The season is shifting and so am I

No more Facebook and I feel free!

Dear Creative Soul,

Once again, the seasons are shifting. Here in Perth, winter has begun a speeded-up segue into spring; freesias and daffodils are blooming, the days are lengthening, and the first dainty flowers, the palest of pink, have opened on my apricot tree. It is beautiful to see this awakening, but a little part of me feels cheated by our too-brief cooler season and yearns for the cosiness to linger longer.

Earlier, I mixed a baguette dough; while it rests between folds, I sit at my desk with my new Kuretake watercolours and paint pears and leaves until it is time for the baguettes’ final shaping and baking. The house fills with the warm perfume of baking bread; we have closed the windows, for outside it is raining and gusty, the air cool, if not shivering cold. Later, I will prepare soupe l’onion and the rich smell of caramelised onion, stock and white wine will create a mouthwatering perfume. I will add a splash of brandy, then ladle deep bowlfuls and top with sliced baguette and Gruyère cheese; under the grill they will go until the cheese bubbles. We will break bread and make conversation.

I want to hang on to this cosy, comfortable season, to wrap myself in a blanket, to have coffee in front of the heater, to wear my (not really suitable for Perth) coats and scarves and boots for a little longer.

And yet.

I feel the shifting of the season deep within me. I see it with my eyes - the spring blossoms, the new leaf growth, the green hills, curious young magpies shadowed by parents, the food at the market: blueberries, strawberries, asparagus, artichokes, beets. And I feel it in my bones, under my skin, deep within my soul. I want to sow seeds in the raised garden bed A has assembled. I want to watch the birds rediscover the nectarous delights of the native flowers - sometimes it is as if they are discovering them for the first time. I want to be like the birds. Curious, delighted, alive like the air that tickles my skin. Nature is calling.

I am shifting too. It has been happening for a long time, a gradual, beautiful shift in mindset and priorities. A shift towards simplicity and connection and joy - in life and creativity - and away from constant busy-ness, social media, and what content marketers say I must do to be a writer.

Instructions for living a life

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

- Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”

I have shifted into someone who is content to create, but not creating for content. Someone who is paying attention to the little things because life is beautiful and astonishing and surprising and complicated, not because I might get likes. I deactivated Facebook last week. I haven’t posted on Instagram for months (although I keep it because I find cat videos to be remarkably good - and cheap - therapy). And I don’t miss it. When I think of the time I spent setting up photos, creating graphics and videos, composing blurbs and choosing the right hashtags, and the frustration of fake accounts following and sharing and artificially inflating likes … that is time I could have spent noticing and connecting. Writing and creating. Being. Living life properly, with joy at the heart of it.

Noticing the transition

The Noongar people call this season of conception and transition Djilba - the weather is a fickle spring mix of cold, clear days and warm, windy days. In the past week, we have had all of this weather. It awakens our bodies, minds and dreams from the slow slumber of winter.

In between showers, we don raincoats and boots, and escape to our local patch of bushland. The wind is brisk and cool; it has temporarily blown away the clouds that dumped 40mm+ rain over the past twenty-four hours. The sun is dipping lower in the sky, burnishing the bushland with a light gold that will deepen over the next hour. Overhead, six Carnaby’s black cockatoos circle, calling to each other over; in the distance, trucks and cars fly past on the freeway, some heading north, soon to be swallowed into suburbia, others heading south, the place locals call Douth or Down South.

As we venture down the path, our eyes seek out evidence the orchids we suspect will have flowered between last Sunday and this. It can be hard to see them at first - the muted greens of our bush tend to blend and so we look for shapes, and are soon rewarded with a lone donkey orchid, first to arrive in its patch. Cowslips are days away from opening, but experience tells us we will find a rebel, open before the others, and we are right. Here it is, a sunny yellow, low to the ground. Further in, we find a jug orchid, some tiny snail orchids, and more of the greenhoods that signal the start of the season in this little patch. In another week, we predict, this landscape will be amass with yellow, cream, pink and purple flowers: tiny lilies, striking orchids, pom-pom wattle, native wisteria. For now, we see patches here, there; the landscape feels slow to wake this year and we wonder if our eight-month dry spell delayed or stunted growth. The evidence of the drought lingers in the dead trees dotting the reserve, more than there should be, and the decaying branch-drop now home to colourful fungi and tightly knitted spiderwebs.

