Tag: Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi

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Two seasons ago before the chill of winter set in, I wrote the following

Gaslighting…’a systematic process that works to make us feel defective in some way, for the beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and appetites to which we are readily entitled. We are made to feel guilty, sinful, irrational, oversensitive or paranoid, as well as sometimes downright crazy for having these mental states.’ Leigh Gilmore. The #MeToo Effect.

When you live your life under the weight of such belittlements, as did my mother, you begin to believe the person putting you down. You think you’re stupid, ugly, inferior in some way and it’s hard to rise above the insults to lay claim to your actual identity as a decent human being. Especially when you’re a woman. Especially a woman of colour, especially when you don’t fit some perfect ideal of beauty or take on the roles loaded onto you.

These are my pressure points, the place in my body where I am likely to feel the greatest pain.

I walked into my kitchen just now where my daughter sat with her boyfriend planning their day ahead.

‘Can you please give me a writing prompt,’ I asked. ‘I need inspiration.’ 

‘Look in the newspaper,’ my daughter said. 

The newspaper was spread on the bench, and I flicked over its pages to read that a female body was found in a wheelie bin in Point Cook, and elsewhere in Lower Plenty, police shot dead a 26-year-old woman whom they feared was about to set her mother on fire. 

The neighbours called and the police encountered an ‘alarming scene’ of this daughter attacking her mother with a knife. She stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and torso refusing to drop the knife when the police ordered her to stop. They then shot her as police do when someone’s life is at risk. 

The mother died; the daughter died. The family was known to police, and an offender in the family was in custody but they did not realise the extent of animosity between mother and daughter, though they knew there were troubled, or some such.

All this I read in the minutes I spent standing at the bench remonstrating with the horrors of life on this day the second day in Melborne with temperatures rising to the mid-thirties and beyond with another on ahead tomorrow.

‘The world is rancid ATM,’ my daughter said, using the shorthand of her youth. She complains about the weather, not simply because it’s hot but because of her concerns over climate change. And hidden in there is a hint I won’t be around to suffer the full effects, but she and her generation will.

My daughter often complains of us boomers. The way we took our privilege for granted and exploited the land in our time for generations to come.

She doesn’t hold us entirely responsible. She knows her history but certainly we did not help.

We, in our ignorance and greed. 

I remember the so-called Halcyon eighties when many people thought they could get rich quick with property deals. Many did, but at whose expense?

All very well to look back on the past and lament the mistakes we made.

We must learn from them now.

The slipperiness of blame and the way it attaches itself to shame. A way of escaping whatever shame might attach to our misdeeds or vulnerability when we cannot bear to know we are flawed.

Hold your breath.

At night when I cannot sleep I follow a technique someone told me can be helpful in settling your brain. Stopping those thoughts that interrupt the gentle slide into unconsciousness that comes with sleep. 

I breathe in for four, hold for seven and breathe out for eight. The in-breath is easy, almost desperate, gasping for air, and the holding on for seven is not so bad. I could breathe in longer and hold it longer. The hard part is the outbreath. How long it seems to take. I have almost no breath left over the last four seconds of the eight. I try it now. 

It has a strange effect. Unlike the quiet automatic breathing I use most of the time, this enforced regime has the benefit of increasing my awareness of my body. My head especially. It gets tight. It feels as though it might explode. It longs for rest, which might well be the point of the exercise to force my mind out of its busyness into a state of calm such I cannot stay awake. 


…I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep…

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi

Yoghurt and blogging are good for you

Nancy Devine has honoured me with a stylish blogger award, for which I am grateful.

Here follows my acceptance speech, which at Nancy’s request includes seven things you might not yet know about me:

1. I would spend all day blogging if I could and then feel terribly guilty for it. To me it would be like spending all day long in a coffee shop chatting with like minded friends about things that are of interest to us all. The occasional tense moment might arise, but most of the time we would travel into new areas of thought and occasionally retreat back into safe and familiar territory, always with the knowledge that there is so much more to learn out there.

2. The only way I can justify the hours each week I spend on blogging is to convince myself I do it for the writing practice. This then is an insult to my blogger friends, as if I do not appreciate our time together. Nothing could be further from the truth.

3. When I was little I wanted to have nine children just like my mother and at the same time, despite my reservations about the man who was my father, even then, I imagined I wanted to marry a man just like my father: a tall Dutchman with blue eyes and blond hair and a deep gravelly voice.

4. I have achieved none of these things. My husband is neither tall nor blond. He is fifth generation Australian and descended from convict stock and my children number four.

5. Over the past several months, in fact since I broke my leg last September, I have undertaken to eat a tub of yoghurt a day. I understand yoghurt is good for you in many ways and I now have the fantasy that it might help my bones.

6. One of my great pleasures is to escape into BBC period pieces, the Jane Austen variety. Their worlds seem so much slower than ours, so much more predictable, but I despise the class divisions and the gender divide in those days appalls me. I would not want to live in such an era. So why escape into it? I keep asking myself this question.

7. Despite my best efforts to be generous to others, I fear I have a jealous disposition. I am inclined to resent those who do better than me, particularly when it comes to writing. I suffer such pangs often within the blogosphere where there are so many wonderful writers.

I think it comes as a function of being sixth in line in a family of nine and always looking up to my smart brothers and sisters ahead of me. I could never imagine that I might be as smart as them. No amount of education, psychoanalysis or life experience seems to shake that view completely. I admire intellects that are accessible on the one hand and on the other I wish they were mine.

As for the bloggers to whom I would like to offer this stylish blogger award there are too many to list. Also, I’m aware that many who receive such awards find them onerous.

So I offer this reward as a mark of respect, not as a requirement that you follow through on any of the tasks assigned, the stuff about linking back to the award giver and listing seven things about yourself and passing the award onto five other bloggers.

All these things to me should be voluntary and no one should feel pressure to oblige. Nor should any of my blogger friends feel aggrieved to not be included here. I’d list you all if I could.

That said, I’d like to make the first two awards to Rumi and Rilke who cannot speak for themselves but can only respond via Ruth at Synch-ron-izing and Lorenzo at The Alchemist’s Pillow.

Thereafter I’d like to mention Christina Houen’s relatively new blog. Christina is a wonderful writer who presents views of life in Australia that to me represent something of the essence of being here in this country.

I suspect he would not want an award for all the usual requirements but I cannot go without mentioning the remarkable, Jim Murdoch of The Truth about Lies. His blog is a font of information for all people who read and write. His blog tends to be a series of reviews on a vast array of books.

Jim is a poet who writes beautifully about other people’s writing and occasionally talks about his own writing process.

And finally, though there are so many more I could list here, so many wonderful bloggers whom I have met over the past few years since I took up blogging more seriously, I’d like to mention both Blackland’s Angela Simeone, a young artist whose work, both in her art and her writing is haunting and powerful.

And secondly Lynn Behrendt who strikes me as a brilliant poet and a modest artist whose wonderful work deserves the highest praise and recognition.

Visit these people and you will come to find our more of what I blog for: intelligence, aesthetics, deep sensitivity and a light touch of humour.

These bloggers are all artists and wordsmiths in their own right, and I value the fresh insights they offer on life’s journey.

Finally, and I should not for I have already exceeded my quota, I mention Kass of The K…. is no longer silent, another poet and a wise and generous woman that many of you will already know.

I must stop now because a flood of associations leads me on to other names and other folks. I have met so many wonderful bloggers through my travels. How rich and wonderful is the blogosphere.

Thanks Nancy for prompting these thoughts and enabling me to introduce and boast about some of my blogger friends.