A reflection, on the eve of my 56th birthday

It’s only when you stop worrying so much about what other people think, that you finally start doing your best work. I read this somewhere and wonder if I am getting to this point.

I will always worry what others think of me and yearn, as a writer, for more publication. But it matters less than it used to.

I am at a stage in life where things are starting to fall into place. I am such a slow learner that it has taken me five and a half decades to discover things I suspect my kids already know. That I am loved, for example. That, despite all the stuff ups and one step forward, two steps back that will continue all my life, I am a worthwhile person. That I can relax. That I am already doing what I am meant to be doing.

I suspect that learning these life lessons – that we are loved, that we are worthwhile, that all the gifts and graces we need to do whatever it is we are supposed to be doing are already there inside us – takes many people many years. There are some who seem at home in themselves and in the world at a remarkably young age, but for most of us, stumbling along and doing the best we can, there are no short cuts; some things only come with age.

And practice. Another thing I read somewhere is that a writer has to produce a million words before they really hit their straps. I did a rough calculation on the back of an envelope this morning – 20 years of writing around 1500 words a week would give me a million and a half. Certainly, I have become aware recently of a new playfulness in my writing, of less earnestness, less trying to write something perfect first time.

It’s the same with other major things in my life. In my job, where I have now been for so long that I am almost due long service leave (who would have thought?!)I am finally feeling confident, trusting myself to do things right and not beating myself up when I forget stuff.

Family. It’s partly that I have more time and energy now that I don’t have four little kids to tend, but even with the dramas that inevitably occur in a group of six, plus partners, I have relaxed into the relationships, calm in the knowledge that there is enough goodwill in the bank, indeed a vast reservoir of love that will carry us through tension or conflict. With my ‘significant other’, I have finally started to believe that he is happy to be with me in all the precious mundanity that makes up the bulk of most lives.

This comes from years of working alongside people – both physically and emotionally. Years of sleeping side by side and holding the kids, being at the end of a phone when they need to talk, being bored together and vacuuming and cooking interminably and going to work when you don’t always feel like it. Keeping healthy and filling out paperwork and traipsing to the supermarket when you can hardly bear the thought of having to think of something to cook, nurturing friendships and caring for parents getting older, walking the dog and cleaning the toilet.

It all sounds so unglamorous. And of course there is a wealth of glamour moments in life – magic holidays, intense romance and dinners to die for. Sunsets you really notice, occasions when the whole family is together and laughing and tender, good deaths, and times in church when the numinous feels powerfully present.

But as I turn 56 – heading inexorably for sixty and, sooner or later, death – when I am looking back over life, what makes me most grateful is the steady joy of daily life that I have arrived at through the ordinary days and ordinary tasks, mounting up to fill this ocean of contentment, which seems a pretty dull word but for me means a deep, vibrant, purring thing.

I really want to keep living – to capitalize on this mid life contentment, this feeling of being at home in my own skin, in the heart of my family, in my husband’s arms, in the stillness of communion with the divine, belting out another few hundred words on my laptop. But if I have to die tomorrow, I am grateful to have experienced this sense of being at home in the world.

Secondhand and solid*

We spend my husband’s 58^th birthday on our oldest and her partner’s property, doing what we can to help them as they build the shed that will be their home for a few years while they save enough to start work on their house.

They do things the old-fashioned way: with lots of hard yakka. Anything that they can get second-hand, they do. The outside walls of the shed are built of corrugated iron, but it’s recycled corry that is every colour of the rainbow. (A few years ago, a photographer Sharon Jones had an exhibition that consisted solely of photos of ageing ripple iron. It was a revelation. So much of it was barely recongisable and looked more like lichen or the bark of gum trees.)

Every window in their shed has been rescued from salvage yards. The main posts supporting the deep front verandah are not pre-loved, but they were self-milled from the bush.

It’s a labour-intensive way to build, and one of the reasons for doing it is economic – they can’t afford to buy new material or to pay tradies to do all but the most complicated work, like installing the electricals. But even if they had all the money in the world, my guess is they would still be doing things this way – slowly acquiring materials on e-bay, working over weekends and holidays to create what will be their home.

It’s not for everybody, and I’m glad it’s not me. I don’t have the patience, or the physical strength and skills. But it does take me back to renovating our own house, 15 years ago. Completely different ours: an old weatherboard in the burbs, but like them, we did everything we could ourselves. It was so hard, it took so long, but once it was done, we had a sense of kinship to the place I suspect would have been missing if we had simply paid money to get it done.

At some point in our lives, we all need to see a job happening from the ground up, because it makes us more attentive, aware, grateful and glad. Once you’ve seen the unbelievable amount of work that goes into building a house, you will never be thoughtless about shelter again. Okay, so professionals might have built your home, but you will know a little of what goes into the erection of every beam, the sanding of every floor, the smoothing down of every join in the plasterboard, the exactitude required to make a frame for every window. You won’t forget that every tap we turn on, unthinking, requires piping and installing; every switch we blithely flick has wires running secretly through the frames behind the plaster and the paint.

