Category Archives: memory

Coming home

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An old upright piano sits in the park, near the public toilets. It is wooden, painted white, and a bit dishevelled. I sit at it and open the lid. The keys are discoloured, some of them chipped. 

I play. 

I play a little piece I’ve made up over many years. I don’t even remember when I started playing it. Maybe in high school. It’s very simple. Based on a single chord in the left hand, and the notes of that scale in the right hand. It’s different each time I play it, and that’s the point. This is the piece I play when I really just want to play. This kind of playing, where I’m just making it up as I go along, takes me to some other place. The whole of me becomes this music, this play. 

It is a relief to become something else for a time, and a joy. 

I’m in Sydney Park. A place I must have walked a thousand times when I lived nearby some years ago. I’d been wandering around the park before I found the piano. Noticing what had changed, noticing what was the same. 

I haven’t lived near here now for years. I’ve lived in another state for nearly three years. I’m visiting Sydney with a man—a little adventure we’re having together. He’s somewhere else in the park now, writing. Later we will walk down King Street and Enmore Road, my arm looped through his, and we will talk about how important this part of Sydney—the park, Newtown, the Inner West—is to me, to my story. To who I am and who I’m becoming. We’ll talk about what home is, what coming home means—a conversation we’ve been having on and off for quite some time. 

By the time I find myself sitting at a piano in Sydney Park, I’ve been home from my travels overseas for a few weeks. I’ve been confused and a bit lost for most of that time. More than a week of the fog of jet lag, not being sure where I was in time, wanting to eat at strange hours, sleep when I should be awake. Actually, just wanting to eat and sleep pretty much all the time. 

But the confusion is more than just jet lag. 

Home is strange to me. That feeling when you get back from being away, where the house looks different in some way you can’t put your finger on, that has lingered.

It’s something to do with time, and something to do with change. Time has passed for me and time has passed for my home, and things have changed, but it’s happened separately. I have an ongoing feeling of needing to catch up, and of needing to catch others up, but not having the words with which to do that. 

The beginning of this year was incredibly difficult for me, in ways I’m not ready to talk about publicly. My mental health took a pretty heavy beating. I’m okay, mostly, but I’m changed. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I’m changing. 

The overseas travel was difficult for me. I was fragile when I left Australia, and frightened. 

The trip helped me find myself, in the way that travel often does. I found my courage again, my capacity to make decisions and deal with uncertainty and unfamiliarity. But it also helped me lose myself. Things that were really important to me no longer seem quite so vital. I’ve changed my mind about some things I thought were more solid. A lot of this is good, of course, but there’s a certain quiet kind of grief involved in letting go of parts of oneself. Saying goodbye. 

And so coming home is strange. I’ve come face to face with an old version of myself, a person I sort of still am but also am not. It will take me some time to make something of the threads between these different versions of myself. 

In Sydney Park at the piano, I play as people and their dogs walk past. I’m not much of a fan of performing; but I’m not feeling self-conscious about playing in front of people like this, which is new for me. 

Some of the piano keys don’t work, and there are pauses in the piece where I don’t intend there to be. Many of the keys are slightly off in their tuning. The sustaining pedal doesn’t work. The piece I play sounds both the same and different to any other time I’ve ever played it, on this different piano. The keys feel different under my fingertips, the piano stool different under my sit bones. 

The sameness, though, is me. The threads of me that link all these different selves. The memory that’s in my fingers as they play, in my body as it sways with the rhythm of the piece. The part of me that was always at home.

Cycles

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The compost bucket is heavy in my arms. It is so full that the lid won’t stay on properly and through the gaps wafts a smell that means I can’t possibly ignore the fact that what I eat is something that was once alive: the smell of rotting, mould and decay. Of something that was once alive but is no longer. I walk quickly, and the liquid in the bucket sloshes around. I make a mental note to be aware of this when I empty the bucket into the bigger outside bin in a moment, lest there be any stinky splashing. 

The compost bin lives about halfway down our backyard, near the shed. To get there, I leave the house by the deck doors, peer around the side of the bucket to make sure I don’t trip down the stairs, and then make my way across the patchy grass, hoping there are no bindis popping up yet.

