take the weather with you

I recently heard the English actor Stephen Fry speak about mental illness, which as a sufferer of bipolar disorder he knows a bit about. He said that a person's mental state should be seen as their own personal weather. It was a mistake, he said, to see that it was raining and think that could be changed. It should just be accepted - it is raining therefore it will continue to rain until it stops. Raining. But it was equally futile, he said, to think that it would continue to rain for all eternity and that life was no longer worth living because the rain would never end.
I always thought Fry was talented, and sometimes funny. I had no idea he was so compellingly wise.

you have to read between the lines

There was once a young girl who discovered that she liked to make bread. She made it whenever she could and it was always very good bread so that made her happy. When the young girl grew into a young woman and she had to find a job, she naturally looked in a bakery and was hired the very same day. The big bread-making benches and mixers and ovens were very exciting for someone who had only ever baked at home in her own small kitchen, but after many months of working every day in the big bakery for somebody else the woman began to lose her passion for making bread. She saw the unnecessary ingredients that her employer made all his bakers put into the dough to help it rise better and look whiter and stay fresher for many more days than it normally would. She felt bad about feeding this kind of fake bread to the people who came to the bakery. It started to make her sick. She planned to save all the money she earned from working at the bakery and use it to leave the town and travel to another country where she might find something else she liked doing. She eventually saved enough to leave the bakery and she tried other jobs, but there was nothing in her life that she loved doing as much as she loved making bread. More than a year passed and she returned to her home town, which she loved, and was offered a job at the same bakery she had left. She thought maybe it would be different but she was wrong. The fake bread made her sad and she lost her joy. Then she met a man who she loved even more than making bread, and they were married and her joy returned and multiplied though it had nothing to do with bread. She and the man became a family, then a larger family, and she spent more and more time away from her job at the bakery. She went days, sometimes weeks, without giving the bakery a second thought, but dreamed almost daily of making her own special heartfelt bread to feed her family. As her youngest child grew, the woman faced returning to the job at the bakery that weighed so heavily on her heart. She knew that her wages would help her family, and that it would feel good to work the dough with her hands and feel the heat from the bakery ovens. But in her heart she knew that it was not the same as the making of real bread.

in which i see the light

In summer the Robinia tree in the corner of our garden is showered in leaves of an astonishing green, radiating light and life. Through winter it has been a mass of sticks and thorns but I have still thought it beautiful, maybe because I know what is to come in just a few months. 

I think this tiny glimpse of green is what nature likes to call The Light at the End of the Tunnel. 

raindrops on ... nasturtiums

Mother Nature was having a particularly fabulous day when she came up with nasturtiums, you'd have to say. They smell sweet, they're a work of art, you can even put them in salad - and they never even seem to try. Not needy and showy like roses, which are beautiful too but in a trumped-up kind of way. Nasturtiums are more like a little brown girl in a yellow sundress and bare feet.
So I hope someone patted Mother Nature on the back after her nasturtium moment, although she doesn't strike me as somebody who'd need anyone else's validation for a job well done. She's more of a: 'Here is my work. Admire it as you see fit. Ultimately I do not require your attention or praise - you need it more than I do.'
A few days ago I was kind of craving a nasturtium day, because it seemed that not much was going right. But then just yesterday I was down on all fours above Rosa and I leaned right in and gave her a big noisy kiss on the cheek and she just gazed into my eyes, six inches away, and smiled at me. Nasturtium moment.

doe: a deer, a female deer

I had to have this lovely deer when I saw it in a retro furniture shop out in the backwoods one recent weekend. When I say backwoods, I'm referring to a town that has a distinct Twin Peaks atmosphere about it, being set at the foothills of a mountain. At this time of year there's always a bracing chill in the air, although I'm never sure if it's from the frosty atmospheric conditions or the dead bodies in the back streets.
The nice lady in the retro furniture shop restores and sells beautiful furniture from the 1950s and 60s, which looks about as foreign in the backwoods as a small spaceship - possibly a time machine. She told me this deer was missing some antlers, although I prefer to think of her as a mother deer anyway, since she's so lovely and placid and graceful. Or maybe it's school holidays in the woodland glade and she's climbed this mountain of boulders, at great risk to her own personal safety, in order to get FIVE MINUTES PEACE. That expression on her face is deer for: Do not even think about following me up this mountain. The girls think the mountain looks like a pile of poo. You say potato.

season's greetings

We bought this wondrous new ornament at a second-hand shop that's just opened nearby, and discovered on the box that it is a Weihnachts pyramide, or Christmas pyramid. Apparently they are very big (figuratively and literally) in Europe. The idea is to light the candles around the bottom, and the warm air sets the fan at the top spinning, which makes all the little people inside spin too. We fired it up on the night we bought it and turned off all the lights. Hard to say which member of the family was more mesmerised, although the looks on the girls' faces (all three of them) were priceless. It occurred to me that most traditional Christmas activities are much more enjoyable when it's cold outside. Hot lunch, open fires, carol-singing. And how sweet would it be to give hand-knitted mittens and scarves as Christmas gifts, if only it wasn't 35 degrees.

This is quite the turnaround for me, if you'll forgive the somewhat obvious reference to the above. In years past I would dread winter - in fact I'd start dreading it in early Autumn, thus missing the beautiful leaves changing colour and instead gritting my teeth against the coming cold. My jaw would only unclench some time in Spring, and not because of the signs I now cherish - tiny buds on the peach tree, green shoots defiant against grey skies - but only when the weather turned warm.

I credit the girls' school with my newfound appreciation of the seasons. They have such a focus on nature and its changes throughout the year, learning poems and stories that are based around the seasons and all their glory. It is a rare thing in this part of Australia to embrace winter. We tend to kid ourselves that we're living in the tropics, and try to shut out the cold by shutting down. I'm learning that embracing the cold can warm you very effectively from the inside.

layin' everybody low with a love song that he made

I was thinking the other day, as you do, what my favourite song of all time would be. Naturally I could not make such an immense decision, but I did go as far as making a shortlist, and this song would be way up there on that list. It makes me cry every single time I hear it, for lots of reasons. It's so filled with teenage angst and that heart-shattering love that you think might actually kill you. And while I love it, I don't actually own a copy of it, so I Googled it today and found out that some hip band called The Killers, which I think the young people are listening to these days, has done a cover version. It does do the song justice, which apparently the lead singer feared it may not, although his voice tends to prove that nobody other than Mark Knopfler can bring it down so low it makes your knees give way. But then it also got me thinking that if any man on the planet sang this song for me, whether he could hold a note or not, I would be his forever. Right after I picked myself up off the floor. And I can say this secure in the knowledge that it will never happen.

Can't do anything, but I'd do anything for you.
Can't be anything 'cept be in love with you.