Right I'm inspired.  Read an article about devoting two minutes to something you felt you didn't have time for.  Just two minutes.  About the time it takes to brush one's teeth.  And giving that daily two minutes for 92 days.  It takes about 10,000 repetitions to form a new habit but heck, 92 days is a good start.

If more than 2 minutes is used, all the better but two minutes minimum.

So, I've filled in an adoption form for a greyhound but haven't sent it yet as I want R to read it first.  R has begun physiotherapy specifically designed for people with Parkinsons and it is already making a difference.  We bought a new used Skoda Yeti (christened after a PG Wodehouse character, the newt loving Augustus Fink Nottle) and gave Jeeves, my darling loyal little Yaris, to a friend and her daughter.

And there's my 2 minutes. 

Just read something horrendous in a piece entitled 13 Things You Must Give Up to Live the Life You Want by Zdravko Cvijetic on Uplift (http://upliftconnect.com):

On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. — Anonymous

If that doesn't light a fire under my backside....

Have been at odds with myself for a while.  The quote above plus a post from a friend (thanks KS) have inspired  me to write here.  I've been silent too long.

Partly because of not wanting to dwell and therefore make more important the negative things that I live with (and to not inflict those things on others) but also just not making the TIME to write. 

I make busy.  I make work.  And there's always work; cooking, cleaning, washing, blah blah blah.  So I can feel good about myself by keeping up the appearance of usefulness, of keeping up my end of things, of earning my right to be here.  Yet, by ignoring the things which make me ME, the things which I and I alone can create, I nullify the gift of my life.  I become just one of the herd; without individuality, without joy, without spark. 

And now, more than ever, I need the gifts I was born with because other aspects of my life which are out of my control, assume and consume more time and energy than before.  To keep sane, I HAVE to cherish and use the truest part of me. 

And there's another bit, a harder bit, the bit about being honest.  Other people seem to have their act together.  I feel like I'm fraying at the seams and that my 'act' is held together by force of will alone.  Heard a phrase from a song by Pink (and I don't follow modern music so have no idea what the name of the song was) where she said I don't want to control, I want to let go.

Well, yeah.

Is that the secret?  To let go so that I sink into the person I might become rather than spinning my wheels maintaining the illusion of this person I suppose myself to be?  It's hard work, dishonesty.  Oh, but the courage required to let go....

The Faint

Ten days ago R and I were having lunch at our local on the river.  R was yawning, as he often does, and I urged him to walk around, myabe get us a glass of water which he did.  Lunch came, we ate, all seemed well.  Then suddenly Richard slumped forward in his chair. 

I propped him up and unlike a 'real' faint, he stayed upright.  Also unlike a real faint, his eyes were open, his head was up, his posture 'normal'.  But he wasn't there.  He didn't react to touch, to his name being called, he barely reacted to his eyes being touched.  The blink was slow and delayed.

The scariest thing was the yawning.  Often when attending the euthanizing of dogs they have agonal breathing where the jaw opens wide and then closes again.  It is unconscious and I don't think they are breathing, it is just the last gasp of a life leaving.  Richard was breathing but he was also doing this frequent  very wide open mouth yawning.  He was also incontinent which he has never been before during his two previous faints.

It took him a long time to come around, far longer than the previous faints.  This episode resembled a seizure more than a faint.  

We went to two hospitals, the local and the Tweed.  Bloods were done twice, he had a CT scan as well as urinalysis and being hooked up to monitors the entire 8 hours we were there.  Again, everything was fine.  No anomalies at all.

Two days later (we were both pretty blah the next day) he was whippersnipping.

Last night I had a dream.  We were walking down a town street.  An auction of a deceased elderly woman's possessions was just about to start.  Her things were displayed along the sidewalk (although the sidewalk more resembled a tunnel).  I saw a beautiful basket with a medallion design on one end, a deep blue brocade coat and a carved wooden sculpture of three lions heads.

I looked over at Richard and he had that look in his eye, the look like he was about to faint.  I told him to get up and walk, to pull himself together.  He did get up and half fell onto the laps of the people sitting opposite who were waiting for the auction to begin.

We managed to stumble down the street, me half supporting him while I exhorted him to hold on, to stay with me.  The last part of the dream I remember is of him propped up on the bank below a bridge.

I realize a part of me is frightened of the unknown.  I suspect the major stroke of a friend's mother recently has fueled this fear.  When we were at the restaurant I thought he'd had a stroke, that either I'd lost him completely or our lives would change forever from the consequences. 