As smelly as the kitchen compost bucket is, it is the outside bin I find most confronting. It doesn’t smell, but it has bugs. Thousands of them. Once or twice I’ve also found mice out here. 

When I reach the bin, I put the bucket down and squint as I open the bin’s lid. The insects rush out at my face in a cloud, heading for my nostrils and squinting eyes. They take a few moments to clear, and I shake them away from my face. I empty the bucket, holding it firmly while I tap the bottom to dislodge the slimey bits of pumpkin from the bottom of its insides, trying to avoid dropping the bucket into the dark cavern of the bin. The pumpkin goop is thick and squelchy sounding and reluctant to leave the bucket, stretching and sliding around the bottom of the bucket instead of falling. But it does eventually fall and lands somewhere in the large bin with a satisfying muffled thud.

IMG_0434.JPGWhen the bucket is empty, I put the lid back on and skip back to the house, pleased to have completed the smelly chore. 

I am perhaps eight or nine in this memory. But it could also be cobbled together from any evening in my childhood. Empyting the compost bucket into the outside bin was a regular household chore throughout my entire childhood. 

There was a point sometime last year that I realised I was a bit obsessed with organic waste — and that maybe I always had been. The empyting of the kitchen compost bin into the outside bin, and all the sensory grossness of the task, looms large in my childhood memories.

IMG_0435.JPGI’m not sure now whether these experiences were unpleasant for me as a child, but I tend now to think of them as confronting but worthwhile. Lessons of a very visceral kind in how life works. Certainly they’re not unpleasant memories — just vivid. And they have not in any way made me want to avoid food scraps and food waste.

As an adult, I’ve initiated and emptied compost buckets on behalf of whole sharehouses, and I’ve acquired and become bizarrely fond of thousands of composting worms.* I’m not disgusted easily (except, perhaps, by bugs, but then maybe that makes sense too, given these memories) and my hands have touched and held much food that is very far from being at its best.

And now I find myself undertaking a major research project on food waste that will see me making things from food scraps (albeit before they’re too stinky or slimey) and making a radio feature about it. 

IMG_0436.JPGIt occurs to me know that when I started this blog years ago, I called it ‘avocado and lemon’ because those were two foods that I have always loved to eat together, and now two of the food scraps I’ll be making things from will be lemon and avocado detritus (the third food item is spent coffee grounds). It occurs to me too that the reason that I chose those particular food items is that they’re problematic in large amounts in the compost.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how life seems to move in circles?

*I called all the worms Barry, in case you were wondering. Known collectively as The Barries. I’m not sure why. Barry just seemed like a good name for such an immensely helpful critter.

Pausing

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20140728-195347-71627070.jpgIt’s been a long time since I wrote here. 

This afternoon, still heavy with the virus that’s pestered me for two and a half weeks now—never quite enough to make me rest completely, but never quite loosening its woolly grip on my brain—I sat in the backyard and watched the garden. I watched the garden that I’ve built these last three months from what was basically a patch of grass. The kale and broccoli are nearly knee-height now, the garlic not far behind. The various beans and peas have climbed up to hip height, and all the leafy greens are beginning to look less like seedlings. I’d just mown the grass and it smelled like a Sunday afternoon.

And it occurred to me all of a sudden that I’ve been here instead of doing any of the writing I usually do for myself. I’ve been building and digging and watching and hoping and imagining. I’ve been letting myself settle into this place, to the new house, to the new research, to what feels like a new stage of my life. 

20140728-195348-71628304.jpgIt fascinates me, the way that life moves on without me even realising and without me really being ready for the shift. Watching myself try to catch up is interesting too. It’s funny how I so often think that to catch up I have to walk faster, maybe even run. What I’m beginning to realise is that the best thing to do is exactly the opposite: slow down, maybe even stop.

I’ve ended up in a place I never really expected to be. Even though I’m not sure what it was that I expected instead. I’ve ended up in a place where my household bakes bread every weekend, where the neighbour shares his sourdough starter with us. Where other neighbours bring over bags of lemons and pieces of furniture and lace curtains.  Where after just three months in the house, I know the names of half the people on the street. I’ve ended up in a place where I’ve lost count of the different plant varieties I’ve put in the ground in the backyard, where I’m teaching and writing about yoga, where I’m researching a topic that I’ve realised in retrospect I’ve been inadvertently preparing for since the compost bins and septic tanks of my childhood. 

