Exuberance and Open-hearted Optimism Borne of Grief and Gratitude
Turning this hard, hard year around
My grandfather passed away on Friday, and this post reflects on how my grief and celebration of this beautiful man has me thinking BIG THOUGHTS about my own life. I hope you’ll let me share them with you today, but if thoughts on the passing of a loved one feel too hard for you to read right now, you may want to skip this missive. I promise it is an ultimately happy and tentatively exciting letter though.
2023 has been…hard. I am not going to sugar coat it. It has been hard for me personally (hard doesn’t seem like a big enough word), it has been hard on my family. I am writing this today as a reminder to myself more than anything else, that these times are impermanent, this too shall change, the sea is the sea is the sea (regardless of the tide).
On Friday my beloved, nearly 99 year old grandfather passed away, after a fierce battle with Covid, on top of an increasingly frail and failing body. I want to write about him more later - to celebrate a vibrant, knowledgeable, kind, and grounded man that lived the better part of a century, but today is not that day. The Saturday before he passed it was my birthday, the last one of my 40’s (I am pretty sure someone stole a half dozen years somewhere in the middle, I don’t think I could possibly be 49). I am now the same age he was when I was born - his first grandchild of many. And the Sunday was my sweet nephew’s 5th birthday, my little Gemini twin born 44 years after my own tentative first breaths. My sweet boy, rambunctious and wild and smart and incredibly kind, had a party at a big indoor play centre with his good friends (and two bestest friends) from preschool. They got all red and sweaty and yelly and only partially filled with sugar, because the bouncing around on inflatable castles and slides was too much fun to stop and eat for any time longer than it took to blow out candles. So much energy - enough to power cities - and such a juxtaposition to his great grandfather languishing in hospital only 5 minutes down the road. I got to imagine my Pa as five while I watched my sweet boy, and I felt like I was witnessing the Möbius loop of life cycles in real time. We knew what was coming for Pa, it was just a matter of how long his wander to the clearing took - that doesn’t make it any easier on the heart though. This week or next we will make the pilgrimage to the Snowy Mountains where he and my mum were from (and where I was born) to lay him to rest with my Gran. When I turned 40 I had 3 living grandparents. At 49 I now have none, which is a prickly, mortal consideration of its own.
2023 has been… hard. It has been filled with extended grief, fear, scarcity, pain. It has been a long wade through what has felt like the swamp of sadness from The Never-ending Story, and I have really struggled to find my joy (despite it being my middle name, boom-tish). It has been more abyss than I was prepared for. I have managed to pick up a really nasty bug (a few of us in my family have it - definitely not Covid, probably RSV, but a doozy!) thanks most likely to the darling little petri dishes that are dozens of children revelling in multiple parties at an indoor play centre. I have been grappling with it for a week now, and today I realised that, as crappy as it is, it has also been a gift. I have no choice but to be in my aching, sore, body. Every cough reminds me I am an animal, that I am not a floating head, but inflamed flesh and blood whose head pounds with each cough, whose back and chest aches, and whose nose is as bright as Rudolph’s despite the aloe vera tissues. And (even worse), I have been forced to rest.
I am not very good at resting.
I don't sit still well other than when I am purposefully meditating or absorbed in my artistic process.
I am always busy, always working, and have now realised that over the last 25+ years in my careers in professional, academic, and advocacy roles that it seems I prioritised busy. I take multi-tasking to whole new levels. I am always planning, always imagining, always organising and researching. Consequently, sleep and I have a difficult relationship, to say nothing of any other form of rest, and I tend to be a bit hard on myself if I am not always working at something (that is putting it mildly). It also turns out that I am…tired. Really, really tired.
Gosh, you know, this being a full time artist and business owner is tough. It is hard. I did not expect it to be easy, by any means, I enjoy hard work, but oof. And I think I have been making it harder on myself. I am a round peg that has dutifully squeezed herself into a square hole for most of my life, trying to satisfy all the entrenched and societal expectations, and despite my gleeful collecting of gold stars, that just doesn’t work anymore. I have been trying to juggle all the balls, and it turns out I am just chucking them in the air and ducking rather than catching and catapulting again, and all those balls falling on my hunched over self have been hurting, but I have been kept on doing it none-the-less. Look at that, a couple of days of cold/flu/virus, some extra grief on top of the layer that was already there, and despite the rivers of snot, I have some clarity.
What I have been doing has not been aligned with my vision, and so, last minute, I joined a program for entrepreneurs by
to help me find my way to a simple, spacious, joyful, humane business/life balance. I am going to explore what freedom and ease look like for me, actually for me, not what someone else has done that I thought I wanted to or ‘should’ emulate, or that looked from the outside like ‘success’. I am so excited to take you on this adventure with me - there may well be some off-roading, some creek crossings, a few loops back on myself, but I am holding space for all the beauty and wonder and curiosity that will entail. And oh, my friend, there is going to be so much art making - that is something that feels like it has kept being put to the side in the quest to do All The Other Things™, which is absurd given it is my whole reason for being. There will be seasonal shifts, momentum and idling, a strong trunk and the flexibility and fluidity of swaying branches that can move with what is happening around me. But I am making my own path. (My stars, I am becoming quite accomplished at mixing metaphors, don’t you think?).And, hand on heart, it will include REST.
