Teenage Dayz – by guest blogger Sue Lansdown
Interview
Sue Lansdown, our guest blogger, shares her inner fears and hopes as she finds her way as a parent of a tween and a teen. She is one of the creators of an age-appropriate, organic range of skincare and cosmetics named (very cutely) peachface.
Being a mum to Toby, 16, and my daughter Talullah, 9, keeps positively reminding me that I am surviving as a mum and that this is very wild and unchartered territory. I am awake and learning on the job.
My kids are constantly opening me to the challenges that I faced as a budding teen, and how confused my parents must have been during those years. I have deep compassion for teenagers and their parents. I feel a great sense of relief that I have beautiful relationships with both of my kids. Being realistic means that could all change any moment! So far so good, particularly when it comes to Toby, we do communicate, he still hugs me, he tells me ‘mum I love you’. This feels like a miracle and the truth of it is that I do know he has a very private world that is a no access area. And that does include telling me to ‘fuck off’ under his breath at times.
I do see beautiful, creative, confident kids with a mix of treacherous challenges and amazing opportunities ahead. The pressures for teenagers are all around, and are hyper-real. With so much attention on how they look, what they own, who their friends are, experimenting with intimacy and drugs, its mind boggling. Life as a teen is intensity plus. Life as a parent to a teen is just as intense and twice as scary having been teenagers ourselves!
The confusion I felt as a teenager was overwhelming, really how did I do puberty? Was I good at guessing, secretly studying my mum, depending on undependable friends, the Dolly sealed section? Looking back now I realize I was frightened and felt unable to share my fears with my friends or my family, though I don’t think any of those fears were noticed and I appeared to be a very normal and contained kid.
Struggling my whole life to understand those confusing years, and now facing me head on are my own children’s teenage years, this is where my learning comes full circle. Though could it be that these years are meant for intensity? Is it that our longing for self-actualization comes from the constant need for growth, experimentation and wanting to love?
It is a glorious confusion, I get to step out and watch and stand in and adore them. Though I don’t know quite how they will both manage these years, the ones I had found so freaky. I get to be available and to be told to ‘stay out of it’! These days are tough and tender days, delicately life transforming and experimental. My awakening alongside my kids is a painful privilege.
(image by teen photographer Nirrimi Hakanson)
A real change – by guest blogger Beth Macdonald
Garden / Interview
Oh March! Isn’t it so good to see you in all your autumn glory? Shorter days. Cooler mornings and evenings and a chance to start to dress a little more stylishly {or is that just me?}. A chance to get the fire on. A chance to switch salads with pork belly and really relax. Everything is starting to slow down. The grass and garden growth {much to my husband’s delight} is less voracious. The afternoons and evenings that are coming a little quicker each day seem to bring with them long, glorious light that takes it’s time in leaving the day behind. My mind, most certainly, is slowing down and has an awareness, a mindfulness about it as it settles into this new season that lays before us.
There has certainly been a change in all of us these past 5 months that we have lived here in this lovely little town. A huge shift from busy city people living in the inner west, in a small terrace to happier, more relaxed people lucky enough to call Burrawang home. I’m not too sure what I was mindful of then. Most certainly my inconvenience at not being able to get a park out the front of our house, or in our street even. That was front of my mind. Each and every day. The stresses of getting kids to daycare, getting ourselves to work, getting through the day, making sure the kids stayed well enough through the week so no one would have to take time off from school or work and going through the motions of day to day {stressful} life. That was front of my mind. The worry. The money. The stress. The busyness.
But now.
These few short months later it’s not just the season that is changing before our very eyes. It’s something actually in me. It’s an ability to stop. Slow down. A mindfulness of my surroundings and within ourselves that I never had before. A chance to really look around. See the changes of the leaves. See the blueness of the sky. The greenness of the trees. The looks of joy upon my girl’s faces whenever they see cows in a paddock or run on our amazingly green and expansive lawn. The sheer beauty that is all around me that takes my breath away almost every single day. I am so grateful that we took this plunge. Made the change. And have these Autumn days to enjoy this real change of seasons for our small family.
Beth moved to Burrawang from Camperdown just five months ago and writes regularly on her blog: http://littlereginald.blogspot.com/
Images taken by Beth on a recent walk around Burrawang.
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Zen and the Art of Washing Dishes – by guest blogger Danielle Spinks
Interview
They say life is a series of imperfect facts and there is much we cannot control. The sequence of washing dishes is not one of them. Glassware first.
Now this is not a creatively devoid affair. The number of liquid drops can create a level of foaminess commensurate with your mood. Use a natural agent if possible, as this will affect the outcome and the pleasure. Playfulness can be created with extra drops. This will manifest a thing of awe – a galaxy of frothing and popping little planets.
