Thriving in the Wilderness

I have always been fascinated by the art of survival without electricity, shops, buildings, or any of our modern-day comforts.  I'm not sure why.  Perhaps this harks back to happy childhood memories of being in the New Zealand mountains for weeks or months at a time with no power or plumbing or nearby supply centre, and regularly tramping in the bush for days on end in all weathers and terrains while my father did his fieldwork, cooking on open fires with a billy, sleeping under the stars.  My brother became a passionate speliologist (caver) and would disappear underground for days or weeks underground, exploring new cavern systems.  My mother would join my father on his field trips even when we were babies, washing nappies in the creek and then hanging them out to dry on a rope attached to the tent, and dangle my brother by a backpack over a high waterfall to keep him occupied for hours when he was about one year old. Meanwhile, I have become an indoor writer with an indoor job in a country that is so overpopulated it is almost impossible to be alone, anywhere.

When Life Takes Over

 I was struck by something recently, when talking to a colleague at work.  She was discouraged and demoralised by her job, and due to management decisions far beyond her control had ended up in a position where she could not leave her job despite it becoming untenable in almost every way.  Extremely demanding but not highly paid work, it did at least cover the mortgage, but was now creating far more stress than being able to pay the mortgage was relieving.

She was not the only one put in this position, with no end in sight and seemingly no way out.  But as I listened to her, a person usually cheerful and reluctant to complain, I couldn't help consider her deteriorating physical and mental state and wonder at what point Life would take over and dictate its own path out of the mess.

Curiouser and curiouser

Curiosity.

This is a quality that humans possess to a greater or lesser degree.  I seem to possess it to a greater degree.  I'm increasingly glad about that as I age.  Curiosity was fostered in me as a child, and is something which is easily overlooked in 'personal qualities which we value most'.

Sinking

We all have different tolerance levels to stress.  We also all have different triggers.  What sets off one person will pass another by like a cloud across the sky. 

My particular triggers are always to do with emotion.  So, this past week has been particularly hard for me.  Things happened at work, people got upset, I found myself in the middle of it all, and when my feelings are churning around inside me I find my eating and sleeping and concentration are altered too, and consequently my ability to continue to deal effectively with whatever the situation demands.   If it drags on for days or even weeks, the stress can become unmanageable.

Books with a Difference #4: Circuses

Both these books are about circuses.  I am not a huge fan of circuses, but they can certainly lend an air of the whimsical and outlandish to a story that wants to be a bit different.  Which is precisely what is achieved in these two interesting books.

Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

This book was discovered by my New Zealand friend, who gave it to me for Christmas one year, knowing full well what I would think of it.  She was right.  I loved it. However, I do feel this is a book you will either love or hate.  Rather like marmite.

The Sun is Inside You

How quickly I forget the summer.  We are officially only halfway through it, but the last weeks have been filled with intermittent rain and grey cloud, and the last three days have seen persistent heavy showers with leaden skies and frigid temperatures.  Only in the UK.

But what amazes me is how, when the sun is out, and the days balmy and evenings light and long, I always think to myself, 'Well, this will keep me going for weeks, for months, for the whole of winter.'  And it never does.  It usually keeps me going for about three days.

Like retreats, or spiritual breakthroughs.  How liberated and light I feel, how convinced that this change wrought in me will last forever, how impossible to forget what I have seen or felt or experienced.  Give or take a few days of continual stress at work, conflict with someone, or perhaps a bad cold or stomach bug, and you feel you are back at square one.

The Amazing Ancient Concept of Wu Wei

Perfectionism, which by its very nature includes 'striving', used to be the bane of my life.  I'm not sure why this trait developed in me, but I know that it grew and hardened in me as a result of the school I attended, where expectations of outstanding levels of achievement in every area were the norm.  It coloured every aspect of my life, from the orderly state of my bedroom to my long hours of self-prompted practice on violin and piano until I was note-perfect, not withstanding moments where I would bash the keys in frustration or throw the violin down (on the bed, fortunately).  I was hugely self-critical, much more than I was critical of others, but, as is the case with perfectionists, also hugely dissatisfied with life.  My stories, which to begin with I wrote with great pleasure and abandon from about age seven onwards, became increasingly straight-jacketed by my own expectations of an impeccable finished product.  By the time I was thirteen, I let nobody read my work.  By the time I was fifteen, I had a dozen edits of my latest novel, none completed, each tighter and less able to breathe than the last.  Yes, I ended up with good prose.  I also ended up with dead stories.

The Middle Way

  

We live in a culture that has a real problem with walking the 'middle way'.

A culture that celebrates extreme fashion, extreme behaviour, black-and-white viewpoints and strong opinions - preferably controversial ones.   A culture that hero-worships people who are impossible to live with but by gum, they make great television, radio, and best-selling biographies, which coincidentally also means they rake in the money. A culture that belittles and disregards those who choose not to share what they think, or - God forbid - admit they don't actually have an opinion, the 'fence-sitters' of politics and current events. 

Paradise Found

 

I have just returned from a very special week in France, at my first-ever writers' retreat.

It was a week filled with poetry and prose, interesting conversations with like-minded people, and the kind of atmosphere that is so conducive to being creative.  The setting consisted of everything I love most: creaking verandas overgrown with wild lavender and jasmine; secluded gardens with comfy cushions under rattling aspen trees; a wild mountain stream with a deep pool in which we could swim and paddle; tangled woods; forest-clad mountains; donkeys and chickens and nightjars and thrumming bees - and even a small grass snake. It reminded me of my old paradise, Cobb Valley (A Piece of Heaven), with its sun-baked earth and wild unravelling edges, and the ever-present rumble of the distant waterfall. 

