QUIETLY

I dont know whats going on. I am better today than yesterday but not well. I am happier with a mown yard. The Girls brought me home cooked food and an orange and we laughed a little. 

I want to do halloween tomorrow but may not be able to. How does one keep going on like this ? 

I call it the year of my dying. I may well live 20-30 more years or I may not live another year – but a surrender into dying is on me. Each time I come down with infections and body failure and a curious disinterest in many things.  Each time I am unable to do another thing – like walk to the top of my path – or walk along the verandah , something dies a little. Not even miserably – just in acceptance.

I have been home now for a week or more and only just walking a little freely today. My flat is at the back of a residence and is surrounded by hedges. So – pretty much for a week – there is just me most of the time. Sometimes birds and helpers. But mostly me alone. And mostly deeply content. Sometimes in pain and hurting. Sometimes a little restless and lonesome. 

Sometimes my thinking and re-membering wander all over the place. Into the many strange sleep patterns of the last 4 years. Of the hospital stays and sudden emergencies. Of the thinking I was making progress and then failing to hold that progress. 

Sometimes I yearn for things. Like going to the Eden Whales Festival and doing halloween and the Fete on Saturday. 

But I seem to have been released from clinging to much – even thoughts or emotions. Or desires. I think to myself – I would like to live somewhere else. But its a mild thought and I am happy here.

I think to myself – I wish such and such an event had gone differently – but then I think – no I don’t.

I wonder whether I would sleep if I went to bed now. Things are very much better for me now as regards my beds. They are comfortable. They work. The whole room works. 

I have the wheelie walker which I keep beside the bed with my phone and iPad and other oddments in. Then when I go to the loo in the middle of the night I have a buffer and support. 

I always thought I would be alone like this as I have been for so much of my life. But after the years with Izzy I began to think that it was a load I would not have to carry alone Then he was gone and aloneness was back but so much more difficult with the degree of illness. And the occasional DAMN I give is mostly over that. I thought I had a helpmeet and companion and lover. But I dont. So I live as I am living now. Into the Dying.

Each time that my Outer World shrinks – I simply adjust but some days it unnerves me.

Now for Bed and Book. My iPhone actually which is turning out to be my favourite. 

THE LIVING YOUNG BREATHE LIFE SPIRIT INTO ME

I’M GOING TO GO WITH THE ONE I LOVE

PICKING UP A MONITOR

This morning MacMan called to say he had the computer so I said I would go and fetch the monitor from the Kids. Turned out we decided the monitor may be too old or the purpose. Nonetheless I stayed there the whole day. A family day. Just about my most cherished of days. We played and talked and made Fathers Day cards. Then Tad and his Mum came and how we wished we could help her. Deep in the bowels of grief and illness and age and everything associated with that. It was a good visit even though not a happy one.

Seems that MacMan is hard at work on my new Mac. I shall buy a monitor in a few weeks when I have enough money. Meantime I shall use the laptop as it is. A 13 incher.

My daughter grows Lavender. She says she is connected to it. She says she is going to retire to Tangiers one day.

I did not even attempt to go to meeting or shop. I am, like my former mother in law – FRIED. Poor Lady she is older than I am. And that is terribly tough.

I went for a monitor but found I had gone for an entirely different reason.

My Son In Law makes knives.

Now its Facetime with Eden. I begin to feel safe once again and less ruffled.

HYDE STREET BELLINGEN

I came across that GenusLoci reading yesterday and it made a great deal of sense to me about many of the things I have lived by and believed in and instinctually followed. I have friends galumphing all over the place – which they are welcome to do but so very few of them come back ALTERED.  In 1973 when Tony and I went North randomly heading around Australia, we really didn’t get far because JUST LOOKING meant little to us. We stopped at Port Douglas and lived in a tent on 4 mile beach and grew to know the people and the place.

I have rather a nasty disdain for TOURISM and tourist resorts.

I grew up in a suburb of Sydney called Belmore. I lived there the first 20 years of my life and it never had the least hold on my spirit or any part of me. Never has. I came here at the end of 1973. Mum and Dad honeymooned here in 1948 and we came every year for holidays. It called me Home and that is what it has remained, Sometimes I go away. Back to the City to live for a time when I got clean. Up to the Tweed when the Kids were both gone and grown.Both of those places call to me as does Eden which I only found in 2013.