20140728-195349-71629295.jpgWhere I’m about to undertake a major creative project that’s not exactly writing. Something that’s more making and recording and a little bit performative. This, especially this, I never expected. 

To be perfectly honest, it’s all been a bit overwhelming. Success and failure each have their own set of challenges, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two, especially if I’m trying to run in all the different directions to keep up with it all. 

So here I am, I thought to myself in the garden this afternoon. Just breathing. Just watching the sun go down. Just feeling grateful.

And it’s been a long time since I simply sat here.

Wandering, place and muscle memory

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20140417-214025.jpgWe are walking down streets we don’t know, ambling, listening, looking, taking it in, and talking, always talking. The sun is out and I have to take off my cardigan as I warm up from the walk, but then put it back on again as the sun disappears behind a cloud.

There is a tiny homemade market in a little park, the stalls set out on picnic blankets. There is a little old woman sitting on a park bench with her granny trolley, squinting at us. A string trio dancing around on a street corner, and further up the road a brass trio in an open arcade. A woman out the front of a men’s suit shop, spruiking its wares, referring to the plain suits as “staplers you have in the cupboard for years”.

The sun comes out again, disappears again; I remove my cardigan and put it on again.

We have been walking for more than an hour when we decide to catch the tram to get where we’re going on time. We catch it to the end of the line and start walking again, but abandon the journey about ten minutes in, realising we’re not going to make it in time after all. The tram takes us back to the open arcade, and we wander through a market, where a sign tells us that, yes, in case we were wondering, one of the stalls sells organic chia. A man talks in short bursts into a fuzzy microphone about the vegetables he’s selling. A few doors down there is a gourmet grocer and deli, and further down still, a bakery where we eat tidbits off pretty little plates before we begin walking again.

Back in the quiet streets, we take several wrong turns, some on purpose, to explore, others by accident. We walk down cobbled back alleys and peer into gardens. We listen to the breeze through the trees, and get acquainted with neighbourhood cats.

We are looking at houses, but, in doing so, also exploring a possible new stomping ground, a possible new life. Walking streets that we might later frequent, guessing (probably incorrectly) at short cuts we might take. We walk steadily for three hours.

Life is strange in transition; the softer autumn light and cooler air seem apt. And the walking, the slow, continued movement, the tiring feet and legs—these things help a sense of the place settle in a little, become somehow a muscle memory as well as a mental one.

Walking and talking: on bicycles, training wheels, motorbikes and change

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20140320-204423.jpgA little girl on her bike rides slowly around the park several times with her father walking by her side. Her bike is pink, it has training wheels that take turns in taking her weight as the bike wobbles from side to side, and pink shimmery streamers flowing from its handlebars. Her helmet, pink with blue flowers, is fastened firmly on her head.

“I think I’ve seen you riding on your motorbike to work,” she is telling her father. “With your helmet.”

I do not hear his reply from my spot lying on the grass with a book; they are too far away. But I hear more on their next round of the park, five or ten minutes later. 

“A motorbike isn’t exercise, is it?” she says. 

“No,” says her father. “The motor does all the work.”

And then they are gone again.

I wonder if they have been talking about motorbikes this whole time. Perhaps she has been asking him all sorts of detailed questions about his motorbike. Perhaps she will continue this fascination as she grows up. I imagine her as an adult, riding a motorbike. 

Watching them move slowly around the park, I remember the period when I first started school, when my Dad would walk me there from home each morning. I don’t remember our conversations, but I do remember how much I valued that time. I remember how I’d have to walk a few steps, then run a few to keep up with his pace. Just me and Dad, possibly talking about motorbikes. Or tractors. Or school. Or my favourite doll, Jessica.

