City Life, and a Conversation

 

I have lived in the city my whole life, and it has made me defensive. I avoid people’s eyes when I’m walking down the street; I avert my face from the stranger on the train. You never know when you will be asked if you have been saved (correct answer: yes, thank you, and hallelujah! This is my stop...); asked if you have a dollar; or told at great length about tedious grandchildren. Perhaps this is why so many of us drive – it’s a great way to stay in one’s bubble.

This regular practice of avoidance takes its toll, however. I’ve done it for so long that it has become a habit of mind; and I realise that, rather than it being a deliberate strategy I adopt when necessary, it has become my starting point. I now find myself avoiding people when I have no need to: in the playground, on the footpath, sometimes even at home without really meaning to. It’s not that I don’t want to talk. It’s just that somehow it’s all a bit hard, and the sense of risk outweighs the possible benefit.

Not long ago, I climbed onto a bus. There was a vacant seat next to a crinkly old man. His crumpled face was dotted with liver spots and skin tags. He had grown too small for his clothes and they hung from his skinny little frame. One glance, and my alarm bells began to ring. Would he insist on telling me about his long life? Would he be smelly, perhaps even incontinent? Would he be very strange?

I didn’t know, but I am sick of that constant companion, trepidation. So I sat next to him – coward that I am, however, I armed myself with a book.

But buses and books don’t agree with me, so I soon shut it again. And the man, whom I had felt reading over my shoulder, asked me what I thought of it. ‘I knew the author,’ he said, ‘when he was at Melbourne University. His wife and mine were great friends. But I haven’t read that one.’

‘Oh?’ I asked, ‘and what did you study?’

‘I was a teacher,’ he said. ‘I taught a lot of new migrants. Had a terrific time. They called me il Professore!’

I read with refugee kids each week, so I mentioned that. And we suddenly launched into one of those great big life-giving conversations, ranging from refugee kids, ghetto schools and educational practices, to the process of writing and action research. ‘Life,’ I suggested, ‘is one big action research project’ and he nodded emphatically, and laughed.

He told me about volunteering with older boys at the youth remand centre. He encouraged them to write stories about their life ‘behind the roller door’, and arranged to have their work published. ‘You’re authors now,’ he’d say to them, ‘so write more! Write more!’

‘What a man!’ I thought. It was the best conversation I’d had in weeks, the sort of I’d hope for at a good party.

The burden of living in a city is also its great gift: the daily interactions with strangers. It takes time and energy, and the bypassing of caution, to engage in these friendly encounters. But when I do, there is one thing I’ve learned: I am surprised and delighted time and again, even on the local bus.

Reaping the Inner Harvest

Gardens are bountiful places, and more things grow than just plants: gentleness, perhaps, and patience, and the bright green shoots of hope.

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To read more, click on the embedded link below and flick to the back; or click here and follow the link to download the issue to your iPad.

Open publication - Free publishing

The Witch Doctor

This piece first appeared in Zadok Perspectives No. 113 (Summer 2012). The Winter edition is out now, with my reflection on the houses in my dreams.

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What would it have been like to be healed by Jesus? I have largely regarded the healing stories to be about the restoration of people to their community; but more recently I have had such a strange experience of physical healing that I find myself revisiting them.

For many years now, I have been tired, very tired, so that I always feel like I am wading through molasses. I have mentioned this to several GPs, who have all patted me on the head and told me it's grief / I have young children / it'll go away.

For many years, too, I have had mild twinges in my joints whenever I stood up, brushed my teeth, or turned around too sharply. I have put on weight; felt bloated; caught every bug that went around; and experienced many other small niggles, all of which I dismissed as signs of aging. Until recently. Recently, the twinges in the joints became screaming pain, so that for a few days I could barely turn on a tap, pick up a pen, or go up or down a step. This was clearly not right for someone in her middle thirties, so I went to the doctor.

Blood tests established that I didn't have rheumatoid arthritis, or any of a dozen other conditions. The doctor announced it must be viral arthritis, handed me a script for anti-inflammatories, and told me to prepare for the next few months as the virus slowly worked its way through my system.

But the diagnosis didn't fit. I explained that this pain wasn't new; instead, it was an exacerbation of my normal. I had experienced aches and pains in my joints for years, and blaming a virus didn't make sense; however, the doctor was unmoved. So off I went, clutching my script and wondering.

