wasps

Yesterday I had the air-conditioner serviced. A sturdy pom launched himself onto the roof to do what he had to do. No sooner was he trudging across the tiles in the blazing heat, when he shouts down to me; 'Did you know you had a wasp nest up here?' I think the Buddha said that a householders life is full of dust - well its full of a lot more than that!! It seems that no sooner is one job fixed then another rises to take it's place. I hate having to find people who can do jobs around the house as so often they try and sell you something you don't really need or want. But the airconditioning service was a good experience - the man they sent was congenial and positive he pronounced my AC system in 'good' condition and we had a little chat about the 'old country' when I gave him a refreshing lime juice cordial with mineral water. He had only been here a year to my 34 - but still I often feel like a stranger in a strange land and its comforting to have a conversation in your own language!

Re the wasps - they have to go, already they are sending scouts down to the lower regions - I found one on the bed the other day but at the time had no idea they had taken up residence in the roof. The garden is full of them too which is good for the flowers - but they'll have to find a new home. I am sending them psychic eviction notices but if they don't heed them the pest man cometh.

White Lightening

I have just finished reading the above mentioned title - another wonderful book by Justin Cartwright. White Lightening was published in 2002 and I found a well read copy of it is the local Kwinana Library.

The story, told in the first person, is about James Kronk a man in his forties who returns to South Africa, the home of his youth, to sit by the bedside of his dying mother. When I read The Promise of Happiness recently I had a sense that all the characters in the book were a part of a whole; that is in the sense that our personalities take on different shades according to what life is dishing up in the moment. In a line in that book one of his characters says that she is a different person to who she used to be. I felt that whatever a character said or whatever they did were somehow a part of the author's character. It was inspirational to read the book because it gave me an insight into writing characters - because there are fragments of my inner life that could take on a life of their own and live themselves out in a novel. But to return to White Lightening: In this book we see the world through the main characters eyes. To make it interesing the character has some crazy fault lines running through his personality and he lives with the grief of the death of his only son - who died when he was having an affair with an actress while working as a director on a porn movie! The action takes place on the coast of South Africa in between his visits to his mother's bedside. The title comes from an event in his early life when he won a running race and broke a world record for a boy under 18 years of age. It took me a while to get into the book as it jumps around a bit in time giving flash-backs to his life in films, but I knew that it would be worth the effort to stick with it. The main character finds out that he has inherited some money and decides to buy a local run-down farm. The action centres around a fantasy he has of making his life in a rural heaven. He befriends a baboon who comes with the property and takes a family of African's living in a makeshift shelter in the sand dunes under his wing. However his efforts end in failure, reflecting other failures in his life. Even so it was fun accompanying him in his ruminations about life as I recovered first from a tummy upset and secondly from a throat infection.

some books from my 2008 reading list

I am looking through the list of books that I read last year; 32 titles in all. Some I have very little recollection of except whether I enjoyed the experience of reading them or not! I read the two Australian 'must-reads' of the year - Tim Winton's Breath and The Spare Room by Helen Garner, but I was more attracted to meaty tomes from the nineteenth century. In May/June Dicken's Bleak House kept me company through many a cold night, closely followed by Middlemarch. Later in the year Vanity Fair was my companion for several weeks. My least favourite book of the year was the Booker winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright. It was particularly disappointing because I had heard the writer interviewed on the ABC radio show The Bookshow and she sounded like a real hoot. Rarely do I not finish a book but I gave up on that one as I found it dreary and didn't like any of the characters and couldn't stand the style of writing. I did however thoroughly enjoy The Forsythe Sago Vol 1 by John Galsworthy - it saw me through a period of back pain nicely! Another book I didn't finish (though almost struggled through it) was As I Lay Dying by Faulkner - his writing was lauded by one of the members on The First Tuesday Book Club so I thought I would fill that particular gap in my reading history, but definitely not to my taste.

And the cream of the crop were: Reflections on a Mountain Lake by TenzinPalmo the English Tibetan Buddhist nun who meditated for many years in a cave in the Himalayas. For anyone wanting a brilliantly written explanation of Buddhist thought and practice this is the book I would recommend most highly - and I've read a few!!

