On Writing (part 3) Write for the cool clear days of winter. Every day a crisp clear reminder of this year that has been. Brilliant blue skies and bold colours, washed down from the heavens with the brisk pull of rain. Illuminating morning beams thrown light across the back yard, every blade of grass a reservoir for a floating water droplet that kaleidoscopes across a microcosm of hidden worlds beyond the human gaze. We stamp our feet for warmth, tuck frozen fingers in to armpits, blow clouds of warmth out in to the cool. I turn my car heater to its highest setting, spend the first few moments in aching agony as it starts blasting colder air across the car and then slowly streams into warmth. I pump the space heater at my feet while I write in the shed, cocooned in scarf and beanie, slowly leaking warmth and words on to the page. Every activity is accompanied by a cup of boiling water, carried around the house, carried across the backyard, carried in to the shed, clasped in one cold hand while I write with the other, then hands clasped together to pass the warmth between them. Every conversation punctuated by the same refrain it’s a bit cold, the same knowing response just another couple months, the same shared experience of a cold that isn’t much on the mercury scale but seems to hit much harder than many other places on this planet. I’ve wintered in Canada, Scotland, Iceland, and each of these places holds a much stronger grasp to the miserable title of winter, but somehow Melbourne’s winter still hits me the worst. Continue reading “On Writing (part 3)”
On Writing *I preface this week’s thoughts with a little note: in the month of November I’ve been undertaking a daily writing activity. This task was originally conceived as a novel, but somewhere along the path it morphed into a long-form deep-dive in to the act of writing. I’ve challenged myself with writing 1600 words a day… on writing. So far I’m almost 35,000 words in to it and still coming out with new thoughts, so there’s something to it. I’m not entirely sure if the whole thing will be published. Does the world want to read my 50,000 word musings on writing…? Maybe…? Probably not…? Any way, if you get any joy out of reading this, I would encourage you to sign up to my very sporadic email list and I guess I’ll figure out the next steps later! Write for clarity. Write for calm. Today I’ll write for peace and stillness, dropping words one by one to the page. Like a meditative stone skipping exercise, spinning ripples out across the lake, today I’ll try to write word by word, examining each word as I pull it from my mind. Twist them, turn them, flip them over, this word smooth and this word odd and these words excitingly prolonged, stretching out this human meaning with an expansive lexicon borrowed from this human internet. This human takes his words and puts them one after another. Some words fit and flow, speed out across the page, leave ripples in their way. Some stutter, drop below the surface on their first outing, lose meaning, lose shape, lose hope in their utterance. Continue reading “On Writing”
On Waste (part 3) If there’s one positive to 2020 and this year that keeps trickling past, Earth Overshoot Day has shuffled back by a month (for a quick overview, have a squizz here, but the basic gist is every year humanity uses up all the stuff we can reasonably sustain for the year, and pretty much every year its getting earlier and earlier). This year was August 22, last year was July 29. This is good. It’s a positive trend. But the fact that it took a global pandemic and the complete shutdown of most of the world’s economy for a brief period of time to accomplish it is pretty worrying. There’s a set of absurdities that co-exist around this space. Amidst the ongoing famine that keeps occurring and reoccurring in various parts of the world there is a constant flow of excess food into landfill in others. Obviously the solution isn’t as simple as just shipping excess potatoes from the US to Sub-Saharan Africa, and there are many more brilliant minds on the case than mine but I thought it would be interesting to examine the issues from a folk singer’s point of view. Continue reading “On Waste (part 3)”
On Waste (part 2) *Quick note: the pic above is from Glasgow, circa September 2014. How time flies! This was just after I’d bought that hat. I’ve worn that hat most days since. Great investment. OK, on with the show… … A kid at school questions why I’m constantly bringing half a banana in as my snack. I tell him this story: Imagine you had a beautiful chocolate cake. You spent ages mixing it, filling it with chocolate chips, baking it and it looks absolutely incredible. Well in the process of moving it from the oven to the bench you drop it, and it lands neatly on its side on the floor. What do you do? Do you throw the whole thing in the bin? Or do you cut it in half and discard the floor side, keeping the delicious non-floor side for your tummy? How close to the floor-side do you cut it? Are you happy to have a 95% non-floor cake? I think we can all agree that taking a kitchen sponge to the floor side of your cake to scrub off the little bits of ick is a step too far (or is it…?) So most people would happily eat most of the cake, as long as it hasn’t been in direct contact with the floor. Well at home I have a big bunch of bananas. The only problem is one end of each banana has started molding, just ever so slightly. Resourceful me cuts all the bananas in half, throws the moldy bits into the compost and brings the other halves to school for my lunch. Delicious. A seven year old’s perspective… that makes sense. Continue reading “On Waste (part 2)”
On Waste I’ve been dwelling on waste since around the time I was born. Not in an academic way, merely as a reflection on the steps my parents took to minimize our impact on the earth. There were many things we did when I was kid that I took as commonplace, that now resurface as perhaps being a little odd, but the acorn seldom falls far from the tree. In my ongoing desire to understand who I am, I start to note the things I do that others could possibly point to as eccentricities. My foibles becomes follies, exaggerating as I age. There were the ‘standard things’, character traits that probably point to Dad’s working-class upbringing: keeping a toothpaste tube far beyond the point where you could squeeze any toothpaste from it, then chopping the end off with a pair of scissors to gouge at the creamy inside. Tie this in to the two or three jars of Vegemite left in the cupboard, each with the tiniest scraping of Vegemite down the sides. The rest of the family would feast on the shiny new jar of Vegemite while Dad would keep eking out meal after meal from the previous jar. Continue reading “On Waste”
On Mum If I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Dad, I need to dedicate equal thought to Mum and the impact she’s had on my life. There is no Dad without Mum. There is no me without Dad and Mum. This is the yin and yang, the cosmic duality that created me and I can’t fathom seeing either of them without the other. Continue reading “On Mum”
On Dad Last week was Dad’s birthday. It neatly lines up with Father’s Day (Australian) every year, landing in the same week. I feel like my Dad has always been the same age. Always slightly bald, tufts of white hair and a white beard, a little Bernie Sanders-esque. Always present, the person in the other room tapping away at his laptop, piles of papers strewn across the desk. He’s been the constant presence in my life since birth. Crazy to imagine it. The three people who have been with me the longest still exist, still maintain spaces in this physical world. We swell from a cell into a conglomerate of matter, sucking parts of the universe into our own being for such an insignificant amount of time, days or months or years and then the time ends and we slowly expel all of these atoms back out into the universe. Continue reading “On Dad”