remembering valerie lester

‘Do with your writing what you’re doing with your life,’ Val advised sagely. ‘Be brave.’

- from The Latte Years

Val and I on one of her friends’ boats in Annapolis, June 2007.

My beloved friend, and the wonderful writer, translator and scholar, Valerie Lester passed away in June. How grateful I am that our paths crossed when she visited Hobart nearly 20 years ago. I owe her a great deal.

She was one of my greatest and most enthusiastic cheerleaders, set many wheels in motion for me and, as per the excerpt from my book above (which she loved), always encouraged me to be resilient and brave.

“I exhort you to keep writing,” she said in her last email to me.

Bloody Mary’s (I think!) in Annapolis, July 2007.

A few weeks after Val’s passing, I learned I had been accepted into my PhD program, which I’ve now begun in earnest. I would have so loved to share that news with her. My PhD project was inspired by a tiny bit of research she asked me to do for her while she was writing her book about Phiz (Dickens’ principal illustrator), so it’s been nearly 15 years in the making. I hope I will do her proud. The project so far has been thrilling and I think it's going to be a real adventure. I'm so grateful to Val for leaving the first few crumbs on the trail for me.

What a talented, generous and fascinating person she was. I have so many happy memories of her and her husband Jim when I visited them in Annapolis in 2007. Most of them involve jazz music, poetry, and gin and tonics! They were both such dear friends and I miss them both very much.

With Val and Jim, Annapolis, July 2007.

Go well, dear Val. Until we meet again.  

when july was summer

Gin and tonics in our backyard last July.

Last July, it was summer, not winter.

Our one-way tickets to Australia were booked.

London wasn’t home any more. It’s a hard feeling to describe, when life is carrying on as much as it always has, but now there is no point buying plants for the garden, or that piece of furniture, for you know now there is an end date, and soon you will leave this corner of the earth. The house you live in and love will soon be someone else’s. You will disappear. It will be as if you had never been there at all.

Here is something I wrote at the time. Just some little observations. Things I wanted to remember.

Tom and I walking up to the street fair, July 2018

8 July 2018

The third weekend in a row of high temperatures, the sun beating down, unfiltered by cloud. My shoulders tanned brown. Tom and I walk up to the village Green, where there’s a street fair. They’ve closed the road by the train station so the usually car-choked streets are filled with donkey rides, Enfield for Europe protestors, gin and tonic stands, a Mini convertible we know no one will win. The smells are intoxicating - Caribbean food, curries, kebabs, Vietnamese tofu grilled on hot coals, halloumi fries piled with pomegranate seeds.

England are playing Sweden in the World Cup in a few hours so giant television screens are set up on the green, the air full of expectation. By the time we walk home with food for lunch, the streets will have emptied significantly. A few hours later, roars, screams and cheers will signal that England have triumphed. 

I linger at the plant stall, my favourite, full of varieties of sage and mint - apple, peppermint, pineapple. Heartsease, its purple flowers shaped like little hearts. House leeks, to ward off bad spirits. Thai basil, which I’m longing to cook with having been watching Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey. All the plants I would buy if we weren’t leaving. But it’s going to pain me to part with the ones I already have. I keep my coins in my purse and move on. 

For weeks now we have lived on salads, veggie burgers, dips and raw vegetables, grains that can be cooked with water from the kettle. I can’t remember the last time I made pasta, soup or a curry. We have a little rain for the first time in nearly four weeks and my thirsty plants gulp it down.

The hard cantaloupe melon we bought yesterday, barely giving off a fragrance, is already ripe and begins to perfume the house. It is beginning to dip into a smell that is less perfume and more compost heap. I suspect we must eat it today.

The smell of over-ripe melon will always make think of that last summer in London.

PS: The reason for the photos with captions on them is because a few days later, on 13 July - bizarrely, coinciding with Trump’s visit to London - my phone died and I hadn’t backed up any photos since May. The only way I could access these pics was through Instagram stories!

one hundred years wasn't enough

My grandmother Daphne as a baby, with her mother Pansy (her real name was Emily but everyone called her Pansy). Taken in London, November 1919.

the light, the season, 

is fading. 

what will be left by winter?

what will be left by tomorrow?

will our family be one person down,

without the one whose heart started

before the guns of the Great War

fell silent,

whose breath spanned two centuries,

whose soul knew many homes.

I wrote the lines above as the sun set last Monday night after hearing the news earlier that day that my beloved grandmother, who I spent three hours laughing and doing crosswords with only a few weeks ago, had had a small stroke and was fading.

I went to say goodbye to her last Wednesday. And on Saturday evening, a week out from her 100th birthday, she passed away. We had been anticipating her 100th as a family with great joy - we even had a letter from the Queen, all ready to go. So it hasn’t been the week we thought it would be, though it has still been a celebration of a long and fruitful life.

But it is also, to use a well-worn phrase, the end of an era.

We were so lucky to have her for so long. But that doesn’t make losing her any easier. She is irreplaceable. It feels strange to now be living in a world without her when, until a week ago, she had always been here.