Nevertheless the dream has stayed with me.  Today, for the first time in months, I have a headache I cannot shake.  It's only fear.  Tomorrow will be better.  In the meantime, all todays are precious precisely because we do not know what tomorrow brings.

Squeezing in a few minutes of scratching an itch (writing) before going for a walk.  The weather has been hot and intolerably humid - until today when it's just tolerably humid and not too hot.  When it is as hot as it's been my brain melts.  Even reading is too much of an effort.  End up watching, mindlessly, television, with the fan  on full blowing right in my face.

Not that I should complain.  I walk around my new life here in the Tweed breathing gratitude. Right now, as I write, it is overcast.  Windless.  I look out a large window over the bitumen turn circle which is edged with the two large aviaries (covered in reflective paper and draped inside with sheets to deflect the heat).  Beyond them is a wall of green bisected by a white trunked tree.  The green wall is a mosaic of greens; pale new growth green, green tinged with yellow, vivid kelly green, deep forest green, soft greens, hard greens, greens webbed with vines and filigreed with pale fingers of dead twigs.  Flashes of pale blue mark the trajectory of the fastest butterflies I have ever seen.  They have pointed, almost triangular wings and describing their colour as pale blue isn't accurate.  The blue almost glows.  But they move so fast and with so many jerks and feints they are  impossible to describe.

When we walk, Richard comes part of the way and then turns for home.  For awhile I am alone.  On the way up the hill I don't think about much except getting to the top.  On the way home I realize, every day as if it's the first day, how quiet it is.  I live in a rainforest suburb and cars drive past, lawnmowers growl, jets pass overhead, but there are long moments, even minutes when I hear nothing but the insects and the birds.  Does the thickness of the bush absorb sound?  My footsteps sound loud on the bitumen.  My breath echoes off the underside of my hat.  The silence serves to bring all extraneous thought to an end.  It presses in until I am finally in the moment; in the green, under the blue.  It is then I take a deeper breath, an appreciative breath. 

And now it's time to walk!  

.

Christmas in the Tweed

Our first Christmas in the Tweed.  Just Richard and I.  Not many presents either.   We have our big present.  We live here in this beautiful place.  Nevertheless we did get each other presents; nice token presents; perfume for me, scotch whiskey for him.  But the best present was what we did afterwards.  We drove to Mt. Warning and walked up part of the track. 

Old growth forests of any sort aren't common anymore so it is a thrill, a deep visceral thrill, to walk among ancient trees, to be a small being among old giants.  It is a sacred place.  The aborigines desire that Mt. Warning not be scaled but of course we don't respect that and people by the thousands climb it every year.  I'm not sure I want to climb to the top.  What I do want to do is follow the rainforest track until it ends and the cleared final section begins.  We didn't do that on Sunday but I will one day soon.

In Sickness and In Health (nothing to do with marriage)

What a week.  I've been sick.  Talking about one's illness is boring so I won't except to say it took me an entire week to come to my senses and do something about it.  And that something wasn't going to the doctor.

I come from a long line of Christian Scientists and although I don't consider myself a Christian and instinctively shy away from anything with Christian overtones (not because Christianity is inherently bad but because of the bad things done in its name), I do believe in the power of the mind, I do believe we are all spirit and that our spirit is essentially the same as the Great Spirit or Infinite Spirit or God from which everything has its being.  And if I am that than I am capable of healing myself.  So after a particularly excruciating morning in which I spent most of the time doubled over in pain I took myself off to bed.  And then to the couch as the house painters were painting outside the bedroom. 

I lay there and visualized the pain as a knot.  I thanked it for its presence (after all I have lost 2 kilos!) and for what it came to teach me but now it was time to let go its grip and relax. 

Cameron and his girls were coming.  I had to be up (and straight up, not bent over groaning) and about before they arrived.  And I was.  By the time they came the pain had gone.  I'm sore.  Whatever it was, in the space of a week, left a bruised feeling but that's nothing.  The cough is still here (an entirely separate affair?) but that too is nothing.  And I'm working on that.

I am rereading In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine.  Finished it and started reading it again.  It is chock a block with underlined words and sentences that held special meaning for Mom.  In the back is written:  Beauty: Eternal Spirit Truth Infinite Life Love.  In fact, although the book doesn't especially emphasize beauty, Mom does. She reads the book with beauty in mind.  To her it seems important to find the beauty in everything.  She also wrote that sins were like mathematical mistakes made in ignorance.  Once one knew better than one didn't make that mistake again. 

Having done a little research (thank you Wikipedia - just did this years small donation) I have a bit better knowledge and appreciation of my roots through the maternal line.  Apparently many of New Thoughts movers and thinkers in its early years were women.  Grandma Hazel was a Christian Scientist and I believe Aunt Joanne was cured of a serious (incurable?) disease through Christian Science.  So the female emphasis continues.

