of affairs. I'm usually the one with a lingering cold but yesterday I had to cart both my dearly beloved husband and our darling daughter to the doctor's. Husband is due to fly to Europe on Saturday and I don't want him to endure the 27 hour flight with his current symptoms. It turns out he has full-on tonsillitis so the prescription for antibiotics he received was very welcome; after 3doses the medicine is already working and he's feeling a lot better today.

Darling daughter's situation is slightly more complicated but not serious: she's been fighting something off for over 3 weeks and as she was off school being ill it made sense to take her along too. The potential diagnosis was surprising: she may have Whooping Cough, despite having been vaccinated as an infant. Ironically husband and I recently had Whooping Cough boosters because it is rife in darling daughter's school at the moment, but we thought she was protected; apparently not.

There is absolutely no reason for this picture of dusk taken from the rear deck except that I think blog posts are nicer with pictures. Very selfish of me.

In the middle of a Whooping Cough epidemic on Australia's mid-North coast and a Swine Flu pandemic I started wondering about selfishness. I've recently been doing spending some time with a woman who sends her 5-year old daughter to school regardless of how the child is feeling: coughs, colds, sneezes, temperature, tummy ache... it doesn't matter, off she goes to school and little parental sympathy is in evidence.

Does that put us on the moral high ground? The book on Buddhism I'm reading calls on me to meditate on Loving Kindness. So for the woman whose child is at school no matter how ill they are I've been trying to find compassion: what is her life like that she feels the need to protect "her" time so fiercely that she can't allow a sick child to interrupt her plans? What support does she get from other sources that means she has to fence that time off for herself so implacably? I wonder if she feels that her individuality drowns when she has to take on the role of nurturing parent - a feeling I have certainly fought with. I don't know the answer but I do find myself feeling outraged and superior, not an attractive combination. I had to cancel my felting workshop on Wednesday morning to take husband and daughter to the doctors' surgery and for once managed not to resent it. I'm not perfect, but I tried to focus on the fact that although I was missing something I am really interested in and I was also missing the chance to catch up with friends in Bellingen for lunch, I was also gaining the chance to spend time with daughter and husband (before he flies off) and that I would be paid in hugs and the sheer delight of a small, warm person sitting on my lap for a while.

On balance I've managed - I think - to curb my worst criticisms and just enjoy the changed situation of having a sick husband and a daughter who's been home from school most of the week. The thing I haven't managed to get out of my head, though, has been the more general outrage directed at selfish people who have sent their ill children to class and now darling daughter's suffering as a result. In her class there are more than a few children who aren't vaccinated against anything, and some of them were in class earlier this year with Whooping Cough. I'm ranting because MY daughter is ill - despite the fact that she could have as easily picked up the germs from swimming class, walking down the street, her brother...

I don't make a lot of sense sometimes, when I think about it (note for my sister when she reads this blog post: there's no actual requirement for a sarcastic comment at this point). I probably need to have a bit more compassion for their parents, too. I know at least one of daughter's friends has parents who run a small business together. If their daughter is off sick one of them has to stay home and look after her, with all the difficulties that brings. When the school was shut recently because of bad weather we took daughter's friend home with us for two days so that her parents could continue to work. I guess we are just so lucky that we both work from home, and this is why we do it.

Halloo hallay! I got a letter...

2009-06-18T15:04:00.005+10:00

"Dear Ms Bowen,

On behalf of the Government and people of Australia, I am delighted to advise you that your application for Australian citizenship has been approved...

... On behalf of the Government and all Australians I offer my warmest congratulations and best wishes for the years ahead.

Yours sincerely,

Renelle Forster
Assistant Secretary
Citizenship Branch"

I'm not quite finished: I have to attend a 'Citizenship Ceremony" organised by the local Council in order to have my citizenship conferred upon me, and that could take 6 months or more. I don't think I have to don a hat-with-corks and sing Waltzing Matilda but you never know. At least after 18 months of darling daughter attending a state primary school I do know the words AND the tune for the Australian National Anthem...

Prevarication Central

2009-06-14T19:28:00.004+10:00

Do I know how to avoid working? Yes I do! Take today, for example. I have a couple of things going on tomorrow: taking documents into the bank for our mortgage application, for example, plus a school board meeting, so nothing very important then and it's perfectly OK for me to avoid any related activities.

Rarely have doing the washing, walking the dog, taking out the recycling, emptying the green waste bin, putting away the washing, cleaning the filters in the dishwasher (more suicidal cockroaches...) and baking little cakes in paper cases seemed so attractive.

I am pleased I walked the dog, though. Apart from finding several lovely pieces of driftwood which I lugged back up the cliff path on the basis that I am bound to find some sort of artistic use for them, I also spotted a collection of shark egg cases.

Further investigation reveals them to be the egg cases of the Port Jackson Shark. This isn't the most handsome of shark species and only grows to about 1.5m and I always thought it flourished in southern Australian waters, but apparently it swims north to breed round about now. I'm not sure if these are egg cases from this year's brood in which case the contents (several baby sharks) have been eaten, or whether they are cases from last year in which case the babies have matured, which takes 10+ months, and hatched.

Whatever the answer, the case are beautiful things in themselves. When I first arrived here I just couldn't believe they were natural! The spirals are so perfect and, when fresh, the whole egg case looks like something that could only be manufactured by machine, not by nature... These have been tossed up on the sand and dried out so they're a bit withered.

Well once I've finished looking down (always a good idea when walking a dog in a place where other dogs walk!) I usually look up, and these clouds rather gripped me when I wandered onto the back deck to take in the afore-mentioned washing.

Getting there slowly

2009-06-11T18:32:00.004+10:00

Who would think it's so hard to choose colours for one's tissue paper? Not me, that's for sure, until I came up against 18 different shades from a commercial supplier and practically had a meltdown. I guess I am exaggerating, but I found it stressful and, guess what, in the middle of the stress recognised that I haven't done any meditation recently (not even a minute at a time so I have no excuse) and that I hadn't done any more reading about happiness recently either. Hmm. Tut tut.

I made up for things slightly by taking 'Buddhism for Mothers' to darling daughter's swimming class and reading two chapters over a well-earned latte - particularly well-earned because in the interests of getting back on my diet I managed to resist the temptations presented by several large glass jars full of different delectable varieties of home-made biscuits that I could have ingested with said latte. You thought I must be driving darling daughter 25km each way to this particular swim school because of the excellence of the teaching, non? Little did you know it was because of the excellent cafe cuisine!

Anyhoo, I've broken the back of the book (not literally Bronwyn, if you're reading this - I promise it will come back to you with its spine intact!) in that I've progressed as far as chapter 8 now, which means I'm almost up to chapter 9 in which the mysteries of meditation are explained. It is one slight failing in the overall construction of the book: there are constant references to 'loving kindness meditation' as being something I really ought to do in order to feel better about myself and everyone around me, and yet one doesn't reach the instructions about meditation until chapter 9. This presents me, in particular, with a small problem in that having had reading competely spoiled for me by a 3-year humanities degree* I have now trained myself to read sequentially through books again and can't bring myself to skip forwards and backwards in the way I was wont to do. And this is really important because if I slip from the path of reading each chapter through in sequence I will START READING FORWARDS IN THE BOOKS I READ OUR DAUGHTER EVERY NIGHT - and I just can't do that. No. I view my triumph over my sense of frustration about reading a small amount of darling daughter's story every night as a sort of meditation in itself, so if I start skipping around I'll be sabotaging things won't I? World catastrophe would probably follow, so I won't start thank you.

All in all, my glass is almost full this evening (despite 10 days of guests in the house and the consequent lack of personal space that entails); it would be completely full except that I've already drunk some.

* Weekly reading lists consisted of upwards of 50 theological texts so I became an expert speed-reader which totally ruined fiction for about 5 years!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs Duck!

2009-05-26T13:01:00.003+10:00

...For putting the link to Pride and Prejudice via Twitter on your last blog post. I laughed so hard my little socks nearly flew off. Unfortunately those who don't like Jane Austen probably won't appreciate it.

Etsy goodness

2009-05-24T17:24:00.007+10:00

Have I mentioned that I'm slo-o-w-w-w-ly putting together an Etsy shop? Well, easing back on the throttle with my print making and giving my head time to settle about what to do next with my art practice has sort of given me permission to veer off in the direction of Etsy and try and get things underway. Now that I've aroused your interest (hopefully!) I'm going to disappoint you by saying that my shop is a long way from being open yet, but goodness me I'm having fun getting it together.

Those of you who've known me for a while will be aware that I've had my own business several times before, and my Etsy adventures remind me a lot of the fun I had when I started my first business, fresh out of university. Under the imaginative banner Sara Bowen Designs I started trading from a rented studio in Arno's Vale, Bristol, UK, as part of a community of start-up businesses operating from what had been the old Cameron Balloons factory. My workshop was tiny, but it was mine, and I loved it. I had a borrowed plan chest, an Ikea table which I used for cutting, and a ramshackle collection of boxes and cuboards which I used for storage. And I hand-painted metres and metres of silk, designed lingerie patterns, graded them, cut them out, stitched them up, packed them in some very funky boxes I designed myself and had made up for me, and then I used to go out on the road knocking on boutique doors in London and the West country. I'm romanticizing it, of course. It was bloody hard work and I had two other 'day' jobs that helped me pay the rent, which meant I was a very fit girl cycling dozens of kilometres every day in all weather as I did the circuit from home to job to other job to studio and back home again. And when I went on my sales trips I'd work hard to get appointments with buyers and then I'd roll up and inevitably nine out of ten of them would have forgotten I was coming and be otherwise engaged (or absent) and the one person I'd get to see would either hate what I had to show them or would only take it on consignment, which is the worst way in the world to do business... [sigh]

But you know what? I loved it. And I still love it. I love making things, and I love selling them, and I love developing the whole 'look' of a thing and tying up things like business cards and packaging together to make a brand (which sounds very pretentious and why would you call it a brand when you're a tiny one-woman start-up business, but that's really what it is, so there!).

