Looking out the window...

Picture of me by my daughter, Aurora.

Soon I will write about the upcoming Two Bays project but before that I am enjoying listening to the sound of rain. Covering the town, like the snow at the end of the story "The Dead" by James Joyce. I vaguely remember the wonderful movie made of the story but I still have the ring of James Joyce's language as he describes the shroud of snow falling on the living and the dead.

Thought I would add a few of his actual lines and that I could easily find them with google but instead find myself lost in a maze of study guides. Either no-one reads the text anymore or the intellectual property rights are far more sophisticated than the absorbing texts I find openly on the net.

So instead of getting all Irish and metaphysical I will concentrate on the constant sound of rain on my roof. Soaking the parched Melbourne earth that has already felt the onslaught of the coming Summer. The ongoing drought in this part of the world from my amateur meteorological standpoint seems more a symptom of global warming. And hence not a drought but a new climatic condition.

So rain keep falling and remind everyone that we are all connected and particularly by water.

And I am also glad I fixed the leak in my roof!

Hope

Wondering about that feathery word. It hovers above our days with ever sharper brightness.
Sometimes it seems the moment between life and death is purely one of hope.

Life as a painting

View from Cooktown hill, Cape York looking toward Cape Bedford

Life as a painting

It is good to know that the annual Hope Vale Pelican project that normally Pelican has been involved in is right at this moment happening on Ellim Beach. Just around the cape in the image above!

Pelican Expeditions has had an incredibly rough year really. We have lost one of our key people (and friend!) to cancer, lost our funding for a cornerstone project and struggled with solving issues around a report which we had commissioned and which turned into a complete nightmare. This nightmare took up most of our resources to resolve and resulted in us landing in a dead end of academic parsimonious silence. Just as we picked ourselves of the floor and took some heart in the ongoing energy of projects to come, my younger sister began a fight for life with a secondary cancer diagnosis. She has had a very unlucky journey with the disease and is now suffering terribly from the impact of bone and liver cancer.

My own struggles to pursue what I see a positive projects in the world begins to fade into insignificance in the face of the ongoing suffering of someone close to me.

Last night I sat beside her in a big public hospital as she finally seemed to reach some kind of rest after an exhausting day of medical procedures and pain. The cool blue light of the hospital night was punctuated with the beeps, moans and sighs of patients and machines. I sat there, conscious that I could be conscious without pain and aware of the more settled breathing of my sister. Thankful for that respite but alert to the next wave of potential suffering. I felt it all today as I threw myself physically at my garden. As if to compensate for the hours of passive suffering of my sister, I tugged, pulled, carried, dug and chopped through the endless tangle of weeds, ivy and clutter around my house.

And life as a still painting, life as a balance of forces, life as a still life, life tilting into imbalance with our first world settled bargaining with nature, tilts.

Beloved

If I were to sing the praises of the beloved there would be no sunrise in the morning. The sun, like a shield of fire, sits firmly on the horizon of dreams.

The world is free from my melancholy thoughts

The world is free from my melancholy thoughts,
the world just is.
The beach, with sand eroding from the fierce tides, cannot see
my young amorous shadow,
hiding naked in the dunes.

Nor the form, pensive and sturdy,
studying the violet Winter hues,
gathering ocean air,
before the return to
the familiar city.

Head in Light

Photo: Shirley Nicholas

I am up late, attempting to write/organise a presentation for next week. Planning for Hope Vale. Problems of funding LOOM as they always do. One of the elders that we work with is going to co-present with me and hopefully some of the kids that come to the camp.

But I can no longer think in terms of capacity building and sustainability and multi-disciplinary and disadvantage and partnerships etc

Instead I will now travel back in time.

The photograph above is one that I have saved from an old glass transparency taken by my grandmother in the 1920s.

Tree listening...

It seems I only have time to tweet these days or maybe my thoughts have just coagulated.
So I am reduced to tweet tree blogging.
Hope to regain blogging consciousness soon.....