A state of stillness
We’ve been bestowed another mild winter; mornings might be fresh, but by 9am it’s usually time to ditch the coat. It’s often colder inside than out - a fact I have to constantly remind myself when I get dressed every morning. As I’ve learnt is true in Sydney, when it rains, it really pours. The East Coast low brings wild winds which howl at the windows of our coastal home. Down at the beach, the surf is pumping for Manly’s thrillseekers, white horses cresting every few seconds. But the rambunctious weather is only in town for four days. The rest of the time we’re dazzled by those endless blue skies, taut like silk, the type of days that fill you with optimism and hope and a literal spring in your step.
We’ve slipped into an easy way of things. Never knowing how far ahead we can plan, I find my diary perpetually empty as the winter evenings draw in, something once I would find unnerving; now, I am comforted by the still, by routine and monotony, knowing what I have is all I need.
After losing someone very dear to me back home, I found myself drawn to books and photographs about nature and the natural way of things. Books that talk about why nature calms us, how to read water and why a sense of awe is so important. I’ve been thinking a lot about our natural landscape, reading it and photographing it. And it really helps. Misshapen clouds that drift into Cabbage Tree Bay. A sprig of bright yellow wattle amongst verdant green. A rock face hewn by the comings and goings of the tide. I know that it’s important to notice, as much as it’s important to create - so some days I take my camera, but other days I purposely leave it behind. It’s where the words for this very piece come to me, when my head isn’t teeming with thoughts that seem to cancel each other out. In a world where we don’t know what restriction is coming next, the rhythmic, constant flow of the ocean provides the stability we all need.
The afternoon light in our new apartment hits about 2.00pm, as the winter sun begins its descent. The sun dapples the sofa, almost always the dog’s sleeping spot, and travels across the room in a golden arc. It really is the small things.
Part of the expat deal I made myself was the knowledge that home was only ever a 24-hour flight away. Now, we find ourselves with that liberty taken away - sealed off from the rest of the world on this big, beautiful island nation, a country whose response to the pandemic I am proud to live under, but which doesn’t make the uncertainty any easier to bear.
In this extended period of ‘slow down’, memories bob to the surface far more frequently. Alain De Botton points to this Memory Cupboard as an important form of entertainment, a quote I find a lot of comfort in; he goes on to talk about how contentment is finding the happiness in small pleasures, the field of dandelions near the canal, a conversation with someone washing clothes at a fountain. I’ll be rummaging through a pile of clean but unironed laundry and my mind will settle on the memory of that sumptuous meal we had in Lake Como at the unpretentious restaurant with the bare walls and simple chairs; or the myriad of smells riding on horseback one balmy summer’s evening back home - citronella, pine trees, sunscreen, a warm and sweaty equine.
If I had to sum up this current chapter of my life, melancholy first sprang to mind, but that’s not quite true. Reflective, quiet and still; all states of being we so often crave in our fast paced world, now conferred on us for an unknown period of time.
