A Good Book

I haven’t written for days, life seems to be getting in the way. The house, my job, friends, the endless circus in my head and more recently a haunting flu have suspended me unable to write, or really unwilling. I want writing to be like rich dark chocolate even when you don’t really feel like it you can squeeze in a block or two. I feel the rambling disconnected days I have been having, hazy with paint fumes, sniffly with a head cold, noisy with road works and boiling with pure anger would not really make for good reading. But having spent a sick day sleeping and reading Elliot Pearlman’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ it seems general misery makes for bloody good reading. Although over the mid book hump and steadily looking toward the end I am starting to hate the writer who has taken me into such a dark and dirty world, I am finding its grime difficult to wash away. Annie Dillard comments that reading a book is a stretch in comparison to living a tactile life, but I disagree a good book stops being read and becomes like a narrative from your brain, you can smell the story, you can hear the characters voices, you can feel the way they move, and soon you are squirming at the morality of their actions and pitying their lives as if they were real.

A good book is tranporting like nothing else.

Catching the Big Fish

I am settled at my computer after a whirlwind of activity and I feel like the washing machine stilled after the spin cycle. After a 4am start, flight to Melbourne, back to back meetings, a 5pm flight back and a 6.30 landing, I got home at 7 to clean my room, get dinner on the stove and now I’m writing for my blog which I have missed for 2 days. In between all of this I have managed to sandwich in David Lynch's little book titled “Catching the Big Fish”, after a beautiful beginning analogy about catching ideas like fish and going deeper to get the bigger ideas, deeper where the bigger fish reside, the rest of the book is a collection of random thoughts. However Lynch kept returning to his practice of transcendental meditation as his means of going deeper and touching the ‘unified field’ or that place of ultimate connection where, as the Beatles say, “I am you, you are me and we are we”.

After the bleak disconnection that I have been feeling this week, I wanted to transcend the amusement park which has become my head, its basically become all roller coasters, clowns oscillating, BB guns going off, and huge stuffed animals. All this action in my head is making my body feel like its on a constant sugar rush. The minutes have been melting away and life is feeling small and compacted. I like Lynch’s idea of using meditation to expand my consciousness and perhaps have that filter through into the rest my life.

Quantity over Quality

It’s the last day of the 21 days of writing and after an exhausting weekend of painting and socializing I am sitting down to complete the last 8 minutes of my commitment. Have things changed I wonder? Has this self imposed sentence had any gains, have my self cencoring and sabotaging habits been reformed, has my 21 day program seen a change for the better? In the last 21 days, I have not necessarily discovered more faith in my writing ability or miraculously come to the conclusion that I am a fabulous writer. What has happened is that I have written, I have committed to showing up to the page every day and producing something, pushing aside the need for it to be valid or good and focusing purely on the quantity. I remember once hearing about a class of sculpture students who were divided in two, half the group were instructed to produce one piece of excellent quality and the other half of the group to produce 200 pieces with no regard to quality. Invariably the group that produced 200 pieces discovered new techniques and ways of working and concentrated on their process rather than the product. The other group with only one piece to produce agonized over their choices and curbed risk in their work focusing solely on the product rather than the process. This is mostly what I have learnt over these 21 days, that quantity leads to quality and if your focus remains on your process and not your product invariably the product will be better.

Monsters in the Closet

Paint fumes are hovering in the inner cavities of my head and are playing tricks with my stomach and parching my throat as they struggle for an exit. Greg and I spent all day painting, it was steady process, room by room, inch by inch, nervous endlessness when starting and excited anticipation when ending. Between brush strokes, rollers and fumes, I had a lot of time to think today, about this house, this second installment in the Greg and Tanya future show. Was it going to work out, were we crazy, would the 10 years it would take to realize our investment be long difficult ones for the sake of a house, that I will never live in.