Unity Magazine used to be a daily part of my teenage life.  I read it and liked it but wasn't really ready for it and even then I was put off by the Christian overtones.  Didn't know that Unity Church also has its roots in New Thought.  

I'm just grateful.  Mom's emphasis was on beauty.  Perhaps.  Her artistic nature, necessarily dampened down by the life she led, found some release in the beauty of the everyday?  I'm only guessing.  I don't know.  My daily emphasis seems to be in gratitude.  Just so damn grateful to be alive to see the beauty in the every day.  And to be pain free.

I've lost my eagle.  That's what I dreamed.  My eagle had flown away and I didn't know how I would get him back again.  I tried to climb over a barbed wire fence but knew even as I struggled with the strands he was far far away and not coming back.  I had a walkie talkie but it didn't matter who I spoke to, the eagle was gone.

I awoke with that dream in my head, feeling sad, feeling bereft.  Feeling trapped, earthbound, inert, sluggish, all those gravity fed words.

So time to take myself in hand, once again.  This dream reflects present perceived reality.  Reality is more a series of chores and obligations with very little soaring.  I am rarely alone, which is a bit hard to adjust to, or if I am, like now, I can expect a friendly query, 'What are you doing?'.  Well meant but lethal.

Took a Natural History Illustration course through the University of Newcastle.  A great kickstarter to getting some art done.  Learned a lot too.  Relearned some things as well.  Happily some of the participants (about 600!) have started a group on facebook.  They are still fleshing out the details but it seems it will be a place where assignments are given and feedback is received.  I'm in.  Have not one original creative idea in my head right now so best to keep the pencil going.

Even now, I've set the timer on the mobile to sit here for 30 minutes and write.  To write anything and everything that comes to mind, just to get something going.  A world of chores awaits; gardens to be worked, weeds to be chipped, painting to be done (A frame interior), enough chores to keep me going for a year.  But I have to start choosing something like this.  Just to keep my hand in.

Incidentally, doing a search of free university courses, there are quite a few for creative writing.  Perhaps a creative writing course is something I could do in the future.

Sad news too.  Both rainbow lorikeets have died.  Found Yasi inert on the bottom of the aviary, the brand new roomy aviary.  She almost seemed paralyzed.  Didn't even try to take her to the vet.  Fed her with a 1mm syringe.  At first she seemed to want to eat but later it was obvious she did not, could not.  Her eyes sank into her head, she was weaker and even more immobile.  She was dead by evening. 

Kept an eagle eye on her mate, Pablo.  All seemed well.  Two days ago, when I took the food and water in, he drank and drank and drank the water which was not a good sign.  But he was eating, calling out to the wild birds, looking normal.  Then yesterday morning, the feathers on top of his head were parted.  Not like from an injury but almost as though either he wasn't preening or he got into something sticky like the grapes we put out on a wire every day for him. 

Last night I thought he looked iffy.  And he seemed a bit sluggish, a bit reluctant to move down the branch away from me, although he's always been semi-tame.  His body shape seemed a bit unusual too, as though his crop was empty - but his food dish was mostly empty so he had been eating.

This morning he was dead on the bottom of the cage.  No poopy behind, no funny smell, no sign at all of what went wrong.  I've had the birds for years.  I'd look up how long but my wild bird file seems to have gone walkabout.  Yasi was named after Cyclone Yasi which made landfall in north Queensland in January 2011.  Pablo had had several *friends* before Yasi.  Birds that came good and were released. 

Could have sent the body for autopsy and get a workup on bacteria etc. but know how expensive it can be with little result.  The scalys seem bright and cheerful.  Although their aviaries are near the rainbows, they don't have contact.  Fingers crossed.

Saw a platypus yesterday.  At the bottom of our street, two ponds are joined by a culvert.  After rain the northernmost one sends a healthy stream of water to the southern one.  We'd seen a turtle sunning himself on a concrete ledge a few days before so decided to sneak up and see if we could have another look without disturbing him.  The turtle wasn't there but a platypus was.  They are much smaller than I imagined.  Thought of them as ferret sized but they seem to be just over a foot long, and that's including the tail. 

We stayed and watched him for awhile.  He leaves a trail of bubbles as he searches the bottom for edibles.  How brilliant to have healthy waterways that can support a platypus and a turtle!  On our street! 

Phil has come and started painting the outside of the house.  Finally we will be rid of the baby poo yellow and burnt orange.  The former owner of the house is the nicest woman but our colour choices are very very different.