Today the first cigarette free day. It was harder yesterday stretching out those last few smokes so they lasted until bedtime. Even resorted to having a few puffs then putting the cigarette out until the next time I had a craving. Today is far easier in comparison. Hardest time around lunch. Lunch can take anything from an hour to two hours depending upon if there is a good midday movie on. Today it took 15 minutes. Usually if there's a movie on I work on a drawing. The movie is 'company' if it's not engrossing enough to warrant full attention. Too energetic today to do anything but get up, do the dishes and head out the door to reinflate bicycle tyres.

Took the bike for a half hour spin. Easier than I expected. I suspect yoga has just made me generally fitter than I used to be. The hardest part is a) sore 'nether regions' and b) pain in lower back from those horrible lowset handlebars. Might invest in upright handlebars. As for the groin, will just have to get 'calloused' up somehow. Don't think Richard plans to ride his bike so might nick his sheepskin seat cover. He went for a grand total of two rides and whinged all the way. Not his cup of tea.

We have been a tiny bit snappy with one another but realizing that we are in the throes, as it were, it doesn't escalate. Hardly worth mentioning really. Don't know why I did.

Had a, for me, really small lunch. Small helping of salad, two crackers instead of three. That's the only way I'll keep from gaining weight, smaller helpings and more exercise. I do have the leeway of portion size for I do Live Large as far as food goes but because of no dairy and the active lifestyle I've lost weight despite myself. Now I don't have the luxury of smoking as an appetite suppressant and metabolism accelerator so have to find other ways to remain steady. I know it's vain but it is so depressing to be chunky.

Countdown to Quitting

Day Three: Haven't stopped smoking yet but it is three days after making the decision to do so. Have one pack and a bit left so it's not too long before having to face those first three crucial days of doing without. But there is much to gain too (hopefully not weight!). Having my breath back, feeling true to myself, gain in energy and sense of smell, perhaps even whiter teeth.

So why have I chosen to quit after giving up attempting to give up for so many years? Of course there are the physical side effects; a smokers cough when I've never had a smoker's cough. Noticeable tingling in my hands and arms in bed from lack of circulation, not enjoying a smoke as much as I used to but the most important reason is how smoking is like having a huge hairy wart on the end of my nose. It doesn't fit with who I am, who I want to be. I blame yoga for this. Yoga and pranayama. It's not only that my lung capacity sucks, it is a Big Lie to continue smoking when yoga brings me closer, however, slowly, to the truth of my being.

And my Being doesn't smoke, does not treat herself with disrespect, does not intentionally and consistently harm herself. She does not pollute the air which is already so polluted with the effects of humanity. I gave up meat because I don't believe in the killing of animals to feed me something I don't need. I gave up dairy because of the pain it causes to cows and calves. So I can be compassionate to others. Why not myself?

Quitting

Have just lit a cigarette in a post where I'm going to give myself a pep talk about giving them up. Have you ever seen someone nicely turned out, beautifully groomed, stylish clothes and wearing tennis shoes (like Cybil Shepherd on the Oscar red carpet once - good for her!) well, that's my life. Cigarettes strike such a false note, especially as yoga is such a big part of it now. I mean, pranayama is all about The Breath. And I have smoker's cough. Who am I kidding? I read of these luscious yoga retreats that I'll never go on because I couldn't go without a fag or if I did sneak a smoke, everyone would know.

And then there's Richard. If I quit, he will, without question. He tried a few months ago but I puffed away around him. What chance did he have? We both would be so much better off, feel much better, all those obvious things, if I just quit.

I'm scared of two things, that horrible sickness of last time when I vomited like a conveyer belt of toxins. Not to get too icky about it but usually when you vomit, it's called a heave for good reason. Not pleasant, pretty disgusting, but that time it was scary. My mouth was open and it just kept on coming without surcease. But I did survive. The second thing is derived from vanity. I don't want to put on weight. I'm down to 118, perhaps less as I haven't weighed myself in a month or more. I haven't been below 120 since 1987 (from a broken heart and fear, not the ideal way to lose weight).

A de-tox juice/vegetable fast might come in handy when I quit (have 2 or 3 packs in the pantry still). Get it all over with at once - of course that means giving up coffee and wine too, perhaps too much to ask for at one time. Giving up dairy products (except for the two tablespoons of powdered milk in the homemade bread) was easy. Thought I'd miss cheese but I don't. Yes, I have chocolate too but think I can give that a miss as well.

If I become a non-smoker I'll get my breath back. I know they say it takes ten years for it to return to normal but the increased lung capacity is noticed almost immediately. My mouth will taste better. I won't reek of cigarettes and won't feel self-conscious around non-smokers, which are legion. The house will smell better. The house will sell better if it doesn't have that nicotine residue. I will have more energy, especially initially when activity substitutes for smoking, but long term as well.

But most of all I will be true to myself. I try and kid myself about my smoking. It's lying. I know it's lying and that's the worst part. Being unkind to me. Lying to me. Doing damage to me, consciously, intentionally, continuously. Why be so mean to myself?

