Lightscape, Vivid 2023, Sydney, Australia, Earth

I took a trip to the big smoke this week. I wanted to visit my eldest for her birthday and take her to see Lightscape as her gift. My third born decided to join us with her two sons, my grandies. The eldest invited three friends to come with. Together we all had a great night walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens laughing, dancing, singing, and taking lots of photos and videos. Here’s a few of mine.

And here are a few photos my daughters took. Some were from earlier in the evening at Circular Quay, where I showed the grandies a few different types of boats, one is at a “boat” with very large tiled sails and a couple more are from within Lightscape.

I’ve lost my face

Waking with a severe headache this morning I knew I was going to have a bad eyesight day. A few hours later, headache still persisting, i headed for the shower removing my glasses and looked in the mirror. I’d lost my face. It was a blur. Over the last twelve months I’ve noticed the lines of age disappearing but today it was much worse. Whilst it was mainly due to the pressure in my head, and possibly the new medication I was still adjusting to, it was still a sign of what was to come. Thankfully my medication was already starting to work otherwise this would have been a moment triggering spiralling into self pity and crying for ages making things more blurred. Haha.

Repeating out loud to myself that I’d lost my face reminded me of the saying, to lose face. A couple of hours before I was in a conversation about business-like partnerships and put my two cents in about how I’d be fair. The person I was discussing this with has known me for many years and I them so we could agree that we’d trust that the other party wouldn’t change character and do the dirty on the other if it was us going into partnership. With all my problems and bad choices I’ve made over the years of knowing this person, I hadn’t lost face with them. My own children on the other hand…

Christmas day 2022 I made a choice, an uneducated one, that caused me to lose face with three of my adult children and their partners. I don’t blame them. I’d already lost face with them once before when I left their father but regained it eventually, and then again with two of them when I made it clear I’d left religion, but had finally regained face there also. After Christmas it took about 4 months to regain clear loving communication with all four of my children. They found my face.

They got there in the end but I thought I’d lost them each time. Maybe they came back around because they realised I hadn’t changed in character. Maybe they realised that the decisions I made were for reasons that made sense. Maybe they realised that people, even themselves, make ‘mistakes’ that need to be moved on from. Whatever the reason, they came back around.

That got me to thinking of others I may have lost face with. I guess, when you have a moment of weakness, or a sudden change in character for some inexplicable (in others eyes) reason people who know your true character could go in a couple of directions. They might know that it’s just a moment and will wait for you to come back around, or they might get upset and walk away, later realising that it was just a moment. But they’d figure it out eventually.

I absolutely hate having moments of mental weakness. I want to be stronger. I hate the feeling. I hate having to rely on others just because my mind isn’t working quite right. I hate reaching out for help. I always quickly regret reaching out because I see my mental weakness as a thing that scares people away. I get scared they will be scared away by my I openness and honesty in looking for help. That I’ll lose face in a way.

And so we raise walls, we isolate, we bite our tongue. We fear the unknown and find comfort in our home. We strive to impress and hide our known flaws. And our friends end up never really knowing us at all.

As the ink sinks in

Note to readers: I don’t think this will read well on a phone. Sorry if it doesn’t.

I was asked the other day if I would ever publish or share any of my poems, and was reminded that even if they were dark, they were of a different time and I am in a different place now. The answer is not really. I don’t write stuff that is worth publishing. However, it occurred to me that it was kind of part of the me I would one day share as part of my “galería” here. And so this blog post is a response to that friend’s question I guess.

I’m only going to share a few poems here. It will give you an idea of what I used to write like. Some are in rhythm and rhyme, but I actually hate using that as it no longer becomes truth pouring out freely, but a halted mess with words or phrases I wouldn’t normally use. I don’t like that. It’s not me.

So here goes…

The light… my light-bringer, my muse at the time. He helped me see that the way I was being treated by my then husband was wrong. Sadly it took me about 8 more years before I was strong enough to finally make a lasting change. And in those 8 years I went through this all the time.