I think most of our choices have a 50/50 chance, I know the process of making decisions is to weigh it all up opting for choices in your favour, but the riskiest and juiciest choices are generally stacked against you, and you have to run the race to know the outcome. Buying this second house and positioning us in huge debt once loomed large in my mind as I tried to add up all the disasters and come up with exit plans and rescue measures. But rarely in any given moment do I not know exactly what to do, and every moment seems to come to its own fanciful conclusion, if it’s bad I learn a lot, if it’s good I learn a lot, at the end of the day all my experiences seem to take me to the same place. I don’t know if we have made a good decision I don’t know if we have made a bad decision, all I know is that everything is ok day, and any little hitches the spilt paint, the exhaustion were dealt with as they came, the only thing I can’t seem to deal with is the disasters of the mind.

It’s a bit like being scared of the monsters in the closet without really ever knowing if there are monsters in the closet.

Endings and Beginnings

It’s nearly a full moon tonight and the air is expectant, the heat of the day is now swirling into a cool wind and inviting a storm, teasing it out slowly. It’s Easter weekend and the city has spent hours emptying out, in preparation for the pared down quiet of Good Friday. It’s been so long since I have been to church or read the bible that I barely remember what Easter is about, Jesus dying and rising again. A time for endings and new beginnings in a way. Things are definitely beginning for Greg and I, our second house is in its last stressful stages of completion and we will be painting all weekend. This house was a long time realization for Greg who has wanted to build an empire and have his own plan rather than depending on someone else’s. For me I feel like a new era of both work and creativity are beginning and for the first time in a long time I feel like they can really work well together. I got a very significant pay rise today, which was amazing, my boss gave it to me without me having to ask, and said that I absolutely deserved it, it was very heartening and like a blessing from the universe that said yes, this working and writing thing can work had in hand. This afternoon I started making some plans for my writing also, I have picked out a few key shows that will help shape the book and I know if I work on it slowly that it will come together. As we drove home tonight, through the dewy darkness, I said to Greg, ‘life is good’ and I meant it.

Time to Gut It

I have started renovations on my writing desk, I have a writing nook that I used for four years while I was studying, it was here that I turned up the radio, sang along loudly and composed the essay’s that set me on fire with their ideas and the expression of those ideas onto the page. I am surrounded by images that I used to collect from galleries, book stores and from the university. They are tacked to my wall like post it notes reminding me of what is, was important to me in my life. Unfortunately they have been stuck in a time warp for the last 2 years and the reminders are stale. My used PC sits on the corner vying for my attention, which I am no longer willing to give. I realize that it all needs an overhaul, I need to gut it and start again. I need new reminders, I need space, and I need fresh energy. Today is the first day in 2 years that I have come here and written something, the fire and passion that used to course through my head and into my fingers has disappeared, as soon as I sat down, I felt tired. I thought it just needed a tidy up but my body tells me it time for everything to go.

Maybe Baby

I finished Joan Didon’s wonderful memoir last night, tears rolled down my cheeks and dammed in the crook beneath my chin for the entire last chapter. Her writing is so lyrical, yet her disorientation is spoken so clearly. Her sadness leaden but she does not cave to pure sentimental recall of her 40 year marriage, not that I would have minded that. I thought about my own short marriage in comparison, but a decade is a decade and living even a year without Greg seems unimaginable. She speaks particularly about the rituals built up in a marriage that don’t die with the partner, that same urge to deliver news about the most mundane things, consult about dinner plans, that first embrace when you get into bed. I once heard that marriage provides the only true witness to your life and the importance of it, with the loss of one partner does the other’s life diminish also. Didon speaks of feeling invisible after her husband died, perhaps because her witness was no longer there.

I have to admit I was glad to finish it, her writing transported me into her ‘mudgy’ as she calls it head, and I was too often confronted with questions of what I would do with the same loss. The true nature of grief seems a process of accepting the death of someone you love and then noticing moment by moment their absence within them.

My mind has not only been occupied with death but birth, Greg and I have decided to start a family and have been ‘trying’ to have a baby. After years of ‘trying’ not to have a baby, this reversal is strange and largely out of my control. The waiting game between periods is excruciating, the information on ovulation and conception conflicting, the guessing and gauging obsessive (as in, am I feeling a little nauseous or did I just eat too much). We have just started so I am sure after a few months of ‘trying’ I will find a rhythm with it, and hopefully not lose my mind in the process, when did I become such a control freak! It’s a huge transition that we take so for granted. One day your you and your husband and the next your you, a little creature inside of you and your husband (keep in mind having a little creature inside of you is the subject of quite scary sci fi films). Then your you, your husband and a new little person who is half you and half him (again quite a scary subject of sci fi films). Mary Kelly is a artist who has constructed a work about the over night (literally) transition of being a women, wife and daughter to being a mother and being expected to respond to that naturally. I find it funny that we make such a big deal out of home loans, new jobs, moving states and yet are expected to take so lightly the conception of a child.

