Squatter

One of the things I miss most about the body I used to have is the ability to squat. This was brought home to me in a very practical way on a recent Easter camping trip, where we and the friends we have been doing this with for 21 years now, dig our own toilet. Squatting on same is impossible for me – painful, awkward, messy (too much information!) – I just can’t do it anymore. And unlike half the population who can wee standing up, when I’m away from a toilet, I need to squat several times a day. (I like the story about a little girl in the great outdoors watching fascinated as one of her little male friends has a pee, saying, ‘That’s a handy thing to bring on a picnic!’)

Squatting is a wonderful position for all sorts of reasons, and not just to answer the call of nature in the bush. In India, where I grew up, traditionally the squat is most people’s default position. I love the sight of old men, sitting around in a bunch, squatting and chatting, maybe smoking a beedi or sharing a hookah, maybe chewing betel nut and spitting great streams of liquid red out into the dirt from time to time. It looks so, well, utterly laid back. A common site on the streets of any Indian city is a sweeper, caressing the dirty ground with his or her twig broom, moving along without ever getting out of their squatting position

And squat toilets are great. I prefer them to the ‘Western style’ ones when I’m in India, especially if I’m on a train, because with the sit down ones, you never know what you might be sitting on. My preference was confirmed for ever the time I sat on a rickety old western style toilet in a place we were staying and looked down just in time to see a narrow head with a long and flickering tongue emerging from the water. I screamed and bolted, a thousand boarding school ghost stories about monsters coming up from the sewers running though my head. Our hosts said nonchalantly, oh yes, that would be a big kind of lizard that lives in the sewers and comes up occasionally. After that, I decided that if critters are going to be targeting my vulnerable nether regions, I need to be able to see them coming.

Squatting is a much better position for defecation anyway. And the perfect position for pushing out a baby. The peak of my career as a squatter was when I was pregnant and did daily pre-natal exercises that included several minutes of deep squats. I felt like a fertility goddess - powerful and content and grounded, squatting peacefully and flexibly with my big, strong thighs on either side of my massive, life-sheltering belly.

I miss squatting at other times too: retrieving an object from the floor, taking a photo of something low down, getting on the level of toddlers and small children to talk to them or to pat a little dog.

But squatting is simply out of the question. Since my knee injury and surgery a couple of years back, it’s impossible. The surgeon who had a good look inside my knee told me there was no cartilage left in there, really, and it was just a matter of time before I would need a knee replacement.

Given that grim prognosis, I consider myself lucky to have had two years of walking many ks a day since then with very little pain.  Isaiah 35, 3 has become one of my favourite Bible verses:  ‘Strengthen weak hands and make firm the feeble knees’. Two weeks ago I came a cropper in the street, having tripped over a cracked bit of pavement. I came down hard on my bad knee and wrist and feared the worst. Amazingly, nothing broke and after a sore couple of days, the knee seemed to be in good working order. So, I really can’t complain.

Next Easter camping trip, though, I’m carrying a folding toilet seat strapped to my backpack.

Cover me

‘Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me,’ sang Bruce Springsteen in his earthy, inimitable style. Most small babies love to be tightly swaddled. Little kids beg to be ‘tucked in’ and kissed good night. The security of adequate cover seems to me to be a basic human need.

One of the reasons I look forward to the evenings drawing in and the nights becoming chilly is the prospect of being covered by more than a mere flimsy sheet. It is so hard to sleep when the thermometer hovers in the high twenties or worse all night long and all that even my trusty fan seems to do is stir up the stuffy air. But my theory is that it’s not the temperature so much as the fact that it’s hard to sleep when you aren’t sufficiently covered.

For those of us fortunate enough to have somewhere to live and decent bedding, one of the best feelings in life is getting horizontal at the end of a long day and pulling up the doona.

It’s not just at night either. Some of the most delicious moments in my life come at the weekend, when I nap in the afternoon: snuggling into bed, pulling a rug up to my shoulders, shutting the world out, knowing that it will keep turning quite happily without me for an hour or two.

These are some of the moments when I most keenly experience grace: when I realise that nothing depends entirely on me. The times when sleep eludes me are the times I have an exaggerated sense of my own importance in the scheme of things, and fret into the small hours about what I’ve done wrong or failed to do right.

Meditators often do their thing wrapped in a shawl. At a practical level, this is because you can get cold, sitting so still for so long. To me, it is also a physical reminder of God’s love. You sit down, you wrap your shawl around you, shutting out external distractions, and you seek to go deep inside and meet with God, wrapped in God’s love.

All day, most days, I am a grown up – working hard, making decisions that are sometimes complicated and taxing, thinking thinking thinking, negotiating, not forgetting, trying my best to be smart and competent and kind. At the end of these days, when I pull my blankets up to my chin, I am a child again, tucked in by parent God. The moment when I pull that warm symbol of love around me is the moment when I try to shed my worries and remind myself that the only thing I need to hold on to is that God loves me.

Sleep is a rehearsal for death, and in the moment of death, all I will need to know is that I am eternally covered by God’s unstinting love.

Published in the May issue of The Melbourne Anglican

Losing our oldies

They’ve gone. Robin and Anne, my dad and step-mum, who’ve been at our place for most of six weeks, have flown home to Edinburgh and I feel like an empty nester all over again. Since last November, when our son and fiancée moved back in with us we have had a full house once more, with three generations in residence much of the time.

