Category: Writing

A snippet from a post I read on Facebook:

“In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars.

At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow.

For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest sickness of all.”

A comment on the thread of the shared post:

I wonder if some of us, maybe most of us, are too far gone to be able to connect to nature again. Short of going out into the wilderness alone and completely unplugged, how, how, HOW do we come back to that state of being?

A comment that hung on to me, and so today, I write.

A Western World Dwellers Prescription For Listening To Stars

1.

A cup of True enough, with large spoonful of Belief

I was staying in a hotel in Portland when I picked up a copy of Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke The Plant. My room overlooked a carpark that was ringed by a number of shops, one of which included a huge Barnes and Noble bookstore that became my hiding place and respite from the busy-ness of the outside. I’d heard mention of this book before, so I added it to my pile of purchases- which were many- and made my way back to the hotel.

I remember the exact place I was when I read this. It was one of those moments that shifts your perspective on its axis. Monica talked about how our current scientific understandings of sentience and intelligence are based around the necessary presence of a brain and a nervous system. Her studies with plants suggested that they too live and operate with profound intelligence, even though the mechanisms at play are fundamentally different to how humans and animals operate.

Her findings were controversial and not necessarily well received in scientific circles. Accepting them, naturally, involved a paradigm shift; a reconfiguration of thinking requiring us to acknowledge the intelligence of organisms outside the brain and nervous system model.

In other words, a letting go of what we know to be true and a making space for the possibility that a whole other world exists that is foreign to the metrics of what is currently measured, understood, and controlled.

For Monica’s scientific colleagues, one of the most confronting things about her studies was how she conducted her research. Instead of setting out with an idea that she would then seek to prove, she simply observed. In essence, her experiments were a series of open ended questions and she allowed what wanted to be shown to find her, without any sense of certainty or attachment to what, if anything, would present.

She knew that something was happening. She just didn’t know exactly what.

What Monica dedicated herself to was not to hearing, but to listening.

And in the process, her whole world opened up.

***

What moved me so much about reading this book was not so much the information. Instead, it was confirmation of something we innately know to be true, even if the rational and sensible world is yet to validate our intuitive knowing with the data.

Of course this non-human, vegetal and arboreal world is intelligent.

Of course it is.

Of course, even the non-human world of the animal is more intelligent than we give it credit for. There are naturally other mechanisms of knowing that exist.

Of course, of course, of course.

So what’s my point? How does this relate to your desire- our desire- to listen to the stars?

I wonder, Dear Person That Also Wonders, if the problem lies in being someone who seeks to hear, rather than someone who seeks to listen?

I wonder, if you became someone who listens to stars, rather than someone who hears the stars, what difference that would make?

To listen is a generative act. It exists separate to the certainty of hearing.

If we dedicate ourselves to the process of listening, then are we not, by default saying to ourselves:

I believe there’s something to be heard.

And beyond that, maybe it’s the practice of star listening itself, the process of star listening, that holds the benefit, rather than the need to hear the result?

I wonder, what if stars weren’t listenable? But we believed them to be?

What else might we discover in the process of attempting to listen?

What else might we find on that adventure?

And beyond that, is it not the process of believing- the believing itself- rather than the who or the what, that is the cure?

An elixir to the heart, a love letter to the universe that knows there is more to the world around us than what we currently experience.

The clay of our body tells us:

It’s your birth right to listen to the stars.

We know this, no matter where it is we’ve strayed.

Is it not our knowing that asks the question to begin with?

Believing I can hear the stars, choosing to believe that to be true, adds something to my life.

It enhances my sense of connection.

Commits me to acts of daily beauty seeking.

Fills me with a sense of wonder for something that exists beyond myself.

What good does it do us to deny that?

The humility of wondering, and at the same time knowing, there is always something to be heard.

2.

1 ½  Cups of Welcoming The Gladness. Add liberal amounts of Staying Open hearted Within The Complexities of Life as needed.

At the beginning of the year, I lost a being I was very close to, my horse Bear. His death was not a slow and peaceful one. Instead it was torrid and traumatic and upsetting and not at all befitting the ending that a creature of such benevolence deserved.

But in the days that followed, something interesting happened. I shared my story of Bear, poured my heart into my writing, not as a quest for sympathy, but in tribute. In tribute to the simplicity of his life, and the deep and lasting impact it had on mine. The many conversations I had on and with death did something unexpected; they further enhanced life.

Experiences of death have the curious effect of magnifying your aliveness. You realise- or are perhaps reminded- of how death and life do not exist as separate poles. That they’re not a linear game, with a beginning and an end.

Instead, as you look around, you realise that death and life are intermeshed.

That death and life hang in the leaves of the same tree. That the very thing that supports you underfoot, that carries you through life, is a combination of composting detritus, the residue of life that forms the very earth, now, in death.

Have you noticed, that in your darkest moments, perhaps even your greatest traumas, how close you’re pulled in towards the curtain?

How you see with a different sharpness, even if what you see appears confusing?

That it’s when you’re on your knees that you really feel the limits of this animal body; how close you are to nature; how fine the edge is that we walk on every day; how close we always are to falling, a noticing so many of us have comforted out of our awareness.

And how many of us, in this state, when our chests are unzipped, our hearts bare to the world, how many of us continue to welcome in the gladness?

Welcoming the gladness means that we’re open to receiving, even in the midst of pain, discomfort and confusion. Even, perhaps, because of it.

Nick Cave talks about the irritation of the world being persistently beautiful when there’s so much suffering going on around us, on both a personal and wider, global level. That this is the hardest thing we find in grief to reckon with.

So why this conversation? And what does it have to do with listening to the stars?

To be open to the universe- and what more tangible manifestation can we speak of than the stars?- requires us to hold all the forces of being human, without them hardening our shell and closing us down.

When we believe we can block out the forces that cause us pain, we block out the forces that bring us joy.

In short, we forget to listen, and begin only to control.