A couple of painful weeks later, someone recommended a natural therapist who had a knack with odd conditions. In desperation, I arranged a visit. The therapist greeted me but asked no questions about my symptoms. Instead, he looked into my eyes with a torch for about thirty seconds, then said that I had a deeply depressed adrenal gland. So, he said matter-of-factly, I expect you've been having severe arthritis; lethargy and fatigue; chronic dermatitis; weight gain; lots of colds, flus and gastro; bloating especially after eating wheat; heavier periods; anxiety; and perhaps depression. You've been suffering most of these symptoms for years now. What was the traumatic event five to ten years ago that triggered it?

Once I had scraped my chin off the floor, I confirmed that I had all the symptoms bar full on depression, although I had certainly lost my spark; and that, among a cluster of major events about a decade ago, my mother had died.

'That would be it,' he said, 'but don't worry, this is easy to treat', and he prescribed a four month program of meditation, stringent dietary restrictions, herbal tablets and exercise; he told me I'd be right as rain in no time, with more energy than I'd had in years.

I went home and ate forbidden bread and butter, then polished off some forbidden chocolate. That evening, I sucked down a pint or two of forbidden beer, and reflected on the course of treatment.

What I began to realise was that I was reluctant even to try it.

Of course I longed to feel energetic, of course I didn't want to feel joint pain, of course I was fed up with being sick, of course I wanted to lose weight. And yet how much of my writing has come out of a slow approach to life that is a physical result of lethargy? How much of my reflective nature is a gift that comes out of pain? How many of my friendships are based on a personality which is shaped, to some extent, by being in this particular body that feels this particular way?

I was scared to follow the regimen because I didn't want it to work. I knew how to be an exhausted, flat, mildly depressive person who feels slightly sick every time she eats a sandwich. I barely remembered the playful, mischievous person I once was; and I didn't know how to integrate her into my relationships with my husband, my children, or anyone else.

I had felt old for such a long time. I didn't know what it would be like to feel young again; long ago I had accepted that I was aging, and modified my life and expectations accordingly.

Too, I'm a cook with a blog about local food. I knew how to use spelt and apples and cream; I didn't know how to cook and write about a gluten free, fruit free, dairy free, sugar free diet necessarily reliant on grains from thousands of miles away.

The concerns were ridiculous, of course – how much more joyful would life be if my energy and playfulness were restored? – but knowing this didn't make them go away.

It made me wonder about the people Jesus healed: was it all plain sailing for them? Or did they, too, struggle to give up some aspects of their self-definition as a cripple, a bleeding woman, a blind man, an outsider? And it caused me to reflect on other aspects of life. How often do we compromise or even refuse healing – physical, emotional or spiritual – because we're too scared of change, even if it's change for good?

I couldn't answer these questions, but I needed to make a choice. Would I opt for the comforting familiarity of pain and fatigue, and the person I had become; or would I take a punt on the mysterious promise of naturopathic healing and all that might unfold?

A day or two later, I grit my teeth and went shopping, stocking up on nuts, corn cakes and vegetables. At the time of writing, I've been on the program for a week and am already feeling a little better: like a crippled man throwing away his crutches, I have hurled the anti-inflammatories into the deep recesses of the medicine cabinet and am running up and down the stairs again.

As a child, I longed for Jesus to cure all my ills. Now I wonder if the Great Healer is to be found in an uncanny iridologist nicknamed the Witch Doctor. He looked into my eyes and perceived my pain, both physical and emotional; he saw me as an integrated whole. It is possible that what was promised has come, once again, to pass: I have encountered Christ in the stranger, and a very strange one at that.

(To those lovely people who first read this in Zadok and wrote to me about coeliac disease – put your minds at rest. I have had a gastroscopy and I do not have coeliac disease, just a nasty gluten intolerance.)

A short conversation which makes it abundantly clear why we need to spend time with different people

The kid: Not many Muslim teachers, in fact only one at this school.

Me: When you and your cousins and your friends grow up, some of you can become teachers and then there will be more Muslim teachers in the schools.

The kid: Yes! And then one day they will all be Muslim teachers inshallah.

Me: Well, that rules me out.

The kid (long pause as he cocks his head to one side and looks at me, then): Maybe we could work together.

In which I discover my bedroom is an unnecessary luxury

 

There was something rotten in our bedroom. I am not talking about my love life, but about the smell of putrefaction which emanated from the wall just behind the headboard of our bed. Something had died in there, and it stank.

The first night, we had just returned from holidays. I walked in, blenched, and wondered what terrible food the house sitters had been cooking. The second night it was stronger, so I blamed my husband's gym shoes and banished them to the hall. The stench grew worse. I sniffed around and located the smell, then we reversed the pillows, remade the bed, and tried to sleep with our toes to the headboard. Fifteen minutes later I was trying not to gag, so we rolled up our futon, carried it into the lounge room, and camped for a week.