I try to take photos on my phone, but the wind tells me to look with my eyes.

I will be back, I promise the wind. Next weekend. With my good camera, my macro lens. Today I will let the wind have its dance. And then I will return to see what delights the bushland has in store.

We leave the bush reserve amid a rising choir of birds: laughing kookaburras, warbling magpies, honeyeaters, willy wagtails, wattle birds, cockatoos, parrots. Soon the magpies, protective of their vulnerable young, will start to swoop unsuspecting walkers, but for today, the tops of our heads are safe.

The first of the jug orchids are out.

A time for every season

We are driving home from the wildflower reserve when it occurs to me that a year ago this week, my novel Wildflower was released in the UK and US, in print, ebook and audiobook formats. Back then, there were podcast interviews, library talks, book clubs and in-depth conversations about the book’s exploration of domestic violence and societal attitudes in the late 1970s from the POV of an eleven-year-old child. The reviews were glowing, and despite a similar experience with the Australian release a year earlier, my hopes were elevated (albeit more realistic than in the past) for greater discoverability, more readers in this bigger market.

But after that initial flurry of interest, nothing life-changing happened. I didn’t make a huge amount of money, no one was beating down the door to buy film or TV rights. Life went on. Was my book successful? I guess that depends on how you define successful. I choose to believe it was because, among its readers, it did inspire conversation and reflection, it did evoke emotional responses. As a writer, that fills my cup, if not my bank account.

I have come to an acceptance of that.

A year ago, two years ago, I would have celebrated this bookish anniversary on social media. Carefully crafted posts - perhaps a video, a staged photo, a selection of reviews, a giveaway - on Instagram and Facebook. Phrases like Happy Book Birthday or It’s my book birthday or Wildflower is one - yay! Perhaps there would have been comments on the post - I loved this book! from readers or Congratulations! from writer friends - and perhaps my effort would have led to a few sales.

But the anniversary has passed and instead, I have quietly slipped away, deactivating my Facebook account and detaching from social media. No announcements, no goodbyes, just a gentle fading away, like closing a good book.

Living life properly

I’m pruning, as I wrote about a few weeks ago. Making way for growth.

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I feel free. Liberated from performative posts, liberated from trying to keep up the pace of posting new, interesting algorithm and people-pleasing content. I have lived that life as a writer, and now I am, as Marcus Aurelius suggests, taking what life I have left and living it properly.

On my terms.

Living life properly means different things to all of us. But for me, it means that:

Instead of worrying about becoming irrelevant and being forgotten as a writer, I am focused on BEING. On LIVING. On FEELING and OBSERVING with all of me.  

On writing about life in a meaningful way for me ... and sometimes not writing about it at all. Just enjoying the being.   

What does it mean to you? Are you noticing shifts in the way you think and do things?

Life at random

Here are some details from my life in the past week:

Random moments of happiness

A footnote about my novel

Set in Sydney in the simmering summer of 1979/80, Wildflower explores societal attitudes about domestic violence from the POV of a curious 11-year-old girl. Weaving themes of friendship, bullying and feminism into the narrative, it’s a coming-of-age story about “challenging the status quo, about speaking out when something isn’t right, about standing up for women and children when they are in harms way within their own homes” (Theresa Smith Writes).

If you are intrigued by the premise of Wildflower and you’d like to read it, it’s available from Blackwell Books (as well as other online retailers, including the one that is named after a river in South America). And if libraries are your go-to and your library doesn’t have it, they can order it in.

(This feels like a much nicer way to tell people about my book.)

La Muse: Pausing to Wonder is a gift of words and will continue to be free for all readers for the foreseeable future. However, if you feel led (and able) to support my writing financially, there are a couple of options: 1) Buy Me a Coffee, which is a one-time “tip” as a way to say thank you, or 2) subscribe at one of my paid tiers if you wish to provide ongoing support. You can also recommend my Substack to other readers or buy my book.

Either way, I am grateful that you have chosen to be here today, to be part of my community of readers and writers pausing to wonder (and wander). Let's keep connecting as a community and building each other up.