Being human, and being open to the gladness means carrying the expectation of heartbreak and heartache, and staying open anyway.

When we say, we expect to be taken down. And we stay open anyway.

When we say, we expect to have our hearts broken. And we stay open anyway.

When we say, we expect to get it wrong. And we stay open anyway.

If we can stay with the experience, and move through it, the experience itself creates an immediacy to life. Where the constant experience of change and flux become nothing more than confirmation of humanity, our practice ground for micro-dosing death in a way that maintains liveability, humility and aliveness.

And it’s in this state:

Where the heartbreak sits alongside all the joy.

Where the loss holds hand with all the love.

Where the unfulfilled desires meet the being-lived adventures..

… that the opening for wonder first appears.

Then you can sit, look up, and see stars hanging against the black like animated questions.

Not offering promises or certainty, but all at once infinitely generous and utterly ungraspable.

Maybe then, we can forget about our knowing. Maybe then, we can let go of our controlling.

Maybe then, we can look up, reach out and let all our facts take flight.

3.

A tablespoon of Prayers to the Ancestors

When I was pregnant with my eldest child, I had a dream. I was sitting around a table, shaped like a half moon. At various points sat the women of my maternal line. No one looked familiar. Skin shades of many colours. Faces of many ages. Bodies of different builds and shapes. I could not find the likeness of my face amongst them. And yet I knew our connection to be true.

In this moment, I was sitting with my ancestors.

I undid my belly like a pouch, placed my as yet unborn baby on the table. They picked him up, cradled him gently, and looked at me with a direct, unbroken gaze.

He is a child of the light, they told me. Take good care of him.

When they handed my baby back, I panicked, did not know what to do. Here he was on the outside- I had no idea how to put him back.

They smiled and said I could do so with my intention.

I relaxed, open the pouch of my belly.

My baby returned to the depths inside my womb.

***

In the many years since, I have found comfort in this dream. In the thought that I am part of a maternal line, full of names I don’t know and perhaps never will. But the not knowing does not cancel out their presence.

I wonder, if our biggest challenge is getting beyond the rational. The we’ve developed a deficit of trust in intuition and imagination being a legitimate source.

Just as our ancestral heritage cannot be denied, our cosmological heritage is one that still rings true. The stars- understanding them, being guided by then, finding shapes and patterns in them- is as present in our bodies as the people who read them. A cosmological heritage.

David Abrams describes imagination as the gift we have to throw ourselves forward of reality; a reaching of the hand through the curtain in an attempt to make contact with something we cannot yet perceive, to extend us beyond the limits of the rational and the sensible.

I wonder what this requires. It seems to me it’s nothing more than the willingness to do so.

The willingness to imagine yourself as someone that listens to stars.

The willingness to be someone who asks the question, what would it be like to be a person who hears them?

I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars takes the time to hear what they have to say.

I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars seeks them out.

I imagine that a person hearing the stars is someone who does not throw ridicule or shade or scepticism, saying what it is they’re hearing isn’t true.

Maybe we need to oxygenate our imagination.

Maybe imagination is what narrows the space between us and the stars.

Maybe we can pray to the ancestors to help. A prayer to the cellular nature of self.

We will pray, and we will say, we know that you know how to hear the stars.

But we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten how to hear them.

Perhaps at the end of the day, we’re praying into the deeper parts of ourselves.

Into the doubt.

The disbelief.

Into the surely this can’t be true.

Praying to those from whom the clay of our body rose.

Praying to those we have lost and who we aspire to be.

Let our prayers be to the unknown and the yet to know.

Let our prayers be in homage to the questions.

4.

Sift out the Handful of Distractions, Over Here.

I have in my hand, a rectangle of information containing the whole world. A screen of distraction from which my friends voices spring, both local and from across the waters. A playground of people, of stuff, of facts, of wonder and the inane.

A constant, pocket sized call to Over Here.

Over Here to a google search for the answer.

Over Here to a message.

Over Here to the Wikipedia, that connects up to the YouTube, that connects up to a tunnel of Over Here’s leading down to middle earth, that’s somewhere Over There but never Here.

A constant sliding door of demands for our attention. A technological seduction, a whisper to our gaze and our attention…

Over Here.

Over Here.

Over Here.

What does this do to us, I wonder.

Is the rectangle in my hand an off button for the stars?

5.

½ cup of What I’m thinking of

I’m thinking of how our daily actions affect the weather systems. How does the meeting at work, or the way we speak to our children, or whether we gather together for meals or eat alone, or what happens in the school classroom or the newspaper printing room or the local government office, how does this shape the rhythms of our planet, our ability to listen and to hear the stars?

I’m thinking of cycles of creativity and rest; of rejuvenation and nourishment. Of laughter and lightness and deleting off my phone the little bits of data that see me locked in comparison or not-enough-ness.

I’m thinking of the heartbeat of forest mice, the roar of grass responding to the rain, the breath of a wave as it breaks.

I’m thinking of a poem I read today by Brian Turner:

Sky

If the sky knew half

of what we’re doing

down here

it would be stricken,

inconsolable

and we would have

 

nothing but rain.

 

 

Maybe the stars are just waiting for us to pay attention.

 

6.

Perhaps, Dear Wonderer, I should have started at this point, and saved you the many minutes it took to get here.

I wonder, if at the end of it, the answers very simple.

I wonder, if the way to connect with nature, is to remember that you are nature.

Which then means,

the best way to learn to listen to the stars, is to first to learn to listen to yourself.

Lately, I’ve been musing on what it means to have a sense of place. What is place? Is it assigned, found? Can it be both? What does it mean to be searching for it? Or to lose it?

These are my meditations on place from the last week of October, 2023.

 

Sense of Place, definition, from anthropologists Steven Feld & Keith Basso:

‘the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over’

 

Overnight, Thursday 26th October

Weather

It’s not a night for sleeping. I lie in bed, listening. The rain hunts the ground like a pack of hungry wolves. I’m craving stillness, rest, a space for things to quietly become.