For the last few days I've been thinking about things like the design for my storefront, the colours I want to use, how I want to label and wrap things, what my USP will be, how I want to present myself... all those delicious things that come with starting an Etsy store.

Naturally I have had to do extensive market research in order to see if there's anyone else out there selling the sort of things I want to make and sell, and how they price them and what their 'shop policies' are, etc. In the middle of all of this very necessary research I also managed to find some delightful presents for my friend's new baby and, because everyone I've spoken to on Etsy has been so generous with their time and expertise and information, I'd love to share with you the things I've bought with you and tell you where I've bought them...

Cecelia from RockabillyBabyDesign has been really helpful and I just love the amazing fabrics she uses. I bought

This fabric is called
'Sailor Jerry's Tattoos'

This is Day of the Dead fabric

and this blanket material is called Asian Bloom

From KonstantKaos I bought some gorgeous baby shoes made from fabric covered in winged skulls, and a skull-print baby T shirt. Sadly I can't show you images as I bought the stock up and so the items have disappeared from the shop front, but do go and look at all the lovely things...

From PunkyMonkeyKids I bought three onesies, two of which are shown here:

You're probably thinking I've gone bananas, but I just love the imagery on these baby things! This is no ordinary baby, and isn't part of an ordinary family, and probably isn't going to have an ordinary life for all sorts of reasons so I thought I'd start him off right, with strong images and a belly laugh, and why not?

Mellow, sort of

2009-05-24T16:43:00.008+10:00

It's been a stormy week but things have begun to calm down a bit today. I'm getting used to the weather here, slowly, and apart from a sort of on-going low level concern as the wind gets up and branches start to fly I'm adapting very well. Our gas lantern won't move from the landing for a couple of days yet, but I'm reassured to know that if the storm blows up again we've got enough milk/bread/baked beans/coffee/chocolate/alcohol to keep us going for a few days! You know, the essentials...

This has been the picture looking back towards the hills for the last 4 days - sadly the camera couldn't record the lashing rain

It's been a good day, though, today. For example, in the aftermath of last night's champagne I slept deeply and woke up voluntarily at about 9:20 this morning, MUCH earlier than normal on a day when I am usually allowed a lie-in! And I have managed to achieve a long bath AND an hour's peace and quiet reading the weekend papers...

While in the bath I was catching up on a couple of chapters in Sarah Napthali's Buddhism for Mothers.

I find myself feeling slightly self-conscious about my continued reading about Buddhism, which probably has to do with a fear of ridicule from my friends and family who might - in my fantasy - look down upon me for being needy and insecure and trying to 'find myself' in some sort of mumbo-jumbo Eastern philosophy when I am a product of the Western world. Or is that how I secretly despise myself? I'm not sure. But you know, the more I read (from the select and very limited little pile of books I've accumulated) the more Buddhist practice seems to relate to my experience of myself and to provide insight and techniques that I am actively finding valuable. I'm not about to shave my head and don a saffron robe (well, I might shave my head if more hair departs it, but that's another story!), but I am trying to learn something about myself through what I'm reading about Buddhism. Perhaps somewhere down the line I'll learn to be a little less apologetic.

Anyway, the end of the chapter Finding Calm was a good one to read this morning, not least because while running my bath I managed accidentally to put my hand on the controls for the water jets, which projected hot soapy water all around the bathroom and everything in it, which included my husband and a selection of previously dry towels. Napthali presents Buddhism as containing an 'uplifting message... that everyone is a Buddha at their core, with a Buddha's love and wisdom - this is our true nature. We are already complete, whole and good, but we obscure this fact with our fears and desires.' It is an attractive contradiction to the Christian tradition in which I was brought up, which emphasised man's essential sin and the need for the redemptive intervention of Christ in our lives in order to become 'whole'.

I notice myself walking around looking outwards. I don't like to look inwards particularly; I caught myself recently imagining myself as a walking 'hole', an emptiness, with the implication that I can't stand what's inside. And I do have enormous difficulty with that, finding it impossible to value myself. It's been the long-standing struggle of every counselling experience I've ever had, and it's a battle with myself that I can't win from the point of view of just somehow magically being able to like myself. The idea that somehow within me is everything I need, is challenging but also incredibly attractive. Napthali says, 'We don't need to travel the world, collect impressive experiences or achieve endless milestones in order to feel complete. What we seek is within us. The answer is to change where we look for it'.

Recently I've found that if I am mindful of myself I can take a breath, consciously relax a bit, and take a few seconds in which to give myself some 'room'. It's like meditation for 30 seconds or a minute, and it's incredibly useful. If I manage it, I experience a moment's clarity and recognise, sometimes, that other choices are available to me in addition to the ones that present themselves from a lifetime's habits of thinking and reacting. 'Buddhist teaching has been summarised with the phrase 'stopping and realising', which among other things refers to the ability to be aware of a negative state of mind and to realise on a deep level that a clearer, more constructive mind is available.' I think it will take years of practice.

Sunday Sunday

2009-05-17T20:49:00.007+10:00

I collapsed into bed at midnight last night having driven back from Murwillumbah (3 1/2 hours there, 3 1/2 hours back...) and slept for a solid 8 hours, woke briefly and then slept again until my darling husband brought in a cup of tea at 11:15am. Bliss! But it's been one of those funny days that always makes me feel a bit gloomy.

Things I've done today: emptied and repacked the dishwasher, fed the dog, given the dog its medicine, walked the dog, cleared up dog poo, done two lots of washing and some ironing, tidied up the house, brought in the washing, emptied the airers and put everyone's clothes away, cooked dinner, put away all the debris from yesterday (I took overnight stuff with me just in case I was too tired to drive home), took my darling daughter to the last day of the Coffs Harbour Show, and introduced her to the delights of crosswords ("Mummy, what's another word for 'blemish', 21 across, 4 letters?").

Among the things I have not done today: any of the stuff on my desk (i.e. end of quarter accounts), whisked up a fantastic print, achieved world peace and an end to the military regime in Burma, read the silly lightweight thoroughly unintellectual novel I picked out at the library last week, or cleared off any of the items on my to-do list.

This translates into more household-y type activities than I would wish for and not much time for myself. It also turns me into 'Churlish Housewife', a role I'm perfecting after several years of practice. I have ignored, of course, the fact that my dearest hubby took over everything yesterday so that I could go to my print show, facilitated me having a HUGE lie-in this morning, made me tea AND fresh coffee later on, and also complemented me on my cooking, despite being in the middle of a period of frantic activity with his work and grappling with enormous technical problems with his usual great good humour.

In my defence, I humbly offer that it isn't as bad as it could have been (I didn't yell at anyone!). These days I try to limit my to-do list over the weekend and confine it to half-a-dozen things that really do need to be done, while programming in some entertainment for everyone. So really that I achieved that: I went up to the print show and had a great day out, and I had fun with my daughter at the Coffs Harbour Show today, and the rest of it is the stuff that keeps families going; it just wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.

Since sitting down for dinner with a nice glass of red wine and thinking that actually this time I didn't do a bad job with the food I've managed to cajole myself into a slightly more positive frame of mind. I think maybe I've fallen for some of my old tricks

As soon as I got a bit down about one thing I came close to spiralling down the 'everything's wrong' slippery-dip which, as I've mentioned before, is very dangerous for me

I began to feel as if I hadn't achieved anything

I started piling up a mental to-do list about 5 miles long and then began to beat myself up about not achieving any of that, which as we all know is meaningless and a complete waste of time

And - this is the big one - the main reason why I even started out on making this mess for myself is that I came back yesterday from this amazing print show feeling unequal to my self-appointed role as an artist: I was intimidated by the talent of those around me and found it hard to place my own work in context with theirs, and plumped for the easy option which is to write myself off as rubbish instead of recognising that my work is good but different

I go round the same silly circles all the time, don't I? But it's getting easier to recognise how I sabotage myself these days, and to see what I could have done this time - and perhaps will manage to do next time - to help myself.

One thing I have found very helpful has been small moments of meditation - perhaps only a couple of minutes - but they help me achieve a more balanced frame of mind. I haven't meditated at all this weekend, which may be one reason why I've been grumpier than I would have liked today. I have learned from that.

Perhaps today has been a better day than I thought it was: I enjoyed going to the show and walking the dog. I didn't waste any of the available fun to be had with either activity by wishing I was somewhere else, and so I didn't rob my daughter of her fun, which I'm ashamed to say I have done on other occasions, so that's a small triumph too. Happiness is... watching my little girl screaming with laughter as she bounces around in a harness on very long elastic bands.

[sigh]

2009-05-14T15:14:00.003+10:00

Poor stepson... he and his delightful girlfriend have called time on their relationship, and for the silliest of reasons: she can't trust him. Never mind that he's trustworthy to the point of stupidity, absolutely straight and incredibly honourable in his romantic dealings - she can't handle it because of issues in her own life. It makes me so sad. I'm not suggesting they were soul-mates or that their relationship would have survived/become more serious/resulted in grandchildren (no pressure there then!), but they had fun together, she is a nice person and so is he and my afternoon is tinged with regret that things didn't work out. How sad for him, how sad for her (and yes, how sad for us).