I still walk and talk with my Dad sometimes. I do so with other members of my family too, and with good friends. There’s something in the walking. So many of those conversations I’ve had while walking, at least past the age of about ten, I still remember parts of; their significance somehow etched into my memory through their link to the physical act of walking. Perhaps too I’ve walked and talked when I’ve needed to talk things out—or when my walking companion has. The conversations so often have led to shifts in my thinking that have in some way shaped how I’ve moved forward with my life.

Things are changing in my life just now. Lots of things. In ways that are significant, though perhaps not big. I don’t know yet, really, because they’re still happening and I haven’t had a chance to reflect on how they fit into the greater pattern of my life. I need to take more walks. 

The little girl and her father do a few more slow rounds of the park, and then they leave. I can hear her still chattering, though I cannot hear her words. I imagine them returning to the park when she rides without the training wheels for the first time, wonder what their conversation will be. And I wonder how and if that walk will alter her life. Will it be one of many?

Conversations about bodies I wish I’d had with my grandmother

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Feet in sandI am sitting on the sand, hair in a sopping wet lump of a braid down my back, face tingling from the cold water and the thin veneer of salt that has lingered on my skin all week. The sand is warm. It is gritty between my toes. The sun too is warm on the bare skin of my upper back; I can feel it drying the swimming costume that covers my lower back. I am on holidays. I am, unsurprisingly, feeling rather content. 

Gazing towards the waves, I spot an old woman walking very carefully out of the shallows, on the arm of a middle-aged woman I assume is her daughter. The uneven surfaces and the small waves are difficult for the old woman. Perhaps she will not be able to come to the beach for much longer. 

I remember a conversation I had with my paternal grandmother years ago—I’m not sure how many, but long before she died—where she told me how much it saddened her when she realised she could no longer walk safely on the sand. When she had to give up on going to the beach. I think too of the many hours I spent on a beach as a child with her, the story—well known in our family—about the time as a young woman that my grandmother ran into the surf with her glasses on, such was her joy at being on the beach, only realising she’d done so when she came out of the water later, noticed she couldn’t see and realised she’d been able to when she went in. I think too of her feet. Of the olive skin and scrunched toes. Of her troubles with bunions. My grandmother’s feet in the sand. 

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about feet and knees for the blog of the yoga business I teach corporate yoga through. About how to look after them so they work well for longer. Remembering my grandmother’s feet, it doesn’t surprise me that she found that she lacked stability on the beach. But it saddens me. And the full meaning of that conversation with her all those years ago—although I must have guessed at the strength of her sadness at the time or perhaps I’d have forgotten the conversation—sits with me suddenly here on the beach. And I miss her. Immensely. 

I miss her because I am watching another old woman who may one day soon say something similar to her own granddaughter. And the old woman probably knows this now. I hope so much that the knowledge doesn’t mean she is frustrated or sad, I hope it means she is enjoying this time on the beach now. 

This is the difficulty of bodies. They break down, they slow down, they fall apart. They waste away. And when they do it’s painful, it’s confronting, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking. My own body has fallen apart in its own way at times. The most significant so far was in a big and lasting way, when I was just a teenager. I used to feel hardly done by about this—angry, resentful, ashamed even—but now I feel grateful. Yes. Grateful. Because this happens to everyone, in some way, eventually, and that it happened for me in my teens was shock enough at an age when I was old enough to be pushed into finding out more about this thing I get around in. Actually, this thing that is me, just as much as my mind is. 

On the beach, my own feet are covered in sand, stuck out in front of me here, off the towel. I am suddenly hugely grateful for them. I have my own issues with stability (baby-sized, perhaps, compared to so many elderly and not-so-elderly folk), and my earlier run-in with bodily dysfunction has left its mark, but even so, this body is incredible. The processes that happen under this skin, the things that keep me breathing and eating and moving around, really are amazing. 

I just wish I’d been able to talk about these things with my grandmother, that I’d known how to respond when she talked about the challenges of ageing. I wish this was a conversation more people knew how to engage in meaningfully and compassionately—about the challenges of having/being a body. Because not talking about these things means we feel isolated when things go wrong. I see it again and again in my yoga teaching work. Or perhaps I’m just projecting my own response to a lack of these kind of conversations. 