This house of many thoughts holds the ability for silence. When everyone (finally) goes to sleep; when the sheep have moved from the field next door and the sound of lambs calling is no longer confused with that of children crying; when the words are written; when the birds are resting (where do they rest?); when the wind drops; when the rain stops.

I think of my horses. When it rains, I always think of my horses.

In the morning, I notice:

The round pen filled with water, a moat circling a mound of unmoved sand.

Dry rugs on my horse. Must be some hours since it stopped.

The slipping of the feet with the feeding of the hay. A ground still oily wet.

Half water filled black feed buckets. A horsewoman’s built-in gauge.

I walk and I look up. The clouds. I am filled with the desire not just to watch them but to know them.

Girl on the ground, knower and namer of clouds.

My eyes follow like greedy lovers. Try to stop them with my thoughts. A pearly show of meteorological seduction that always ends in tears.

My phone pings. A friend from town.

Still up for meeting? she asks. A shame about the weather!

To her and I today is something different.

To her: A minor inconvenience; a change of shoes; a jacket.

To me: A muddy schlep of hay carting and feed giving; a checking of fences; a merry-go-round of tending and of care.

I continue, one foot behind the other, this woman made of water and of bone.

Overnight, October 27^th

From my bedroom window

Last night, I saw a satellite move across the sky.

Me, lying in bed, pinned under the firm, insistent hands of my newly purchased weighted blanket.

The satellite, smooth skipping, moon walking round the sky.

It started on the left, my eye catching it as it launched from the outline of the Kowhai tree. I followed it until it disappeared beyond the outline of my window.

I wonder, who else is looking up and out their window at 9.57pm on a Friday to see a satellite on the move across the sky.

Sometimes, I call my mum.

Look up, I tell her. You see the moon?

We’re watching it together.

Place: Still searching

On Choosing Place

A remembering

I’m in a big hall, the belly of a whale. It’s too large to hold us with any sort of cosiness. Us, a small group of 8. Above, the beams of the ceiling run from right to left like a rib cage. When I walk, I do so slowly, intentionally. The echoes make the sounds of careless footsteps available for everyone to hear. This space does not feel welcoming, but it’s also not resistant. It’s neutral, ambivalent, neither here nor there. It watches out of one eye, gives the impression it would rather be somewhere else. Spaces of academia are like that to those who’ve rejected their insides.

I am here, in my chosen land that did not birth me, to learn Te Reo Maori (the Maori language). The pamphlet says it’s for beginners. I quickly learn it’s not. When you aren’t born to a culture, or a people, there is breathed in knowledge of place and word absorbed with osmotic frequency. I have entered from the outside. I scrabble to catch up.

We begin to learn a Mihi, and a Pepeha a formal introduction that describes land and place connections. I find it beautiful, a relief, to start not with my name, but with my mountain.

Once, I asked my dad why they chose the name Jane.

“It was easy to say,” he answered.

Oh, I replied. Girl, named after words that were easy to say, is about to choose her mountain.

Go away for a few minutes, the teacher tells us, and when you come back you can share your mihi with the group.

Tēnā koutou katoa,

Hello everybody

Ko  ……..     te māunga

My mountain is

Ko ……..  te awa/roto/moana

My river/lake/ocean is

Ko ……… te waka

My waka (canoe your ancestors arrived on) is

Ko ……… tōku iwi

My iwi/ tribe is

Nō ……. ahau

I’m from

Ko …….. tōku ingoa

My name is

Nō reira, tēna koutou, tēna koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Welcome to you, your ancestors and your descendents.

This is the format we are given.

I begin. The names of things I’ve chosen, they are un-given.

My mountains are not one.

The Blue Mountains of New South Wales

Mount Arthur in Tasmania

Mount Donna Buang in Victoria

Mount Eden, in Auckland

Māpounui, the mountain over my home

My river/lake/oceans are many:

Wentworth Falls

The pond at the bottom of our land in Bangor

The Yarra River

The Pacific Ocean

… to name a few.

To New Zealand, I arrived singly on my Waka, my canoe. I am the first.

My tribe is my family, and my friends. Spread all over the world. Not assigned but mostly chosen.

I’m technically from Australia, but sometimes, I’m not sure.

My name is Jane.

All my mountains. All my rivers. All my people.

My name is Jane. My name is Jane. My name is Jane.

Welcome to you, your ancestors, your descendents.

Welcome to those still falling from the sky.

On Childhood Place:

The Blue Mountains

Snippets of what I remember

I remember: Taking scissors and giving haircuts to the Pine Trees; dragging my mattress into my parent’s bedroom, too scared to sleep alone; kookaburras; hot sun through curtains in the summer; the Three Sisters; eucalypt oil in the sky; my rabbit, Alice, living in amongst a pile of cut off tree stumps in the empty stable out the back; taking my forty cents to buy blank notebooks at the newsagent; twenty cent bags of mixed lollies at the shop; watching Kangaroos at dusk behind the fallen logs; a VW beetle where if you lifted the car mat under the driver’s feet you could see straight down to the road; riding with my mum in front of the saddle; our old dog Ben; pretending I was the lead singer of the Bangles, belting out tunes in the empty and newly built extension of our built of bricks 60’s home; having stomach aches on Tuesdays when it was maths; eating Shepherd’s Pie every week because I didn’t want to tell my mum I didn’t like it (she thought I did); the big Plain Tree in the front paddock.

October 17^th

Place: At home, feeding my horses

I’m standing under a cluster of Blackwood Trees. It’s started raining lightly. The ground under my feet is still dry, a network of elevated roots making it possible for me to raise up higher still should that situation change. The contour of the land means I’m standing above Merc, a lead rope length away, eating his hay, the lower, thinner branches of the trees allowing just enough room for his height and width to stand sheltered and cocooned but not boxed in.

