bird and bell..

how it is..


yesterday i had a mini meltdown.. an American term i know but the way i felt and the way i might have looked to you if you'd seen me, would make you think the description was pretty well on the mark..
i'd spent most of the day in the classroom at school, setting it up again for the year.. most starts-of-the-year i'm like this but yesterday it was a stronger upheaval than usual.. i do not want to go back to work.. i think i've probably just had enough.. being at home seems like the best way to live.. it's not that it's easy.. more that life lived at home taking the days as they come has become my reality of peace, being here in the day gives me time to make sense of the world outside this one..

am i a writer? i try to be.. i do what i can with what i have.. i like my own company and i like the company of words.. i'd like to say i play with words but i don't really think this is the case.. i'm more of an amateur in that area.. still making connections with them.. still pulling them out of the sea inside my head, still trying to work out which ones to keep and which to toss back..

and, saying all this, under the green umbrella of a cherry-plum tree in the back yard, can i tell you that i've not long finished reading My Father's Suitcase? ..Orhan Pamuk's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. .. my friend Vilma gave me a photocopy of it when i saw her last night.

it starts : Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts, and notebooks...

i am sitting in a backyard in Berwick, Australia January 2010 reading the words of a man in Istanbul, Turkey speaking to an audience in Oslo in December 2006 and i feel his presence with me as though he was sitting on the other side of the table..a green, wooden bird-spattered table tucked inside a shaded space, bamboo chime clunking in the breeze behind us..

just after i finished reading his essay, i had one of those moments where every moving, sounding, seeable thing seizes on your attention and gets it.. one by one i go through what i see hear, feel, smell can touch, can't touch, have met before, haven't seen ever.. an all-of- a-sudden rises up and i'm aware of the life of a thing in the big world of everything.. the dog lying on his back in the stick-up grass rubbing back and forth on an itchy spot, the heat-burnt purple bottle-brushes of a shrub near the fence that would flake into black crumbs in my fingers if i touched them, two pieces of pottery nailed to the palings, one a circle of chubby angels, the other a terracotta square with a central flower ..and while i'm thinking what the flower is,

a rush of wind blows over the yard and throws me off course and i hold onto the papers and listen to leaves and shut my eyes and hear a breath in my head ..the breath of my sister.. Michele used to catch her breath when she was sleeping a little k.kaw i could hear lying on the top bunk beside her single iron bed that had belonged to the nuns, her bed against the window on the other side of our room. my sister who died and now lives in my head, in birdsong, in birdflight, in the windchime i bought at a nursery in Warrandyte in December..Three tin birds connected by a beaded leather cord and on the end of the cord a funnel shaped bell that rings now in the wind like a school bell did in the 50s in Morwell where we all went to school. all nine of us.. here we are again, here we run around the playground ringed by pines, the long block of playground and us running all over the place and yelling to each other free and noone looking at us and all on our own here in the yard of my mind.