The kindness of strangers.

Today, I want to send a big thanks to author Nikki Gemmell, columnist for the Australian Magazine, for providing me with the impetus to sort out all my far ranging thoughts and ideas and organise them into an achievable project. Although I am not quite so delusional as to believe she was really writing to me, just for a moment I am going to subscribe to the adolescent fantasy that she was somehow writing for me.

Because the Sara Henderson quote with which Nikki ended her weekend column absolutely made my day. My week. Possibly my month. It is now printed out and stuck to the wall in front of little writing nook and I see it every time I lift my gaze from the computer screen. Which I do quite often. Usually when I'm considering the really important questions, like should I have a boiled or a poached egg for breakfast?

I actually had a kind of bodily response to this quote. Partly it gave me shivers because, as a midwife, I often find myself telling women that they have all the strength they need within them for their labour and birth. But also it gave me a kind of heart-expanding, shoulder-squaring moment of understanding that equally crucial to having the strength, is the capacity to own it, to wear it fearlessly and unapologetically in plain sight.

So, armed with this fantastically take-the-bull-by-the-horns attitude, I headed into uni to attend a research session run by Professor Ginger Carrieri-Kohlman. (I already liked her just because how can you not like a woman named Ginger?)

In her session she asked each of us to write one word inside a circle on a blank page. One word. The word that sums up the thing you are most interested in. The thing that you could think and write about for ten years if you had to. The thing you are passionate about. The thing you could base a PhD on. And I didn't even have to think. In a split second, it was there in front of me. A one word guiding framework for the next three years. It was a bit of a rabbit-out-of-a-hat moment. Hallelujah. Eureka. And all that business.

I couldn't quite believe it. After a month of reading across acres of topics, days spent on diversions and many hours spiralling down into a subterranean maze of databases, of course I really knew what I wanted to write about all along. I just didn't know that I knew it.

So how great are these women? I don't even really know them at all and yet somehow they both found ways to help me turn my brain around and move forwards with this project. I love the way humans interact with one another without even knowing it. And I love the way smart and helpful women are everywhere in the world, just lurking about, unknowingly being inspirational to someone like me.

P Day.

Well, there's no backing out now. I have confirmed my enrolment in the PhD program and am about to kiss life as we know it goodbye. From this point forward there will be a many headed monster of expectation, procrastination, anxiety and word count to manage on an ongoing basis. 

So, to make sure that my entire life is not taken over by the sensible trousers, this week I have been inspired to start a new group thang with my mates. I stumbled across this exceptionally good idea whilst searching for whole food recipes which I will employ to combat my sinking feeling that my family is eating way too much convenience food. Baked beans on toast anyone?

I floated this idea of a foodie club to my friends and have received great bucketloads of enthusiasm in return. There are now around 25 signed up members and we have a date for our first fiesta. However, we have tweaked the original cookbook club idea and are all going to cook from the fabulously food-filled Smitten Kitchen blog for our inaugural event. This will be an excellent source of distraction whilst planning my mammoth research and writing event over the next short while. Because, naturally, the most pressing question of the moment is not how shall I begin my literature review but instead, what am I going to cook?

I spy.

Floor show.

I spy.

My new favorite old lamp.

The big reveal.

Okay, so I have been a little distracted and kind of completely not doing anything aardvarky for the last wee while.

But with good reason.

I have been quietly beavering away at an entirely different kind of project, namely making my life more like what I would like it to be like.

I have quit my job. Quit, quit, quit. Done, finished, resigned, left the building. And I have applied for PhD candidature on a project that I am absolutely super excited about. I think this is possibly my most creative act of the year so far. Certainly it is the act that has required the most giant leap of faith and reassessment of the shape of my universe.

And all this rearranging of things has made me realise that for me, art art is only one aspect of creativity. Because, you know, life is art, right? So spending time re-shaping your life to be more fulfilling and interesting and engaging and generally more like the kind of gal at the party whom you go home really wishing you had a chance to talk to, that's an art too. 

Also, I have been making gardens. At my house, in the backyard and down the side. Making gardens is good. And now I am like some kooky garden pervert and drive around just staring at other people's gardens and checking out their foliage.

So this year*, I am very optimistically going to attempt to -
1. revive the aardvark
2. write a PhD (ok, some of it)
3. do work that I enjoy
4. walk the dog every day
5. feed my child something vaguely nutritious every once in a while
6. keep the new gardens alive
7. paint the house
8. not get caught in another job that doesn't suit me
9. spend Sundays with my husband
10. start a new business with my friend Bec.

 * Yes, I am aware the the traditional time for new years planning has passed and we are now in March and it is way too late to pull a bunch of bogus resolutions out of my arse. But that's just how I roll.

Bisy backson.

I'm not going to say I'm back. Because that implies some kind of rekindled dedication to regular posting, and I'm just not sure if that is a reality that I can commit to at this very second.

At the moment, there is a great deal of thinking important thoughts going on inside my head. This is quite taxing and requires a relative degree of madness.

For therapy, I have been painting parts of my house.

I have decided, that with it's expansive walls and super high ceilings, painting whole rooms of the house in one go is an overwhelmingly large task. And I suspect such giant tracts of colour would perhaps be overwhelming for the sets of eyeballs that live inside the house. So instead I am painting small parts of rooms and experimenting with the ways in which little moments of passing colour can change the feel of the place. 

I have tried to photograph some of this but there is a giant thunderstorm outside and no natural light except of the extremely gloomy kind and it all just looks a bit blerg. I will wait for a sunny day and then share the joy of the very small painting project with you.

The insane storminess is a bit of a theme around here lately. It has been relentlessly rainy. But because I am a sterling dog owner, I have been taking my dog out in the extreme super wetness. This is what the beach looked like a couple of days ago when I was there with my dog and she made friends with another dog called Rufus who looked scary but was really quite nice. Rufus is a pretty good dog name I think.

Night life.

We get some pretty spectacular views of the steelworks from our new house. At first I thought it might be a bit oppressive, but actually, it's just gorgeous. And it's not even noisy or even one bit stinky. I am becoming quite fond of it.