How lucky I was to have her as a grandmother, and what a shining example she was of how to live well and authentically. I adored her sharp wit, her endless fascinating stories, her cooking, her affinity with plants, her love of nature. She taught me to cook, to sew and to play cards. She indulged every one of my silly childish whims but she always treated me like a grown up. She encouraged my love of writing and storytelling. When my book came out, she was in the front row at the launch and she read the whole thing, with a magnifying glass.

I will always cherish the memories of her indefatigable spirit, her sense of fun, her generosity, her quiet conviction, her pragmatism, and her fierce independence. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I felt so different from the rest of my family, convinced on some occasions I had been swapped with another baby at the hospital. But then I would think about Ma and her mother, and the kinds of women they were and realise ‘ah, that’s where I get that from’. I am proud to think that both their spirits live on in me, somehow.

Without her influence, I know I would have been a very, very different person. I am so grateful.

All of the above I told her while I sat with her quietly last Wednesday, holding her hand and stroking her hair. But I wish I had told her these things more often while I still had the privilege of being in her company.

So let this be a timely reminder for you, dear reader. Tell your loved ones you love them. They really won’t be here forever. Even though, in Ma’s case, it felt like she would be! I’m so glad Tom and I moved back to Australia when we did and that I got to spend lots of time with her these past few months. Those memories are now very precious indeed.

Happy 100th birthday Ma. As far as I’m concerned, you made it.

I will love you always.

***

Daphne Lucie Elizabeth Moore
11 May 1919 - 4 May 2019

reclaiming loud

The opening pages - the altar, if you will - of my current journal, where my ritual is to make a collage before I start writing in its pages. I don't think it was an accident that those words somehow found each other.

“It’s not a woman’s job to get smaller and smaller and take up less and less space until she disappears so the world can be more comfortable.”

— Glennon Doyle, Love Warrior

Sas Petherick wrote recently about reclaiming the word 'bossy' for herself - a word that had negative connotations for her since childhood,  which subsequently affected how she saw herself and how she interacted with the world from a place of fear rather than worthiness. How she went through life doing everything she could to avoid being called 'bossy' because it made her feel so small.

Sas says:

Usually, there is a word.
Some phrase or sentence that when uttered, has the power to leave us feeling small and powerless. Diminished. Childlike.
I wonder what is it for you?

I’ve been trying to reclaim the word loud.

When I was younger, being called ‘loud’ - too loud, more often than not - left me feeling diminished and cut down. It felt like a rejection of my most essential self - an excitable, enthusiastic, outgoing little girl who was the first to put her hand up in class if she knew the answer; who loved to talk to people, tell stories and share things with others; who loved making up games, performing and making people laugh; who was fascinated by the world and the people in it. 

When people told me I was 'loud', that sent me the message that I needed to shut up. That I was too much. That what I had to say wasn't important, no one was interested. That making too much noise - taking up too much space - was not a good thing and I would be more acceptable, and more likeable, if I were quieter. Funnily enough, I don't recall the boys I knew being told they were too loud (but that's another story).

As I wasn't one of the 'pretty' or 'popular' girls either, the label of 'loud' made me even more self-conscious of my failings and flaws. As I became a teenager I found myself retreating inwards - I was only loud with people I felt I could be myself around (mostly my three sisters). Yet I still loved performing and acting, often winning the lead roles in school plays, so 'withdrawn' was probably not a word people would have used to describe me! And I noticed that people tended to like me more, or didn't mind how 'loud' I was, when I was entertaining them.

But what people didn’t realise - and nor did I, until I went to therapy as an adult - was that acting was a place of safety for me. All that gregariousness, enthusiasm and fun that I felt I couldn't express as myself went into playing parts, pretending to be someone else, instead. This eventually seeped through to the rest of my life and as a result, I no longer knew who I really was. 

About 12 years ago, in my mid-twenties, I tried to reclaim that word 'loud'. I became that confident young girl again - who liked who she was and let the world know it. Who put her hand up. Who enjoyed sharing her stories and experiences with people, and sharing in theirs too.  Who was vivacious, full of energy and, for the first time in her life, dropped her people-pleasing tendencies and put her own needs first. She was also a bit broken, and very naive, but was determined to rediscover her true self and purpose, and proud of how far she'd come in the process.

But then came the familiar cries of ‘too loud’ and it all unravelled. 

What hurts the most when I think about that time is not that I was betrayed and torn down by people I thought were friends, because they were insecure, unhappy people and what they did wasn't about me at all (sidenote: when people bully you, it's never about you). What hurts the most is that I betrayed myself, my true self. I didn't fight back or confront them about how much they had hurt me. I didn't use the voice I thought I had found to stand up to them.

Instead, I just did what I thought I had to do, and what I had always done, when I showed people the real me and they didn't like it - I pressed the mute button and shut down. And when you are complicit in your own betrayal, that is a wound that takes years, perhaps a lifetime, to recover from.

