Thought doorways – Page 2 – Wendy's Out of Station

Feeling odd – from Hyderabad to home

Soundtrack Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

1130… 2017
It’s Republic Day here at home, Australia Day there at home. I’m going home to Mumbai to my second favourite city in the world. I feel odd, shakey inside. Colonised. Coloniser. Post-colonial.

I just finished packing, looked out the hotel window. A poor man is washing trousers in a muddy puddle on a construction site. It’s the same image I saw on my first morning, on my first trip to Mumbai in 2001. Refugee women cooking breakfast on rubbish fires, washing clothes in muddy puddles on a construction site. It is India. Progress, change, the same.

Today I feel lost inside.

I was born on the land of the Kulin nation
I grew up on Wurundjeri land
Today I live on the land of the Turrbul people
My ancestors were English and Scottish
I am Australian, my soul Indian
Today I journey, always coming home.

What to say. Where to look. Who to be. Human? Woman? Anthropologist? Ex-engineer? Just me? Who is that?

On the way out last night, the Uber GPS said, “You will arrive at 2015.” Time travel or taxi?

I guess the only way to find out is to go. Journey home. Always coming home. Home is where the heart is… right?

And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there

November 2006
Hard to imaging that I didn’t even want to come to India when my first work trip came up more than four years ago – five years ago, wow time flies. I raised a sardonic eyebrow when a friend offered the advice: “You like people. There are lots of people in India. You’ll be fine.”

But fine I was, WOW, more than fine. Come with me a moment, I will get back to this trip I promise, but if you’re going to have any chance of understanding how I feel about India you need to go with me on this – did you ever read Pookie books when you were a kid? You know about the little white rabbit with wings? Well, I have these memories of sitting up in bed with Mum reading me the adventures of Pookie. She bought me all of them. He was a little lost rabbit, different, who found home and belonging on arriving in the Gypsy night market full of incredible sights and smells too foreign and wondrous to imagine.

So there I was, 2001, starry eyed like Pookie in the back of a black Ambassador taxi inching out of Mumbai airport into a full on Indian traffic jam. Back then direct flights from Australia landed after 10pm. And it was also Ganesha’s Birthday, a festival that is just huge in Mumbai. Imagine Pookie’s lights, a million little pixie lights strung over stalls made for the festival, twisted around barrows selling food of unknown tastes and ingredients, with awesome smells. Everywhere women selling garlands of flowers. Fresh coconuts split for juice, sugar cane squeezed to make some sweet elixir, later advised by my local friend to be too hygienically dodgy for me drink. Glass cabinets of fried samosas of a million different varieties. Amazing exotic flowers festooning multicoloured smoke filled entrance ways, beckoning, offering passage to new worlds where mysterious temples are inhabited by brightly lit, smiling, blue idols. And everywhere incense and smoke from small fires. People rushing in and out between the traffic, cars ignoring lane markings – are there lane markings? I laugh, unable to wipe the grin off my face. Horns are blaring, head lights flashing all in a relentless press to get somewhere. Children laughing, calling, running out, adults carrying impossibly balanced loads over miniature foot bridges before disappearing into shanty towns shrouded in mystery and smoke. Everywhere full of people and laughter and magic lights. So much pulsing life.

And I sat hypnotised in the back of my taxi inhaling the scent and wonder. Like Pookie, uniquely at home. Somehow belonging.

Waking to the next morning’s foetid reality after a pre-dawn tropical thunder storm couldn’t dampen my wonder. Naked children were playing in puddles. Those narrow foot bridges had been over open sewers foul with every kind of rubbish and excrement. Scrawny yellow dogs snapped and chased and barked. Brightly clad women squatted, cooking over rubbish fires in a squalid shanty town clinging like the torn underskirts of an ageing sari to a freeway construction site where men were already working in the dawn light, swarming like a million ants. Squalid, dirty, raw poverty. But shining with the pride and beauty of the human spirit. I felt truly at home and that feeling hasn’t changed.