More than anything, in this moment in the sunshine on the beach, I miss my grandmother intensely and wish she could be sitting here with me on the sand now, water dripping from her hair and dribbling down her spine. Watching the waves come in.
~
The post on knees and feet I wrote can be read here.

Stories and objects: a lost bracelet

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Watch locketWe are talking about the frying pan I’m about to buy when the woman behind the counter notices my necklace, a locket.

That’s lovely, she says. Is there anything in it?

I open it to show her the watch inside. My parents gave it to me some years ago, I tell her.

Her face softens immediately. Oh, it’s lovely. I bet you love it. Gifts like that are special, aren’t they?

She begins to tell me about gifts, of jewellery in particular, her now deceased parents gave her. She is one of those women who have worked in a department store for twenty years or more: immaculate blonde hair, just a little too much foundation, long manicured fingernails, rings with big stones on at least two fingers on each hand, just the right amount of some age-appropriate fashionable perfume. As she talks, I notice suddenly how small she is—she comes up to my chest, at most.

She tells me the story of her falling on the way home from the train station one day and losing a beloved bracelet her parents had given her.

Half way through the story, just at the part where she injured herself falling over and walked the twenty minutes home only to discover the bracelet was gone, she starts laughing at herself failing the necessary steps to put my frying pan transaction through because she is distracted by her storytelling.

Hang on, let me put this through first, she says. I laugh too. We finish the transaction and fiddle about sticking receipts to boxes and deciding about whether I need a bag. I am about to leave when she remembers—

Wait, let me tell you the rest of my story. Please do, I say.

When she realised she had lost the bracelet—which she never usually wore to work, but this one day, of course—she called her Dad in tears. At this time her mother was in a nursing home, but her Dad still lived in their home. Her Dad listened and soothed her distress with all the appropriate words. The next day when she could walk okay again she went back to the spot she had fallen, but the bracelet, predictably, was gone.

Some time later, she went to visit her father at his home—I still get teary thinking about this now, she tells me—and at the end of her visit her father remembered suddenly, and disappeared to his bedroom. When he came back, he had a small jewellery bag. In it was a replacement bracelet. Not the same kind, nothing like it, she tells me—he probably wasn’t involved in buying the first one, even. But this one, this one was even more special than the first, and she would never wear it to work.

Oh, Dad, I say to her, touched.

I know, she says. I miss my Dad. He was the kind of man who’d be thinking about whose birthday was coming up in the next month or two, so he could be sure they’d have a gift. He loved giving gifts. She gazes out past my shoulder. But I should let you go, she says.

And I do go, but I thank her for sharing the story with me, feeling that what she shared was so much more than a story about a lost bracelet. What she showed me, a complete stranger, was grief. Not the kind we usually think of—sobbing, distressed, wild—but an everyday kind. The kind where a person is suddenly reminded of a hole that’s been left.

Walking back through the department store with my frying pan under my arm, on my way back to work, I am, for a few moments at least, a little less overwhelmed and irritated by department stores and shopping centres and crowded places where people seem to forget that other people are moving in those places too. Instead, I am aware, in a way that makes my skin tingle, of what it is that all these people might carry around with them that stops them from seeing other people, and I am reminded of this speech by David Foster Wallace about the world and people and changing our attitude to others. And this reminder, perhaps, more than the story itself, lovely though it was, is why I will remember that small blonde woman’s story, and the image I have of her elderly father holding out for her a small velvet bag containing a bracelet.

Traces of things from the past

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Ceiling from the floor In the mornings, I roll out of bed and onto the floor, where I breathe and move my body through a series of strange shapes and stand still and move again and sit and lie down and breathe. Some mornings my breath is difficult, sometimes my back or my hips or my neck and shoulders hurt. Most mornings my bedroom carpet smells like the dog who used to live in the house with the people who lived here before I did.