It takes great maturity to be childlike, so add more drops and make a Grand Meringue or a mousse of suds.
Plunge a saturated cloth into the depths of a coffee cup. Work along the inner sides and bottom, rub the handle and base. Under a stream of warm water, employ the tai-chi of the wrist. Your grace and efficiency will dislodge any particles of detergent at minimal water expense.
Press the cloth – be gentle but firm – around the rim of a wineglass. This is a ceremonial circumnavigation that pays respect to an extraordinary vessel of conversation and communion. When satisfied with its purity, baptise with The Rinsing Act.
Place cutlery into the water and let it bathe. Take a fork. The spokes of this object, those teeth of utility, can be flossed under a brush. Use the same delicate attention to a Knife. Then a Spoon.
Cutlery done, it’s crockery’s turn. Take a bowl, give it a circular massage, make it beautiful on the inside and then the out.
Finally, the dented body of a frypan can get a slow and thorough scrub – a ‘thank you’ for wilting spinach, toasting nuts, and the decades of unglamorous, expert service.
With hands wrinkled, warm and pliant, pull the plug and release this galactical microcosm. Let it flow through the tunnel on its way to the light of the great Wherever.
What for many is a prosaic and disagreeable task can be one of your day’s most enjoyable experiences. It is akin to meditation. A reflection. An expression of gratitude. A wiping of the slate for tomorrow.
And I hope, my friend, you can find that your mental drawer of clutter and daily nonsense has been emptied.
Bubble image from Flickr by John Petrick.
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Musings on mindfulness and tea. They’re related!
Interview
“Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there, something else is also there—life, represented by the cup of tea. In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.”
- THICH NHAT HANH
This wonderful and resonant (to tea drinkers!) quote was provided to SOHI by Paulina from The Berry Tea Shop. We know that Paulina walks the walk as well as talking the talk. She retired from Sydney cafe life in favour of the slower paced existence of a fine tea purveyor and has never looked back. Thanks for sharing your philosophy with us, Paulina!
Image: Teacup Ballet by Olive Cotton, the nana of photography in Australia.
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One Hundred Moons of Solitude – by guest blogger Steve Harrison
Interview
SOHI reader and ceramicist Steve composed this small piece for his recent exhibition of ceramics at Watters Gallery in Sydney in January. He writes about mindfulness of locality, materials, and his inner creative dialogue – the mindful voice of the inner artist.
“It’s been just over eight years since I discovered the Joadja bai tunze native porcelain stone deposit near Mittagong and started making my special bai tunze and washed gravel bowls. I work alone, I tend to work directly from my emotions and intuitions, so if I have any objective, it is this; that I work independently using only what I can fashion myself from my own local resources. My work always addresses beauty and the contemplation of beauty and my interaction with the natural word. My failure to adequately achieve this is what drives my search.
My main concern at the current time is to envisage some sort of relationship or engagement between intellect and passion, thought and action, trying to bring some harmony into my own troubled existence through the creation of beautiful objects while dealing with the tensions and anxieties of a modern life. A life that I am attempting to live ethically and responsibly. It is easy and glib to rattle off such statements, but very difficult to walk the walk, to actually live it.
My hundred moons of solitude have allowed me to indulge my introspection and I have come to realise that Garcia-Marquez was talking to me when he discovered that place, the gap between reality and fantasy, the realm where inspiration lies. Reality is all tough, hard work, fantasy is much more plastic and malleable, like clay. I feel that I ought to write something profound about this, but fail to. I would have liked to have written something meaningful perhaps about Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part’s spiritual minimalism and radical simplification and how it’s influenced my radical localism and minimal spirituality, but apparently not.
I wish that I could have written about my desire for beauty and simplicity, my trips to Japan, where I failed to find my muse and how simplicity is so complex that it is indescribable and how trying to make something elegant, simple and uncomplicated, simply isn’t simple or uncomplicated.
I’d like to have said that the many long hours spent doing mindless manual work like the sorting of little white granules of quartz from the dross of dark rubble found on an ants nest, so as to get just the ‘right’ textured grit to add to my clay body, is actually exhilarating in the achievement of it, and that the most boring job of grinding stones down to dust so as to make a glaze can be very rewarding.
I wanted to express something of the beauty and the rewards in the many little steps in the creative process, no-matter what they are and that I’m actually starting to realize that I’m often happiest labouring at this tedious nonsense, not just because it is leading to something bigger, (which it is) but because each step, each event, is complete in itself, as an act of beauty. They coalesce to create the beautiful, elegant whole that are these works. But I didn’t.
Probably all the better.
I failed to find my muse, I continue to fail to create it, I fail to write about it meaningfully and I fail to adequately describe my failure. Isn’t life a beautiful and complex thing!”
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