W

Richard's gone to town. All morning to myself. Should be cleaning the bird verandah, which I will, just later. Doesn't work expand in the time available to do it or some such thing? If it does it will take me all morning and part of the afternoon to do the chores. But that's okay. Feels good to be alone and know my time is my own without interruption. Don't get me wrong. I love Richard and do not wish to live my life without him. At the same time, I believe spending time completely alone is necessary. I breathe more deeply.

I have a pastel painting going that I'm excited about. It's a departure from what I've usually done. It's gone through two metamorphoses already. I'd seen, of half seen, this painting on the wall of a room on a television program. This often happens. I see something or partly see something and it sparks off an idea. In this case I visualized a big big sky, a desert sky with pale blue shading down to a pale sand colour. In the back ground were two somewhat horizontal black slashes of colour, like beetling eyebrows and in the foreground, right near the edge of the paper, was a black sphere. But that painting didn't eventuate. The colour wasn't right to begin with and along the way the impact of that mental image vanished. Then I remembered an intriguing water stain that is on the back of an old horse head sketch. Copied it loosely onto the paper. The big black circle from the previous painting didn't fit so I wiped it out. Now I have this sinuous dreamy painting in greens, yellows and blue with some pink. It's kind of abstract but in it is a woman's anatomically incorrect body and a large face in 3/4 view. Not clearly delineated but they are there. Without intending to I've drawn inspiration from Birgit Erfurt's Karma Tarot. Perhaps in the curvy shapes and shadows but definitely there. Still, I like it. It's a far cry from the meticulously (for me) drawn pencil sketches where I lose myself in the details. This is much looser.

A few years ago I went to the Toowoomba Gallery and saw this painting, totally abstract, that was filled with light. It was almost spiritual this light. I kept returning to have aother look. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the artist. That painting has stayed with me. This last work has the merest touch of that painting. A glow, a sense of things unseen. Admittedly, it's been fun to work with colour again. Even Natalia is cooperating in not playing with the pastel sticks.

The success of the application to quarry the mountain made for a couple of crappy days. It was as though someone had died. I grieved at the same time as I was angry. Rather than pretend I wasn't feeling those things, as useless as they were, I just let them through. I was mad and sad and that was that. Luckily the feelings passed and I'm my usual cheerful self again. In fact, in the past two days there's been this subtle but pervasive feeling of joy. Perhaps because it is finally over. When living under a shadow for such a long time, one forgets what real sunlight feels like. There's a long hard road ahead. We have to make the house saleable which means painting four rooms and, once the house is ready, cleaning the outside of dust and cobwebs and then keeping it that way. I ceased to worry about the thousands of black house spiders which make their homes under the eaves. There are so many and they are so tenacious that almost as soon as they are removed they return. Richard has to clean out the shed, a mammoth, nay Herculean task. He's been collecting 'stuff' for twenty years in case something might come in handy. There is some concreting to do and some gardening but otherwise just maintenance stuff. I'll have to clean the feed and tack rooms and keep them dust and web free as well.

Then comes the balancing act of putting the house on the market at the same time as we start looking for a place of our own. I've searched for real estate from Tenterfield to Nambour, from Byron Bay to Nanango. I am confident we'll find the right place - then comes the move. Thirteen birds plus two others that must be caught to take with us. Felicity won't survive without supplementary feeding and as Suki is her mate he needs to come too. Moving aviaries and birds will be the most logistically difficult - but not impossible. But first things first and the first thing is to clean the ruddy bird verandah!

quarry

Richard has gone to the first day of the court hearing of Lockyer Quarries and Lockyer Valley Council. The judge came out yesterday to view the site. Shanahan was also present. There were other people in the Land Rover but don't know who they were. So now the judge has seen the site and the hearing starts in earnest. I have tried to keep a serene attitude. What will be will be. We've done what we can and now it is out of our hands (see Tarot card reading in previous post). Still, I know that I am having trouble letting it go. I haven't given up surrounding that hill with protective light, that's a given, but letting my imagination run away with me, that's harder to control. If we lose, then we lose and it begins a new phase in our life. But in a way, it's not even about us anymore. It's about protecting one small pocked of remnant vegetation from the bulldozers. It's not a big pocket in the scale of things but it is rare, dry vine scrub, and getting rarer. We've got to stop chipping away at what wildness is left. I hope the judge sees that. The only bone of contention is the noise. Everyone else mediated their little tails off so that there is nothing left to contest.

I am bewildered because in the first sentence of the appeal it says that Lockyer Quarry wants to quarry the mountain and the Council is refusing permission - and then they go straight to mediation. Once council's solicitors set (and said) "conditions", Game Over. No mediation should ever have been entered into, it should've been no quarry period. But that's done and dusted and it only depresses me to write the above.


Later same day. We lost.