My room is small. Over time, I’ve worked out where I need to stand at the beginning of a sun salute so I don’t end up kicking my bedside table half way through the sequence, where on the floor I need to lie so I’ve room to let my legs drop to the floor on my right side and then my left for a lying twist. I’ve worked out these same things about how my body fits into the space in each of my bedrooms for the last eight years or so. In most of those houses, I’ve also practiced in various shared spaces: the lounge room, sometimes the kitchen. The feel of carpet, floor boards or kitchen tiles under hand and foot; the layer of dust that gathers under furniture; the way hip bones, knees, shoulder blades dig into and are bruised or not by various floor surfaces; the way light plays on the ceilings and light fittings — these are things I know about the houses in which I’ve lived, these are the ways I remember those places.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Buddhist concept of ‘samskaras’, or ‘traces of things from the past’. Which is probably another way of saying that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own past. I recently had an essay about the traces of places in memory and the concept of ‘home’ published on Tabula Rasa. I’ve often wondered about how much what we think of as home is really just about familiarity, or whether there are also places for individuals that feel genuinely more like home than others, regardless of how much time a person has spent in that place. How much of ‘home’ is inherent and how much is learned?

My thinking about samskaras and place and home has done strange things to time. I’ve not been entirely confident about where I am in the week, and often where exactly I am in the timeline of my life. It’s a sentiment I’ve repeated several times in the last year, and I wonder whether it’s the effect of making a change in my life like moving interstate, and everything that’s come with that. Moving back to a place I’ve lived before has perhaps amplified that weirdness in time. It’s pushed me to see again past versions of myself, and to try and integrate both past Sophies and present Sophie into some kind of coherent narrative of identity. It’s an odd process. Not entirely unpleasant, but definitely weird.

Another way of thinking about samskaras is to think of them as habits — in doing, thinking, responding — that have formed because of the stuff of life. Of course, periods of great trauma or stress or joy leave traces, but so too does the mundane, everyday stuff of our lives. So it makes sense that a period of transition or big change like moving interstate, where many or most of one’s everyday habits are shed, would have the potential to shine light on some of the other habits or traces.

The shake-up of everyday rhythms and habits might also explain why time is so strange for me right now. In her post on Claudia Hammond’s book, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, Maria Popova summarises Hammond’s theory about why a good holiday feels at the time like it’s flying by, but long when you look back on it later.

“…the Holiday Paradox has to do with the quality and concentration of new experiences, especially in contrast to familiar daily routines. During ordinary life, time appears to pass at a normal pace, and we use markers like the start of the workday, weekends, and bedtime to assess the rhythm of things. But once we go on vacation, the stimulation of new sights, sounds, and experiences injects a disproportionate amount of novelty that causes these two types of time to misalign. The result is a warped perception of time.”

Change, they say, is as good as a holiday. I wonder whether that’s because, like a holiday, change injects this novelty into life. It gives us an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. And if, as research suggests, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are so important to our wellbeing, then what a great opportunity this is.

Something I love about the concept of samskaras is that it’s entirely neutral. There is no judgement; the traces are just there. Whether or not a habit is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a judgment value we place on it after it’s noticed. The idea in noticing is to have some idea of what we’re carrying around with us, because those things inevitably affect the way we think and behave in the present. They affect who we are. Figuring out what in that luggage (or is it baggage?) is helpful and what isn’t is a tricky process though.

I remembered the other day that when I moved to Sydney from Melbourne all those years ago, I wrote about packing memories into boxes. (But I also wrote about packing ideas for the future into boxes… and then abandoning them. Clearly moving and packing was a powerful metaphor for me.) My life at that time was incredibly confusing. I’d been through a particularly heartbreaking breakup, immediately after which I’d decided to move interstate. This meant quitting my job, then having to find a new one; it meant meeting lots of new people and learning to live with a whole new set of people. I had to get to know a new city. I felt like I had to get to know myself again too.

It’s been useful for me to remember that time now and how confusing it was for me. Partly because this time around I’m not hurting anywhere near as much as I was then, and partly because it shows me that perhaps, for me at least, prolonged confusion is just part of the process of making big changes.