Lying there at night, my thoughts turned to Tokyo. Many people in Japan sleep in the same room in which they spend time during the day; the futon is rolled away each morning. Millions, perhaps billions, of people sleep in their living rooms; and so did our forebears, whether in tiny huts or larger Saxon halls.

I have grown up in a wealthy bubble of human history, the modern West, and have always had a designated bedroom; but now I am wondering why. It was so comfortable to sleep low on the floor, where our beautiful woollen rug lay at eye level; it was so cosy to gaze up at the shelves of books lining one wall of the room. Sounds were muted by the books and soft furniture, and I slept and made love very well. Meanwhile, our kids came in early for cuddles in bed, something that hadn't happened for a long time.

Each morning my husband rolled up the mattress and tucked it between couch and cupboard; the floor was freed up for play. Each evening he unrolled it again and, after a moment's ritualistic re-tucking of the sheets, we slipped into bed. It was hardly onerous.

Meanwhile, our once warm bedroom felt empty and cold, and I began to realise it was not the room designation but the presence of the mattress which made it a good place to sleep.

It led me to wonder why we have separate rooms for sleeping and reading and playing. Is it habit? Culture? Class? Is it a statement of wealth? Since I spent a week sleeping in the lounge room, my house has felt ridiculously big.

We're not about to downsize in a hurry, but it raises questions about the norm. Our house is smaller than the average Australian new home; even so it often echoes. Are there ways of living so we have privacy and elbow room, and yet use most of the space most of the time? Must some rooms remain vacant all day and others empty all night, or could we remain comfortable were they to double in purpose?

It was liberating to realise we don't need such a large house, that we are flexible enough to adapt. If we want to downsize or change how we live, if we want to go live in a shack, we can; and we can hold these ideas loosely until their time comes.

As I pondered these things, the ants kept busy behind the skirting board, and I became intrigued by this unseen catalyst. In making us uncomfortable enough to move, in provoking questions about how we live and what we need, even the death of a small hidden thing became a gift.

Now we are back in our bedroom and a perfect skeleton, picked clean, lies invisible to me just inches from my head. What further ideas will grow out of it? What dreams will it bring? What mysteries does it hold? I will find out by lying quietly in the darkness, and listening to the silence.

Response: Stuart Brown's Play

I have long noticed that when I am flat I become obsessed by Getting Things Done. The dishes, the floors and the dinners become important and difficult and time consuming and I find it hard to enjoy my children or anything else. The old adage suggests that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and a lack of play certainly makes me very dull indeed – but work and play are not, I find, in opposition. When I regularly engage in play, I work better and life goes rather more swimmingly. The jobs get done quickly, my kids are delightful, and I find the time to play even more. I recently read a book which, rather gratifyingly, supports my observations: Stuart Brown’s Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul suggests that the opposite of play is not work, but depression.

The triggers for depression, of course, are another thing. Our society’s frenzied and selfish pursuit of financial success and personal happiness is a major trigger; so are the self-help books which encourage these twin and very tedious foci, and Play toes the party line. According to the blurb, ‘our ability to play through life is the single most important factor in determining our success and happiness’, which suggests to me that Play is designed to be picked up at the airport and read on the plane by middle management. As a result, many claims in the book are justified by the suggestion that they might increase one’s marketability, profit margin and, of course, happiness – whatever that is.

It would irritate me more but for my many crappy experiences of work which suggest that middle management has much to learn about how to set up interesting, rewarding and effective workplaces, and if Play will help them with that task, then it has my blessing. In any case, being pitched at middle management makes it a quick and easy read. Meanwhile, those of us not in middle management who are willing to overlook the success-and-happiness formula (and a few gross generalisations, such as which are playful thus creative countries) will find many interesting and salutary points.

Brown has studied play for many decades, and this book outlines his understanding of the nature of play, its necessity to human health and development, and the benefits of a playful approach to the whole of one’s life. An activity not just for children, Brown defines play as a state of mind: ‘an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time’. Thus it might range from filling in the cryptic crossword to kicking a ball to going for an aimless wander. Play is vital because it is in this unconscious absorption we tune into the world and are freed from our limitations; and it provides an outlet for our deepest most creative selves.

As a result, Brown claims that people who play are more creative, energetic and insightful; they are better at solving problems and negotiating difficulties and conflicts; and they continue to grow intellectually and emotionally.

