Tag Archives: Personal

My Last Blog Post

Hi all – I’ve decided to wrap up this blog.

I’ve thought for some time I might be able to keep doing occasional posts, but I don’t think that will work—not for me, anyway.

The main reason is to do with focus—I find when I am writing posts, and even commenting on other blogs, that I’m constantly running the words through my mind. I’ve been known to go for a walk around the block and on returning enthusiastically add a comma to what I had just written before the walk—the perfect comma.

This is fine when the project is what you want to be doing with your life, but that’s no longer the case for my blog and me.

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An Eventful Month

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I bought these flowers to celebrate Frank coming home and my birthday – I thought they looked nice in the late afternnon wintry golden light. Mum gave me the glass jug for Christmas after we spotted it together in a second-hand shop in Bendigo.

I’ve had a fair bit going on since my last post—and I hadn’t intended to leave it this long before posting again. Frank (my partner) ended up in hospital for 5 days in mid-June, and the whole thing wasn’t exactly fun for either of us. I took him to the emergency department of The Austin late on a Thursday night, and after numerous tests and treatments he was released on Tuesday lunchtime… on my birthday!
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Fires In Victoria

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Image from The Age, a couple of days ago

I want to write something about the fires here in Victoria, but I don’t know where to begin.

I mainly want to let you know that none of my family or personal friends are directly affected – so at least I am doing that. 

My friend Kelly has also done a post about the fires: Victoria Burns and a Nation Weeps.

I have been feeling so overwhelmed by the tragedy that I am not functioning very well – mainly just depressed and distracted, I suppose. The whole thing has come on top of immense heat waves and for me, dental issues that have involved a lot of pain but are being resolved now. I wasn’t in a really great space before it happened, is what I am trying to say. Continue reading →

Festival Of Life

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Here’s my partner Frank sitting outside our tent at the music festival we went to last weekend. We got there Thursday afternoon and left Monday afternoon, so it seemed more like 5 days.

This is a relatively small festival—about 2000 people go. The site is in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, not far from the snowfields. Here’s a Google Earth bookmark of the festival site, to download, should anyone be interested… you double click on it and Google Earth will open, if you have it.

The festival was great, and we feel different. Apart from the sheer pleasure of mixing with the people, and enjoying the music, there’s something about camping in a bush setting that makes one feel more physical.
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Emotional Balance

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photo by Victor Bezrukov

I thought I’d like to write about what emotional balance means to me. As I mentioned in an earlier post Feelings Are There To Be Felt, I haven’t quite got emotions “worked out”. But I’ve needed to focus on mine lots so I reckon I should really be an expert by now. Ha.

In my younger days I was very withheld emotionally. No-one knew what I thought, or how I felt. I didn’t know how I felt. At school I was very quiet and awkward, and didn’t connect much. One time a group of kids made a list of everyone in the class, with a brief description, to submit to the school magazine. For me they put “Silent Brain”. I misread this and thought it said “Silent Drain”—I was extremely upset! (inside) (It didn’t make the magazine.)

The only time I felt love was for the cat.
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Letting Creativity Just Slip In

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photo by Random Tree

I had a conversation with my mother the other night about the creative process, and I thought ah-hah!… I could write about this.

She was saying how she came up with a poem about apples a few years ago, while driving through apple orchards and then on homewards (she lives in the country). As she kept driving the poem came bit by bit… she said that the words “just slipped in”.

I thought that was a great way of putting it, and it’s how it happens with me, too. Then I was thinking about how I set things up to allow those words and ideas to “just slip in”. Being still or meditative in some way is necessary, but I’ve also noticed that if I provide a structure for my creative product, the goods are more likely to come to me.

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How I Found Immortality

Well… I haven’t really, exactly. In that I can’t prove it. I’m 55 at the moment and so have not proved one can live forever. But then it’s something that can’t be proven anyway—a person could live to be 300 years old and die the next day.

But I thought I’d tell the story of how I came across the idea of physical immortality.

sax.jpgIn the mid-80s I lived in a household of musicians, and two regular visitors were Andy and Mike. Andy played bass and trombone, and Mike played saxophone. Both of them had their head completely shaved—the idea being that this allowed the cosmic rays to penetrate their scalp more easily, making them immortal.

Now Andy was quite a character. He had previously lived in our house and seemed to think he still did—he stored his bee pollen in our fridge for some reason (I don’t think he had a fridge) and he ate half our fruit after we had been to the market. He had a reputation for covering our kitchen with carrot pulp from juicing carrots, and having orange palms from drinking too much of the makings. Setting up our house for a 4 a.m. mini-golf game didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I don’t remember much about Mike—only that he had a nice girlfriend.

The point of all this is that the shaved heads, and the reason for them, was just one more entertaining weirdo occurrence in our house. Continue reading →