Definitely not a full glass today

Dinner

2009-05-13T21:14:00.003+10:00

Quite often on a Wednesday evening my stepson comes round for dinner. Life is so much better now that he's out in the world, living in a shared house. Early difficulties with unreliable, druggy flatmates have been resolved and now he's sharing the house with two women whom he rarely sees.

On Wednesdays I take my daughter to her swimming lesson, which is a 2-hour round trip for a 30 minute lesson plus shower, but she really enjoys it and it's one of the rare occasions on which I can catch up with some reading. This evening I had a good look at the Penland Book of Handmade Books (which I can thoroughly recommend if you're at all interested in book arts) for a little inspiration, and then I vegged-out on a silly comedy/romance/novel thing that has zero intellectual merit but I just needed some light relief!

We got back to dinner (almost) on the table and our usual banter, during which my stepson was heard to utter the phrase, "I'm a rabbit". Let's face it, we're not talking big ears and a fluffy tail here (so far as I know...) but I'm chosing to allow myself to think of his cute factor, or at least remember the days when he had one. Anyway, it all made me think how great it is that at last we can all talk together like adults, once daughter is in bed, and that we have fun together now in a way that wasn't possible when we/I were/was mired in the iniquities of an untidy bedroom and an unfocused approach to life. I feel very lucky in the way things have turned out, which is a nice feeling at the end of the day.

Flopping around

2009-05-08T20:48:00.006+10:00

I'm hoping to apply for an arts residency next year, which is a bit like the art equivalent of a retreat: one goes to a different place which may be more or less well equipped for your particular arts practice in the hope that the experience of 'difference' will inspire one to new heights of artistic achievement. And in the way of spiritual/religious retreats, arts residencies come with different levels of external involvement. Places such as Penland in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, USA provide full workshop facilities and a thriving community of artists and students where residents come for years at a time to develop their skills and be inspired by the people and the landscape. Other residencies may offer little more than basic accommodation and may be so solitary that the resident artist sees no-one else for the duration of their stay.

I've been on what you might loosely term 'spiritual' residencies in the sense that I was once a regular visitor to Marygate on Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast of north eastern England. I started going in my early 20's because I knew a woman called Deb who was training to be an Anglican chaplain and she used to go and thought it would be good for me, too. The first couple of times I went I stayed in Marygate House, which was a communal house but thereafter I stayed at Cambridge House and took silent retreats. My days were spent thinking and walking around the island, and building paths by hauling shingles up from the beach and laying them - my way of paying for my stay as I had no actual money.

I look back on my stays there with great affection. I was at once needy and wary, and it was great being held to the heart of a community of people with whom I had no kinship and yet who cared about me, while at the same time being free to do whatever it was I needed to do. At the same time I found it very confrontational in that I was left to be with myself, which wasn't always easy. And that's the thing: I need a lot of personal space but at the same time I find it quite difficult to be alone with myself.

I'm remembering this at the moment because my dearly beloved husband is away - for only a short time, this time - and I'm finding it hard to get into my work! Partly there's residual tiredness from a couple of weeks of fighting off the germs that are thriving in the condusive atmosphere of the new term at school and the temperature changes of this time of year. Partly there's a lot of residual mess that's silted up around the house during a couple of heavy weeks of hard work. And partly it's because of the unaccustomed silences in the house: I crave silence, peace and quiet when everyone's around but if you leave me alone I get twitchy! It's good to remind myself that this is what I do: it's not new, I've seen it before, I know what to do... and that is to ignore the silence and get on with things; make plans and don't get swallowed up by the spaces in between things. So I've made a list of art-related challenges, resolved to ignore the mess and not waste time tidying things up, and decided to get to bed early tonight! On that note, bon nuit et dormez-bien.

Grrrrr

2009-05-01T16:22:00.002+10:00

I went out to lunch today with three female friends (I'm sorry, I find the phrase girl friends hard to use, for some reason) to the newly revamped restaurant at the Surf Life Saving Club here in Coffs Harbour - the only place in the whole darned town with absolute beach front views. (This is a secondary topic of conversation: how in hell's name is it the case that a town with such a big tourist industry and such magnificent views manages to have so few beach-side restaurants, cafes or bars?) Anyway, we found that our reserved table was right next to a large piece of wall and changed to one with a better view, thus depriving a table of younger men with our company.

Next thing we knew, the waitress said that the table of younger men had asked her if we were 'cougars'? I'm sorry, will you please run that by me again? Do we look like a table of four large felines native to the Americas, with a terratorial range extending from the Yukon to the Andes? No? I thought not. We were nonplussed until the waitress returned to say that the men had explained: 'cougars' are also older women who date younger men. Ahhh... We replied that we were not, but queried what their term was for men who dated younger women, to which the answer was 'rich'. Irony is alive and well in Coffs Harbour.

How do I feel about this? Well strangely, not very flattered. On the one hand I suppose there might be a small tick in the box beside any young man who suggests I might be attractive, but it's slightly unsettling to discover that from my outward appearance I have silently fallen into the age bracket reserved for "older women".

Watch the birdie

2009-04-26T21:03:00.005+10:00

Poor thing!

A rather large hole in the window

The bird must have died on impact and dropped into the chair... What a way to go

Inner stuff

2009-04-26T19:02:00.003+10:00

You may have wondered what happened to my use of 'Mood Manager' recently, and the answer is that my month's free trial expired at the end of March so I've stopped using the software.

Was it useful? Yes, but not in the way it was intended to be used. I didn't actually find that monitoring my moods was particularly helpful; what has been helpful has been taking the time to think about myself and how I'm feeling as a regular part of my daily life.

I've been thinking about this over the last few days. I found myself feeling stressed and anxious and I hadn't taken the time to reflect so I was getting more and more worked up, and feeling that I had too much to do and possibly couldn't achieve all that I had set out for myself. This is a bad point to come to for me because there's a real possibility of spiralling into a whirlwind of negative emotions along the lines of not being able to do anything, failing, not being good enough... I'm sure you get the picture. I can find it quite hard to get out of that very negative way of thinking, but on reflection that has the effect of being an avoidance strategy. I get so worked up that I have to drop some activity in order to salvage any achievement at all. Perhaps that's why I do it? I'm confronted with lots of things that apparently interfere with the things that I really want to do, so I allow myself to fall into a pit of despair - which is horrible but familiar - rather than having to deal with the situation, perhaps? I don't know, which is to say that I find it uncomfortable to think about it, so I'm not going to follow that line of thinking any further right now!

Anyway, luckily I had only just got to the early stages of this rapid spiralling descent when I realised that the real problem is that I simply haven't made any time for myself recently, and certainly not any time in which to reflect upon things. No wonder I'm having problems coping! And as soon as I realised that I began to be able to manage my feelings of anxiety, and to gather together some strands of self-control.

I find the state of being in a worked-up panic about things very disabling. I feel as if I don't have control, that external forces are driving everything and that I'm about to disappear along with my own wants and needs. It can descend into total panic, but on those rare occasions on which I manage to avoid going any further down that path and I calm down I manage to reclaim a sense of control about all sorts of peripheral anxieties that manage to tie themselves in with the main causes of worry.

For example, I realise that I've not been sticking very well to the CSIRO diet that we've been following successfully for almost a year. And having made the effort to get back into going to the gym I haven't been to the gym for two weeks. Now I do have a semi-reasonable excuse for both of these perceived 'failures', which is that it's the school holidays so our daughter is with us AND we drove around southern New South Wales visiting family and friends for a week which put us out of our routine. But since we've come home my rising sense of panic has at once allowed me to say that I can't cope with controlling either exercise or diet and it has prevented me from taking any control.

The word 'reflection' keeps appearing as a key to all of this. I don't need special software; what I need is acceptance that in order to stay sane I need to spend some time every day or so reflecting on myself, how I am and what I'm doing.

Having paused for long enough to reflect a little on my current condition I seem to have retrieved some enthusiasm for getting back into exercise and the diet this week, aided by the fact that school starts again on Tuesday which always seems to make things easier. Fingers crossed.

Strange happenings at 10 Kotara Place

2009-04-26T18:56:00.001+10:00

Upstairs part of the living area extends behind a stub of wall so that we don't use it all that much. It's got two bookcases in it and some of our darling daughter's toys, but it's separate from the main living area and unless she is playing there we don't really visit at all. This evening, however, I needed to get something from a book case and...

... imagine my surprise when having picked up the required book I turned around to see glass shards everywhere and a dead pigeon lying on a chair. The poor bird must have flown straight into the centre of one of the large panes of glass and, instead of just making a loud thump and falling to the ground outside the room, it must have hit the glass at exactly the right point to make it shatter. There is glass everywhere so our daughter won't be playing there for a while. We'll have to fence it off so that our dog doesn't make off with the bird; I'm waiting until daylight tomorrow to take photos and send them to the management agency. I'm not sure whether the landlord's insurance or ours covers avian entry! If I don't take the photos I don't think anyone will believe me.

Up...

2009-04-18T21:26:00.006+10:00

... is how I'm feeling, having been to visit our rural block and found that the shed was not inundated during the recent floods (our possessions in cardboard boxes are intact and not at all damp), our house platform is intact and the access road has been restored - it's a rough and ready job, but we can drive up to our block so I'm not complaining. Phew!

This is the view looking diagonally down the gully that runs between the house pad and the studio pad

There's been some earth and branches washed down the gully but considering the amount of rain it really isn't bad

The pads (platforms carved from the hillside on which to build the house and studio) themselves have suffered very little damage and none of the batters (earth walls behind the pads which have been 'battered' into a slope) behind the pads has slipped at all. We walked up the the spillways above the benches (the batters are stepped backwards into the hillside; benches are the flatter areas between one batter and the next) to assess any damage and while we saw a little bit of slippage in a couple of places the main effect of the tremendous rainfall was to wash off the top soil exposing the beautiful colours of the Argillite rock underneath!