We knew the rain was coming before we felt it, before we saw the clouds open like a paper bag softly torn across their base. The strong smell of soil and rotting leaves and bugs with busy lives underfoot sent out the calling card aroma of Land Before Rain. A scent that feels damp and rich and heady, soil speaking eagerly to sky.

I lean against the rough trunk of the tree. My eyes fall on the ashen colored tones of bark mixed in with tans and browns. Some single drops of rain run in between the grooves, arms tight by their sides, heads stretched out, racing towards earth.

We are here for The Waiting. The time of day when Ada, my almost-yearling filly eats her feed- slowly, methodically, with baby chews and some obligatory, fumbling awkwardness- and I stand with Merc, lest he steal away the goodness in her bucket.

He’s finished already, moved on to his hay, the line of rope between the halter and my hand still holding a soft loop. In my busy-ness of feed making and hay transporting, I have my ear buds in, listening to a book. My stopping, The Waiting, makes that very specific type of listening suddenly seem all wrong. An inherent disrespect. A missing of something, although to whom and of what, I’m not sure. I notice all at once I’m being watched, being witnessed, by nothing and by everything at the same time.

We must miss a lot, I think to myself, by hurrying over land.

Merc reaches his nose towards me. In the position that he’s in, he could easily displace me, push me over. But he does not. His reach is gentle, enquiring, a whiskery “hey, hello”. Maybe he’s heard what I am thinking, his nudge a cue to bring me back. I reach out and instinctively rub his right eye, remove the long strands of forelock that have merged themselves with the sticky globs of waxy dust that together found their way to the corner.

He turns his head the other side; we repeat it on the left.

His ears stay soft, forward. I feel like he’s enjoying my company but what communicates that to me, I’m not sure exactly. I feel pleased. I let myself trust the feeling. So many beautiful moments lost by not trusting what we feel.

And even if it’s not the case, may my believing make it so.

 

It would be 6 pm in an area of suburban Portland when the light would start to dim. The red tinged bark of the young Sequoia Tree that lay directly in my line of sight from my hotel window seemed especially luminous at this time. I marveled at that tree; strong, proud, absorbent. I imagined her insistent roots under the concrete. I wondered if there were ever moments where she craved, called out for the big forest. What intelligence within her felt displaced.

Fernweh, is the word they use in German. Longing for a place you’ve never been.

Every night, we’d both watch a man with his life piled in a shopping cart, push it from one side of the carpark to the other and disappear from sight.

Me in my hotel room overlooking the car park, her in her planted spot, overlooking the carpark.

I thought of that man and wondered, what happened to you?

If he knew he’d been witnessed, by me and the Sequoia. And if he even cared.

I talked to my tree and asked, what’s it like to be planted in a place you can’t escape from?

 She was too gracious, too accepting to form an answer. A rock and a hard place.

When I got home, my son asked me about my time away and I replied:

I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t say it was enjoyable.

I meant to say:

I wanted to lie in the soil and let it cover me. I wanted grit in my nails and a squish under my toes. I wanted light that changed so I had to shield my eyes. I wanted to look out and be forced to stop my feet so I could make the looking last for longer.  

 I missed the world outside the city. And I am grateful to be home.

 My time away made me realise how my world of the non-human that surrounds me- my trees, my birds, my dogs, my horses, my everything’s- inspire so much of my words and my work. And without them, I was a little lost at sea, in search of a new anchor.

On Wednesday, I travelled to the airport in an Uber for the two-day journey home. I had yet to write something for this week to share with you today, yet to formulate my question.

I knew the nature of the airport would not inspire, but a conversation with my driver did. Inspiration from nature of the human nature kind. And with that, my mind took a swift right turn, moved sharply sideways, and then galloped straight ahead.

This week, my challenge to myself was what can I see if I look differently?

This was my answer to that question, a piece of writing I mapped out on my adventures from Portland to LA, LA to Auckland then Auckland to Dunedin.

 

Human | Nature : Portland to Auckland

Total Minutes of Friendship: 831 minutes, 16 seconds

 

Uber Driver

 

He pulls up with his white, hybrid station wagon, pops the boot,

grabs my heavy bag by a strap designed to hold together but not to lift.

It’s New To Us, he tells me, tapping the roof,

which I understand,

the second rung down from New To Everyone.

I give a satisfied nod,

position my face in a way I imagine someone who

might appreciate cars would position their face,

especially when the car

is a New To Us car.

 

The traffic will ease, he says,

you won’t be late.

When they first put this road in

we thought three lanes was

over the top.

 

Whyever, would we need three lanes? we said.

 

Now we say hallelujah when it merges to five

and finally, we get somewhere.

 

He points out the window, I turn over to the left.

 

When they finish that train line- wiggles his finger with some force- they’ll take you right from where I picked you up,

 

to right inside the airport.

 

“Inside”, he repeats, admiring, incredulous, emphatic, his now cupped hand gesturing up and down as though trying to catch an unsuspecting passenger with a cup.

 

He seems satisfied, triumphant, which confuses me,

coming from a man

 

who gives lifts to the airport as his job.

 

You know, the other day, I picked up a man.

He flies to Idaho every Thursday,

has a Ballroom dancing lesson with his daughter,

the gets back on the plane,

and flies back home.

 

She’s getting married soon.

 

I smile a half smile, my insides warmer with the thought of a man who flies every Thursday to Idaho to take ballroom dancing lessons with his daughter.

 

If I’d caught the train, I replied, I never would have known that.

 

His face looks pleased.

 

I call my trips five-minute friendships, he says.

 

I smile, make a note on my phone.

 

5-minute friendships.

 

By your scale, I tell him, we’re already over five friendships in.

 

Total Friendship Time: 26 mins 37 secs.

 

_______

 

Lady at the airport shop selling bags (and other things)

 

I don’t know if you’ll like this, she says, but that’s not why I’m showing you. I just like showing people my favourite things.