What is it with numbers? Especially number 11 and 22, the numbers I've always thought of as *my* magical numbers. There was even a time many years ago when I thought of changing my name so that it would add up to 11 or 22. I didn't. That I thought seriously of doing so and went through all the permutations and variations to find something similar speaks of how seriously I took numerology. I still take note of dates equalling 11 or 22, license plates and clocks. It's the clocks that speak the most. Almost every day and every night I wake up at a time that equals 11 or 22. This morning, 5:33, last night when I had to get up to go to the loo, 12:08. I realise that numbers may appear to appear more regularly because I take note of them. I would notice a 9:49 more than I would a 9:50 but that can't be said for those times when I open my eyes and the first thing seen is an eleven or twenty-two. It's still synchronicity playing a part in my life.

I miss those days when Everything Spoke to Me. I studied Wicca and Tarot and Numerology and Crystals and read read read, everything from Joseph Campbell to Aleister Crowley. I was firmly convinced of the efficacy of magic and sometimes saw through the Veil of Maya. Now I am older and pragmatic and have lowered the veil of habit and illusion between what appears to be reality and reality itself. Of course I smoked alot of dope back then, not that smoking dope demeans the truth of what I knew. On the contrary I suspect an altered state can serve as an introduction to an different but not necessarily false, reality. We put too much store in facts; in what we can count, see, touch, hear, smell or taste. Although seeing and counting what we've seen appear to have become our primary senses. At any rate, smoking marijuana showed me that there was more to what was there then I had known. Of course I fell into the trap of smoking dope just to smoke dope. Like so many others. But mind altering substances have been used for aeons to explore behind the Veil. The difference is they were used as an adjunct to religious practices while western society just wants to get stoned.

So now I'm sober (save for red wine), don't read Tarot or Crowley any more. I haven't given the books away, I occasionally get the Tarot deck out to admire the art work (Karma Tarot by Birgit Boline Erfurt), the crystals catch the light in the kitchen window and the clocks remind me that there's more life than can be found in any philosophy. If I could read Tarot for myself I probably would. I could read for other people and was sometimes uncannily accurate (predicting a pregnancy and illness for two friends, the first had no intention or desire to get pregnant but did anyway, the second had no idea anything was wrong with her). So that was simultaneously satisfying and a little scary. But read for myself? I couldn't do it. I read but nothing I read made any sense or came true.

While I'm writing this, rather than do a reading for myself I am trying one of those free online Tarot spots. This is what I got: The Lovers for how I feel about myself now. At least I know I'm ultimately on my side. Death, for what I most want at the moment (cataclysmic change). The Tower represents my fears, my world falling apart (the quarry and having to move), Temperance for what I've got going for me, a "way of handling difficult circumstances with calm confidence." The Hanged man for what is going against me, being hung up while others (the lawyers and the Courts) decide my future, and for my personal card, The Fool...nothing more need be said.

Sulawesi Breath

I often listen to a CD of birdsong from Sulawesi while doing yoga. On the last track there is a recording of a bird singing near dusk or night as there is a frog chorus in the background. I suppose you couldn't really call is singing, more of a calling, in a breathy descending minor key, of two and then three notes. It is the loneliest sound I have ever heard. There is no answer to that yearning hello. Just this waiting for a reply that never comes. The bird finally stops, the frogs chirp on but the silence and the infinity of the night is deafening.

I don't know what kind of bird this is and knowing it's name would not make it any dearer to me. It's all tied in with 'if a sparow or a leaf falls, would God know'? This bird symbolizes, for me at leat, all that we've lost, all that we could lose, if we don't clean up our act. What sound did a Dodo make? A Carolina parakeet. It's wretched that we will never know, that those sounds are lost forever. And this bird sings in the wilderness for a mate that never replies. Is that how it feels to know yourself to be finally and forever alone?

While I was meditating today and concentrating on my breath I could hear Tony the budgie talking to himself on the verandah (I love you, The Regurgitator, pretty pretty PRETTY bird). In the poinciana outside this room Felicity was lamenting her (to my mind at least) on off again relationship with Suki. Her calls didn't sound like contact calls but more of a lament. Suki came home yesterday but is gone again today. As I hovered in the indescribably state which may be a percursor to mditating it occurred to me that the breath which was the focus of my concentration and which was starting to define that oceanic feeling I sometimes get while meditating, was the very same breath Tony and Felicity were using. We were united by breath. In and out, no matter the rate, the air flows from one through another.

Listening to Words of Peace the other day, Prem Rawat spoke of how this planet, this Earth, is as far as anybody knows the only place with life on it for millions and billions of miles. He spoke of the miracle of meeting another who is alive and breathing This Day, and how we should greet each other with that shared miracle in mind. No one from 150 years ago is alive. No one today will be alive 150 years hence (barring medical miracles). And this Earth? A teeming, violent, buzzing, symphonic, fragile, resilient, chaotic yet ultimately precious place is the only place like it anywhere. This tiny tiny little light, this soft soft little sound in an infinity of empty space yet we live as though there are billions of Earths just a footstep away.