existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
Hi. Just over a year since I last posted on this blog. When I log into my dashboard I see the many half written drafts waiting. The new series I had started. The coming-soon teasers. Plans for this website to grow. When I hit publish on my last post, I didn’t know it would be…
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It’s been a pretty busy past month or so, and writing has been more of a challenge for me. We are currently on a visit back to the UK, so very much out of our regular routines, and of course the babba is a month older, and now very much constantly on the move (crawling and furniture walking), so I can no longer really write in moments of playtime. Nothing unanticipated there.
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We agree on a time to meet, and I start planning the night before. Countless tiny tabs on my phone in the dim light of the lamp while O sleeps. Routes plotted in the Maps app. Mental calculations: if we reach here by 10.30, will we manage to get there by 3? In the end: we leave later than we’d hoped. Of course. It wouldn’t be a family roadtrip if we left on time. But it’s not disastrous. We’re off, the Toyota Blade close behind, rainclouds battling it out with the sun for possession of the sky.
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At the end of December, when my baby was just three months and I was still spending more of the night awake than asleep, I made a list of three personal and professional things that I wanted to accomplish this year. One of them, as I mentioned in a recent post, was to develop a writing practice.
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My family left yesterday evening. We hung around in the airport while they queued to drop off their bags, I sat on the floor to feed O, then walked him around the departure terminal while we waited. As I type, they are still in the air, wrenched away from me back home across the globe. They arrived in Auckland towards the end of February, stayed almost a month. Now they’re heading back into a northern hemisphere Spring, while we move into Autumn.
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It’s Sunday morning and everything is strangely calm. The light is grey through the window, a grey we’ve accepted as the norm this summer. When I opened the curtains a few hours ago the garden was deadly still, a soft rain barely perceptible falling. The trees are stirring now, a gentle musical movement, and a fat speckled-bellied thrush is perched on our fence, lost in thought. Occasionally a rough gust shakes everything up, leaving leaves rustling and dancing in its wake.
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You might have noticed that I’m trying to write weekly again, at least for a while. I like taking a moment to look back upon things at the close of the year, a moment to pause and ask myself what I want going forward. I embrace the symbolism of January, two-faced Janus, gazing both into the future and the past. It allows me to pivot, redirect my attention, review my priorities…
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I started writing this post towards the end of October, as I began to stir and emerge from the blur of the first few weeks. I remember turning the page of my calendar and realising with a physical shock that the month was almost over. I’d barely noticed it had begun.
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It’s September 1st 2022, just after 6pm. I’m writing in the grey of the gloaming. Outdoors a dogged barking, the tu-tu-tu twitter of the birds, the occasional rush of a car. The trees are still, the sky bruised.
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August – September Update I’ve spread a teatowel over the counter in order to bring my laptop close. The sounds of the kitchen embrace me: the soft burr of the timer, the hiss and sigh of the pot on the stove. Outdoors night is falling, the window to my right dark and green, grey sky…
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July Update I saw this headline on the cover of a magazine recently and couldn’t resist borrowing it. Over the past few weeks blustery storms have alternated with cold frosty snaps, the coldest temperatures I’ve ever experienced in Auckland. A freak tornado ripped through Papatoetoe, the hospital is heaving with RSV, everyone is under the…
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The Winter Solstice is upon us tomorrow, I am looking forward to longer days of light. On Saturday morning we wake in the small hours to a storm fit to launch an ark. Cosy and warm while the house creaks and groans around us, we let ourselves be lulled back to sleep. When we wake again it is to the sound of continuous soft dripping, as though a shower or a tap has not quite been switched off. It has been raining heavily all week.
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Right now I’m sitting outside on the deck in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt, catching the last of the low (3pm) afternoon sun while K tries to tame the garden, the air heavy with damp soil and cut grass.
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From Devonport Wharf through Maungauika Reserve down to Cheltenham Beach. And back again. Just hopping on here real quick with some photos from an evening walk we took yesterday, after a long day of study. Swimming in the sea is always so magical. Spent today sleeping in, spring cleaning the whole house, changing bedsheets and…
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I associate the smell of woodfire with autumn giving way to winter, dark wet cobbled streets, treacherously slippy fallen leaves, damp socks, dim bike lights, painful chapped hands. This is the season of course that heralds Christmas, the turn of the year, and thus it felt so natural to me that it took a few seconds before it jarred against the reality of warm summer air and blue skies. I could smell wood-smoke on Christmas day
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It’s early morning before work and I’m writing again in the grey of the soft light. The feeling of writing: thoughts running through my fingers, the beat of the words, the shape and sensation of them, the joy of making something tangible out of something existing only in my mind, an exacting almost topographical pleasure.…
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I’m sitting at our desk in our study with the wooden slats of the blinds angled just enough to let in the light. Outside is blue sky. I can see a fantail bobbing up and down among the sun-warmed leaves of a fern tree. This is September. The past month has gone fast. Barely three…
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On the eve of my three year anniversary in New Zealand, I wanted to pause for a moment to try write the words that I would have found comforting back in 2017, before I left.
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Driving to work, the sky is blanketed in a puffy quilt of pink and purple. Beneath it, the sun is a ribbon of pale gold. Palm trees loom darkly on the fringes of the road. Houses are black save for the brilliance reflected in their windows. The morning traffic lurches forward sleepily, unpredictably. Horns blare.
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Work is picking up. Winter is always a busy time in Medicine. Too many people live precariously on the edge of decompensation, all it takes is a virus, a cold, to tip them over the edge. The medical take numbers are swelling. The wards are over-capacity. But quick discharges are practically non-existent.
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Mad to Live 