A small step

2009-04-07T17:49:00.002+10:00

Woohoo! I should probably be posting this on our "Lookout31" blog, but I'm sticking it here because it's easier and because I may have mentioned previously that we're hoping to build a house one day on the rural block of land we own off North Boambee Road. Well, we are a small step closer to building something at some point in time because Builder #6 is apparently coming around tomorrow afternoon to tell us why he CAN put in a quote that is somewhere in the same galaxy as the price we can afford if the bank is kind to us. Again I say, Woohoo!

Baldy #2

2009-04-03T21:40:00.003+11:00

I'm hoping that the new, relaxed me (described in my previous post) will carry me through the trauma of the fact that I'm beginning to lose my hair! Baldness is not a good look on a woman unless you happen to have Sinead O'Connor's bone structure, and believe me, I don't.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of the problem. I've never exactly been blessed with a thick mane of hair; it's always been very fine and there's never been much of it, but now if I stand in front of the mirror with a light above me I'm dazzled by my shiny scalp. I had thought that the problem was restricted to the top of my head (and how many people look at the top of my head?), but I was a bit shocked to find, when I examined the back of my head using two mirrors that the shine is beginning to extend down the back of my head towards my neck. I can tell how bad it is using the 'Scale of Tact' used by my delightful hairdresser, Dan...

This is not good. I'm 43 and not, as far as I know, suffering from any nasty illness. The culprit is likely to be the fact that I had a full hysterectomy and am taking HRT. I spent months trialling different types of HRT before I had the operation in order to find one that worked for me, and believe me, those little pills can wreck havoc upon you if you don't take the right one for you. I tried pills that made me suicidal within days, pills that made hair grow in all the wrong places, pills that made me eat like a horse and pills that signally failed to do anything noticeable at all. Which is why I was so happy to find that Kliovance suited me: a little bit of progesterone in the mix seemed to have huge benefits despite the fact that "technically" I don't need it. In fact I reckon that starting HRT marked the first occasion on which my poor old malfunctioning body actually got the hormones it should have had for the preceding twenty+ years, since I'd suffered from endometriosis from the tender age of about 14 years old. On HRT I've had more energy, fewer mood swings, better skin... and less hair. It seems that the female body can convert progesterone into testosterone, which then binds with androgen receptors in my scalp (if I've understood the medical language properly), thus killing off my hair follicles and turning me into a soon-to-be baldy! Help!

I guess the risks of baldness and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (something else Gynaecologists don't tell you about when you consider whether to excise your reproductive system) do outweigh the pain and misery of endometriosis, but I find myself feeling a bit sorry for myself about the lack of hair things because it ain't going to be pretty. Clearly I do need to talk to my doctor and an endocrinologist about my hormone levels and to rule out a thyroid problem, but I think I also need to consider strategies to cope with hair loss.

Hats? Yep, I love 'em. Sadly I can't afford to have them tailor-made for my enormous head, but it would be a good look! I could legitimately channel Isabella Blow and the English Eccentric look for my Australian neighbours if I could afford it, but I may have to learn millinery before I succeed. I might be better off finding an African-Australian neighbour who could teach me to tie the gorgeous headscarves worn by Nigerian women. I love them, too! Or I could just continue to wrestle with my vanity and attempt nonchalance. No hair? Who cares? I haven't quite got to baldness yet so I have some time to work on my attitude. I'll let you know how I get on.

Rain, rain, go away...

2009-04-03T21:22:00.005+11:00

You may have seen on the news or indeed read on my other blog, Double Elephant, that the Coffs Coast Region has been declared an emergency zone by the New South Wales state government owing to the enormous quantities of water that poured out of the sky on Tuesday/Wednesday of this week. Well, it hasn't stopped raining yet and apparently we're due for more deluges of monsoon-type rains this weekend and particularly heavy rain next Monday. Hoorah! I hadn't appreciated quite why the city centre flooded as badly as it did (I seem to have driven through the area about 15 minutes ahead of the flood waters!), but the backing-up of the storm drains and creeks around the area coincided with a high King tide (King tides are equinox tides), so that water flowing out to sea was met by extra high tides flowing in towards the city and the outlying regions, hence the floods.

Gurdial standing on the plank across the crater

Anyway, so far so good, until Jake (the headmaster who recently built a house near to our block) sent us some photos yesterday. King tides aren't to blame, instead the valley is a huge water catchment area and as it came down off the hillsides it slammed straight into an inadequate culvert under the main access route up to our blocks... and washed the road away, leaving a crater impassible by vehicle and only just navigable over a single plank on foot. Jake's family couldn't get back to their house after work and school and have had to decamp to his mother-in-law's house (with five kids!) for the duration. Adam, who built his house right next to our boundary was lucky that he was at work while his wife was at home, so they were able to park their cars on either side of the gulf and have been ferrying children/food/adults back and forth between work, school and the shops via the rickety plank! Gurdial, whose blueberry farm is two blocks away from ours, on the other side of Adam's house, hasn't been able to get up there. We finally got all our boxed up goods into our new shed last Thursday and haven't been up there since so we have no idea if the rain water was able to drain away from the concrete foundations or whether our carefully stacked boxes (which were on pallets, luckily) have escaped the flood waters or not...

Gurdial's brothers standing on the plank. You can see the 3 large concrete culverts from which the road surface was washed away

Thanks to Jake sending us the photos we were able to go up to the crater this evening for a meeting to discuss what happens next, although they were all still arguing when we had to leave to collect our daughter from after school care, so I don't know the outcome. But the options are to spend $2,500 - $3,000 on a more-or-less well done 'bodge job' which would see large rocks placed down the sides of the re-positioned drains and topped off with water-repellent clay soils covered in gravel, or to invest more like $10,000 on doing the job properly which will include digging out a drain in order to divert the water flow while proper concrete pads are put in for the culvert and retaining walls built before a contoured slipway is incorporated into the road profile above... Clearly the latter idea is sensible, but apart from the time it might take to do and the fact that no work would be able to start on either option until the water flow has considerably reduced, there is of course the question of cost. It's likely that the bulk of the costs would be shared between Gurdial, Jake and us, and I have to say that we hadn't planned to spend a big lump of money on the road right now.

It's quite a large gap!

I do think that all the Buddhist reading I've been doing recently has had some effects. I am making a conscious effort to examine how I'm feeling, to recognise the signs of becoming stressed and to calm down, to relax more, to forgive myself more, to be more realistic, to encourage myself to exercise and to quell the nagging, critical inner voice. It's not that I'm embracing Buddhism so much as that I'm acknowledging the sense in what I'm reading and trying to apply it to my situation in a practical way.

Not a baldy any more

2009-04-02T15:28:00.006+11:00

Belle isn't bald any more! Because I've spent several evening recently sewing 400m of cotton embroidery thread (in 4 colours) onto her little head... approximately 1,000 lengths of thread! I am completely mad.

If I find any more thread I might - one day - lower her hairline a little. Right now, though, I'm remembering that upper class ladies in the late 1500's - early 1600's used to pluck their foreheads to attain such alabaster elegance because it was a sign of beauty. So there.

And I quote

2009-03-31T18:05:00.003+11:00

Not enough quotations recently, so here are some more that I've been reading:

"Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north" (or a cave facing south, for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere...)

Tibetan saying

"One must practice the things which produce happiness, since if that is present we have everything and if it is absent we do everything in order to have it"

Epicurus

"By 'happiness' we mean any span of time in which joy would seem immediately possible"

André Comte-Sponville, Le Bonheur, désespérément

"Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher

Quotes taken from Matthieu Ricard's book Happiness: A guide to developing Life's most important skill

LOL

2009-03-28T16:09:00.002+11:00

I don't laugh out load very often (perhaps I should?) but this appealed to me... Thank you to Ampersand Duck for the link to http://rolcats.com/. Who are the people who think up these things...?

P.S. there is a very small printmaking connection in there somewhere... can you find it?

Three wheels down, one wheel up

2009-03-28T12:11:00.004+11:00

Last night I had a chance to practice my powers of calm and clear thinking when I had a small but humiliating accident in the car while at my darling daughter's school. Last weekend Coffs Harbour celebrated Harmony Day, which promotes peace and understanding between the many different cultures represented in the local community. E's school decided to bring together its own Autumn Festival with Harmony Day celebrations yesterday after school and so parents and students enjoyed the harmonies of the children's and adults' choirs, African drumming (hmmm...) and excellent didgeridoo playing among other delights in between very heavy rain showers.

M and I left early to meet some friends and I went back to the school to pick E up at 5:30pm, after a lot of rain. Well that's my excuse, anyway, for the fact that as we left the muddy field that serves as the school's over-flow car park, I reversed to let someone else out and... the back wheels of the car slid off the 'path' and into a small ditch, leaving us stranded with one front wheel in the air and absolutely no possibility of getting ourselves out of the situation without considerable assistance. What to do...? The only option (well, apart from screaming in frustration at my own stupidity or bursting into tears I guess) was to go back into the celebrations, round up some assistance and hope that better minds than mine would be able to work out what to do next, so thanking myself profusely for having put waterproof shoes and my rain jacket in the car I left E where she was and went in to beg for help. I'm ashamed to say, though, that I lost it with my husband. He's the one person in the world with whom I feel comfortable admitting that I don't know what to do and that I'm a step away from sheer panic, so what did I do? I shouted at him! Luckily he's a very forgiving man (although he did put petrol on the fire by telling me to calm down).

