Life drawing model

I was a life drawing model for Amelia Draws and she painted this beautiful watercolour.

One of the things I enjoy about Amelia’s work, apart form her eye, is also seeing her discuss her life as an artist alongside it –  the single parenting, blending families, feminist parenting and day jobs.  This is my favourite piece of hers.

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What December 2016 looks like (in the subtropics)

In the subtropics, around the middle of summer things start to die in the heat so Christmas is a strange presence in the season, although I guess not unlike Christmas being situated in the dead of winter in the northern hemisphere. Because the season of summer is not associated with new life here, but rather with the onset of destructive storms, bush fires, drought, and burning sun. Kitchen gardens are largely left to rest. The weeds grow furiously but otherwise everything feels very slow in the humidity.

Storms signal Christmas is coming and the garden succumbs to the mix of overgrown and death.

For me, the foods of summer are all Mediterranean, Mexican and Asian and seem to come in the colours of Christmas. And we eat out in the garden unless the mosquitoes are terrible.

My favourite part of Christmas is all the spontaneous socialising. Friends who message you to tell you they have two Cabernets and are waiting out the rain in a quiet corner, so hurry up and join them in the bar… and other friends who invite you and your kids to swim in their pool and share pot luck dinners together, and friends who beg you to be invited over because their kid is going spare and they want to talk and laugh with you, and all the playfulness and, the exposed skin and lying under a fan even, the goddamn craft (which now includes sewing by my kids).

And this year it included for me a writing deadline for (hopefully) another book anthology next year.

Previous views of December here:

2015

Interestingly, I didn’t post photos in 2014.

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

I love to see what December looks like in your part of the world, so if you care to, leave a link to your own December photos in the comment section.

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If one does one’s solitude right

“I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.” – Maggie Nelson

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The pleasures of ordinary devotion

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

[Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, or in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough? You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don’t always know.

From Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

 

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A year ago tonight

A year ago tonight my boyfriend moved in with us. It felt like such a big step back then. But in the end, we just laughed together a lot more.

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A little way away

From a notebook, more than a year ago:

I had been without a car. And so, when suddenly he gave me his spare car, I made plans right away.

Those plans involved taking the children with me over the border to stay with a friend by the sea. The spontaneity was irresistible. The tightness with the children. The freedom of leaving somewhere.

But I forgot to tell him until the last moment.

I am not used to this negotiation, is all I could say by way of explanation. I am not used to thinking of someone again, to be consulting, to be leaving you.

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More of spring in this part

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The moon that rose

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“They had so much to avoid talking about”.

This, “Breakfast at Bethany’s” is such a thoughtful short story on dating (and re-partnering), by Craig Billingham in Verity La.

Things were going well – Martin could feel it – so why not press on, take another step? They were enjoying each other, like adolescents with age-spots and pre-crimped skin, but infinitely more interesting. They had so much to avoid talking about.

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On repartnering

It is rougher. Messier. More mistakes. More imperfect than you expect, even when you expect imperfection. It is layered and complicated and ordinary.

At its best it is that untidy, because that is where the vulnerability and bravery hold. But you have to surrender to that, over and over again.

Repartnering.

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