It’s the uncertainty which has me off balance, having to live life ‘normally’ even though at any given moment, my whole way of life will change. As I run my fingers over the gold embossed quote on the back of Didon’s book, I notice it is unsettlingly true even though it refers to death and not life, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end.” (Joan Didon), I guess at the end of the day it’s a fine line.

It's Just A Moment

I am day at 14 of my 21 days of writing, two thirds over the hump and for the first time, I feel reluctant to write, honestly reluctant to do anything. I am like a electrical plug sitting only half way into the socket, some of the power is going through but there is a general sense of uncertainty about everything I do. I woke this morning to a horrible anxiety dream, of rushing to get to an appointment while looking for part of my outfit and putting it on to find it is too tight and uncomfortable. The rest of the day has been spent climbing out of this dream, but being wound back into it against my will. I feel drenched in tiredness, heavy and leaden as if my limbs have been soaking in water. My throat is stuck and still like before you drop off to sleep in the car, and my actions have been like that jerking awake when the car trips over a pot hole.

My eight minutes are up, and I am ready to pack up and have a snooze, I am going to Yoga tonight and know I will have to drag myself there but will feel amazing when I am done. This is a special class, developed by a teacher who has a dancing background, it has a grace and sense of fluidity which is wonderful. The classes are held in a warehouse high above Chippendale with polished floors boards and long windows that look onto the city.

I am listening to U2 and in their eternal words ‘it’s just a moment, its time will pass’, I plan to restore the power tomorrow and write with more energy and intent

Showering in Nature

Greg is chatting on the phone and I am finding it hard to concentrate, my stomach is very full and the taste of Chinese is lingering in my throat. We are unpacked and about to jump into showers and complete the rituals of a weekend away. I feel totally relaxed, we have basked in the last rays of summer, perfect blue sky days and nippy nights which make the bed inviting.

My favourite moment today was a long mid morning shower in the open air bathroom, the gushing of water blending with the chatting of birds, particularly one Rosella who watched us all morning. Playful rainbows jumped around me as the sun cut through the drops, enfolded in the warm water and the fresh smell of soap as I looked up into the paper bark gums and clear blue sky. I felt grounded and totally in the moment, alive yet calm. It really captured for me a grace that I want to invite into my life everyday, a harmony I want to breathe in during chaotic moments, and an energy that I want to draw up from the earth.

Riding My Own Bike

My limbs are sleepy and my eyes softly gritty after an hour-long massage. I have snoozed and slowly had the stress pulped out of me like squeezing the final bit of toothpaste out of the tube. I have crawled languidly up to the Gunyah, the cavernous restaurant attached to the Paperbark Camp. Two of the three sides of the deep room open onto a verandah, where I can see the upper-mid section of the trees, if I were starring at a women I would be looking as her breasts and starring down at her toes but completely missing her face. There is a light breeze and the slapping of the leaves sounds like soft rain. Delicious stray wisps lick my arms and the back of my neck. The sun is strongly dappling through the trees and an empty room seems full because of their presence.

We arrived late last night impressed by what was lit up before we stumbled to our tent in total darkness, we slept a lovely sleep blanketed by fresh air, and surrounding by the low key sipping and buzzing of night creatures, cut by the occasional hoot of an owl. Unfortunately, we woke to the buzzing of our alarm that I had absent-mindedly packed still set for 6.30am. Confused I was convinced the tent had some sort of in built alarm system, which I drunkenly grabbed for, before realizing the buzzing was of my own doing. After a dose, we enjoyed a long breakfast and lingered over the paper.