On arriving this time I simply passed through Mumbai on my way down to God’s own Country and, perhaps foolishly, I economised on an airport hotel. That economy meant the hotel was “functional” at best and that I only slept courtesy of the airline earplugs I had stuffed in my bag. I should say immediately that I still slept with a smile – in fact I don’t regret it at all. Peaking between the dusty hotel curtains before bed to see where all the noise was coming from showed, even through the filthy glass, that five floors below traffic is still snaking down the same main road into Mumbai along which my taxi crawled five years ago, and it’s still gridlocked in one continuous traffic jam, even at midnight. The look also showed that my room’s twinkling ambience is courtesy of the top floor of my hotel being festooned with constellations of a million pixie lights. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look amid the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they wil lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror

2215… 2017
I’m back in the familiar Marine Plaza Hotel in a subtly shifted Mumbai. So much has changed, so much is still the same. The drive was much faster, more prosaic, even with the engineering feat that is the new Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link. But Haji Ali Mosque is still at the end of its causeway, all lit up and floating. And the Tower of Silence is still there, looming above the unsilent. I always used to have tomato soup and a club sandwich when I arrived here, going native with the vegetarian tandoori sticks tonight!

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that you will trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

Peninsula Rose

There is no soundtrack to this post unless you choose one, but do pour yourself a glass of bubbles

This is a post that I forgot to share back in December when I was crazy busy getting ready to come to India. Cathy and I had a brilliant day with bubbles and an amazing lunch on the Mornington Peninsula, then we had a bit of a perambulate in some lovely garden areas.

Who would have thought that artichokes and garlic gone to seed could look so beautiful. Love flowers that “convention” says are passed their best – the best is yet to be.

And then we went to Flinders Beach for a walk in the drizzle and found a very large friend feeding in the sea grass. And some learner wind surfers who were caught without wind, and like ducklings had to be brought back to shore.

Laneway Life

Recently I advised a friend visiting Melbourne to take a wander through the laneways that make up so much of the quirky eating culture of this incredible city. So, since I’m here I thought I’d do the walk I recommended, getting off the tram at Federation Square opposite Flinders St Station. I do love Fed Square, thriving with people coming and going, flags flapping, all corners and nooks and crannies, but it does look a bit like Italian designer luggage that’s been around the baggage carousel one time to many. This time I didn’t go into the Ian Potter Gallery, or into the Centre for the Moving Image, both of which are amazing cultural resources. Instead I crossed over to the Young and Jackson’s corner and headed west down Flinders St. Of course Melbourne aficionados will tell you I should have gone upstairs in Young and Jacksons for a drink with Chloe, and it was about lunch-time, but well, once you’ve seen one Brazilian it’s appropriate to keep your blog PG rated.

So, down and right into Degraves St. I’ve loved it for years since it was dodgey and dirty, and a way out of Flinders St Station to avoid both crowds and rain. Used to be quite the challenge to work out how to get to work zigzagging through laneways to avoid getting wet. Now it’s the scene for street cafe’s and some pretty unique shops. Including one specialising in hand made Italian paper and ink pens. Continue reading “Laneway Life”

Melbourne Town, coz there’s no place like home

Soundtrack: Hmmm might have to think about that a bit…
ok, Dire Straits, Walk of Life

So here I am, back in Melbourne for a couple of special family birthdays, to catch up with some amazing friends, and for Christmas, so I thought I’d better show you around. The image above is of the Yarra River (the only river in Australia that used to run upside down, but it’s much cleaner these days) and the spires of the CBD. The City of Melbourne is located on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people. I was so proud to be able to buy my nephew a beautifully illustrated children’s book, produced by the Wurundjeri people called, Welcome to Country (Black Dog Books, 2016). I hope with his multi-ethnic background he can grow to be a custodian of his land, the land cared for today and over thousands of years by the Wurundjeri.