I have to say that I love the Steiner School. While I have no doubt that other schools would be possessed of parents who would willingly have helped me, the Steiner School has a particularly generous and creative group. Unbeknownst to me, while I was asking for assistance among the parents - and getting many offers of help from people whose names I don't know - someone I did know, Wendy, had spotted E in the back of our car, stopped, and asked E if she'd like to play with her children in their car while she got out in the pouring rain to see what she could do to help. And the father of one of E's classmates had, by the time I got back, already stopped, got out a webbed strap, established that he couldn't get the thick end of the strap through the tow-loop under the car and was thinking up other solutions to the problem. In the end, after three goes, we managed to pull my car out because another helpful father stopped by and proferred a D-ring shackle that successfully united the webbing strap with the tow-loop, et voila! All of us were absolutely soaked by the time we'd finished and I am SOOOO grateful. What a lovely group of people!

By the time I got back to where my husband was waiting I was cold, wet, tired and very annoyed with myself. The annoyance has diminished into resigned humour and a determination to ensure that we carry a tow rope, webbing straps and a couple of D-ring shackles in the boot for future creative uses. I have managed not to sink into a pit of despair about my inadequacies as a parent and a driver, but still, it is a little embarrassing... and I feel especially embarrassed by the fact that the rear bumper does now have a dent (and my husband cleared out a fair amount of field from the exhaust pipe!).

In terms of my search for happiness this has been an illustrative process for me. I would have done a lot better if I'd managed to keep myself a little calmer after it had just happened. Wendy saved the day for my daughter by successfully distracting her with other children which meant that she didn't feel too traumatised by it all. I did what I needed to do, but ended up beating myself up about it a little bit, and while it's good that I managed to restrict it to only a little bit, I recognise that a bit more calm and a sense of humour in the initial stages would have carried me a long way. I will store that knowledge up for next time, while simultaneously praying that there isn't a next time!

Ragdoll blues

2009-03-26T19:32:00.008+11:00

It's not very glamorous being a rag doll in the making, is it? After the face is put on you're sewn up (with a hole left in your side for the stuffing), and then you're clipped...

...then some prankster photographs you the right way in but with stuffing on your head...

... before the iniquities of the BALD photos. Look! No hair! Huh, and they've named me 'Belle'. Is that some kind of a joke?

Books & Boxes with Ampersand Duck

2009-03-25T11:53:00.003+11:00

That is such a cool name for a private press/blog... and I'm feeling very excited about the fact that I've signed up to do a week-long course with Caren as part of Sturt's Winter School for creative arts in July. A whole blissful week of making books and boxes.... (sigh) I can't wait! I can't really afford it, either, but I have some help in so far as I should be able to stay with my brother-in-law and his family in Goulburn, which is about a 40 minute drive to Sturt in Mittagong. Fingers crossed.

I do love going on courses. Last year I was lucky enough to go on two in Sydney at Primrose Park in Cremorne, Sydney, and the whole experience was great. There is a particular thrill in the selfishness of engrossing myself in something for a complete period without the usual interruptions of family and daily life! I don't want to behave like that every day but sometimes it is just lovely to get away and allow oneself to wallow in having fun and making things. And there are all the other benefits as well: access to expertise, meeting people, making potentially useful contacts and new friends, just being somewhere different for a change and seeing how other people do things... all of these outcomes eventually flow through into new work. I'd been thinking that I might not have a chance to do anything like that this year, and doubtless I shall find nearer the time that it isn't exactly convenient for me to slope off for a week (when M is going to be away a lot this year and we're also trying to build a house) but what the hell. I just had an emailed acknowledgement of receipt of my application so it looks as if I'm going!

Happiness Is

2009-03-19T14:56:00.003+11:00

Exercise, I'm convinced of it. I spent an hour this morning in the Botanic Gardens again, clenching my abdominal muscles and trying to get my head into the correct position during my Pilates class and the magpies were warbling, the Tibouchina trees are covered in purple flowers and the sky was blue. Bliss! And it was all helped along by the fact that I've discovered DEET, so the mosquitoes didn't carry me away today. I had to come home and have another shower to get the insecticide off my skin but that's a small price to pay for not having hives.

I've also been having fun binding the two pulp-printed hand-made paper books that were the product of the residency I did at Southern Cross University in January. With moving house and illness completion of my part of the project has been held back, for which I feel bad, but it's now getting there. Willis came over today to find out what he has to do to bind his two books and hopefully by the end of next week they'll be finished and ready to send up to Tim in Lismore. Photos etc of the work will appear on Double Elephant, my "art" blog.

Mother and daughter time

2009-03-15T10:09:00.006+11:00

I love making things with my darling daughter and I've found the best way to stop stressing about not doing enough of that sort of thing with her is to get my head out of my navel and DO something with her... to whit, she came home a week or so ago and asked if we could make a rag doll together. It turned out that her Steiner school teacher had said children can come to class with toys etc if they had made them, which is wholly unreasonable in the real world but completely in tune with the school's Steiner ethos! So we had extensive discussions about size, skin colour, hair colour, face and clothes which resulted in some beautiful drawings, and I found an old sheet that I've been saving for rags. We had fun dying it to a more natural skin tone using tea bags. I knew it could be done but feared it might be complicated, but it was so simple!

Dunk your material in a bucket in which you have poured lots of very strong tea (don't forget to strain out the tea leaves or remove the tea bags first or they could produce strange patches or spots if they rest against your material). Leave for 20 minutes and then check the fabric, remembering that the shade will look darker on wet fabric, and take it out when ready. Drip dry and then iron to set the colour. Voila!

I went out and bought embroidery cottons for the face, skeins of thread for hair and some fabric with a small pattern for clothes and we started... I downloaded a pattern for $3 from an American website but on reflection could have drawn one myself just as well (although the buying/downloading process was very easy), and I embroidered most of the face although darling daughter did also do some embroidery. For a small person of only just 7 years she is very dextrous with her fingers and understood completely what she was trying to achieve. All in all we had a lot of fun, and I'll post some more pictures in due course.

She doesn't have a name yet but she'' have reddish hair and a blue dress!

... and she has very big eyes...

Happiness is

2009-03-11T20:41:00.002+11:00

Taking your kids out to dinner, especially the one who's moved out and can entertain you with tales of his flatmate's girlfriend trashing the place after a drug binge, his latest candidate for the post of girlfriend and other amusing stories! And my super-duper daughter did amazing swimming today: every term they have a 'safety in the water' lesson and as she's progressed she's done lots of different things from learning how to swim fully clothed to 'saving' each other. Today it was proved to her just how far she can swim: using a mixture of front crawl (freestyle, in Australia) and 'survival backstroke' she swam continuously for 25 minutes, which left her absolutely exhausted but still afloat. She is only 7, after all. I'm so proud of both of them

Even if the wine at the restaurant was nothing to write home about

Now you see it, now maybe you don't...

2009-03-11T16:15:00.002+11:00

I really hate the whole ageing thing. In the old days I could rest easy, knowing that my blood pressure was incredibly low and that I was fit, fit, fit! Now I'm suffering from stress, I'm a little bit overweight, distinctly less fit than I used to be AND it seems that the pressure inside my eyeballs is increasing, putting me at greater risk of glaucoma. I went to the optometrist in Coffs Harbour recommended to me by my optometrist brother-in-law, Tony, and was told that I'd got high pressure readings in my eyes. This isn't good news. Ten years ago I lost the sight in my left eye for nine months and had various other episodes of unexplained bleeding into both eyes so I already know what losing my eyesight is like... Since the first bleed I have spent many hours in the optometrist's chair and this is the very first time that my eye pressure has been elevated, and it marks a distinct change from the situation two years ago when I last had my eyes checked. The days when my doctor used to tell me to start smoking and drinking in order to increase my blood pressure are clearly long gone!

What does this tell me? Well things have clearly changed! I'm older, probably fatter, probably a bit less fit than I was two years ago. I've experienced a lot of stress - possibly no more than usual in my up-and-down sort of life, but still lots of stress. I've started drinking a cup of real coffee most days, but I don't drink as much alcohol as I used to. I've been on the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet for most of the last twelve months.

I think it also tells me that I should be taking my efforts to change unhelpful aspects of my life seriously. I've been following the CSIRO with great results, but I still eat too much meat and I haven't put great emphasis on the low fat part of the plan because I shifted a lot of weight by just dropping carbohydrates. I eat too much chocolate. I probably don't eat enough potassium, magnesium and calcium, mainly because I'm lazy about ensuring that I eat bananas every day and/or take a supplement. This is particularly short-sighted of me as I'm on HRT and need to ensure I ingest enough calcium to avoid osteoporosis. I have started taking more exercise, so we'll see if I can keep up with two Pilates classes per week and two gym sessions per week, and I will need to increase the length of gym sessions and the variety of weight training and cardio work I do.

In the spirit of taking responsibility for both the good and the bad in what I do, I think I've made a start, which is good, and now I need to stick at it. I need to recognise that what was true when I was in my twenties and thirties is out of date now I'm in my early forties, and adapt accordingly. I need not to slide into a pit of depression about how wrong everything is and focus instead on being calm, reducing my stress levels, getting my chocolate cravings under control and improving my overall health. Cheers!

Buddhism for happiness?