But now, instead of figuratively packing and unpacking boxes, I’m breathing and standing and folding forward and bending backwards and twisting and sitting and lying down and breathing. Having that thread, the yoga, has become, unexpectedly, a way of remembering what it’s like to take up space in the world I inhabit now as well as what it felt like to do so in times and places I’ve left behind. It’s a way of remembering what it felt like — in every sense of that phrase — to be me at those times, and of noticing what it feels like to be me now. It’s a way of feeling time and all the things it changes and all the things it doesn’t and to see that things just go on even if it’s not always easy or straightforward. It helps me see that at some point I’ll be looking back on this present, perhaps as I roll around on the floor in some new place, and be seeing the traces, the samskaras, left by what’s happening now.

Thoughts about the year that’s been

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As is so often the case at the end of the year, I find myself today mulling over things, thinking about the year that’s just about to close and the new one that will begin when the clock hits twelve tonight. For me, 2012 has been a really tough but ultimately rewarding year.

I’ve moved house twice (once interstate), taught yoga full time, finished a Masters degree, begun new friendships and built on existing ones, spent time with my family, spent time alone, had some essays published, worked more on my larger writing project, tried my hand again at short fiction. I’ve said goodbye (for now) to some friends and hello to others. I’ve spent plenty of time outdoors, upside down, prone and supine. I’ve watched the plants in my various gardens grow and change and sometimes die. I’ve walked many, many kilometres. I’ve read a lot, cried a lot, laughed a lot. Friendships have been tested and, happily, survived. Ideas and hopes and dreams about life’s direction have shifted, sometimes subtly, other times massively. I’ve spent an awful lot of time practicing yoga. And cooking. And being surprised at myself and at life.

Honestly, if I think back to this time last year, I can hardly believe it was only a year ago. The year that will end tonight feels like two or three years squished into one.

I have a few bits and pieces lined up for 2013, but mostly I have no idea what’s in store for me, which is both exciting and absolutely terrifying. Life is pretty unsettled and confusing right now, but that’s not hugely surprising, given that it was only just over two months ago that I landed in Melbourne. I know I can expect a whole lot more uncertainty and probably some more shifts in perspective—but then that’s half the reason I wanted to make the move to Melbourne. As difficult as change can be, it’s also a really good way of noticing patterns in my thinking and behaviour (in yogic philosophy these are called samskaras, or ‘traces of deeds done in the past’) and giving myself a chance to figure out which of those patterns are useful and which are not. Letting go of the less useful patterns is an additional challenge, of course. Probably a life-long one.

It will be interesting (that word we use when we’re not sure whether something is good or bad or somewhere in between) to see how things unfold in the next few months. To see which patterns stay and which ones go.

Tonight I’ll be celebrating the year that’s been with a couple of dear friends. I’m looking forward to 2013, to getting on with whatever it is that the new year will bring. Happy new year.

Ghosts and New Beginnings

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Life is very strange at the moment. Well, it has been for quite some time now, but it’s been extra strange since my housemate and I landed in Melbourne. It’s taken me a little while to tease out the strangeness, to get a good sense of where it’s really coming from.

The answer isn’t simple, of course, but part of why I’ve felt pretty weird these last couple of weeks is that I’ve found myself trying to marry together different parts of myself. The parts of me that existed when I lived in Melbourne, the parts of me that were there when I visited and missed this city, and who I feel like I am now. I’ve mentioned here before that Melbourne often feels to me like it’s haunted. For me, it’s a place full of ghosts — ghosts of the past me, ghosts of long-over relationships, ghosts of friendships changed. And perhaps the missing of the place has made each of those ghosts just a little more powerful now I’m living here again. Nostalgia is a strange thing, cruel at times.

A while ago, for a piece I was writing, I was reading a lot about narration and the self, and how vital it is for our mental wellbeing to build a coherent sense of self. So much of that building process is about making connections between events, objects and places that are, really, not closely related to one another. In other words, we tell ourselves a story about what happens to us in order to make sense of it, and in order to create the character we call our ‘self’. What’s happening to me now, I think, is that those stories aren’t quite matching up. There’s a bit of rearranging to be done in my thinking about them.

Along with that confusion though has been an immense sense of relief. I feel relaxed here, at home. I guess the weirdness will settle eventually, and that I’ll figure out how to fit all those parts of myself back together again. And, I hope, I’ll learn to live more easily with the ghosts here. They are, after all, mostly benevolent ones.