I bought the book on my first nostalgic stop at The State Library of Victoria. When I was finishing high school I used to come here to study. Truth be known it was more that in the building I felt smarter, and it seemed so grown up to be pretending to study and drinking coffee in the cafe of what was then the Museum. Today renovations have made a magnificent space for researchers and visitors alike, the light, the atmosphere, it still makes me feel more learned, more wise. You can inhale the journey of knowledge. I wished I had some Foucault or better yet, some Australian female philosopher to imbibe slowly, clearly my subconscious was thinking of Michelle Boulous Walker. But instead I sat back, breathed slowly and let the learning seep in the pores of my skin, let my mind wander up the layers of shelves to the enlightenment of the dome. Continue reading “Melbourne Town, coz there’s no place like home”

The Anti-hero you need

I need to tell you quickly (because I should be writing) about a book I read yesterday – total inspiration, made me walk taller: The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. Look I have nothing in common with the hero, Aud, other than we are women living in a world that can be really hard. I mean she’s tall, Norwegian, an ex-cop, rich, a master of martial arts. She has woodworking skills and an incredible girlfriend. She has killed, I haven’t! But like all of us she’s damaged, she’s loyal, she takes no shit or prisoners. And while I was reading that book I walked proud, believed in myself, felt less overwhelmed by life: that positive feeling has lasted into today.

Yes Aud steps outside the law, she does things that make her anti-hero not heroine, but to me that just makes her more real. There are quite a few reviews that rave about JJ, you know that new Marvel series they think is empowering and feminist (umm not in my world) and how she’s the new anti-hero that women need to aspire to be. Well Aud would be a much better tv series female anti-hero than JJ! That show annoys me – as if women get superpowers to stand up against violence! We don’t get external superpower mojo when we are oppressed, when men manipulate and control and emotionally abuse. We have to find courage in our ordinary humanity, if we can we find other women, and then we get up and keep going. Hoping for superpowers or flopping hopelessly waiting for a superpower saviour won’t save abused women. I also feel like its a show that profits from rape culture & intimate partner abuse of women. End of sermon!!

Sadly the Aud series publishers are, well odd, so in Aus only books 1 and 3 are available electronically, which means that I’ll have to wait for book 2 to arrive in paperback from distant shores. And that well known web-publisher named for incredible women, well the product description for these books is “xx” hmmm, not very helpful! Luckily my electronic goggling skills found more details and I risked “purchase now”.

While I’m waiting for the delivery person you’d thing I should get back to my writing, but luckily Nicola Griffith has also written some interesting looking sci fi and historical fiction so procrasti-reading can continue. Have a look at the Blue Place, it really is worthwhile.

My mother, the woman I thought I didn’t know

I am lucky to have been mothered in my life by two strong, beautiful, capable women. It took a long time for me to let myself discover in my stepmother a woman and friend that I love and respect. Until now I’d not discovered my mother as a person: she died in 1980, very much still my Mummy. I am lucky now to know and love these two priceless women. It’s wonderful that the human heart can morph, can love without limit or competition or comparison.

There’s a woman in my life I barely knew. Never got to know as a woman, as an independent person. Never got to separate the Woman from the role of Mummy.

Some may say I’m too much in my head, but it was feminist philosophy that hit my triggers, called challenge to my resounding clanging shut bronze defensive doors with many many locks. They said that the most important relationship for a woman to recover, to find herself, to discover human intimacy, to identify herself as a subject in her own right not an object relative to a man, is with her mother. No way. I checked the locks and bars. No mother needed here.

But here I am some eighteen months later, after a long-lost friend of hers telling me how much I am like her, after many more feminist nigglings “Before any woman, before you can see yourself as a person, you need to see your mother as a person, a subject in her own right, an individual not a role, a woman is a woman first, a daughter, wife, mother only thereafter”. After an uncle sharing photographs I didn’t have. Nauseated by endless feminist fiction where the daughter reconciles with her dead misunderstood mother. After visiting her grave and feeling almost nothing, after fleeting thoughts and questions I quickly suppressed. After all that niggling like a buzzing mosquito, on Saturday afternoon I found myself crying in the front bar of a pub. Hugging strangers. Telling all who’d listen that my Mum was there in ’54. Proud to have been born in Footscray. Bulldog Premiers. Singing under my breath the old words, words she held more dear than any hymn. It felt like it was time, not just for the Bulldogs but for us.

So here I am trying to identify for myself the woman, my Mum. To look at footsteps 36 years faded, and find a person. A woman.

I know she was loyal – perhaps to a fault. Loyal to her beloved Bullies, to family. Loyalty reciprocated by friends, even after her death. Fierce loyalty that could look a lot like stubbornness. She wasn’t shy, afraid to stand up for what she thought was hers, or afraid to speak her mind: I sure learned those traits young.