2009-03-10T20:49:00.005+11:00

I wonder if Buddhism has occurred to you as a possible exploratory route to happiness? It's certainly occurred to me many times over the years, although I've instinctively shied away from anything that looked too much like hard work. I'm also unsure if I am or if I want to be someone who 'aligns' myself with something. Many years ago I knew someone called Anton Wasilewski (I think that's the spelling) at university and he pronounced that I was a person with no morals but plenty of underlying principles, and I think it is principles that have got me through life in the absence of anything like faith. I have no faith. I joke about having had the 'faith bone' removed, but truthfully I don't have any faith. Internal searching hasn't even disclosed to me the part of my mind in which faith would reside if I had any. I've read research that suggests people with faith are physically and mentally healthier so in some ways I feel as if perhaps an absence of faith in my life has made things more difficult, but I've also felt glad to be the author of my own misfortunes and I am reluctant to describe any part of my life or myself to something other.

So anyway, back to Buddhism. I'm interested in the fact that some of the people who've published research and written books about happiness and how to achieve it are practicing Buddhists, but with my Bachelors degree Christian theology behind me I am crushingly ignorant about Buddhism and I'd like to know more. One thing that's confusing me is that there are so many variants of Buddhism, different schools, although with my knowledge of the history and practice of Christianity perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I don't know that I'm about to embark on a personal journey into Buddhism, but I do think that meditation, mindfulness and compassion in particular may have important things to teach me about being less stressed, living now rather than in the past or in the future, and forgiving myself - all of which would do me a lot of good. So I'm reading two books at the moment, which are at different points in the plethora of western interpretative literature about Buddhism: Sarah Napthali's Buddhism for Mothers and Matthieu Ricard's Happiness: a Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.

The Napthali book is (so far) amusing and relevant in that its author is not a guru. She's a time-poor, frazzled mother with a supportive partner who is otherwise uninterested in her spiritual journey, and she's an ordinary, mistake-making, non-academic student of Buddhism who isn't claiming to have all the answers. If nothing else, reading the book makes me realise I'm not alone! Ricard's book claims a lot more authority, if only because of its weightier prose and the fact that its author is a fully ordained monk and a science graduate with amazing parents and a fabulous education who could probably have turned his hand to anything and been an outstanding success but instead has devoted his life to Buddhism and specifically to the interface between Buddhist teachings and modern physics... Intellectually it's a lot more interesting, but less sympathetic. Indeed, having been brought up in that very British way of understating achievement Ricard's calm and dispassionate recital of his successes makes him sound a bit smug when it's supposed to showcase his Buddhist non-attachment to wordly things and his lack of delusion about his place in the world. I'm hoping that as I read more I find something more fallable about him and that I'm able to avoid schadenfreude. That wouldn't be very Buddhist, would it?

P.S.

2009-03-05T18:25:00.002+11:00

Those of you who were wondering why in hell's name I paid for gym membership without going to the gym or cancelling my membership might like to know that here one has to pay for a year in monthly instalments. One can put one's membership on hold for up to 12 weeks (which I did) but for longer periods on hold one needs a genuine excuse and a doctor's letter! Being half Scottish isn't deemed sufficient reason for not paying...

Ouch!

2009-03-05T18:14:00.002+11:00

I started going to Pilates today and I can tell you, I'm going to ache tomorrow! My lovely Italian friend Paola gives classes twice a week in the Botanic Gardens and, as she has children at the same school as our daughter, I don't have any excuses... This morning was an experiment and I had a wonderful hour, rediscovering small muscle groups that I didn't realise could operate independently, in an open-walled pavilion in the gardens.

Anyway, the warm breeze and the birdsong and the stretching were a great prelude to sitting my Citizenship Test at lunchtime. I was booked in for an appointment in April but M got a call the other day to ask if I'd mind taking a cancellation appointment today - without having had a chance to receive the relevant booklet in the post. I read through the on-line version last night and I'm pleased to say that I passed with 95%, having dismally failed to select the right option on the question about land mass of different states. Had they asked me about the first Prime Minister or the date of Federation or of Anzac Day, or the meaning of the colours of the Aboriginal Flag or the basic events of the Eureka Stockade I'd have been fine, but clearly I'd not fully read the section on the geography of the different states. Never mind. I passed, which is the main thing, and it means I can start the process of applying for citizenship.

They're right

2009-03-04T11:20:00.002+11:00

Which is generally something I find distressing to admit, but it turns out that exercise really does make you feel better! OK, actually I knew it already and have previously acknowledged its truth in my own life, but I'm sitting here at my laptop feeling justifiably pleased with the fact that I went to the gym this morning.

To give you some idea of how long ago it is since I darkened their doors, they had actually installed a new entry system. And had been using it for some time. So my first task was to present myself at the reception desk and try not to look too embarrassed while asking for a new key card ("Yes, I am a member." "No, I didn't get a key card when the new system was installed." "Why not..? Because I haven't seen you since May 2008"). I managed to laugh.

Happiness is... making cobweb felt

2009-03-02T11:09:00.005+11:00

There are flashes of bright colours all through this scarf

This one is a bit more muted, with tones of green and turquoise

On my quest to de-stress over the weekend I decided to get on and do some more felt-making, because I thoroughly enjoy it AND the results are going to be birthday presents for some lovely people I know (whom I sort of hope don't read this blog very often, otherwise they won't be very surprised by their impending parcels!).

Detail of the mohair and silk noile inclusions that give an irridescent quality to the material

Cobweb felt - my name for it? - is very sheer felt made by laying out gossamer-thin layers of wool and fulling the fibres very gently indeed by rolling them up in a bamboo mat and rolling them forwards and backwards hundreds of times until the fibres mat together and form felt. I've not done it before but found instructions, which I adapted to my own needs, in a book. I am really pleased with the results and in addition to that, I spent a pleasant afternoon outside in the garden making everything so I came in yesterday evening feeling as if the sea breeze had blown away the cobwebs in my head at least and that I'd thoroughly enjoyed the meditative aspects of repetitiously fulling the scarves.

This white scarf is one of the first I made and its edges are rougher

... but I love the colours against the white

Mood Manager

2009-03-02T09:43:00.003+11:00

I subscribe to The Happiness Institute's newsletter and was intrigued to read over the weekend about a new tool aimed at helping people gain some insight about and control over how they feel called 'Mood Manager'. Well there's a 30-day free trial and what can I say..? I signed up. It isn't downloadable software, instead you sign in to it over the web.

Everyone loves a quiz, especially about themselves, and getting started with Mood Manager involves taking a DASS 21 test (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale). This rates your levels of depression, anxiety and stress over the preceding week and allows you to monitor your responses. There are lots of things Mood Manager doesn't do, and it isn't a replacement for professional treatment if that's what you need, but I'm interested to see whether the process of logging unhelpful thoughts, regularly retaking the DASS 21 test and using the software's tools to analyse some of my thoughts and behaviours will identify issues I haven't previously thought about.

One thing has already come up: on the first DASS 21 test I took my scores were 1 for Anxiety, 10 for Depression and 14 for Stress! Perhaps I've got so used to thinking of myself as being depressed I ignore the possibility that I'm actually more stressed? I wonder if I was to do something about feeling stressed I might feel better all around?

I decided to take advantage of the 30 day trial and use the software to its fullest so every day I'll note how much sleep and exercise I got and how I felt, I'll pay attention to those 'unhelpful thoughts' that drill into my thoughts so frequently, and I'll try to think about what I'm doing. At the end of the month it will be interesting to see if the process has helped me, and whether pulling that information together is something for which I need an on-line programme or whether I can actually do it for myself. And in terms of reducing my stress levels, which I think is important but which I've been putting at the bottom of my list of priorities, I'm going to sort out a schedule for my week that includes at least one thing I really enjoy doing and also fences off time for exercise. I know I feel better when I exercise, but since M was ill last year and I had to stay home with him I have completely abandoned it, and that's silly and something I should sort out.

Gardenia

2009-03-01T08:29:00.003+11:00

Not enough pictures in this blog yet, so here's a spurious one, a propos of nothing. Scented flowers do make me happy, though. I'm not someone who likes strong scents usually, but Gardenia is beautiful and I'm just thrilled that over here I can grow a tree from something that in the UK is a hot house plant that usually yellows and dies from the cold!

Hmmm

2009-02-26T10:21:00.002+11:00

My mind isn't cold and bare, in fact it's got all sorts of pictures going on in it, but here's a problem: where do I hang the damned things in our new house? THERE ARE NO HOOKS! And moreover, I'm not allowed to put up any hooks (or at least, not without incurring a huge replastering and repainting bill at the end of our tenancy, which, as we'll hopefully be building a house soon is likely to be one of the points in my life when I have least money). Perhaps this says that our absentee landlord has a cold and bare mind?

I'll have to make do with creating lots of inspiring art in the studio to make up for it, and selling it for thousands of dollars, thus expediting the construction of our house!

And I quote

2009-02-25T21:37:00.002+11:00

Two quotes for you since we're on the subject of moving house and I've been absent for a couple of weeks:

"Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home"

John Howard Payne, US actor & dramatist
(1791 - 1852)

"A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself"

Louis L'Amour, US novelist of westerns, from 'Bendigo Shafter'
(1908 - 1988)

Quotes found on The Quotations Page

Coming up for air

2009-02-25T21:18:00.003+11:00

This evening I feel as if I've cracked our recent move: virtually all of the boxes are unpacked and although we may not know exactly which cupboard something is in, it is in its designated cupboard. If you can't find it, that's not my problem, right?