 

She clutches the patchwork leather, multi-coloured bag to her chest. She’s tagged me as an easy sell. I wonder if I send out wafts of Easy Sell.

 

They don’t buy all the leather, she tells me, holding the bag forward. Not new anyway. They’re off cuts.

 

She’s proud, like she’s made the bag herself, instead of being the lady behind the counter in the airport shop selling them.

 

Off cuts! She continues, emboldened by my interest.

 

I am interested. I do like bags. Wafts Of Easy Sell That Likes Bag. Must not look too interested.

 

I lean in.

 

They collect them, the offcuts. Dump them out, arrange them by colour palette.

 

Her hands scatter in the air like a Jackson Pollock painter. My eyes see bits of leather flying round.

 

You want to know something else?

 

She’s enthusiastic now, like a busker in the street who’s finally drawn a crowd.

 

I kind of don’t, but I kind of do.

 

She takes the flappy part that closes the bag and swings it over the top.

 

It’s reversible, she says. You can make it look different by clipping it the other side.

 

She stands Dragon’s Den triumphant.

 

Reversible.

 

She gives me a moment for the news to sink in, reaches her hand inside the bag, pulls out another smaller, scrunched up cotton bag.

 

A bag for your bag, she says, waving it like a flag.

 

She’s delighted, cackling.

 

I want to buy the bag.

 

At the counter, she draws a third line on her page, like she’s counting groups of five.

 

You’re my third “My pick today”, she says, self-congratulatory, oozing delight.

 

I think, perhaps, I should feel used. I do really like the bag.

 

She flips the paper over, more marker lines across the page. That’s yesterday, she booms. When I marked off how many times I was right.

 

She cackling now, out loud, a smoker’s rasp.

 

I tell the other girls here, there’s no reason that the day has to be boring. The other day a lady told me I was a genius. I think that’s worthy of repeating.

 

She’s laughing harder now.

 

My daughter says that every time someone makes a nice comment about something that she’s wearing, it’s like getting a free taco. She’ll call me and go, how many tacos did you get today, mum?

 

Walking out, she yells after me, keep spreading the joy! We make a difference.

 

Total minutes of friendship: 16 minutes, 33 seconds (and a new bag)

 

 

Browsing

 

I wander round another shop, finger the clothes hanging on the rack.

 

I like your jacket, the man behind the counter says.

 

Thank you, I say, glancing back at him, my jacket and myelf swishing

Right out of shop.

 

Of course, he says.

 

Everyone in Portland says Of Course.

 

One taco for me, I think.

 

Total Minutes of Friendship: 2 mins, 46 seconds

 

 

Air New Zealand Flight NZ 3, Los Angeles to Auckland

 

I’m Jim, his hand outstretched to shake. He’s 6’3, maybe more.

 

A smiling face, warmth as big as he is high.

 

This is Tammy, points over to his wife.

 

Jane, I say.

 

I like them very much. Less than 30 seconds later, their names escape me.

 

I’m sorry, I say, I do this all the time.

 

Do you know Jim and Tammy Bakker? Jim replies.

 

I think I do, but I wonder if I don’t. The reference seems to help.

 

I nod in spite of myself.

 

There! He says, you’ll remember our names now.

 

He’s laughing now, out loud.

 

The airline hostess makes a drink, Jim makes a joke. She does not laugh. I laugh.

 

A bit stiff, I whisper to him.

 

Anal, he replies.

 

We sip our drinks and smile.

 

Total Minutes of Friendship: 13 hours, 6 mins (plus exchange of WhatsApp numbers and a google search of Jim and Tammy Bakker)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A letter.

Dear Jane,

I would like to ask you to pause for a moment and consider what you could say to us that could help us move forward with the challenges we all face. Perhaps you can lift us into a more joyful state. 

From, Seeker Of Joyful States

Dear Seeker of Joyful States,

Let’s start with a story. The patch of land on which I live, I know and tend to intimately. Within it, there are one or two pockets I know more deeply still; those I’ve spent more time in, looked at more often, those I feel a greater sense of kinship with.

The trees outside my wooden panelled office are one such place. All around, they cocoon me in my book adorned, computer tapping space. The one directly to the front, beneath the window straight ahead, is not concerned with height, but with width. Her green arms, with their tightly spindled leaves spread out in all directions, maintain a constant resting state of impending embrace, an arboreal dream catcher.

Facing front, there’s an apple tree. Her apples and my taste buds don’t get on. Their slightly sour taste makes my face screw up. I don’t tell her this of course; a friendship preserved by the omission of unnecessary truths. Her gnarled arms and over-knuckled fingers, old and youthful in equal amounts, are all at once ordered and chaotic, an intriguing maze that draws the eyes upward without allowing them to reach a specific destination.

The knobby bits that stick out from the branches, it turns out, provide the perfect resting place for the hooks from which my nectar feeders hang. Naïvely, I started with just one, wondering if anyone would come, a solitary bright orange, sugar filled lantern hanging suspended in the sky.

Word soon spread in avian society that there was a new dealer in town. An innocent one, they probably chuckled to themselves, foreseeing my future as an dedicated nectar peddler, an open all hours enthusiastic feeder of feathered friends in need of their next hit.

 

 

Inspired by an idea I recently read to create a pen-and-paper only, no technology corner, I bought a fold up beach chair made of some man made washable fabric and a cheap, olive coloured fluffy blanket that compels you to say “Gosh! isn’t this soft?!” every time you touch it, despite have done so many times before. They delight me, not least of all because I’d been looking at much more expensive versions when they stumbled in my way. A bargain always adds an intangible certain something-something to a purchase.

So, I took my $30 beach chair, unfolded it, slung the blanket over the top and placed it on the rug inside my office, faced towards the tree where my nectar feeders hang.

And every morning, I sit, with my notebook on my knee, writing pen in one hand, coffee in the other, and I watch.