Living like this can have its moments, but for me it has been overwhelmingly good. I’m grateful our kids have had the experience of living close to their grandparents – dropping in for cuppas and meals, throwing parties for them, having them to eat and stay over at their houses and apartments.

I have washed, dried and packed away the sheets and towels and the house feels empty and still. There hasn’t been a lot of time for writing or for time a deux with my husband these last few months, and I look forward to getting both those back. But I miss Dad and Anne! I miss having resident oldies. Living cheek by jowl with them has reminded what remarkable people they are, and inspired me with a vision of what old age can be like.

Sure, they are fortunate enough to be in reasonable health with faculties well and truly intact. Both, however, have had serious health issues a-plenty over the years. Dad, a scholar, lecturer and preacher, is half blind and more than half deaf. Still, he goes on doing what he loves to do, using hearing aids, a monocular, a magnifying glass and beefed up font on his laptop. Anne, who drove an ambulance in the war, climbed Kilimanjaro with a group of blokes as a young woman and has lived all over the world, has dodgy hips now and walking can be difficult.

Despite these limitations, they seem to possess an endless and genuine cheerfulness, as opposed to a fake cheeriness. They laugh off their aches and pains and seem to be, well, grateful is one of the words I most associate with them. When they talk about the past, they are not full of bitterness and regrets but rather of gratitude for their long lives and the continuing richness of their days.

Their interest in other people is part of what keeps them young. When they are with others, especially our kids, they focus intently on them, asking them leading questions, recalling previous conversations, sharing their own stories, encouraging them in their passions. They’ve coped gamely with most of their grandchildren living together without benefit of matrimony, welcoming the boyfriends and girlfriends into their orbit of attentive care.

Their plane leaves at 2am, so we have the whole of their last day to sit around getting nervous and emotional. As it happens, we are understated to the end. We have had a brilliant time with them, done all they wanted to, and everything has been said. They pack, and re-pack, and go for a walk. We have something to eat. We watch a ridiculous Miss Marple mystery on the ABC, killing time, and then they are gone.

I wish they lived around the corner and we could see them every couple of days. But at almost 90, every time we see then is a bonus, and we have had a lifetime of practice at saying goodbye.  Every time they stay with us, and spend time getting closer to our kids in their worlds, it lays down memories and layers of love that we will draw upon after we are separated by death. Their faith in some sort of afterlife is catching, as is their matter of factness about separation and life and whatever unfathomable mystery comes after.

As people get older, they seem to either calcify – hardening in their opinions and their emotions, or they are open to change and challenge and their hearts get bigger as they age. I wander round my newly empty house, missing them and hoping to be more like them: adventurous, open, big-hearted and grateful.

 

 

Recycled CBM: Ode to autumn

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 first published in The Melbourne Age at the end of March 2001. Autumn is still my favourite season.

Back in The Age with a faith piece - What would Jesus do about refugees?

WWJD  - ‘What would Jesus do?’ - was a motto that did the rounds among evangelical Christians in the 1990s. They wore wristbands emblazoned with these letters, using them as a guide to making every day ethical decisions.

A Christian myself, I regularly ponder what Jesus would do. There are, of course, numerous situations for which this question provides no guidance whatsoever: IVF or the use of nuclear power for example. You have to do a fair bit of serious, contextual Bible study to glean guidance for many of our contemporary ethical conundrums – something fundamentalists of any religion are not known for.

There is, however, one burning current issue to which I am convinced the answer to ‘What would Jesus do?’ is abundantly clear; the question of how we treat refugees fleeing persecution and heading to our privileged shores.

I’m not about to list the ways we can do this more effectively and compassionately without opening the floodgates to millions of people. Others far more qualified than I am have been doing that eloquently in these pages for weeks. I simply want to point out a few of the events in Jesus life that give a pretty reliable indication of what his attitude to the ‘boat people’ might be.

Jesus was consistently attentive to the poor, the powerless and the outcast. He shocked and disgusted the religious and political leaders of his day by hanging out with women, lepers, prostitutes, the mentally ill and beggars. Race was no barrier to his exercise of friendship and healing.

Jesus’ anger, the Gospels reveal, was reserved for those with power, money, and privilege who used it to exploit those who had none. The corrupt moneylenders in the temple had their tables upended by a wrathful Jesus. He called the religious heavies snakes and vipers when they were hypocritical and when they tried to exclude ordinary people from access to God. 

The God of the Hebrew Scriptures was the same – consistently portrayed as being on the side of the poor. Read the book of Amos if you want to get a taste of this God.

Furthermore, Jesus was himself a refugee as a baby, fleeing from King Herod who was trying to kill him. Jesus welcomed outsiders. He was radically inclusive. His early followers shared their possessions and were urged to give to those in need.

No matter how much our Prime Minister claims to follow this Jesus, I am convinced their policies on the treatment and processing of asylum seekers could not be more different.

Palm Sunday commemorates the date Jesus peacefully rode a donkey into the midst of those plotting his murder. This year, Palm Sunday falls on April 13, when, along with many Christians and other concerned people, I will be walking in Melbourne for justice for refugees, starting at the State Library at 2pm.