Time has slipped along this last week and a bit, and I was half surprised that it was Saturday morning when I woke (though honestly, my body tells me it is some time 25 years in the future).
There have been extended days of extreme heat here in my part of Oz and it is something I really struggle with. I am like a delicate flower, a snowdrop perhaps, that wilts in the heat (though I may look anything but).
My genes come from the cold, from the north of Scotland and from Norway, and even four or five generations removed from their old home, they have not yet adjusted to Australia. The summer heat (and fires) that are here already, at the beginning of spring - summer wearing spring’s clothing. I am trying not to think about what the next five or six months will bring, though my propensity for self-inflicted catastrophizing on top of baseline anxiety makes that all but impossible. Surrender, I tell myself, there is nothing you can do, you have no control over the weather. But my body does not agree, feeling responsible and in fear all at once.
Today though, I will relish the much cooler (more normal for this time of year) temperatures and the light rain, and the galah outside that concur this weather is much more agreeable.
I have a great list of posts, ideas, that I want to write about, that have half thoughts or full paragraphs written, but my fingers want to write something unplanned and inspired by a few thoughts I had in the early light this morning, and some reading I have done this week.
Sam over on Soft. Simple. Still. held space for some thoughts on grief in Notes and it was a lovely conversation.
We often feel alone in our grief, and knowing that others have so many of the same experiences is comforting, in a (sad) way. I have been thinking about just how much grief we all carry around, that I am certainly dragging along with me everywhere, and how I might release some of it. Some, of course, is bound to us, an invisible tattoo that only we can see (and feel), but there are little griefs too, like the grief of leaving my favourite seasons of the year behind, that can feel no less perilous to a mind and body in the moment. Particularly a body on constant high alert.
On the equinox I spent some time looking out over the vast, extraordinarily blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean, with my beloved Dad. It was his birthday, and together we quietly pondered the big things that come from feeling small in the face of something so seemingly limitless. Watching the seabirds patrolling and diving, thinking about everything going on under what we were seeing the mere, if mesmerizingly glittering surface made me think of something Katherine May recently wrote, “So much goes on outside of our gaze” and she shared a link to the most marvellous of videos (did I share this already? Even if I did, you should watch it again.) Rather than being terrified at that thought, that things are happening when we aren’t looking (which I actually would quite expect of myself, having just the smallest insight into my own behaviour), I found it so, well, hopeful.
“So much goes on outside our gaze”.
I have written before that in times of worry and crisis, to know that the birds in the watershed down the road are still doing their thing, that the lizards in the yard have no concept or care at my worries, gives perspective and even ease.
But the simple words, so much goes on outside our gaze, is not just liberating and comforting, but oh my, it is tantalising. I am naturally inclined to be hungry for knowledge, curious and interested and seeking wonder, and now I can’t stop pondering what is going on outside of my gaze.
I want to know all the things going on outside my gaze.
(Well, I will be honest here, I want to know all the things that have nothing to do with human things, I want to know all the more-than-human things).
I want to know what the orca thinks, how she interacts with her world when no one is watching under the aforementioned vast, extraordinarily blue expanse. How the sea lions and hermit crabs and scary-looking Moray eels think and feel about their world, how they think and feel about themselves. I want to know how the seabirds know what they know and what they do when they don’t know. I want to know what the favourite fruit or insect of the channel-billed cuckoo is - I mean I know she likes mulberries, but is it her favourite? What fruit does she dream of? Would she work for strawberries, like me? I want to know the love and safety and contentment a cockatoo chick feels, tucked under the wing of her cloudlike parents feathers in the hollow of an old tree. I want to know what she thinks the first time she hears rain. Does her mother tell her what it is, rain, these beautiful life giving drops as tears from the sky? Or does she already know? Did she dream of it as the stardust she is made of assembled her beingness into being? I want to know the stories of the moss, their perception of time so different to ours, measured in a slowness that is itchy to humans.
I want to know the itchy-ness of slowwww time.