It took me ten years (and writing a book!) to really understand what that time was about, what the lessons were. The confidence I'd worked so hard for had slipped away so easily, which made me realise I still had work to do.  It has taken until now to feel brave enough to try being that excited, enthusiastic, loud person again.  

But this time, I feel less afraid of the smackdown, because it's probably about time I accepted that I will always be too much for some people. Choosing to live my life with the volume dial turned right up will likely trigger someone else's insecurities at some point, but I'm finally in a place where I know that isn't my problem. 

Because now I get to choose what 'loud' means.

Loud doesn’t mean annoying or full of yourself. It is not code for 'shut up, go away, no one is interested'. Loud is not a demand for attention. 

Loud is just a desire to be heard, and to be seen, for who I really am. 

Loud means using my voice, however I want to use it. I owe that not only to myself, but to the women who came before me and didn’t have a voice. And to all the women in the world who still don’t have one. 

Loud means being brave enough to speak the truth in my heart, trusting that it is safe for me to do that, and not waiting to be invited on to the stage. 

Loud means standing up for myself, and for others. 

Loud means knowing what is important to say and then saying it, backing myself all the way. Thinking before I speak, of course, but breaking out of this pattern I've been in for the last few years where I overthink everything so much that I lose my nerve, the moment passes and I end up saying nothing. 

Loud, ironically, means listening to that small voice inside me that just wants to be free. That just wants to show up in the world without fear, without agenda, just with love and the desire to be useful and joyful.

Loud is a strength, not a flaw.

Loud is bubbly, bright, alive and grateful.

Loud is me.

Maybe loud is you too.

It’s OK to be loud.

what I've learned from meditating for 250 days in a row

"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." - Fredrich Buechner

Apart from brushing my teeth, drinking coffee and telling Tom I love him, I don't think I've ever done anything every day for such a sustained period of time.

But on Saturday, Insight Timer* told me I had just meditated for 250 days in a row.

How does that feel, you might ask?

It's hard to explain, but I guess a rambling blog post is a good place to try. I don't know if I feel calmer - and calm was definitely something I wanted to feel more of this time last year, when my old friend anxiety had moved back in. After 250 consecutive days of meditation, if anything I think I feel my emotions more.

But perhaps the difference is knowing I *can* sit with them, and they will pass. I no longer feel afraid of anger, sadness or loneliness. All things I used to avoid feeling if I possibly could.

I don't feel at one with the Universe. There have been no giant revelations or moments of enlightenment. But there has been a clearing, of sorts. I do feel like I know my mind better. 

I have become more conscious of things in my life - and within myself - that I'd like (and need) to change. 

When you force yourself to get still at least once a day, you slowly learn how to switch your mind off, even if it's only for a few seconds at a time.

Those moments - those fleeting, precious seconds when I am actually not thinking and am just there, all breath, in my body and all I can hear are cars on the street, or the rattle and creak of the floorboards, or the wind or birds outside, or the oven warming up, or my neighbour leaving for the day, and my mind is empty and quiet, and I can feel the quietness of it - are bliss.

I meditate for an average of 10 minutes at a time. Occasionally I do 20 minutes, like I did this morning. I'd like to build up to more. That feeling - where everything drops away and I witness my mind emptying and getting still - has only ever lasted for a few seconds, so far. I've never been able to maintain it for very long but those few seconds are always worth it. They make me think "ah, this is the point of it all."

Meditation has helped me find ways to relax, to check in, to be in the present throughout the day, not just when I've got the app timer running. When you force yourself to stop and just be where you are right now, you start to realise how much of our mind's energy is spent fretting over the past and the future. 

Stress has not vanished from my life because I've been meditating every day. If anything, I'm more aware of how stress feels in my body. But when that happens, I employ a breathing technique which clears the mind and helps me relax. 

Meditation has helped me to be (slightly) more patient with and forgiving of myself, which I hope will translate into my interactions with others. 

It's become a wonderful way to start the day. I meditate before I do anything - no checking my phone first, and ideally immediately afterward I write in my journal or do Morning Pages (but that doesn't always happen). Once I've meditated, I go into the kitchen and find Tom has made a coffee for me (and unloaded the dishwasher!) and sit there, taking in the taste of the coffee, feeling reset for the day, my senses heightened.

Meditation has helped me feel more peaceful and content in my heart. Every time I hear the closing bell, I feel reassured that I'm a good person doing my best, trying to be kind, improve and move forward.

And that's worth making time for each day.

So what if instead of fearing the power of dark thoughts, we used our minds’ power to create safe havens within ourselves to explore them. Maybe literally envisioning cocoons inside our hearts where we can sit before cozy fires, hot drinks in hand, and ask of our fear and laziness and depression and shame and lust and rage and whatever other thing we might otherwise try to ignore: What is it you’d like to say to me? What indispensable nourishment do you have for the Life of trust I want to live? – Kristen Noelle (via Leonie Wise)

* Insight Timer is a free app and is the one I use based on recommendations from friends and well-wishers. I absolutely love it and am not being paid to mention it in any way! I just wanted to share because it has genuinely improved my life.