Opening a window to recharge, refresh
On going gently, being kind to myself and walking in the bush
Dear Creative Soul,
My house today smells like fresh air, like sea salt and damp earth - the windows are open and the house is airing on this spring-like winter’s afternoon. It’s 25°C in Perth and the sky is a cloudless periwinkle blue. In a few months we will crave a sky broken with heavy clouds, but today the endless blue is welcome. A weather reset. A recharge.
From my desk, I hear the creak of the clothesline, birds singing and calling in the distance - soon they will find their way to our garden, and dance in the bird baths, peck at the damp ground - and the thump of limestone bricks A is lowering into the ground. He is reclaiming more garden from tiny patch of grass that remains, only allowed to stay because that’s where the clothesline stands. If I move my head to the right, I can see him working, enjoying the sun on his back while he prepares a space for a raised vegetable bed. To the left, he has cleared a space for a small fire pit - perhaps later we will light it up for the first time. There is a ringnecked parrot (we call them 28s here) on the fence now, sizing up the apricot tree which this week unveiled its first flowers of the season, a promise of the harvest to come. Now there is a New Holland honeyeater, flitting among the grevillea in search of honeyed nectar. Now two, no, three, chirruping their little hearts out like no one’s listening.
Swallowing the lemony-earthy dregs of my tea, cold after sitting on my desk for an hour while I played with watercolours, I ponder the concept of recharging. More specifically, how this week I’ve run low on energy and capacity. How it feels that big emotions are lurking under the surface and I can either keep calm and carry on … or I can find a way to release them. I get the sense from talking to others that they feel a similar way too - perhaps, as some have said, there is a link to the opening of Lion's Gate Portal, when a rise in awareness may initially manifest as anxiety, overthinking and restlessness, before giving way to a newfound purpose. I don’t know. What I do know is that I haven’t been sleeping well, I’m overthinking, and an undercurrent of mild anxiety trembles under my skin.
Breaking away from to-do lists
In my events management day job, I run on lists, using productivity tools such as Asana, spreadsheets, and my phone alarm setting, as well as a more old-fashioned approach - a trusty old notepad for scribbling down things. When something is done, it’s crossed or (virtually ticked) off. My role involves everything from organising catering and Citizenship Ceremonies, to event managing bigger community events, as well as supporting other team members. Our event season is fast approaching and the to-do lists are getting longer and more urgent. There are forms to complete, site plans to draft (and redraft), people to chase up. And I’m juggling multiple projects at once, my mind jumping from one project to another in the space of minutes.
If you’d asked me yesterday morning how I was feeling, I’d have said something like “Good, a bit tired from work, but fine.” It was my day off and, after the weekly cleaning was complete, I had my ideal day sketched out in my head: test out my new watercolours, take up a pair of jeans, start writing this week’s post. No procrasti-baking or gardening. No, just a few hours’ of creative space, hours I’d been looking forward to for days. A few hours of going gently, not a to-do list in sight. Showing up for the small stuff. The stuff that fills my cup.
Earlier today, I chanced upon Satya Robyn’s thoughtful post Why Go Gently, in which she delves into easing up and approaching her days “at a lower, gentler hum”, an approach I am also adopting as I move through my (early) fifties. We are both writing about similar things, both trying hard to make space to gentle our bodies and mind. And so, yesterday morning, I was excited at the prospect of letting go of work and welcoming play. Of letting my work-first, work-hard system rest into a more compassionate state.
Things did not go to plan
Ideals exist in our imagination, a conception of what is perfect, desirable or suitable. And of course, my ideal day went awry as soon as the cleaning was done. It started with the jeans. What should have been a thirty-minute task at most turned into a two-hour chore when my new sewing machine rebelled against having its needle changed. The topstitch tension, perfect the day before, was inexplicably loose - fine on the sample fabric, loose on the actual hem. After unpicking the hem and restitching for the fifth time, troubleshooting all the way with the instruction manual and online forums, I was agitated and close to tears, knowing that the gentle afternoon I had planned for myself was slipping away. When two of our adult children dropped by for a short, unplanned visit, I felt this agitation rippling through my body, my fingers twitching, my mind tugging me away from the people in front of me and attaching firmly on a problem that lurked a room away. When they left, I threaded and rethreaded, adjusted thread tension, changed the needle again … still, the stitching was frustratingly loose. Unable to connect.