Of course this is good for the workplace, but it is also good for everything else, and Brown writes convincingly about the importance of play in child development, parenting, marriage and old age, as well as in education and vocational discernment. When so many of us are bogged down in the rat race, it is helpful to be reminded just how invigorating it can be to step out of the rut and play with one’s kids, one’s spouse, one’s friends, one’s neighbours, or even, shock horror, alone.

Brown does not specifically mention meditation, but as I read I found myself reflecting on the relationship between it and play. They are, to me, two sides of a coin, as good play, particularly solitary play, often precipitates in me a meditative stance. For example, letting the busy part of my mind wander through the cryptic crossword can provide the space for deeper insights than simple anagrams.

Much of what Brown says is common sense: of course your marriage is more interesting if you have a playful approach to it; of course playful people are better at solving problems. But sometimes common sense is not so obvious, and our natural desire to play is often suffocated by societal pressures to act ‘grown up’, as if being adult requires that one become stultifyingly dull. Therefore, despite my reservations about the success/happiness paradigm and my dislike of a few generalisations, I recommend Play to you, along with a good game of Scrabble, an evening of parlour games, or a thrilling round of hide and seek.

Why I no longer draw with my children

 

So many children are easily discouraged about their creative abilities. Even my own.

I first realised this while drawing. I love to draw, but for all my resolutions, I rarely make the time to do it. Every now and then, however, when my kids were drawing and I had a few minutes, I would sit down at the end of the table, pull over a piece of paper, and begin to sketch. Within minutes they would stop, every time; and it took me years to notice.

Why are you stopping? I'd ask.

Because I can’t draw, they'd say.

And so I'd say useless things like, We all draw differently just as we all have different singing voices; what you’re doing is fantastic; and if you’re looking at mine you need to remember I’ve had 30 years’ more practice. But it was too late; they’d have shoved the paper away by then.

Worse still, they might then ask me to draw an elephant or whatever, because they ‘couldn’t’. Sometimes I did, but then I felt like I’d failed them; sometimes I didn’t, and they made me feel so mean. Yet I couldn't see how me doing their drawing helped them to develop a style or build confidence, so I finally solved the problem by refusing to draw with them at all.

 

I ran into a similar issue at school. I read and write with school kids in a one on one program. During first semester of this year, I thought we could play with journaling. Each week I read out a story, we asked wondering questions, then we sat side by side writing a response to the questions raised by the story. And week after week, despite the constraints of shaping my handwriting to Victorian standard cursive, I’d still fall into my own little world and get lost in a story; and the kid would look over at some stage and sigh. Yes? I’d say, Would you like to share what you’ve done?

Nah, the kid would say; and then sometimes they’d exclaim that they couldn’t write. No matter what I said, and no matter how much praise I lavished on them, if the kid looked at my page of neat handwriting, discouragement would set in. Yet I was so desperate to write with anyone, even a seven year old, that it took me a while to realise what was happening.

Finally, I began to wonder about how I related to people who were ‘better’ than me. I have a very competitive streak, held firmly in check, and so I have always found it difficult to make friends with people who are smarter / more qualified / better at everything. Because I know this about myself and have worked on it for years, most of my friends are indeed smarter / more qualified / better at everything and my life has been enormously enriched by this; but it has taken me a long time to get to this place.

Even now, I struggle to go out on a limb in front of anyone except a child. I can write, sketch, sing loudly and do a dance if there’s a child needing to be drawn out; but never, never for an adult. I wouldn’t want to draw in front of a ‘real’ artist or write in front of a ‘real’ writer, so how could I expect a child to?

So I began opting out at school just as I did at home. Because I hate the idea of sitting there idly or, worse, watching, while a kid dreams and writes awhile, I take in the cryptic crossword. Now we do the reading and wondering together, then the kid is cut loose to respond while I scratch my head and fill in a few clues. They glance over from time to time and see my pathetic scratchings, and the mistakes crossed out, and all the empty boxes, and grin to themselves, then stick their nose back into their own story. At the end of the session my puzzle is still only a quarter filled in while their story, about something in which they are the only expert, is an accomplished piece: something to be really proud of; and the only one left feeling like an idiot is, very happily, me.

PS - I came across this piece on *not* drawing for children; it clearly articulates that towards which I am fumbling.

Pictures show my oldest daughter's portrait of 'Sam' from Sam and the Tigers, a gorgeous Black reclamation of the story of Little Black Sambo by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney, drawn when she was three; and a spinning top, which she drew at 8 - the things she gets up to when I'm not looking!