Blabbing for me here was just me having a conversation with someone and not knowing that what was happening in our home was not normal.

—

I couldn’t see a way out back then. I didn’t realise I could just leave. Walk away. I thought I was supposed to keep taking it and that in trying to be better every day I might one day reach the point of good enough to not be hurt anymore.

Winged monkeys are mischief makers. Giving voice to my thoughts and feelings would be like giving wings to monkeys that I knew would make trouble for me. So long as I just stayed quiet and did what I was asked without complaint I would get less harassment. If the truth of how I felt ever leaked out through the cringe of my mouth or the darkening of my eyes, I’d cop it, so I figured words coming out would be much worse. So they didn’t get wings till nearly 7 years after I wrote this.

Enough of the heavy stuff. Here’s a few lighter hearted dodgy ones from when I started writing poetry for the first time since 1992. The first, below, I wrote of what I saw as a comic experience when I was 18. I’d always pictured it as words written with a falling feather, so I finally told it.

These are the trees of my childhood. I lived in them. The “Archive” here was the National Film and Sound Archive. I used to dream of making films one day, but that’s a boat I missed. It was something I used to visit every now and again before or after work at Dendy Cinema, Canberra.

This one was a rather abstract collection of experiences or things seen when visiting Darwin for the first time with my sister.

And that was from the same trip, but of getting to be in Kakadu and step onto Arnhem Land. Growing up I was slightly obsessed with the Northern Territory so it was kind of magical finally stepping in places I’d dreamt of visiting one day.

And then there were these dodgy experiments I did where I pulled a card out of my wallet and quickly wrote whatever came to me in under 5 minutes. Here’s two I turned into videos when doing a Screen Media course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqN5rj5M_Gk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovaZ_LUDTPo
Told you they were dodgy. Haha.

Well I did it. Another part of me for the “galería”, not that I see it as a current part of me. It was once and maybe one day I’ll do more again… besides in geocaching logs. I’ve done a few of those. I found a Shakespeare themed cache once so I sat at GZ and wrote a dodgy poem in Shakespearean Sonnet form.
https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=e45e99a5-12e0-4a74-b2ec-053630481c54

See! It’s all dodgy shit. Nothing to publish in a book, that’s for sure!

Okay, so I just tried writing a poem or two. One is a shakespearean sonnet which I will definitely not share because it’s something very personal to me, but I like the way it turned out. Then I wrote two Haikus that flowed from the same theme as the sonnet. Here’s one… my parting words:

Longing to touch skin
Making her wet from within
She resists again

Life Inside A Rainbow

🌧☀️🌈

Waterfall day

I had to escape my house today as the home owners dog was being put down and buried there. I figured the weather was perfect for visiting a waterfall. The waterfall and pool looked perfect for a swim. The water temperature was not perfect. At all.

After standing in belly button high water for a couple of minutes the numbness set in and I made the splash. The plan was to swim to the other side and lay on the rocks there a while. I lasted about 20 seconds and had to bail. Hahaha. I went and found another spot to relax in the sun.

I tried to draw. I tried to write a poem. I tried to enjoy being there on my own, and I was totally all alone there the whole 2 hours. I failed all three. But it was nice still. Much better than watching a dog getting buried metres from my bedroom window.

Here’s what I did end up writing anyway. Good luck at reading my messy handwriting.

I was kind of looking forward to a big warm pub meal for lunch, but it turned out they only sold sushi (?!), or hand rolls to be more precise. So I settled for supping on that in the sun before going to find a geocache looking down over The Channon, and went home.

Wave cloud painted

I tried. I didn’t have the right tools, it’s very two dimensional, copying a wave made it a solo cloud, and storm clouds with that much rain aren’t that small. So not the best in realism, but not too bad for a first attempt at oil painting.

Now To Morrow

Month: May 2023