But then I come Home. Amongst my people. Amongst my ghosts. Amongst the seeds of the future.

GENUS LOCI.

Including the very deep philosphy that has dwelt within me for as long as I can recall. Call it anarchy. Call it whatever you like – but mostly , mostly I have had the great good fortune to live it. To live by my deeper beliefs. That is a very wonderful thing.

GENUS LOCI.

THE FOOTBRIDGE AT URUNGA

 

GENUS LOCI

BELLINGEN

“Geographers call this special something that makes a place unique its “genius loci” – literally, “the wisdom of place”.”

THE WISDOM OF PLACE

“Wendell Berry once wrote that “wisdom accumulates in a community the way fertility accumulates in soil”. Historically, people throughout the globe were so bound to their territory that their identity was inseparable from the places they were from.

But no longer. Today, our connection to place seems to be eroding as quickly as the topsoil Berry compares it to.

In the last century or two, it’s become common for us to skip from place to place like stones on a pond, crossing state and even national boundaries with ease. Car and air travel have lowered the time and expense of such journeys, and modern technologies like air conditioning, watershed engineering, and artificial fertilisers have opened up whole new areas to human habitation on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, mass media and globalised businesses have made moving seem less intimidating by lowering the cultural barriers to relocation.
The benefits of living in such a mobile society have been promoted for centuries: a more significant opportunity. Freedom from persecution. Better weather. But what are the trade-offs? What have we lost by becoming urban nomads?

According to a growing body of thinkers, a lot. Perhaps too much.
One unfortunate consequence of all this moving around is homogenization. When people stay put and relatively isolated from others, they develop unique ways of speaking, thinking, creating and working. That’s how Latin differentiated itself into French, Spanish and Italian, or how every Aboriginal people had a different set of iconography for their art.

Geographers call this special something that makes a place unique its “genius loci” – literally, “the wisdom of place”.

Today, genius loci is an endangered species. As we continue to globalise, we’re losing unique musical traditions, languages, folk remedies, land management practices and more at an alarming rate. The homogenising influence of the capitalist economy has been like taking a blender to a salad, turning a rich array of cultural flavours into a bland mush.

But reconnection to place is about more than mere cultural homogenization. The loss of genius loci also has profound consequences for our relationship with the natural world.

That’s because an itinerant society isn’t able to perceive the long-term rhythms of a place: how frequently it experiences extreme weather events, for example, or the intricate ways in which the various plants and animals in the ecosystem keep each other in check. Without this knowledge, we often end up causing great harm to ourselves and other species trying to fit in.

The bottom line? Until at least some of us rediscover what it means to become native to a place, we’ll continue to reproduce “cultures of nowhere” wherever we go, and our ignorance will continue to wreak havoc on the people and species around us.

Rebuilding genius loci – like any form of RESTORING CAPITAL – is a long, long, process. These days, it’s rare for someone to live in the same place for 20 years, let alone 20 generations.

A great many of us in Australia are relative newcomers, having arrived in the last few centuries by force or the promise of a better life. But that shouldn’t keep us from starting. Every great journey begins with the first step, and by asking the right questions, we can make great strides in adapting ourselves to the places in which we reside.”

Savour Soil Permaculturek

URUNGA

EMOTIONS

AND NIGHT COMES

• 

AND ALL IS WELL

at the crescent moon the silence enters the heart

Chiyo-ni, from Woman Haiku Master 

of what use words ?

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea, 
And the silence of the city when it pauses, 
And the silence of a man and a maid, 
And the silence for which music alone finds the word, 
And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin, 
And the silence of the sick 
When their eyes roam about the room. 
And I ask: For the depths 
Of what use is language? .

Edgar Lee Masters: [from his poem] Silence

QUIETLY AT HOME

OLD DOGS CHILDREN

I’M GOING TO GO WITH THE ONE I LOVE

ERIC AVERY

NIGHTMARES AFTER THE ICU

GRANTED – A THEME SONG