I should have remembered: the process of moving takes most of a month! First there's the packing, then the loading (in our case about 30 car's worth of boxes shifted between the two houses so that we could start off with food and crockery, computers and bedlinen, each in the right place). Then there's unpacking... and if you're me, this is a mountain that needs to be climbed as soon as possible in order to avert the depression that sets in almost immediately when I'm confronted with a large pile of boxes. I think I was some sort of cat in a former life as I seem to need to turn around several times and get everything right before I can settle down. Things aren't entirely perfect, but they're pretty good. All the stuff that belongs in my studio is actually in the studio, and in the world outside I have my computer set up properly and connected to a printer, the washing machine is plumbed in and there is no longer a mountain of unwashed clothes and sheets hanging around the floor of the laundry, my clothes are all in the wardrobe and the wine cellar is unpacked.

Now I am very, very tired.

Happiness is...

2009-02-10T21:44:00.002+11:00

Having a pool party to say farewell to our swimming pool! We'll be moving closer to the beach so the plan is to have fun at the seaside instead of around the pool.

Now why didn't I photograph a champagne flute? I drank lots of champagne at the party...

On the move

2009-02-10T21:38:00.002+11:00

A brief post to say that we're in the middle of moving house. You know the scenario: lots of boxes waiting to be filled, and a looming deadline with the packers coming to take some of our stuff off to storage on Friday and then returning on Monday to move our furniture into our new rented house. In the middle of all the fun our phone lines will be transferred... now this should mean little interruption, but who knows? I started to say that of course there'll be problems but I decided I sounded too pessimistic and I'm trying to be positive, aren't I? So I'll simply say that I may not be able to post much for a week or so, depending on how things turn out. That's fair, isn't it?

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to moving my creative stuff into a nice, light room at the new place, with a sink and my very own toilet! My printing press will live in the garage which is only on the other side of the wall from my 'studio', and this arrangement will give me room to make things.

Talk to you soooooon....

Good news

2009-01-31T22:25:00.002+11:00

We got the house! We haven't signed the lease yet (we're planning to do that on Tuesday, when I get a day off from my residency and will be in Coffs Harbour) but the property has come off the market, the owner is busy installing a new first-floor deck to make the most of the sea views from the upstairs living areas and we've booked a removals company with a provisional date of February 16th for actually shifting furniture from one place to the other. We have a mountain of work to do now, packing, re-packing, labelling and re-labelling boxes old and new so that our belongings can be split between our newly-built shed and the new house. I can't say I'm entirely looking forward to the process but I am looking forward to the result.

Here's to our first evening sitting on the balcony, sipping something cold and admiring the seascape!

And I quote

2009-01-31T22:21:00.002+11:00

"The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection"

Bertrand Russell, British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970)

Quote found on The Quotations Page

Lazy Sunday mornings

2009-01-25T13:44:00.002+11:00

As a treat we went out for brunch this morning to the Beachstone cafe, which is a few kilometres outside Coffs Harbour in the middle of a new housing development, very close to Sapphire beach. E loves it because there is an excellent playground, and we've got to know the people who run the cafe and own the development. I managed to creep out of bed this morning leaving M to snore while I sneaked into the office to get a head-start on the quarterly business accounts, so brunch - as well as a general feeling of smug superiority - was my reward for hard labour!

Anyway, over two large cappucinos, a plate of lamb cutlets with roast beetroot and puy lentils (M), pancakes with sugar and lemon for E, and eggs, bacon and bubble-and-squeak (me), M and I got talking, had an argument, sorted things out and basked in the glow of mutual support before peeling ourselves out of our chairs and heading back into the world.

What did we argue about? Well it boils down to having fundamentally different approaches to life which, if held suitably in tension with each other, provide us with a good relationship and balance. But boy, if either approach gets the upper hand we end up in trouble, and this time I'm the guilty party. We were talking and I was thinking hard when a metaphor for my approach to life occurred to me. I continually act as if I'm edging around the outside of a building, many stories up, with my back to the wall, hanging on tightly and trying hard not to look down. If I hold on tightly enough I'm safe as I move gingerly from ledge to ledge but woe betide me if I relax my grip. M, on the other hand, moves forward in his life as if striding over flowering meadows with lambs frolicking around him and birdsong on the breeze. My 'internal weather' is a bit like the set of Bladerunner, all apocalyptic shadows, gloom and clouds; M's 'internal weather' is definitely predicted to be sunshine.

This all works, most of the time. As long as we're moving forward I tend not to notice the yawning crevices just in front of me, and as long as M moves forward he basks in sunshine and doesn't pay attention to clouds on the horizon. I don't mean to make this sound as if either of us has a simplistic approach to life: it's much more complex than it sounds and has to do with the life experiences that bring us both to this point, as well as what is psychologically necessary to us in order to do our jobs. Introspection and gloom have often been corollaries of an 'artistic disposition' (look at Van Gogh), so that's my excuse sorted out. M, quite differently to me, has to be positive and optimistic and must project that towards his clients, otherwise they'd have little faith in his ability to achieve his targets. Who wants to spend money with an Eeyore?

Recently, however, I've been very gloomy and depressed and the balance has shifted. M and I needed to talk in order for me to realise how difficult I sometimes make it for him to be as positive as he needs to be in order to produce the goods at work. I've spent weeks shooting down every little bit of sunshine and I've got to stop. Moreover, by making a conscious effort to stop I might facilitate some of the things I want in life too... So that's what I'm going to try to do.

Happiness is...

2009-01-24T22:06:00.005+11:00

Happiness is unexpected presents!

I did a very small favour for some friends recently, when we were in Brisbane, and today one of them called round with a lovely handmade gift: three small notebooks covered in a painting on paper and some beautiful card, with an instruction sheet.

Just lovely. I feel very happy and very touched at the thought and effort that went into them. Thank you.

A new home?

2009-01-24T19:14:00.004+11:00

There's no deadline being held over our heads but our landlord put the house we're living in up for sale last year, and recently he appointed a third agent to try and sell it for him. No-one ever thinks to consider the uncertainty any of this might cause the tenant! We sit on the sidelines wondering if our home is about to be sold out from under us, and trying to make sense of the changes we detect in the overall situation. What we deduce from the appearance of a third agent is that our landlord is getting quite serious about selling the property, and as the third agent hasn't even bothered to talk to us about things and is just sending people through with greater frequency, our suspicions seem to be accurate.

We've been "looking" for a while, but now we're really looking, in much the same way that our landlord is now really trying to sell the place, and today perhaps we found our next rented home. We went to see a 4-bed place in Korora, which is the suburb of Coffs Harbour that we used to live in before that landlord sold the house out from under us last time. This house is very near the sea: a track at the end of the road leads down a cliff-path and onto the beach, and it's all far enough from the highway that the only sounds in our ears as we fall asleep will be the wind and the waves. The yard is OK: not huge but not tiny and with a wooden under-cover deck area where we can put our outside dining set and the barbecue; there's a storage shed and a huge double garage where we might actually be able to park both cars. Inside the house is upside down so that the main living areas take advantage of the sea views and the breeze. Downstairs are two small-ish bedrooms, one of which would be E's, plus two large tiled rooms that would become my studio and M's office, together with a kitchen area, a large bathroom and a huge laundry. Upstairs is a large open-plan living/kitchen/dining room, a WC and the master bedroom/ensuite bathroom. Today was a stinking hot day and there was a lovely breeze and the views were fantastic. Now we're down to just three people in the family the house is a great size and I think it would suit us. All we have to do is jump through hoops and persuade the landlord and the managing agent of the same thing.

We've been working out the money, too, and it seems good. We'd be saving $120 a week in rent (because it doesn't have a pool or a tennis court!), plus about $3,000 a year in pool maintenance costs, plus the extra electricity costs of an ageing pool filtration system, and we'd save petrol as well as it's about 6km closer to town so all our journeys would be shorter. Even though it will cost us a fair amount of time and money to move I think we'd save over a year, and as the house is a long-term investment for its owners we aren't likely to be chucked out.

This sets the agenda for the weekend: we're going to be working out our cash-flow forecast for the year, trying to envisage a calendar for moving, and putting together all the documentation we need to go with our rental application. It's a long weekend here so M won't be able to put the application in until Tuesday morning (I'll be away all next week), so my fingers are firmly crossed.

A lovely glass of water because it's hot here at the moment

And I quote

2009-01-21T17:45:00.002+11:00

"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved"

Victor Hugo, French playwright, author and poet, in Les Miserables (1802 - 1855)

Quote found on The Quotations Page

Things that make me happy

2009-01-21T17:40:00.004+11:00

E was 7 last week and at the weekend we had a Hawaiian Hula-hula disco pool party for her at home

Fortunately no photos exist of me in the grass skirt...

All the guests were given leis, and we had a lot of fun

Mostly Down, actually

2009-01-21T17:28:00.002+11:00

Yup, try as I might I haven't really managed to be 'up' recently. My family might not believe me given how grumpy I've been for the last few days but I have been trying to sort myself out!

Anyway, they say a change is as good as a rest so despite feeling slightly worried about it, I'm off bright and early tomorrow morning to start a 2-week residency with Tim Mosely in Lismore. For the last few years Tim has been the driving force behind a project called 'Codex' at the Visual Arts Department of Southern Cross University. A couple of years ago, when I'd only been in Australia for a few weeks, I was invited to be a part of Codex 4, and now I'm going to be part of Codex 6. My memories of Codex 4 are slightly blurred by the fact that I managed to contract Giardia part-way through and missed a few days, but the end result was great and did a lot for me in terms of opening doors in the arts world over here.