The first few days my nectar feeder hung, it attracted the Tuis. This was the expectation. The Tui, a native bird to New Zealand, are honey eaters, of a size you’d need both hands to hold, with elegant features, a finely contoured head, and eyes that assert that they’re clear of their place in the world.

From a distance, the unknowing eye might think they are black; up close, their feathers shine with peacock iridescence, like an expensive piece of jade seen beneath a layer of crystal water.

On their throat are two white tufts, conductors of the orchestra to their very distinct song. Their tune is a stand out in my island forest and to the human ear haphazard, arriving like a series of audible fairy lights undergoing intermittent power surges. At the start, they make a hollow tapping sound, before briefly breaking out at maracas, trilling momentarily, descending to a low note and before using their whole body to crescendo with a loud climatic squawk and then looping the track back round again.

One pauses feeding, looks at me directly.

You’re welcome, I said, as though doing him a favour. We both know the favour is reversed. Today, he’s feeling gracious, let’s me think that he believes me.

Overnight, the Tui’s spread the news. At first they talked to the Kaka, the big mountain Parrots. The sound of them landing on the guttering before leap frogging to the tree makes me jump. They came, stood on my nectar platform and inquired with their beak. Feeling it out, tasting with their tongues, hanging off the side and upside down. Their brown and green plumage with burnt orange flushes, crawl all over and under and through my tree as if gravity was something they could choose.

I didn’t expect you, I told them. But I’m glad that you are here.

Me and the Tui’s and the Kaka.

Then came the Wax Eyes. So many Wax Eyes. Birds the colour of silken moss and lichen, the green hues blending to yellow without transition. An ombre work of art. Their white rimmed eyes, their body forming a kind of perfection that makes you wonder if their even real.

All along the Wax Eyes had been there. I had never seen so many, arriving like forest confetti. Perfect winged gifts dancing right aside my window.

 

Where is this story leading, you may ask? Well, directly to the first part of my answer which is:

Both within challenge and without, we have to find our metaphorical nectar feeder. A space that allows us to make an offering, sit down and pay attention, to something other than ourselves.

We have to take the time to notice what’s already with us; what beauty is camouflaged amongst the leaves, what requires a little more sweetness on our part to make itself visible.

Challenge narrows our focus. Wonder widens it. And life in its details is wondrous if we are still enough and interested enough to seek it out.

It’s not something that can be forced. But we can let it find us by creating the right conditions, asking the right questions.

This story I’ve just told you about my office and my chair and the trees and the birds. In some ways you could say it’s nothing special. And I guess that’s what I love about it. It’s both ordinary and extraordinary.

What makes it one or the other- ordinary or extraordinary- is how much I’m paying attention. Einstein said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” Watching the birds remind me of that decision, and I do my best to remind myself as often as I can. That I believe the universe to be friendly. Because it’s from this space- the space of believing things to be innately friendly instead of hostile, wonder filled instead of challenged- that I can meet the hard things that inevitably come up and not lose my gentleness. Or at least, have a place where I find it returns to me if I do.

 

1.

Pamela & The Oaks

There are certain landscapes I walk through where I know I’m little more than a very brief visitor. You’re not meant to stay here, the hills and mosses tell me, and I respect them, making my footsteps lighter, my strides slightly quicker.

The landscape does not need me here, want me here, I know.

There are other places I pass through, buildings I see, stories I hear, and I feel an instant kinship. A part of my body knows, recognizes, and calls out, I’m so glad to see you again, it’s been ages. I’ve missed you. Despite the fact we’ve never met before.

We hear a lot of talk about the stories we make up, the stories that define us, the stories that limit us. But we don’t often talk of the stories we arrived with.

And I wonder , what stories are held in the earth of our bodies? What stories breathed us into being? What stories looked out through our eyes before we knew what we were seeing in an effort to be known in this form, in this life, in this time?

Stories looking to find their ending or be continued on.

When I walked through the Oak forest on a patch of land in Scotland, like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole, my body remembered.

Hi, it called out, smiling, we’re so glad to see you again. I wasn’t sure which part of me was talking, or what part of me heard them answer back.

I only knew that it was.

It was the same with Pamela. I already knew her. A deeper knowing than the more superficial workings of my mind could hope to understand.

In the 1930’s this patch of Scottish ground of which I speak- the one that holds the Oaks- belonged to a 25 year old woman called Pamela. Or more specifically, Pamela’s husband.

The estate had been lost in a gambling bet the generation prior, and Pamela’s money- an heiress to a not insubstantial sum- was wanted to buy it back. And so, the story goes, Pamela married a man looking to make good on a deal gone bad, and her money used to buy back the estate.

At this point, it would be easy to colour Pamela with a quick swipe of your mental paintbrush, to relegate her to a scene of Downton Abbey and to hold her in your mind as nothing more than another wealthy woman. I lament the amount of women throughout history who have been cast aside,dismissed for reasons various; whose fierceness, brilliance and intelligence were never given the same opportunities or platforms as their male counterparts. We can be grateful that at least in Pamela’s case, she had money to protect her.

But let’s continue on.

In predictable fashion, Pamela was soon surrounded by men in grey suits advising her on how to make good on her purchase. After all, if her money had been used to buy the estate, then it needed to somehow make it back. As though the land itself was responsible for reimbursing the price tag human’s attached to its head.

Conversation soon fell to the Oaks. We should cut them down, they said. Use the wood. Fetch a price. Cut them down.

It’s funny, isn’t it? That we can stand next to something of beauty and not see it. Not feel it.

But Pamela said no.

No. You will not cut the Oaks.

Pamela said no.

In the 1930’s a 25-year-old woman called Pamela stood in the Oak forest and said no. And since I heard that story, I’ve thought about Pamela every day since. I even feel, within the colourful depths of my imagination, that we’ve become friends.

I often think of what it took, as a woman of that time who by default had little power, autonomy, or voice, to say no to those men in grey suits. To say yes to those beautiful trees.

