Life is a jewel

I watch my orange cat, just home from 3 days of hospital. She's celebrated her arrival with sleeps, purrs, wobbly stalking up and down the passage, and suet pudding-like slumbers on my lap.

She has chronic renal failure, and I've been trying to tumble the reality of that around my head. Right now, she's home and so happy to be so. Three days ago, she was limp and refusing to eat...and the reality is that a cycle with a specific outcome has now begun.

Tears rained all Saturday before and after leaving her at hospital. A morning eyebrow grooming appointment ill-timed just as I got the news that she needed urgent treatment turned into a surreal experience of physical pain from the tweezering and an awkward silence as she worked quickly around a grief-taut brow and quiet tears streaming.

The hospital let me visit regularly. Some visits were sitting by her cage, cuddling her while trying not to dismantle the drip as other shaven and listless cats looked on uncuriously. Others, they unhooked her and let me sit in a consultation room - for an hour on Sunday night even - letting her settle onto my lap and fall asleep after she made sure she was heavily wedged into the crook of my arm, my other hand heavy and unmoving against her flank.

She is a loving, living creature. I've been there for her all of her life bar the first 4 months. She's been there for me for the last 15 years of my adult life. She's eccentric, playful, perverse, understanding and undemanding.

After the tears comes determination. To give her the best life I can, right to the end.

Ownership

This word troubles me in so many ways.

The most frivolous objection I have relates to its most abused meaning in the land of management speak. In boardrooms, meetingrooms and videoconferences across the English-speaking globe, "ownership" is assigned to ideas, projects, portfolios...the dull list stretches on towards tedious infinity.

But the harder one to grapple is about consumerism.

Jane lives in a big house with young, glamorous, and I suspect fairly well-off, parents. The walls are white, the skirting boards are glossy, and the carpet is unexpectedly deep and luscious underneath my feet. I'm eight or nine years old, a shy child but not old enough that my young enthusiasm has been permanently beaten down by shyness, and I'm over for a play date.

Jane leads me to a bookshelf ... I'm placing it in a corridor, or a dining room - some unexpected space where white bookshelves recess quietly into the wall. There I find Dr Seuss books. Not just some Dr Seuss books - but all the Dr Seuss books. All the ones that I look for hopefully in the weekly trip to the library. It's such a rush of untold wealth that I have no idea how to react apart from an embarrassed reluctance to let any signs of my awestruckness slip. I let my eye gloss over the titles, catch one I have not yet sampled (Green eggs and ham - the library copy always on loan) and gingerly pull it (unstained, unbent) from its neighbours. Jane's happy to let me read it on that soft carpet, but her pride comes from ownership and it is most definitely Not. For. Loan.

I was brought up in an environment unbalanced by having and not having...parents from the upper middle class who had forged their own financial path independent of their own parents, with resulting times of real need and frugality. The values I learned were that of modesty, making do, using till it's broke, and realising the richness of life that can be found in shared wealth such as libraries, parks, wilderness. In 2010 the landscape has changed so much - now public parks are overrun by personal trainers, libraries are obsolete as children stay home to play computer games or watch DVDs that their family owns, and wilderness becomes an uncomfortable space where most signs of your success (the things you own) are missing and there's only YOU.

I don't know where this post is leading...except to remind myself that everything passes, that ownership does not define me, and that the relationships I have are more important than any material thing I could desire.

Toes or shoulders

Melbourne put on a corker of a rainstorm today...fabulous buckets of driving wetness. It's such a change from the normal tedium of summer heat, and the angst of the drought - so all you can do is sigh and step boldly into puddles. But Melbourne weather has a tone of capriciousness that cannot be ignored. Today it was the choice of getting soaked from your socks to your knickers within 6 steps of shelter, or braving the brolly which in the strong gale turns into a paraglider and causes your arms to be wrenched from their sockets.

After 5 minutes of almost losing my footing and getting tugged into traffic, I gave up to the greater power and tramped damply to the tramstop.

Melbourne weather 1, d'Este 0

Loyalty and that bloody game

Most people see themselves as loyal - it's a characteristic most people wish to be seen to possess and also how they would like to define themselves. I see myself as loyal to my family, my friends, my choir, my teacher, my values, my self. I express my loyalty through my deeds, my words, my actions. Of course, if you asked any of the above, including myself, there'd be plenty of breaches of those loyalties. But somehow I still rise about that and continue to identify this quality in myself. Interesting, eh?

At lunch one Friday in September I sat in a city cafe and was distracted from my book by two bouncy young suits chomping down on burgers and chips for a mid-day calorie boost (my lemon pepper calamari suddenly looked desperately girly next to such manly meals). Their conversation was a wall of almost automatic self-inflation - the nonstop bragging sat as comfortably on their lips as the sauce on their chips. Real estate, promotions, chicks...my Virginia Woolf novel was laughing in my lap but I couldn't not listen.

"How do you think the game will go tomorrow?"

The AFL grand final was soon upon us.

"Well the forward line is strong but ..." - well please don't expect me to recall football conversation, I'm the daughter of a folk guitarist, not a spectator sport enthusiast. I zoned out as they punted inpenetrable words like "Gablett" and "push the behinds" across the table but tuned in again as one asked:

"So what are you going to be like on Saturday night then?"

I could see the zing of energy from Suit No. 2 as he leaned forward. "Mate - if the Saints win, I'll be partying hard! And if they don't - well, I'll be collecting big from my bookie!"

I always thought of football fans as being - well - fanatical. Seems in these times that other loves can sway the passionate to more profitable idols.