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm. In this book Janet Malcolm investigates the issue of biography and asks important questions about the practice. She does this while writing her interpretation of events in the life (and afterlife) of the poet Sylvia Plath. She asks whether biography can ever really tell the truth about a life. Unputdownable!

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright.
Justin Cartwright is one of my favourite authors and this book deserves a whole post to itself! Clever, insightful, full or wisdom, a great story, wonderfully written.

card for the day

A tightrope stretches from the beyond to the beyond. What does this mean? One ends stretches into infinity the other dissapears into nothingness. Where do they meet? And the figure on the tightrope - so balanced, so serene; neither looking too far ahead nor back to the past.

I look at this card from The Tao Oracle deck and wonder at its message for me this morning. There is a situation in my life that is reflected here. I do feel stretched between two poles. One one level I am here at home creating a life, a garden, painting pots, and the other pole is down in Albany where my two darling grandchildren live. Last night I drove back along the long Albany Highway, through the hazy heat, the washed out colours of a parched landscape, the highway itself like a tightrope over the land. So it is a delicate balancing act to stay centred. To look back can be dangerous, to look too far ahead -unbalancing.

Writing from the waiting room

The Queen of the Night enters through the screen door and comes face to face with the face of a dog. The dog slips back into the room the Queen of the Night does not forget her mission and continues to enter into our consciousness one way or another usually by the nasal passages. She slips into the passage in the middle of the face and penetrates into the brain of her subjects. There she fills them with pleasurable sensations and long lost memories and deeper feelings that they may well prefer to forget of distant continents where the rules were different and everything was much less down to earth. Yes she has otherworldly schemes and dreams. She only makes her presence felt in the night in the dark in the slippery time of day when it is hard to see the things of the day-to-day. She operates on the senses when some of them are asleep and at rest and then she brings out her jewel box of memories hidden in a fragrance so dense and intoxicating you forget that once you were human and think maybe you have died and gone to heaven. Briefly. On the hint of a waft of air nothing solid to go on just a passing wisp of air that reminds you of things long buried and juicy. You think you might put on a robe and go down into the bazaar of the night and sit around an open fire and have a glass of chai and sit on the ground sipping in the glow of the fire with travellers all around you. You might stay there for a while but then you might stay there all night with the sparks of the fire dancing into the forest of the night wrapped up in a silken shawl given to you from a fellow traveller who sold everything to stay in this wonderland. But suddenly he also was gone like so many who were there one day and then you never see them again until maybe they turn up on a ranch in Oregon five years later and hand you a photograph and you were wearing that same shawl. They remember the colour of your eyes and the shape of your belly. They remember kisses and try to retrieve them but other strangers mouths are moving over yours now so you smile instead and take the photograph anyway.

The unimaginable happens

Since I last posted the unimaginable has happened. Existence has been unbelievably kind. I have moved into my very own home! Who could have predicted this momentous event after a lifetime of renting. Not that I am a fan of the culture of 'real estate' (I always maintained that the idea of 'owning' land was ludicrous) but when I recieved an inheritance at the end of last year the only sensible thing to do (with rents soaring and availability of rentals decreasing) was to invest it in myself with providing said self and young Fred with a place to be ourselves. Oh joy is me! So for the last two months consciousness has shifted from reading writing walking and gardening to searching and finding a home. What a little gem of a house I am now living in. My finances allowed me to look at the cheapest going and I found what I was looking for in a little house at the back of the Kwinana golf course. Kwinana is an older working-class suburb that sits behind a huge swathe of industrialisation. But the suburb, established in the sixties to accomodate the workers from the industry on the coast, has streets of well established homes and gardens on tree lined streets with masses of parks and bush in between. And, bliss upon bliss it is quiet and peaceful. Our morning walks are now through real bush instead of manufactured parks and the path around the golf course is a little walk in heaven. We have come home and it feels nourishing and liberating to be able to relax into our own space. The little house itself has everything I wanted and was left neat and clean by its previous owner. Thanks to a government scheme where the state buys one third of the equity in the house the whole thing is wonderfully affordable. And now let the creativity begin!