I’m filled with admiration and wonder at her feist, her determination, her strength. I’m filled with awe at the stately Oaks.

I’ve thought about the concept of legacy, and what it means to create one. What could be more beautiful, if nothing else was left to whisper your name, than to have the spirit of a hundred oaks to stand for you.

As I stood in that forest I looked up and said thank you to Pamela. You will never know me but my heart thanks you.

I saw your oaks, and I understand.

Pamela loved the Oaks, and the Oaks loved her back.

2.

Picking flowers

Yesterday, I dreamed of lying in long grass, covered in petals, so I could watch flowers undisturbed in their process of becoming.

Does beauty only exist if it is witnessed?

The answer slingshots back.

Of course not, she replies. Beauty exists for the purpose of existing only. The least you can do is pay attention.

The answer given generously, the tone kind and yet direct.

It felt normal, in my dream, to want to feel my plant-ness. To get closer to the answers un-thinkable and only all-feelable.

I look down to check my hands. Are they now tendrils, shoots looking for support, to reach towards the sun?

I hold them out, above me, arboreal. Still hands, I lament, my human-ness an expected disappointment.

I crawl closer to one flower: I have a question.

I take out my leaf paper, my stick pen, write down in soil-ey ink:

I’ve always felt conflicted about picking flowers.

I’ve wondered what right I have to do that?

Do I break the spell they cast the minute I break their stem?

My dream-state petalled self in the quietness of the green which speaks of dew and moss and tiny fern shoots hidden under logs, resting for an answer.

And it comes, my answer, matter of fact:

All you have to do is ask.

A pause.

With the intention, they add, of hearing the reply.

Why is it I’d never thought to ask?

Of course. All I had to do was ask.

A botanical lesson on how to be human.

3.

When the land remembered how to be a meadow

A ripped off cardboard sign hanging on an old farm gate. A number scrawled across in permanent pen. For sale, it said. We rang it, ended up in conversation with a man in a pair of shorts too tight for his legs sitting on the high seat of a tractor. The owner of the land.

We walked around, murmured, dodged the unintended graves of the dead, left to graze a patch of soil who had nothing left to feed them in return. I tried not to be appalled. Kicked the rubble with my feet.

Tomb size rabbit holes, the carcasses of a trapped top-heavy sheep. I imagine them back to life, launch a sheep rebellion. The farmer’s house fills with sheep and shit and grit. Held to ransom by a wooly flock of bandits asking only for fair dues.

I look around, scrape back the top layer of soil in my mind. Underneath, I see seeds, waiting in patient readiness for their turn.

We’ll take it, we say out loud. Hands are shaken.

Give it to me, I say more urgently in my mind. I send out a thin layer of hug across the land.

It was the thyme that came back first. Then the tussock, the oats, and the wheat grass.

Once, when walking, a hawk took off in flight, a swift acceleration upward into empty air. At my feet, eggs, a nest. I retreat, apologetic in my haste to get away.

Please come back now; I speak in the direction of the vertical migration. I didn’t know you were there. I’m sorry, I add, for disturbing you.

Ground now safe enough to nest on.

Later, in conversation, we turn and look. The once barren patch of land a velvet rug of cashmere and mohair grass.

We turn and look at the land, busy remembering how to meadow.

4.

Tracing the outline of mountains with my eyes

I don’t know how it began. I message my friend, Jack, the person I thought taught me.

Remember, I said, the practice of tracing the horizon with your eyes? I do it all the time, I told him. A landscape meditation.

I start on the left, beginning at the furthest point. I trace the mountains and the trees, the buildings, whatever I can see.

Up and down, up and down, up and down, mapping the heartbeat of the land.

I think, Jack tells me, it relates to a musical tune, in Maori called the rangi (which is the sky). It was said in the old day the rangi of each tribe’s song or chant was uniquely described by the ups and downs of the landscape against the sky.

The land and the sky together in a song I hear with my eyes.

Thank you, I tell him. I love that.

5.

Things to carry into October

A heart-shaped rock I found, and placed in my pocket
Longer daylight days
A new friend made this week
Bulbs to plant, in the hope it’s not too late
A bird’s nest, soft with moss and wool
Beautiful letters I’m learning to write, traced in ink
My home after many months of travel
My pillow, awaiting my return
The luminous oak coming back to leaf

This writing was inspired by the incredible Robin Wall Kimmerer and her question asking in her book, Braiding Sweet Grass.

 On the topic of anger.

It begins with a question. I thought I would answer with a letter.

Dear Jane,

If I had to describe myself, the first words that come to mind are angry and defensive. I’ve had much trauma in my life, which I understand has formed me. But here’s the thing. This part of me- the angry part- it’s also the part I use to create things. To do things. And when I really look at it, it’s also responsible for a lot of what I love in my life.

I don’t trust myself anymore to do anything without my angry, internal critic being the one spurring me into action. Is there a way to be ok with this and make peace with myself?

From,

Looking for a different way

Hi Looking for a different way,

I hope you don’t mind that I wrote you a letter. I realise in doing so, I’ve probably made this whole experience a lot more personal. The irony is, at the end of the day, all of the challenges we face are intensely personal and yet strangely not at the same time.

That’s the magic of it I guess. That we can take someone’s very specific problem, with all its nuance and detail and recognise it, also, our own.

Speaking of which, a note to self: We need to remember more often that we are all running in parallel, all heading essentially in the same direction, even if the width between us sometimes makes it hard for us to see each other.

I have a lot to say on the subject of trauma. It forms a huge part of the daily conversations I have with people my “other work”. I could break what you’re experiencing down into its composite parts to help you make sense of it, should that be what you desire. But I’m not sure that it is. I say this to let you know that myself or others are available to you to help, should you seek it.

When I really read your question- when I read it with my whole body-  I get the sense that to speak about trauma is not what you want from me right now. And to answer in that way would be a missed opportunity for us to hold hands, move to the edge of the diving board and pin drop into the vortex together. To explore things from a slightly different perspective.

