Category Archives: thinking

Blooming Jacarandas

Jacaranda season 

My passport expired last year after ten years of representing the possibility of travel rather than facilitating any actual travel. It has been retired without a single visa or stamp in it. I sit on the domestic commuter train instead, endlessly shuttling backwards and forwards between my work cubicle and sleeping compartment. I stare out the window, too worn-out to read, too numb to hear the music in my expensive headphones. I watch the backyards, queues of cars, the smooth even walls of on-ramps and bypasses slide by. I no longer notice the grounds of the prison, unless the kangaroos that live there are mugging for portraits as the train passes. But this month the Jacarandas are in bloom and every familiar sight is rewritten with lavender punctuation and a sweet soft scent. Jacaranda trees are like me – introduced long enough ago that most assume we’ve always been here. My Nan was born in Toowoomba, but her Ma came from ‘the old country’. Jacarandas (from South America) are officially a pest here now, squeezing out the native trees. An analogy still too close to the bone to bear and a wound salted by the fact that the trees continue and grow as heavily promoted tourist attractions for the locations ‘lucky’ enough to already host them.
I walk the dog and listen for the heavy, trumpet – shaped bloombells to land on the carpet they make. Purple droplets. There are rituals and myths about good luck in exams at those unis and schools with trees in the grounds. The colour is amazing this year – the drought makes the trees desperate to seed and seed needs bees and bees, well bees are where the magic happens aren’t they?
The rest of the year the trees are anonymous in the city. Green among the many greens we take for granted but for this one wonderful month these jacaranda trees invade our senses and give any cherry blossom a hard run for title of most beautiful.
I used to envy the Japanese their Hanami season – picnicking under cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms are a perfect symbol for so much of Japanese culture. Haiku poetry, zen embrace of the now, a reverence for natural beauty, a deep understanding that striving for perfection is misguided. Ah – Cherry blossoms hanging on bare boughs, scenting warm air, and driving spring’s lusts back into our blood. All so very elegant, exuberant, sensual and ephemeral.

Here are our own zen muses. Jacarandas in bloom interrupt routines and demand enjoyment. They invite you to find a blanket and some food and drink and relax, staring at the glory of the sky through an impossible colour.  I’d rather they weren’t an import but life is no longer a game of perfect, it must be dealt with in the reality of here and now not just what could or should be. A blooming Jacaranda now is worth any number of Cherry blossoms that never seen. No passport required.

Can’t find the stories for the books

Too much of a good thing?

Too much of a good thing?

Writing has stalled.
Bogged.
Lost in the wilderness.

The discipline is there, time in the saddle, words down each day but the fire in the line is missing. How to fix?

I got up from my desk, very slowly and very carefully so as not to disturb the references on my right, the notes and journals on the left, the correspondence behind me, the ideas and clippings behind me to the left, the recently read and waiting for review, the to-read, the not-sure pile and then finally the dog who had curled up on the stepping space. They used to be a path to the door but it had shrunk when I cleared some of the books out of the kitchen. The stovetop and the bathroom were the only places in the three bedroom house free of book piles due only to the unrelenting truth that fire and water remain the mortal enemies of paper.

I made a cuppa and sat on the back stairs as the couch was covered in magazines and papers and the dining table was hosting a long-term craft convention, complete with comparative pattern books and technique tomes. The dog sat in the sun in the yard and looked at me. I sipped and thought. Perhaps sometimes too much of a good thing is simply too much.
“Something has to go.” I said to the dog.
“Better not be me.” he replied and wandered off to sniff at some grass and see if the crows had dropped anything interesting from their headquarters.

I sipped on, realising that my bibliophilia had reached an unexpected crisis point. My hoards of books were suffocating the stories trying to come to life. It wasn’t just books stashed and crammed into the house until there was no room left for my heart to break but they were the most symbolic, they would be the hardest to release. Each one was a promise, a kiss, a call, and a friend. I believed in some deep and sad way that I would be irrevocably diminished in some ineffable but vital way without every single one of them and yet something really had to give and it had better not be me.

Trust in the process

Learning something just doesn’t work unless there’s a moment of surrender and I make or let myself say “I don’t know”. When I was a child I didn’t have this challenge. I expected that I didn’t know lots of things but as an adult, I am attached to the idea that I already know things, that I’m already good at some things.

Learning just feels like a lot of failures and plenty of frustrations and errors. That doesn’t feel great. “I don’t know” is a vulnerable place to be in our world of specialists and competition. I can see the value in it too. It is my ego that stops me from admitting I don’t know. My ego holds me back from the chance of learning!

When I reach the surrender of “I don’t know” then I know I am actually ready to learn. From that point, I am truly starting fresh. Then I just have to trust in the process and let the ‘failures’ and frustrations show me the way from there.