Far out, fad

I was thinking of pet rocks the other day. Which is quite an achievement...because I bet that apart from the random trivia question, those suckers are fairly well vanished from the collective consciousness. And yet for a time they were real, accepted parts of life. I remember a family friend proudly displaying one to me as a child, and my small brain struggling to work out whether she was totally mad or if there had been some great leap in science and rocks had been found to be sentient after all.

But why was I thinking about pet rocks? Well, obviously it was the phenomenon of the Snuggie.

What is going on, people? How - how - can a ridiculous novelty telemarketing garment-slash-bedding item become something that people actually buy and wear? I want to find the research on this move from object of mockery to mocking ownership to daggy acceptance?

To me it represents the worst of our culture. It's like the worst combination of consumerist angst (it's new! I better get one!) and canny marketing (although "a blanket with sleeves"? oh for heavens sake). Even the Crikey team got into the act. But in the process of this intellectual ribbing, suddenly Snuggie sales start to leap in Australia, and the reality is that there are real people now who have purchased and are using these ludicrous things.

I'll keep my blankets without sleeves thanks. I recently picked up a lovely nanna rug from a country op shop on my last road trip - it was made by nannas out of scraps of wool, it's soft, warm and can stand the test of time in terms of both style and functionality. Beats a Snuggie any day!

The end of the world

I was in the library queue on the weekend, with my current distraction from the blues being the consumption of quality literature. The librarian was using (I recognised) a notoriously difficult software package to process the loans, and as a result was a bit slow.

Normally this annoys the heck out of me as I want to reach over and show them how to do it, but that day I was being working on being gentle on myself and the people around me, so just waited placidly until she was done fumbling with the F4 button and the erratic barcode reader.

However the woman behind me was not so forgiving - as the librarian peered at the screen's mystical messages, I heard a hurrumph of some magnitude behind my back. I turned to the hurrumpher with a smile of kindness that was an effort but still genuine, and said "Oh it's not the end of the world".

"I'm going to miss my bus - so it is!!" she snarled. A few moments later, as I packed my things into the car I saw her angry purposeful figure race towards (and catch) her bus.

Joseph Campbell once wrote a wonderful piece about how he used to get infuriated with his wife who was always late, until he decided that, since it was such a regular occurrence, he would see if he could create a different experience for himself whenever he had to wait for her. He learned that, instead of getting frustrated and angry, he could explore the moment and his immediate surroundings to a depth he normally wouldn't have time for, and waiting for his wife became something to savour. As he puts it, "As long as you move from a place of fear and desire, you are self-excluded from immortality".

So imagine if the missing of a bus was really the end of the world. That one missed connection was a disaster in your life that invoked insurmountable anger and a collapsing of your reality. I know that I certainly have been guilty of over-dramatic responses to events...but at the same time recognise their falsehood. Ultimately, if the computer is slow, if you miss your bus, if you pick the slow queue at the supermarket - the universe does not deconstruct. Awareness brings you deeper and richer experience of the world, not the end of it.

I don't want to write a book

It's the ultimate dream, isn't it...to write a book, become incredibly successful and have the world gasp at your insights, thoughts and aspirations. It's going to be the great life-changing novel...the addictive fantasy series...the brilliant suspense...the epiphany-loaded philosophical tract...the much needed text book...or the earnest self-help book full of personal life lessons.

And of course that dream was mine...isn't it everyone's?

All my life I held the thought of My Book in my heart, knowing that one day it would be released from within, that one day my great communion with the world could commence. In the meantime I nostalgically re-evoked primary school teacher praise for my early efforts, admired deep-hidden poems from my angst-ridden twenties, and embarked on some serious explorations of writing in my thirties. I devoured the Right to Write, critiqued the books I read, sucked up classic literature and made decent efforts to work at developing style and skills in a journal. The plans were coming together, winding down work hours and setting up a space in the house, getting a timetable, getting disciplined, and off I would go. But then the thunderbolt.

I was browsing through Readings, a fistful of birthday vouchers at hand. I wandered through the new novels, the new non-fiction, amazing books, less-than-amazing books, books written to make money, books written to make a point, books written to share the inner dream of others. This shop was full of book, all new, all waiting to be purchased, maybe read, maybe not, but there for the buying. As I suppose a bookshop should be. But instead of feeling like a kid in a candy store, I felt...lost. I found myself frozen in between Jonathan Littel and Christos Tsiolkas. The motivation behind all these books may have been genuine, but all I could think of was the commodification of all those motives, pure and impure, into $29.95. What were we all doing in there?! Why did we have to acquire, own, sell, covet, these objects?

My epiphany - in a nutshell - was the realisation that the dream to write a book is archetypical - it's so not the unique personal quest that I had it pegged as - and it's flawed. You can give years of your life to a book which never sees the light of day. Even if you actually get published, which is highly unlikely, your soul-stripped-bare masterpiece can still be outstripped by a piece of commercial drivel. Conversely, you can write a piece of commercial drivel and make a heap of money but know deep inside that it's a piece of bollocks. And what is left in the end? Piles and piles of once-were-trees sitting in a bookshop, on a bookshelf, or in landfill. What type of positive creative act is that?

So I don't want to write a book after all. If I write, it will be in a form that takes up as much space as itself, in a format that one or many can read at no extra cost to the environment, that can build at my own pace, stagnate as long as I do, and which can be as grand or as intense or as frivolous as I need it to be. A book is a fine dream...but one that it's time to let go.

I walked out of Readings and bought fresh pasta for dinner instead.