I am convinced that when we ask the universe for something it does nothing else but bend to our will. I had half heartedly promised to look over the book and come up with a new direction and the paper this morning seemed have endless stories about art, and art shows. I suppose this happens every weekend but still, it felt like a hand written and delivered message. And just like that, I have come to a decision about what I am going to do. I want to write the book from live experience from going to galleries and talking to people, rather than from research. I want the book to have a moving energy that brings my romance with art alive and hopefully makes everyone who reads it swoon too. Having said that I have decided to see Andy Warhol in Brisbane in a few weeks to get the ball rolling along.

With a few hours to kill we set of on bikes to Huskiisson, I haven’t ridden a bike for at least 10 years, but hey it was just like riding a bike. I felt like I was living the simple country life riding to lunch, parking my bike and then riding off afterward. My riding style is quite alarming and once I started to really notice it, I understood some things about my life. For example when I get a downhill stretch, I put the breaks on. So when life is giving me some momentum and help in reaching my destination, I activate the break pads. When I have to share the road with a car, I freeze up and stop pedaling pasting myself to the side of the road. When bigger more threatening forces approach the road I am happily pedaling down, suddenly I just stop having taken away my own right to be on the road. I do not take risks, I do not ride with one hand and I rarely look around to take it all in.

Knowing that this is not what I want anymore, my ride back was very different to the ride there. I sped down little hills, I let go of the handlebars occasionally, I kept madly pedaling whenever a car approached and asserted my place on the road. I even raced Greg to the finish line. This is how I want to live, I am not going to be jumping ramps or riding standing on my handlebars, but I am not eighty I need to be in the race to win and on the road to ride.

De-Numbing

I am downloading the Weeds album from i-Tunes, it is part of the birthday extravaganza that I have planned for Greg, which includes a weekend away at a luxury eco-tourism resort, a beautiful Abelard business shirt, a pair of black cuff links and the afore mentioned album. I always like to pile it on for birthdays, due to Greg’s inability to take unless he is offered exactly what he wants, I expect most of it will be returned, except the weekend and the album. I have learnt by now to always pick a few things he can’t take back just to teach him humility. As a result of the Internet connection I am sitting at the door way, like a little guard. How I have changed, no more rain dances or having to clean my room or do the chores or waiting for the right moment, writing has become like everything else, just doing and no drama. I had a mental health day today, work has been numbing lately and I needed a day to wander. I went into the city to do chores but I decided on the bus ride in that I was just going to be OK and relax into everything today, it’s amazing what just making that decision can do for you. I went to my usual haunt the book store where I poked around for a couple of hours, building up stacks of books next to me as I decided what to buy.

As I have started writing a book about engaging with modern art, I had a look at the art history section. After a pile of about six books, I decided on Mathew Collings ‘This is Modern Art’. He seemed to be writing in something of a no bullshit and confront the questions style about art, since I am going to be doing the same, I thought I better check it out. The first chapter enticingly called, ‘Kicking Arse’ has me lost and I realize I am reading the writing of someone who is cool and knows all the cool hang outs and terms, I see a ray of hope for my book, which is Mathew Collings meets Elizabeth Gilbert, not that I am keen to have my writing held up against either. The first chapter that I wrote of my book was brilliant it related to a real human being finding her way through the art world but she seems to have disappeared in the most recent chapter, afraid that her voice was not good enough, a strange objective and distant voice has taken over, I am going to think about it all on the weekend and rewrite it. I keep randomly fighting off the thought of whether I actually have any talent, and have to keep telling myself that is not my problem right now, the only pressing concern I have is to write, and write I must.

Off now to tie up all the lose ends before escaping, I hope the weekend can get the circulation of my life running again. I feel like I have been on a train this week expecting that every time it stopped was my stop and realizing it's not, strange week. Met up with my friend Berti who I haven’t seen for nearly 3 years she has been working on the cruise ships as a shopping guide, which sounded like a completely parallel universe, where the average age as Berti says it is deceased and the main focus is to get the oldies to spend as much money as possible. It was funny to hear Berti using terms like seafarers and going out to sea and coming into land. It was great to see her, Berti is like a favourite black dress that always look elegant yet sexy and makes you feel fantastic, she going off to Italy soon, to be - believe it not with a man called Fabio.