So where-ever you are listening to this from, I suggest that we do exactly that. And while we’re at it, let’s invite anyone else who finds this question, these words or this conversation relevant to them to hold hands with us also.

Let’s jump together now….1, 2, 3… Jump

So, we’ve jumped. Welcome to considering yourself from a slightly different perspective. Welcome to the Museum of your Emotional Insides. The MEI. You have a season pass, it turns out (in case you didn’t realise).

If you’d just come with me to the far corner over here, I’d like to you stop at Exhibit A.

Exhibit A, I admit, is slightly ephemeral… you might have to snatch at the air to grab it, because it’s actually a question.

And the question that is wanting to be asked is, how do we make this into something beautiful?

 How do we take this anger, this self-criticism, this lack of trust, and alchemise it?

You don’t have to know the answer to the question now. That’s part of the gift.

Just asking it will change you.

But in the asking, what you do have to embrace is the possibility of being a person who would ask such questions, and in doing so, realise that everything that has come before holds the possibility to be nothing more and nothing less than compost for everything that you wish to hold, create, feel and experience after it.

So for a few moments, consider what you’ve asked and sit with the question:

How do we make this into something beautiful?

Now, let’s move on.

We’re going to walk along the corridor and make our way to Exhibit B.

I think you’re going to like this one, but if you need to go to the toilet, now is a good time, because the presenter we’ll be talking to is kind of intense and isn’t known for her brevity (that’s me).

When you’re ready, sit down. You’re in the museum theatre now and you’re sitting in front of a big, white screen. The screen lights up and you see a flash of images that feels impossible to keep up with. There are animals and nature scenes and people that you know and people you don’t and universes and galaxies and fields and spaces and colours and all forms of different light that flash past your eyes with kaleidoscopic speed.

All these things live within the clay of your body. All these things travel with you.

Just when you think it’s getting too much, the screen goes blank.

You pause, slightly confused. It’s dark now. A voice says out loud:

 

You write that your trauma that has formed you. But this was never the case. Your trauma has informed you. It has led you to have some of the experiences you’ve had. And for those, we are sorry.

But formed you? No. You were always bigger than that.

You were formed- are formed- by something much more primal and ancient. By something elemental and at the same time greater than the sum of its parts.

A constellation of forces, longings, desires, sadness’s, loves, losses, wonders that pushed you into this life.

I don’t say this to be poetic. I say this with the understandings that to attribute your trauma to your formation is to force yourself into skin that’s too small for you. And to live in skin that’s too small is not to live at all.

You, asker of this question, have many skins, many animal bodies that are waiting for you to inhabit them.

They tell you that up until now you’ve miscredited all you’ve achieved and much of what you love, to the driving force of anger. We would like to tell you that this is a falsity.

Anger or no anger, it was you all along. All the good in your life, you created. All that you love in your life, you created.

As a matter of interest, the Irish language doesn’t describe anyone as being an emotion. Instead, they say, ‘the emotion is upon you’ like a cloak that you take on and off.

If we took the anger you have written of, dear question asker, then we could not say you were angry. We would say anger is upon you, implying, of course, that it’s capable of being taken off you.

We hope that the invitation you are seeing is to notice the you behind the emotion. You with the fire, you with the water, you with the earth, you with the air. You.

We hope these thoughts let you hold the anger a little more lightly.

We are hopeful that you might be able to see a tiny shimmer of something more beautiful already.

 

——-

 

Exhibit C is a series of flash cards. They’re lined up on the floor. Please, if you choose to, pick them up along the way.

If you look down, you’ll see the first one at your feet.

It says:

Hi, I’m not sure if we’ve had a direct conversation before, but I’m anger. Pleased to meet you. I have a feeling there’s some misunderstanding going on between us that I’d kind of like to sort out. I never wanted to convince you that I was the creative energy behind all the good you’ve created. I mean, don’t get me wrong- I love being the front woman. But I was only ever interested in stepping up when the matches felt too damp to start the fire, when something was needed to burn away the pain that was getting in the way.

We were never meant to be at war, you and I. We are on the same team. I am the sentry, the protector, the boundary that gets built when soft edges don’t feel like enough.

And it’s ok. To let me go does not mean I disappear. It doesn’t mean I can’t be accessed when I’m needed. It just means, for right now, in this moment, you’re exploring a slightly different way.

Even if you don’t know what that looks like right now.

Love, anger.

___

 

You keep walking. Another card. You bend down, pick it up and start reading.

 

Oh hey. So this is awkward… anger is a pretty hard act to follow cos you know, all up there in your face and stuff. I’m self-trust **waves awkwardly**

I’ve been asked to share one fact about me that you might not know… I settled on this one.

I’m something that has to be practiced. A lot of people seem to think I’m black and white but it’s really not like that. You have to work at developing me. And why people don’t want to believe that so much is because it’s a process of trial and error.

We don’t like trial and error so much us humans. We like certainty.

But like all things worth practicing, the frequencies of self-trust need to be re-tuned, tweaked, adjusted. Sometimes, you’ll get it wrong, and that’s ok. But more often than not, you’ll get it right. And you’ll start to understand what it feels like in your body when that’s the case.

Self-trust doesn’t land heavily. It tip toes in like a colourful mist of different colours, hues and shades. You’ll start to recognise which is which and what’s what the more you pay attention.

And that’s really what it comes down to- paying attention, playing with trusting yourself.

Hold the conversation you have with yourself more lightly. Let it not be so serious.

___

 

You turn a corner and find one more card. You pick it up. Questions again. You start to wish you’d never asked one in the first place.

 

On it is written:

 

What are you going to allow to come forward?

 

How can you practice gentleness?

 

Will you let yourself learn to be human, over and over again?

 

Thanks for holding my hand, lovely question asker. I’m glad we got to have this conversation.

All my love,

xx Jane