A week of small wonders

Feat. snottygobbles and bobtails

"Each day should begin and end in the reverence and rapture of wonder.” - Sarah Ban Breathnach

I’m currently wandering my way through Romancing the Ordinary by

Sarah Ban Breathnach

, a beautiful book I chanced upon in my local charity store. I’d popped in during my lunch break, just for a quick look (as I often do) and found the book tucked in between two novels, its spine and the lettering almost blending in to the background. But the title, quiet yet compelling, made me pull it down; the subtitle made me keep it. I’d never heard of it, or of the #1 "New York Times" bestselling author, but I knew I’d been led to exactly what I needed.

Written to celebrate the seasons and the senses, Romancing the Ordinary encourages women to rediscover their other senses: intuition or knowing, and wonder (rapture and reverence). If you’ve been a regular reader of La Muse: Pause to Wonder, you’ll know that’s the path I’ve been wandering for some time now. A path that has led me back to my creative self, that has helped me prune and grow, to reawaken and rewild. Reading Ban Breathnach’s book affirm feels like an affirmation. A validation that I am on the right path for my feminine, creative soul, meandering as it may be. I still have decisions to make about how this looks for my work life, and perhaps Ban Breathnach’s words will help me along that path.

There is a strange dissonance, though, reading a seasonally-driven book about sensory living when you live in a different hemisphere, and I found myself having to push back against that dissonance. And so, after reading through the January chapter with its cosy focus on drawing inwards - while I am experiencing heatwave conditions that also forces me inside (but is less cosy, more sprawl out with as little on as possible) - I’ve decided to re-start from the middle (June) for greater harmony with the season I am in. This same dissonance happened with my subscription of the UK-based The Simple Things magazine, which I discovered during the pandemic lockdowns, but since it didn’t go as spiritually and sensually deep, it was easier to pick out what worked for me and what didn’t.

Creatively, I’m in a season where the best I can do is show up for the small stuff. It’s the holiday season, of course and most of us are feeling it, but my day job in events is in no way reflecting the calm I would love to cultivate at this time.

Beth Kempton

, I am doing my best to bring the calm in! It’s no easy feat … tomorrow I will be helping to decorate four trucks which will, from December 17-23, drive around every street in the local government area I work in as part of the annual “Lolly Run”. For 70 years, this Lolly Run has delivered sweets to residents’ children in the lead up to Christmas; this year we have more than 40,000 bags of sweets to deliver over the seven-day period. A lovely tradition, one that brings smiles and nostalgia and a sense of community to so many, one that my husband A remembers fondly as a child.

But …

To help make it happen I will be working my normal 32 hours and then another four hours a night on four of the seven nights to deliver small bags of joy and wonder to little souls. The trucks will be decorated, Christmas music will be on loudspeakers, and the festive merriness will, no doubt, be contagious.

I’m excited … but already I’m tired from a jampacked event season, so my creative well feels a little in need of nourishment. Bite-size nourishment … because there’s not much room for more than an hour here or there of dabbling with watercolours and stitching. Today I wasn’t feeling it when I took out the paints; I felt my old nemeses, perfectionism and outcome, lurking. I didn’t want to start a new sewing project I wouldn’t have time to finish before Christmas and our upcoming cross-country trip to Sydney. I couldn’t settle - unlike yesterday when I felt grounded and relaxed.

I’m so grateful to have a wonderful, spacious creative room, a place to create, discover and unlearn, yet the space of my self feels cluttered. There’s a niggling layer of irritation just beneath the surface; it pops up when I’m wrapping an awkwardly shaped gift for my mother, and again when I try to paint a poppy with the opposite of a loose, relaxed hand.

But there is still room for wonder, there is always room for wonder, and I don’t have to go far to find it. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t even need to leave the house. I just need my eyes, ears and heart open.

Which is a nice segue to a posy of images and words, a hand-picked bouquet of wondrous glimmers. Things that made my soul sigh, my heart sing; things that moved me to tears and laughter and awe. Things that reminded me of the gift life is and things that reminded me of the beauty in the ordinary. The extraordinary ordinary.

This week, this is what I have to give.

A week of small wonders

A parade of mushrooms after misty summer rain.

Gladioli flowers reaching for the sun, fighting the wind that curls around the house: blood red, royal purple, ripe apricot, candy-floss pink, bridal white.

A willy wagtail (djidi djidi) chatters in our peppermint tree while I wander barefoot in the early morn.

Newborn tomatoes and infant zucchini, future food for the body and soul. And caterpillars, plump from plundering the rhubarb.

The smell of rosemary, crushed between my fingers.

A dawn chorus sings me awake. Outside the window, a party of honeyeaters and silvereyes.

The look of childlike awe - really? me? - when a 101-year old man wins a Christmas gift hamper that includes a $100 gift voucher and treats he will share with others.

A ballet of Monarch butterflies in the Geisha Girl (Duranta repens) shrub; the floral crochet on our Jacaranda.

Reading the heart-shaped love note my husband left in our Advent Calendar; the numbered drawers once held sweets and tiny gifts for our four children, but we have resurrected it for ourselves, for little reminders of the wonder of each other, of us. As I leave a note for him to find tomorrow, I find a long-forgotten wrapped sweet one of the kids missed. A mintie, an Australian sweet known to dislodge fillings.

The first lemon of summer. The last blueberry.

An early morning shower; sunlight and raindrops on a blossoming gladioli

A simple dinner: snapper fillets marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, chilli flakes, seared in a cast-iron skillet, then baked; a crunchy Greek salad; a generous scoop of lemon rice. My tastebuds dance long after the aroma fades.

A beautiful dress for $7 in the charity store; another customer tells me that it perfectly complements my “little bit hippie, long, wavy hair”.

Chopped pistachios, brown sugar, eggs, flour, vanilla - mix, scoop, bake; after cooling, boxing mini pistachio muffins in a paper-lined Christmas tin with a label made from watercolour scraps. A morning tea treat for a work meeting; a little sweetness for my colleagues’ day.

A thank you card on my desk; a smile to return to when work gets tough.

The memory of visiting Germany this time last year brings emotions and desire close to the surface; I look through photos and read my travel musings, and remember the wonders of experiencing a northern winter for the first time.

Celebrating 16 years’ marriage to the man who was my new beginning, the man who made me leap, even though we were both scared.

A walk on the beach at sunset, all whipping wind and stinging sands … and then, as we round the point and walk along the calmer “pond”, we see a stingray and the whipping-stinging discomfort disappears like magic.

The warm satisfaction of using up the veggies in the fridge to make a vegetable pie with flaky, buttery pastry that melts in the mouth.

The many joys of walking in the bush, in the mixed woodland ten minutes from home. Each time, a question: what will we find?

A seed pod, waiting for the wind.

“Jewels of the bush”, tiny Christmas Spiders (aka Jewel Spider, Six Spined Spider or Spiny Spider) hunting for mates as summer spins its sweaty web.

Candle-like banksia trees, the Western Australian Christmas Tree (Nuytsia floribunda), a snottygobble (Persoonia longifolia) shrub; a baby bobtail lizard camouflaged in leaf litter, ants feasting on a beetle carapace.

The overlooked beauty in ageing … and decay … a flower decomposing, deconstructing.

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

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