In 2019, after the death of my Nan and my oldest and dearest friend, I realised life was for living, and I wanted to change the way I had been existing (and just existing) - to follow my passion, and to try and give some sort of light and delight to the world, an act of reciprocity and reverence and wonder. Two and a bit years later, after all those months of preparation, I became a full time artist. Eighteen months since and here I am today, my Pa has passed, and over the last few weeks I have been reflecting on what a full and deeply grounded life he had, and how the journey I have been on has not been what I envisioned. He worked so damn hard, being an accomplished shearer and farmer requires that. But he always knew the importance of a nap at lunchtime, always had room for music and poetry and song at the end of a long day. There was always room even on a full belly for a bowl of sweets. I am not romanticising the hardships and long hours of gruelling physical labour, the uncertainty and grief that comes with living on the land. I am celebrating his resilience, and exuberance for the exultant aspects of life too, for family and pondering, for singing and dancing and ruminating, for reading and remembering and speaking poetry and sharing all of that (and a beer or two) with those he loved. For music and food and laughter and love. I can’t express my gratitude and adoration for my Pa in mere words. Fifty years from now, that is what I would love for my nephews to remember about me too - that I had a life well lived, and that they felt cherished and adored by me in the same way that Pa made me feel. That I honoured my human body, that I celebrated being here, present and grounded in this wild world with them.
I have been laying in bed (and coughing) and dreaming up more {Fleur + Fauna} pieces, and I am itching to get started. If they come even close to my imaginings, my wild heart will be so happy. My muse has been bound by my own fear and perfectionism for too long - there is no room for that anymore. I have been thinking about the things I want to hold a conversation with you about here, and my friend, there is so much to talk about! I am dreaming up all sorts of ways to empower and encourage our inner artists, our creativity and wild heartedness, and for the first time in a long time I am feeling excited and hopeful and eager to fling my arms wide and twirl.
And so, the rest of 2023 will be…an unimaginably wondrous adventure.
Indulge my new-found exuberance and open-hearted hope and optimism borne of grief and gratitude.
Let us walk this wild world together.
For my Pa, I am including here a very Australian late 19th century tale by Banjo Patterson “A Bush Christening”, which he recited by heart to me many a time, and which I read to him days before he left this mortal plane, forever in our hearts.
On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few,
And men of religion are scanty,
On a road never cross'd 'cept by folk that are lost,
One Michael Magee had a shanty.
Now this Mike was the dad of a ten-year-old lad,
Plump, healthy, and stoutly conditioned;
He was strong as the best, but poor Mike had no rest
For the youngster had never been christened,
And his wife used to cry, "If the darlin' should die
Saint Peter would not recognise him."
But by luck he survived till a preacher arrived,
Who agreed straightaway to baptise him.
Now the artful young rogue, while they held their collogue,
With his ear to the keyhole was listenin',
And he muttered in fright while his features turned white,
"What the divil and all is this christenin'?"
He was none of your dolts, he had seen them brand colts,
And it seemed to his small understanding,
If the man in the frock made him one of the flock,
It must mean something very like branding.
So away with a rush he set off for the bush,
While the tears in his eyelids they glistened-
"'Tis outrageous," says he, "to brand youngsters like me,
I'll be dashed if I'll stop to be christened!"
Like a young native dog he ran into a log,
And his father with language uncivil,
Never heeding the "praste" cried aloud in his haste,
"Come out and be christened, you divil!"
But he lay there as snug as a bug in a rug,
And his parents in vain might reprove him,
Till his reverence spoke (he was fond of a joke)
"I've a notion," says he, "that'll move him."
"Poke a stick up the log, give the spalpeen a prog;
Poke him aisy-don't hurt him or maim him,
'Tis not long that he'll stand, I've the water at hand,
As he rushes out this end I'll name him.
"Here he comes, and for shame! ye've forgotten the name-
Is it Patsy or Michael or Dinnis?"
Here the youngster ran out, and the priest gave a shout-
"Take your chance, anyhow, wid 'Maginnis'!"
As the howling young cub ran away to the scrub
Where he knew that pursuit would be risky,
The priest, as he fled, flung a flask at his head
That was labelled "Maginnis's Whisky!"
And Maginnis Magee has been made a J.P.,
And the one thing he hates more than sin is
To be asked by the folk who have heard of the joke,
How he came to be christened "Maginnis"!
The Bulletin, 16 December 1893.
If you are able to write this beautifully when ill then I have faith that your future creations will be fantastic! I am so sorry to hear of your losses, find comfort in the love they gave when they were able, take the time you need.
warm wise care around you at this time...