Doust quote.

I like this, it gives me hope!

"You know, they say that every writer, almost every writer, that he or she has a book that they have to write before they can write a book. It's a book that is lying within them that they must get out of their system before they can settle down and ... this is a book I had to write. [Boy On A Wire.]"
Jon Doust

buckets of moonbeams...

For about 2 weeks now things have been good, really quite good, continuously quite good. After an outburst about two weeks ago I got some important messages of support, and since then something in me seems to have clicked. Admittedly I've had a few moments, but they've had traceable causes.

The biggest difference is being off the drugs. I realise now that they were keeping me stuck in a false sense that everything was ok, when it most definitely was not. I have just had to go through the shit, just like everyone else, to get out the other side.

Partly, improvement in my state is due to a renewed sense of hope now I have a sense of home to come back to. And with home a coherent narrative of self. It has been a concern at times that that is an unreasonable expectation, but it's important to me, and that's what is at stake here: a sense of self. So much of my time in the past seems to have been spent flitting from one partially-real self to another, where I have inhabited a part of my personality distinct from the other parts and sometimes the different bits just don't add up together: no core, no contiguous self.

And with home, community, and a place within community. A purpose. I clearly remember the devastation at Carlisle street focused around hopelessness without purpose, and that was at least 10 years ago.

Very early on in therapy a main preoccupation had been drawing a coherent map of my life. I'd construct minutely detailed time-lines, showing months spent in this place or that, who with, how I left, what car I had, how much money, what length my hair was...sometimes trying to construct new countries that might explain absences and actions when there were bits missing, or they were there but the whole just didn't make sense. It was a puzzle to fit all the pieces together and make sense of all these gaps I felt in me. Every time I poked my finger under my ribs or into my thigh I’d touch the edge of a hole; it was disconcerting.

But I just couldn't map the territory, I came away dissatisfied that it was still a piece of two dimensional paper with a couple of lines drawn on it. I don't remember when I gave up trying to map my self.

When I stop whining about rmit I have to admit that one of the greatest liberations I have gained from my studies of landscape architecture has been a sense of the immensity. And with that a realisation that no one person can fix it.

con·tig·u·ous (kn-tgy-s)

adj.

1. Sharing an edge or boundary; touching.

2. Neighboring; adjacent.

3. a. Connecting without a break: the 48 contiguous states.

b. Connected in time; uninterrupted: served two contiguous terms in office.

Always, for as long as I can remember at least, there have been bits of me that fear the actions and words of other bits, worrying they’d say and do things that I'd be completely embarrassed by later, when I returned to 'sanity.' So I screwed the lid down tighter and tighter - which of course meant that there'd be a blowout somewhere else and the most feared things would manifest.

But lately I'm tracking it all, being kinder to the bits, and feeling, for I don't know how long, a sense of wholeness. Iguess in simple terms, it's making friends with the darkness instead of wall-papering over it.

i suppose, growing up surrounded by sheep is not necessarily good practice
for living in a city...

A good education is a marvellous thing.

An good education is a marvelous thing. And I will be eternally grateful to all those who have given and supported my efforts in taking the opportunity to partake of two exemplary and radical degrees. I am extremely lucky and white, middle class Australian and the rest of it. I shouldn't complain, only 3 weeks left to go. However, about 5 hours ago I was reminded of just how fucking annoying stupid people with too much education can be. Why 'academics' in this course (and i use inverted commas advisedly) can annoy me so fucking much is the undying dedication to obfuscation that I have had the abject stupidity to subject myself to for four cunt years.
'What do you mean by "expanded field"?'
'If you read the course guide which is a document developed by the department outlining the tripolar model against which we must align our practice [your what, you academic?!] and which all we lecturers have had to position ourselves against, within this tripolarity, and boy does that make staff meetings exciting blah blah blah and use it to position your own projects.'
'I've read the course guide twice and I still don't understand what you mean by "expanded field"? I know what expanded might mean, but field has so many possibilities...do you mean a paddock that's getting bigger?'
'Well there no right or wrong answer, it's a useful way of positioning yourself and helping you to examine where you sit.'
'In a big fucking paddock.'
other student: 'I think if it resonates with you, then it is useful, and it might help you to think about your work and to position yourself.'
'So, if it doesn't resonate with me i should just ignore it. It's not going to resonate because I've got no fucking idea what it is that you're talking about.'
'You could try Googling it, Christine.'
Yes. Right.
Only sixty one thousand hits. Right.
Now fuck off.

Dorianthus excelsa

Transition towns

Caught this guy, Andrew Lucas, talking on Bush telegraph this morning, about changing suburbs away from fossil fuel dependency, growing food locally, etc.

If you go to the end of the article and click on the listen to this link, you'll hear some really inspiring ideas.

http://www.foe.org.au/resources/audio-centre/2009-sustainability-convergence/m_Andrew_Lucas_Transition_Town.mp3/view

"Panorama" panorama.

A view from a morning of my stay in the caravan at Panorama. Forgive my melodrama, six weeks is no time at all; but this morning I just can't shake the feeling that the prison I am in is closing too tight. I stictched this together because I needed to feel that what I long for is really real.
If only I was clever enough to live in this walnut and count myself a king of infinite space...then I suppose I wouldn't be longing, I wouldn't be living for a future elsewhere, I wouldn't be dreaming of projects that imagine a new world of possibilities, using trees and moss and communal spaces terraced roof gardens, retaining walls as houses, places where one might have an opportunity to live with your neighbors, in a street that is the extension of the house...it is a horror to wander in an empty city, morning after morning, evening after evening, street after street after suburb after highway after everyone has disappeared.
Highlight of my ramblings was a Sunday afternoon soccer in the local park. A beautiful game, simple, elegant. Hume in the white, all-Iraqi boys. Played Preston (Darebin) in orange. 3-1 Hume, those boys were fast and pre-cise!
Each verbal encounter is a shining light in my pedestrian world.
I don't want to live in this box anymore!

- and check this out for weird:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI

Bobby is a Cassandra...

Edge of Sand

Things got a little bit furry this morning, I believe, so she headed out to the edge of the sea. It was a beautiful day, the rain sharp and cold, the wind whipping in blue. It was a return to where it all began - journey back to heartland. So much has happened for her, so many changes, new words, a new interior construction and sense of wholeness.
When she came back to the city a few weeks ago she talked suspiciously of a re-dis-intergration, and I know at time there have been moments when it feels like the centre will not hold and she will return to psychic anarchy. But through practice she's remained thus far, intact. At times I've watched her marching to a mantra that must be at each moment repeated, holding to the edge, her knuckles white, lips white.
She walks a line sharp and fragile, triangular weathered sandstone, balancing one foot in front of the other, bare foot to grip, repeating at each step the mantra, perhaps not tomorrow, but nevertheless in this moment free, and free now and free now and now and now and now. Arms wide.
The rain is cold, it is fine to feel on skin.
If I see her again I'll say hello.

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939). This written 1919.

The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?	5 10 15 20
Printings: The Dial (Chicago), November 1920; The Nation (London), 6 November 1920; Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala, 1921); Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922; 1924; 1926; 1931).

you are my sunshine

(This is the best I seem to be able to do.)

You are my Sunshine

Press play and check this out, folks, if you haven't already. I so want to post this video here, but i just can't work out how. So frustrating!

http://hellejorgensen.typepad.com/gooseflesh/2009/08/ha.html

Thanks for this great link, Kate.