Kids who think milk comes out of cartons and meat out of plastic packets are the most extreme example of the phenomenon – in previous ages only experienced by the very rich – that means modern city dwellers can be so removed from reality they have no idea where things come from or what goes into the making of everything from a litre of milk to a jumper to a cake to a shed.

I sit in the sun, bending the edge of a piece of corrugated iron over with pliers, so that it can be the right angle to be nailed on the edge of the roof. It takes a long time. Tess and Will’s dads are jackhammering a trench to pour the concrete footings for a stand where their main water tank will sit. Will is nailing corry on the wall of the shed. Tess is washing the concrete floor so we can put another coat of sealant on. By evening we will all be weary and in need of both a good feed and a good wash under the shower tree near their camp.

As I say, I couldn’t do this week after week, not any more, maybe not ever. But at day’s end, Al and I have the satisfaction, rare for pen pushers, of seeing a physical result for our work. And I’ve been reminded how much work goes into anything worthwhile. Anything that lasts.

* Thank you to Ian Stapleton for this title, which is the title of one of his books, 'Secondhand and solid'.

Autumn - a piece from long ago

There’s a time, around now, when we stop shutting the warmth out, and start letting it in.

All summer I am fanatical about shutting up the house. Our house is weatherboard, and the inside temperature only stays bearable if you shut it religiously every morning and open it at night. So one of the most important chores is to close windows and pull blinds down early, and then the reverse at the end of the day.

There is a day, though, around the end of March, when I am shutting and pulling as I’ve been doing for months and stop, mid-action. I leave the blind where it was. I re-open the window. I let the sunshine come flooding back in. It’s that time. Autumn is here.

People have different theories about when the season turns. Firm theories, passionately held. Like those who swear by anything you care to name that your tomatoes must be planted on Melbourne Cup Day, or they will do no good in the summer to come.

Others reckon that Anzac Day marks the turning of the seasons. After April 25^th, you start to batten down the hatches and prepare for winter to come howling in. My birthday comes when we’re putting our watches back, and it’s often hot, so I know that there are still little tail ends of summer well into March. But by mid April, most years, there’s a perceptible shift in the air, and our mood shifts with it.

Maybe it’s the end of daylight saving that heralds the cooler weather, and makes our thoughts turn to fires and jackets, thick soups and warm drinks. I’ve always been confused about time changes. The only way I can remember which way to alter my watch is by thinking that the compensation we get for the coming of winter is an extra hour of sleep.

But I don’t really feel that compensation is necessary, because I love winter. I love summer too, but one of the best things about living in Melbourne is the changeable weather. I like hot Christmases, bitter Julys, jaunty spring, autumn with its bracing mornings and clear days. I couldn’t bear to live somewhere that was warm all the time.

I love the unpredictability of Melbourne’s weather, the four seasons in one day, the dramatic cool changes. I love the way you never know what the day will bring, or if what you put on in the morning will be completely inappropriate by afternoon.

People say ‘talking about the weather’ disparagingly, but I like to talk about it. I grew up in a country where the climate was exactly the same for four months in a row, so Melbourne’s weather is endlessly fascinating.

If I had to choose a favourite season, though, it would be autumn. I’ve lived in the north-east and the south-west of this state, and it was my favourite season in those places too. In alpine Mount Beauty the autumn air was so crisp and pure it practically seared your lungs, you could take great gulps of it and feel it doing you good. The skies were clean and the mountains stood up against them with almost unbearable clarity and beauty. In coastal Portland, autumn was the least windy season. There was a lovely lull, a serene time of windless sunshine, while we drank in the last of the warmth and prepared for the wild gales of winter.

I think part of the attraction of autumn is that it’s a season of melancholy. The poets celebrated this: the feeling that inevitably seems to come with this time of year of things passing, of death and decline and decay and the fact that we are all, inexorably, growing older. I get weepy in autumn for no apparent reason.

I suspect this melancholy is particularly poignant in Australia, where summer memories, especially of the beach and the long-ago Christmas holidays of childhood are positively drenched in nostalgia. We recall the hot days by the sea, the crowds, the ice creams, the children’s voices, and then we walk along by the water in early autumn, and the beach is empty and the crowds and the laughter are gone, and we feel strongly the passing of youth, beauty, life itself.

And autumn can be so piercingly beautiful: cold moonshiny nights when at last you can put away the fan and snuggle under a doona. Cool mornings blossoming into sun drenched days with just the tiniest hint of chill. I sit in my garden at the beginning of autumn and wonder if it’ll be the last time that I can sit out there without a jacket. I drink it in, stocking up the light and warmth against the short winter days ahead.

This piece was published in The Melbourne Age on 22 March 2001.

My latest in The Melbourne Anglican

If I were a New Year resolution making person, which I’m not, my humble, manageable resolve in 2015 would be to learn my favourite Psalm – number 139 – by heart.