As I drove to the grocery store yesterday, the mundanity of it all completely without magic, I braked dramatically at a small, cement roundabout here in this hard-surfaced suburban sprawl, and beamed a smile so large I may have looked a little terrifying. Three masked lapwings, plovers as they are colloquially known, stood in the middle of this cement eyesore, and suddenly its purpose was not to move traffic in an orderly fashion, but to be a stage, a great performance venue, rivalling The Sydney Opera House, nay, rivalling The Globe. The males bobbed and danced around the female, a spectacle of such beauty and delight. Jerking head movements, their little black caps looking like slicked-back hair-dos, elongating their bodies and stepping almost on tiptoe (I am sooo tall, look at me!). Flicking their wings, moving past one-another as she stood in the middle watching it all very nonchalantly.
I was completely delighted. I still am, just thinking of it. Of course, I could not stay stopped in the middle of a roundabout, so I don’t know how the wooing ultimately went, whether this was the first woo-dance for these three, or one of many preceding. But I want to know.
I want to know.
I don’t want to know what a human - even a knowledgeable one - thinks they know about these things (we all know how often that certain knowledge has to be rewritten), I want to know it from the inside, from each being’s perspective. And all at once that feels so overwhelming that my mind may well melt, and still, and still I would have it, just a moment’s glance.
Which leads me to think about shapeshifting again. I am writing a piece on shapeshifting, and I asked what beings you would like to be able to transform into and I have loved reading all of your thoughts. You can join the conversation here - I would love to know where your imagination and feelings take you. My words around this topic are more abundant than I had expected. Seems I have big feelings about shapeshifting (among many other things).
I could easily sit here and start imagining what it might be like to be the fast and nimble eastern wattle bird outside my window here, but there is work to do.
Instead, I will open up my palette I just removed from the freezer (yes, crazy artists like me keep their oil paint palettes in the freezer overnight), and turn back to the little pieces on my easel.
A new set of paintings coming this month that I am already in love with (paid subscribers will get a sneaky peek today when I finally record my September studio video).
I can’t know what is going on outside my gaze, of course, but I can imagine, and I can make a large space in my heart for the wonder and awe of what I do get to see, and I can make my art as a celebration of all our more-than-human kin and our desire to be closer to them, again.
And I can put my noise cancelling headphones in because as amazing as the koel male in the mulberry is, his constant calling (and I mean constant, and loud) is not the most relaxing sound. It goes up and up in pitch until it sounds like he might explode.
Seriously.
I wonder what his favourite fruit is?
PS: Paid subscriber chat coming you tomorrow!
I will ramble on about September’s happenings and you can watch me paint this (until now) secret project for October (and see me in the mirror - see, clever, huh?).
If you’re not a paid subscriber, and you want all the goss, you can
PPS: A couple of really lovely posts to share with you.
🌟Go read them in full. I promise you will thank me.🌟
For me a tawny owl’s call is a work of art. Art exists to extend wakefulness. It’s why we need it now, in these times of enfolding darkness, more than ever. Art comes out of the dark, makes shapes from shadows, untangles from the lightless knots we carry inside us. The best art I know contains a shriek and a howl (wonderful, isn’t it, that the word owl is contained within howl).
But now, with the rain and the gloom that has planted itself over this little island for the last few days, my creativity has been dancing, running, and jumping with joy. So I want to share a short photo diary with you on just some of the most beautiful wildlife that calls Mull home.
Such a great turn of phrase... "my fingers want to write something unplanned." They do have a mind of their own, those writer's fingers.
I feel like I’m dancing when I read your words Natalie, at least in my head anyway.... and especially these words which ring so loudly! I too am curious, I hate that I have to work (away from my hill) and miss something that was wonderful, or new, or even something I’ve seen before but in a different way... I feel all those moments too which are unexplained and I want to know.. I need to know!
I hope thé heat isn’t too ghastly for you - here in France it has been 32c for the last two days with more to come... there is barely a sign of autumn yet... it’s worrying xxx