Erotica For Writers

I have been reading erotica for writers, Julia Cameron’s Right to Write. I find at the end of every chapter and sometimes even before, I am dying to get to the page to lay out my life and heart like she has, to invite people into my room like I have just been transported into hers. Interestingly today’s topic is about mood, most pointedly about not being in the mood to write. My mood had waxed and waned through the hours of the day and had settled into a most disagreeable slump. I was at a sales course by an American who dressed like a mid western preacher and spoke with the same fever. Normally I would be embracing this kind of action, building myself up to go forth recreate, sell and be better. But my heart was heavy today I felt like I was looking at someone exercising, knowing that's what I should be doing but still not wanting to. I came home swelling with a dark mood, my head felt like it had a snowy TV channel in it, and life felt like I wearing something tight and itchy. Raging I dared the world to annoy me more just so I could give it a what for.

Luckily my friend Suzannah called, I answered the phone ‘hello beautiful’ and my mood melted, just like that. Her tired voice reflected my own dilapidated state and she told me she was just too tired to do a coaching call about my writing. I had asked her about a week ago whether she would coach me through the up’s and down’s I was sure to face and just tell me to keep going. She reluctantly agreed. Her call tonight was to postpone, then she just told me the truth that she was tired, too tired to be profound and almighty and lead me to the path of enlightenment when she barely felt she was on track. We talked it out and agreed to light each other’s way and relaxed. She checked in on my 21 days of writing, on our last call she had set me the task of writing for the next 21 days consecutively for at least 8 minutes. I told her it was going well. It’s actually been going incredibly well, for whatever reason just having the clarity of instruction to write for 8 minutes and with no censor has been very freeing, I am at day 10 and writing everyday is becoming like a comfortable soft T-shirt that I slip on when I get home.

I am sitting curved into the pillows on my bed, the sky outside is a smoky blue as the sun packs up for the day, the breeze of the fan brushes the soles of my feet every few seconds as it turns, David Gray is lilting softly in the back ground, beseeching me to sail away with him. The swelling has gone down and I feel soft, my head is supple and clear, and my mood is quietly sedated.

Bollywood Dreaming

Although it's only been four weeks since I have been back, my recent trip to India seems like a life time ago. The last time I went to India I kept a blog of mostly my shock and misery with some lovely photo's peppered in between. When I told people I was going back for another month long holiday; Why? was the most common question.

Sadly I never finished my Bollywood Dreaming blog and people may not have understood what a profound effect travelling for the first time and returning to the place of my birth had on me. I hated India with a passion it was like being permanently stuck in the twilight zone, contradiction abounded and Indians I discovered only know black and white. I also discovered that I was very Indian in this sense, over the last four years of studying and working I had become brittle and hard, the slightest wind threatened to snap me. All I know is I left the first time swearing never to return and almost as soon as the plane landed I suddenly just wanted to go back.

On this recent trip despite a lot of advances I found this strict adherence to black and white was still ever present, having lunch at a 5 star hotel in Varanasi we saw that they had both a chicken and cheese sandwich on the menu, when we naively asked if we could have both the cheese and the chicken in one sandwich we were swiftly told it was not possible, when we questioned why the waiter just repeated no. I don't know how a country that can't mix cheese and chicken is going to be a super power, but go figures.

What had changed was me, almost gone was brittle Tanya that folded in the face of trouble and instead I was more a supple read flowing with the wind and not against it.

The Taj Mahal really is as beautiful as people say it is..

Just The Three Of Us

This blog is generally coming in three's, there are three under the tree and there are three main reasons why I have started a blog

It is one the chronicle of the writing life that I am making day to day, my climb higher up through the creative branches with its grand views and also it's a record of the sudden slips and the scraping falls that is pursuing what you love in the midst of terrible fear...

It is two the chronicle of my real life, of corralling the strength to move house, to grow a veggie garden, of becoming and being a wife and preparing myself for a baby that is floating somewhere in the air waiting for the right time to come...

It is three a chronicle of my inner life, of whirling as Saturn returns and leads up to my 30th birthday, a sorting out of priorities, a drawing of boundaries and generally being a bit kick ass about the life that I want, the way I want to live and how I want to be treated....