It’s not a very original choice – lots of faithful people love this psalm with its sublime lines such as:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there…

Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

…Even the darkness is not dark to you; (a line I clung to through times of depression); and

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Descended from generations of Presbyterians, I have a natural affinity for the psalms, which were the only songs that some of the stricter brands of Presies were allowed to sing in worship back in the day. I’ve also spent time in Benedictine monasteries, where the monks recite their way through the entire book of Psalms each month.

The thing I love most about the psalms is their brutal, sometimes ugly honesty. My favourite bit of Psalm 139 is the lines that are omitted in the common lectionary and left out by most people reading it aloud in church, verses 19-22. Get a load of this venom:

O that you would kill the wicked, O God, that the bloodthirsty [nice irony there] would depart from me…Do I not hate those who hate you O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

With even deeper irony, the writer ends the psalm, immediately after these vicious lines, with the request: See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Trust me, this is by no means the most bloodthirsty of the psalms. There’s the one (Psalm 137) that talks about bashing babies heads against the rocks, for instance. The thing I treasure about these ancient, confronting, heart-rending prayers, however, is that they hide nothing from God. The writer’s words to God travel from praise, rapture and wonder to hatred and fury and back again.

As a young woman growing up in the sixties and seventies, the unspoken rule was that anger was not permitted. Neither was sadness. Nice Christian girls pretended they were happy and they certainly didn’t get mad. We now know the crippling psychological cost of this.

My encounter with the psalms as a young and not so young Christian woman taught me that I could be honest with God when I was seething with rage or numb with despair just as much as when I felt joyful and loving. It taught me what the ancient Hebrews appear to have known instinctively – that no emotion I can dredge up will discombobulate God. God wants me to be real, rather than nice. Doesn’t matter what I direct God’s way, God can take it.

Nut job

Nuts and dairy are my weakness. When I recently took on a fairly extreme detox diet for a few weeks, I felt fantastic, but the two things I missed desperately were dairy and nuts. Milk in my tea, yoghurt for breaky, cheese for treats (the soft ooze of blue castello at room temperature) and, as my only snack, nuts.

I’m keen on any and all varieties. I love the weird chalky texture of macadamias, with the creamy sweetness that shows they are really fresh; the meatiness of walnuts; the exotic taste of pecans; and the feeling you have after eating a handful of cashews that you’ve had a dessert.

My top fave, however, is the humble peanut, or groundnut as it is sometimes called in the Subcontinent. I love them every way – raw or roasted, salted or plain, in or out of their shells. I buy them in bulk: at work I have a big square glass jar that holds a kilo, which is the quantity I buy, raw, from the Indian groceries shop just round the corner from my office. At home, I purchase beer nuts by the two-kilo lot from the wholesaler where we get all our non-perishables. Six bucks a kilo – best value you’ll find anywhere.

The most common nut in the world is technically a legume, and humans have cultivated it for about seven and a half thousand years. Most of the world’s peanuts are grown in China, but a decent percentage are also grown in India, which is where my love affair with peanuts started as a tiny kid.

On my first trip back there after 19 years, in 2003, the first thing I did when I got up after flying in late the previous night, was to walk to a street stall and buy peanuts – poured into a cone of newspaper twisted into shape by the stall owner, exactly as they were in the sixties. Nuts and pulses of various descriptions were piled onto a hand card – a flat wooden platform at about waist level, on top of four bicycle wheels; the seller could trundle his mobile shop to wherever the crowds were.

During our long Christmas holidays, Mum used to take my sister and me to the local swimming pool – the only one in the major city of Ahmedabad (pop around three million back then, way more now). It was a ripper – Olympic size, clean and glistening. The life-saver was a lady clad in a sari, sitting cross-legged in a chair beside the water. Not that she had much to do on her watch – the three of us were the only people there. The genders were strictly segregated; in the men’s times the pool was seething with patrons, but we had the entire place to ourselves.

As we frolicked in the shallow end and did our laps, we were watched in fascintion by dozens of Muslim women in their burquas, fingers hooked through the cyclone wire fence around the pool. Our bathers were modest in the extreme, but in Ahmedabad, where there were hardly any foreigners, the three of us attracted attention walking down the street in Indian attire.

After we’d swum, the ritual was to buy a cone of peanuts at the handcart outside the pool – total cost twenty-five paisa (around ½ a cent in today’s money). We called these our ‘shivery bites’ – my Irish father’s name for something you ate to warm you up after a swim.

Another vivid peanut memory is of sitting in a stationery bus with dad, eating, you guessed it, peanuts, our cupped hands full of them, munching contentedly while we waited to get going again. Suddenly, over dad’s shoulder came a simian arm and hand – a monkey who had entered the bus, perched on the back of our seat was helping itself to its favourite food.

I do flirt with the more glamorous members of the nut family from time to time, but I keep coming back to old faithful. I suspect that eating too many peanuts isn’t good for me. I am happy to give up most things in the pursuit of health, but not peanuts. Like milky tea, the humble groundnut is, for me, non-negotiable.