Tim usually suggests a theme for the project and this year its 'Resistance'. He's gone for Che Guevara, but I've been thinking more about things like antibiotic resistance and insulin resistance, genetic resistance and electrical resistance. It will be interesting to see what the first day or so throws up in the way of discussion! We'll all meet for the first time tomorrow, mid-morning, and it's up to us to negotiate how we proceed. The only real parameters are the time-frame involved (roughly two weeks from now, give or take a few days), the facilities and the fact that this is a project centred around hand-made paper so we'll be making the paper to make the book or whatever it is we decide upon. Knowing Tim, we'll also be doing some pulp printing, which is his special technique for screen-printing coloured paper-pulp onto freshly pulled wet sheets of paper so that text and image can become an integral part of the paper.

I remember last time as being stinking hot! The weather forecast is predicting around 32 degrees C in Lismore, and the university campus is an airless hole, situated in a natural depression that was once the caldera of a local volcano. So I'm taking shorts and T shirts - out with glamour, in with sweat for the next few days, I think!

And I quote

2009-01-18T16:45:00.001+11:00

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory"

Albert Schweitzer, French philosopher and doctor (1875 - 1965)

Quote found on The Quotations Page

Making Time

2009-01-17T18:21:00.002+11:00

I was reading a post by Colleen Gonzalez on Eric Maisel's blog and boy, did it ring true... Essentially it was about finding time to do the thing you're really passionate about and this seemingly simple simple task is something I trip over, again and again. What hit me in the solar plexus was a comment from Suzanne Kelsey about the importance of MAKING time,

"The irony is that once your kids are grown, and even if you suddenly have 40 hours a week to write, the habit... will not come any easier. There will always be reasons not to start"

Perhaps it's all blindingly obvious to those who have already nailed the habit of making time to do the thing they'd otherwise be moaning about not having enough time to do, but for the rest of us - or at least me - it's good to be reminded of this simple truth!

Last year my Daily Drawing blog was an attempt to make a little bit of room in my life for drawing, every day, and it has really worked: now that particular project is over I find myself drawing every day anyway, and feeling as if I've missed out if I can't manage it, so I've proved to myself that I can do it. Now what I have to do is enlarge the activity if you like, and encompass some bigger projects.

And I quote

2009-01-17T09:08:00.002+11:00

"The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it"

C P Snow, English novelist and scientist (1905 - 1980)

Well that's me done for then, isn't it!

Quote found on The Quotations Page

Happiness is...

2009-01-17T09:00:00.002+11:00

A cocktail with friends on a Friday night at Bar Fiasco, down by the beach.

CAIPIROSKA

1 lime, chopped
3 teaspoons caster sugar
15 ml sugar syrup
ice cubes
60 ml vodka

Muddle the lime and the sugar and sugar syrup in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and vodka, shake vigorously and strain into a chilled glass. If you want a minty lime cocktail you can add mint leaves with the chopped lime and sugars and muddle them together.

Hmmm

2009-01-15T08:49:00.006+11:00

I did a bit of a u-turn this morning, reflecting on what I intend by this blog, and I deleted a post that made me feel sad - something I've never done before! The transformation is surprising: a lifting of sadness, and a small sense of renewed energy. What was I doing that made me feel sad? I was focusing on the past and letting it bog me down.

There are a couple of key points hidden in those sentences: I very much have the power to create (and change) my own mood, so it isn't all about outside agencies affecting me, it can also be about me affecting myself. Daft, isn't it? But I therefore have the power to change things: even if I can't stop the outside agencies (and I'm not talking about the FBI here!), I can change how I respond to things, which is something I've always known and too infrequently remember.

Phew, now I've hammered that into my head a bit this morning I can think about things I was mulling over yesterday and the day before when reading Eric Maisel's Creativity blog. Jan Allsopp over at ...'In my spare time' alerted me to Eric Maisel some time ago but it has to be said I've not been an avid reader until recently when I noticed some of his posts popping up, titled "Traits of the Creative Personality". Aha! I thought. Now I'll learn some of the mysteries of being more creative and I'll be happy... and of course, it's not quite that simple.

Eric Maisel suggests ten 'traits of the creative personality': confidence, depth of knowledge, social unconcern, patience, organisation, openness to experience, love of challenge, divergent thinking abilities, tolerance for ambiguity, and self-trust. How do I score? Well actually I'd give myself 7/10 which surprised me. I could do with working on my depth of knowledge (it isn't a journey that ever ends, I think), and my confidence waivers enormously depending on how I'm generally feeling, but otherwise I'd say I do OK. And there's another lesson for me: actually I am already equipped, after 43 years of learning, with many of the skills I need in my personal, professional and artistic lives - I just don't realise it, or at least I frequently forget. Maybe the aspect of myself that I need to work on most is self-belief, which is subtly different from self-trust.

How am I feeling today? Mmmm, I'd say I'm moving towards another full-glass sort of a day, especially if I can manage to do some work. And something happened that made me and M very happy yesterday: my stepson has found himself a room to rent in a shared house and will be moving in there next week. That sounds awful but in fact he's 21, he's been itching to get out for ages, and our lives have all been miserable living together for over a year. I am looking forward so much to the weight of resentment and lethargy lifting from the house, to feeling comfortable in our home again. We will hopefully return to the pleasant time we all had when he was at university for a year: he came home in the holidays and was pleased to see us and we all had lots to talk about... Moving out will give him and us the independence and privacy we all crave, but we'll still be here for him, helping out if needed.

Happiness today is: our children recognising that they have power to change things in their own lives and actually getting up and doing it!

I'll go with orange juice this morning as it's only 09:50! Might move to a full martini glass later...

Barometer

2009-01-12T22:06:00.005+11:00

I wanted to see if I could find a visual way to measure how happy I am on any given day, and the phrase "glass half full" occurred to me. I thought it might be fun to show how I'm feeling by displaying pictures of glasses in various states of emptiness - and no, they aren't all full of alcohol!

A full martini glass, because I'm pleased with myself for having figured out a few 'Blogger' things

I may take them out later on if I don't like them all of a sudden.

The Artistic Pursuit of Happiness

2009-01-11T17:49:00.003+11:00

What am I doing? This is a question readers of my other blogs might well ask, so I thought I'd better explain. I'm not very good at being happy, a fact that I am forcibly reminded of in the run-up to Christmas each year. As I've aged the year has assumed a series of patterns around me: first the speed-up of time as the Northern hemisphere's Spring looms, then a slowing down of time through the northern Summer, until a build-up to that teetering moment at the top of the rollercoaster at the end of September and wham! I slam into Christmas, rebound in the week between Christmas and New Year, and enter the start of the next year feeling thoroughly miserable. Interestingly moving into the Southern hemisphere a couple of years ago has done nothing to change the pattern. I guess 40 years of Winter in December/January/February and Summer being in June/July/August isn't going to change for me very quickly. I find myself wondering if it ever will change, or if it's bred into my bones.

The long and the short of it is that I suffer from depression, and have done since I was a teenager. There are lots of reasons why, and most of those reasons have taught me important things and make me the person that I am so I have no regrets, but unfortunately I also have quite a bleak outlook on life. I keep it all at bay, usually, by staying busy - very busy - too busy! - but the hiatus between Christmas and New Year always catches me out. Everything around me stops. Work stops, school's out, you're in between the highs of Christmas Day and New Year's Eve... it is at once a time of relief (possibly the only time in the year in which I don't feel guilty for not working) and despair.

What does one do? In my case, the best remedy is to start a new project, and this is it.

I've spent the last few years intermittently working through a river in my art. Well I'm sure that river will be there, every now and again, for years to come but I've been looking around for something else to focus on. My work has never been either figurative or personal, except in a very sideways sort of a way, so I find myself slightly surprised to realise that this year I'd like to try something a bit different. Last year's project was The Daily Drawing, 366 (it was a leap year!) small drawings, each 7 x 7 cms square, done on little pieces of Somerset Rough Not etching paper that I'd saved up from when I tore the paper for an edition of prints to size. The project's finished now, but it has reawakened pleasure in drawing, something I've lost sight of over many years. And I got excited by drawing people, and by how personal the project ended up being. Laying out some of the drawings on my printing bench I saw a visual diary of a year of my life. OK, many of the drawings were patterns or botanical details, but lots of them were small markers of what was going on, from M being in hospital several times, to E's school sports day, to the round-and-round-and-round frustration of a particularly BIG argument with P.

What is this project, then? Well it's all a bit woolly and may only gain clarity as I go along, but the intention is to explore the meaning and definition of happiness, hopefully in a way that is artistic as well as personal. I guess I'll be reading, writing and drawing and whatever I read, write or draw will go up on this blog. Will it help me? I don't know. I think I've spent so much time fighting misery that I'm not very good at being happy. Living has always been a struggle that has required enormous amounts of energy. I'l be 43 this year and I'm tired of fighting. My mother died aged 63 - much too young - but it's created a future milestone in my own mind as it did for her (her own mother died aged 58, and I remember the emotion with which my mother greeted her 59th birthday). If I was to have another 20 years alloted to me, what would I like to achieve in that time? Being happy would be a very good start. My mother told me all she ever wished for on New Year's Eve as the clock struck midnight was for her and those around her to be happy, because it encompassed the ideas of having health and sufficient wealth, and so I've always wished the same. I'm not sure how my mother approached the idea of being happy. My friend Helen tells me that she thinks happiness is truly 'living in this moment', with the implication, I suppose, that living NOW precludes the two possibilities so prevalent in my life of living in the past and worrying about the future.

It's clear to me that there are many different notions of what happiness is and how to attain it, so I plan to explore at least some of them, with the aim of noticeably improving 'how much' happiness I experience between now and roughly this time next year and, if possible, improving my overall capacity to be happy. I may need to revise some old and unhelpful ways of thinking, I'm sure I'll need to absorb some wisdom from others, and perhaps I'll create something new as a result. As for the rest, we'll have to wait and see...