When the Old Life Haunts the New: Poem

What shall I do?

When  I pick up the broom    

            he leaves the room.

When I fuss with kindling he

            runs for the yard.

Then he's back, and we

            hug for a long time.

In his low-to-the-ground chest

            I can hear his heart slowing down.

Viruses (not the electronic sort): Poem

This was me, the last week:

'Viruses are my sister's children

who have come to stay at my place

for the weekend.

They try to get into the cupboards.

They draw with thick crayons

on the back of my throat.

Books with a Difference #3: Cultures

The Paper House, by Carlos Maria Dominguez

This intriguing novella tells a story within a story, of a booklover slowly driven made by his passion, gradually overwhelmed by his 20,000 volumes, and what he did next (no spoiler alert here). 

Books With a Difference #2: Islands

Okay, so here are another couple of books I've read that I think worth mentioning.

The first is The Girl with Glass Feet, by Ali Shaw (winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize)

This has to be one of my favourite books.  Possibly not to everyone's taste, it is a unique blend of magic realism, love story, and painful human relationships which evolve, and then dissolve. 

Books with a Difference #1: Childhood

 

I've decided, from time to time, to review a few books I have read which have made an impression on me for one reason or another.  Many of them have themes that resonate with my own stories; some of them are just plain curiosities.  Usually they will be fiction; occasionally non-fiction.  If you have also read them, or they remind you of something you have read that is similar, or similarly 'different', please comment and let me know.  I'm always looking for more good books! 

I Am the Song: Poem

 

I am the song that sings the bird.

I am the leaf that grows the land.

I am the tide that moves the moon.

I am the stream that halts the sand.

I am the cloud that drives the storm.

I am the earth that lights the sun.

I am the fire that strikes the stone.

I am the clay that shapes the hand.

I am the word that speaks the man.

Charles Causley

There's Something About Trees

 

Trees.

There is just something about trees.

It is no coincidence that most of the stories I have written in my collection The Wishing Tree and Other Dreams features trees in one way or another.  I would have liked to feature a tree as the central character or plot point in every story in this collection, or hidden them as secret symbols, rather like in Where's Wally or The Da Vinci Code, but stories have a way of writing themselves and sometimes they insisted they simply did not have room for a tree.  So that was that.

So, what is it about trees that is so beguiling?

The Collector: Memoir

My maternal grandfather flew from Britain to New Zealand when I was eleven, and never got off the plane, thanks to a heart attack.  My grandmother was waiting to greet him in Arrivals, little knowing she would never speak with him again.

Beyond the Unimaginable: the Seadragon and the Seahorse

Surely there is no other creature as outlandish and wildly imagined as the sea dragon or the sea horse.  I simply had to find a way to put one or both into a story, and eventually they made their way into 'The Sea Urchin', an unsettling tale about a waif child born of the sea who lures a boy into her watery world, never to be seen again.  The sea dragon and the sea horse barely feature, but I liked to imagine them anyway; they fit well into this tale of weird and wonderful creations that surely must have been imagined by a Universe on acid.  Think about it for a minute.  Sea anemones, jellyfish, angler fish, sea horses....they are all so alien, so otherworldly; barely conceivable.

Unromantic Romance

You may have noticed how none of my stories are about romance. Given that many of my readers are probably young adults, this may come as a disappointment to some of you. The truth is, romance has never interested me. Not reading about it, not searching for it, and definitely not writing about it.  I realise I am probably an anomaly in this day and age.

The Art of Wabi-sabi

 

'The question is not what you look at, but what you see.'  Henry David Thoreau

So, what is wabi-sabi?

'Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.

Seeing Eye to Eye

    

When I was in my late teens, my mother informed me that she had gone to see a fortune teller, a man who lay on a bed amidst plumes of cigarette smoke and didn't look at her once.  He told her that she had two children; that her son would have two boys and that her daughter would travel. 

     Now, I have never held much store by foretellers of the future, but I have thought of this a few times over the years, especially given that I constantly dreamed of travelling as a child, and yearned to know what was beyond the furthest hills I could see from the valley where I lived.  And then my brother had two boys.....

 

'To travel is to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye.'   Thomas Cook, from the 19th century.

On the Beauty of Brokenness

　

"In Japan there is a kind of reverence for the art of mending. In the context of the tea ceremony there is no such thing as failure or success in the way we are accustomed to using those words. A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to "to patch with gold". Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it "good as new."

The Dream Weaver: Memoir

I started keeping a dream journal, fully illustrated, when I was seven. It was on very poor quality brown paper in a floppy wide notebook, and I still have it. I probably began this tradition after hearing my parents say for the umpteenth time, 'you should write them down!' as I related my dreams in tedious detail morning after morning.

A Piece of Heaven: Memoir

Cobb Valley, New Zealand. My inspiration, my heaven on earth, the safe place of my soul. Every child should have such a place.

Are we not Wise Enough?: Poem

I had a dream that all of time was running dry

and life was like a comet falling from the sky,

I woke so frightened in the dawning, oh so clear

How precious is the time we have here.

On Being Kind

'Being Kind to Ourselves.'

It sounds so trite, and so self-indulgent. But the truth is, even the Dalai Lama has spoken and written extensively about the need for compassion towards ourselves first and foremost. Until we are kind to ourselves, we will not be able to sustain being kind to anyone else.

Why is this so hard?