A convinced me to take a break (it took a while, I am rather stubborn when it comes to things like this); he encouraged me to walk away, drink a tearful coffee with him, to give myself some distance from this project which had catapulted my mood from “I love this newfound interest in sewing” to “I f***ing hate sewing, what was I thinking?” faster than it takes to say Great British Sewing Bee. At this point, I put this all down to righteous frustration, but moments later, when I burst into tears upon receiving a text from a family member - they had a problem and probably needed my help, which I had no capacity (mental or otherwise) for at that moment - I understood what was really going on. And it wasn’t the uncooperative machine. No, that was just the tipping point. The small thing that led to big feelings.
My emotional battery was flat and I needed to recharge. Too many demands on my emotional space, too much time worrying about others - family members grappling with loneliness and illness, another living in Bali whose phone was stolen, another who who received horrible messages from a so-called friend.
Back at the sewing machine, I employed the old turn it off at the power point trick, then started with a new bobbin. This cunning “recharge” strategy worked - twenty minutes later the jeans were hemmed, and the new paints were out. I spent the afternoon doing painting exercises from two books - Painting Calm by Inga Buadavice and Watercolour For the Soul by Sharone Stevens. A meditative mix of random shapes, then flowers, leaves and finally, two jellyfish, tumbling my thoughts and feelings onto scraps watercolour paper. As for writing, all I managed was this Note.
Going gently
When I become aware that my emotions are close to the surface, I go gently, treating myself with love, kindness and compassion. It’s something I’ve had to learn to do over many years and the process can vary. Sometimes I pull back into myself - stay close to home, seek refuge in creative “therapy”, prune what I don’t need to do and give myself space to recharge. Sometimes I throw a big cry into the mix, followed by breathwork, stretching, a walk on the beach and in the bush.
This week I chanced upon Campfire Stories, a platform for short films to “inspire change towards ecological balance, human sanity and an alive future”. I don’t know how I found this series - perhaps it found me. Watching the beautiful short film Once Upon A Forest, featuring 'twig poet' Marie Westerberg whose creative thinking is saving the broken forest that saved her when she was broken (I’ve shared the video below) brought me to tears. Tears of sadness at this broken world. Tears of joy that our individual choices can make a difference in the world, rippling beyond our self to the community and further. Tears of recognition when Westerberg said, her voice cracking with depth of feeling:
“I think it’s one of the reasons why so many of us are depressed. Because we don’t get space and a place and a job where we can actually be kind. I think it’s one of the nice things with humans. We’re really kind if we get the chance.”
Marie Westerberg
Her words reminded me how important it is to be kind to myself, so this ripples out to others. Because if I let myself go flat, and don’t allow myself to fully recharge, I can’t share the good parts of me, can I? And this film, and others in this series, reinforce my need to slow down when I can. As Campfire Stories founder Mattias Ollsen says:
“The culture of modernity is ever faster cranking up its pace. More and more, faster and faster, and, so the thinking seems to go: better and better. But it seems to me it doesn't work that way.
If anything, I believe we need to slow ourselves down a little.”
- Campfire Stories founder and filmmaker, Mattias Ollsen
A walk in the bush
It’s August, spring in Australia, and the Noongar people of south-western Western Australia refer to this time as a season of conception or growth. It’s a colourful time, with masses of wildflowers (yellow, white, pink, purple) emerging. It is also transitional time of cold, clear days as well as warm, windy, rainy days.
After overnight rain, the skies are again blue; sheets are flapping in the breeze and A is assembling the raised garden bed. Later, after son #3 leaves to catch a train to his home in Kalgoorlie, seven hours away in the Goldfields, we will meander through our local patch of bush, five minutes’ drive from home, and search for orchids. We will walk past eucalyptus trees with lines carved by nature all the way down their trunks and I will wonder if I could paint that tree. We will notice how sunlight shines through gum leaves, rendering them almost translucent, how some of the banksias (too many) have died back, how the helmet orchids still have not flowered. We will look for birds and kangaroos and evidence of bandicoots; we will marvel at the engineering of spiders, and wonder if the rustle over there is a snake. I will stop to peer at fungi and feathers and flowers that weren’t there last week. We will close our eyes and feel the wind on our cheeks, the sun on our skin; we will listen to birds and wonder if we should install a bird call app on our phone. And we will look for chicken eggs - laid, we think, by an escapee from a neighbouring five-acre block - because it makes us smile to think of a random, elusive chook wandering through the bush.
Perhaps today we will find spider orchids. Sun orchids. A cowslip.
Or perhaps we will have to wait another week and simply enjoy being in nature, slowing ourselves down a little, recharging the battery before another work week begins.
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