She was active in trying to get me the best. No pre-school near our home? She formed a committee, and it opened the year after I started primary school. No primary school near our home? She drove a parents’ council so one was built, opening for my Grade 6, just over a year before she died. She sewed my Barbie clothes when we couldn’t afford to buy them. She worried if the new high school would be good enough for me.

She loved food, and friends and wine. To party. She was vibrant. I think she laughed. Yes she laughed, I remember she laughed at other mothers’ horror when she brought me to my ballet concert covered in charcoal from my school concert chimney sweeping debut. Cleaned me up and sent me out to be a queen. She struggled with weight, but I remember soft enveloping hugs. I missed those hugs. She loved apricot – the colour, the fruit, jam, especially apricot flowers. And purple, I mean who has a purple toilet? I guess it was the 70’s. She didn’t drive and was afraid of water. She was afraid a lot I think, and isolated. She found a sister in my Aunt. She wrote ILY randomly through the calendar of 1980 on dates after she knew she would have died.

She was the queen of lists, she would have been dangerous had she lived to wield a spreadsheet. She worked as a book keeper then shop keeper. She could budget. On holidays we played cards, 500 and canasta. She had a home she loved, with simple treasures – glass reindeer, a trio of dalmatians, albums of Pat Boone and Johnny O’Keefe, Elvis and Bill Haley & the Comets. She loved Christmas planning, laying out the presents months in advance. She hated ironing. She was passionate in love and temper and joy. She beat herself up when she thought she didn’t meet her own standards. She and my Dad took turns to hold me when I had nightmares.

She was fallible, but aren’t we all. She wore pink, had manicured nails. She loved me. She laughed so hard she cried when I dropped the tablecloth out the apartment window and it caught on pipes halfway down.

Her mother died in Footscray. She and I were both born in Footscray Hospital. Her Dad was a life member at Footscray. Their blood ran red, white and blue. So I stood, tears flowing, in a Queensland bar surrounded by strangers, singing Son’s of the ‘scray, the red, white and blue. 62 years after she screamed herself hoarse when they last brought home the flag. And I think I met a woman with blue eyes, a voluptuous love, and a loyal generous heart.

A high point: The High Line

In all the agony of New York, I loved The High Line. It’s a former elevated rail spur that has been converted into a fabulous urban garden. Should have stayed up there for hours. And it’s where I found the best coffee that I drank in New York.

And a bee and I found each other not too far from a pair of water towers. No wonder I was happy. Continue reading “A high point: The High Line”

Top 10 day: Montmartre I’m pinching myself

I didn’t go to Montmartre 19 years ago so it was locked in for today come rain, hail or shine. Thankfully there was no hail and only a few spots of rain. Seriously, I can’t wipe the smile off my face, it was one of the best days ever. Last night I downloaded a self guided walking tour to my phone – it recommended going in reverse. Catch the metro to the “top” and walk down to avoid the crowds, stairs, pick pockets. Seemed good to me. Well total win. Total win. Pinching myself.

So after exiting the metro there was still a bit of a climb up a few stairs to Place Dalida – sorry I’d never heard of her, but apparently she was a famous singer.

Around the corner was my first glimpse of Sacré-Cœur and just a short walk to sustenance and a great coffee in the Pink House!

The guide I’d downloaded really underplayed the museum up the road -Musée de Montmartre – it did not encourage you to go at all. Well I think it is a total MUST. It is in Renoir’s house. The gardens are special, the architecture just perfect. Look at that pear tree! I was in heaven. Nearly went to heaven as I fell off the swing – not pictured!

And inside is the most amazing art. Floors and floors of it. Just breathtaking.

Some close ups from that one:

I could have stayed for hours. Sorry about the reflections on some of the photos, very hard to photograph paintings through glass without that happening.

But there were many steps to be taken so I dragged myself away to walk past the vineyard (apparently the wine is terrible but is sold for charity and raises a fortune because of the association). Just look at those grapes under the netting!

Below the vineyard was an early cabaret – Au Lapin Agile. Love the painting. I wonder how many hungry artists paid for their dinner in art?

Having wandered with the (sinning) artists it was time to head a little higher up the hill and visit the saints. Well that sounds like a good story, but the truth is that I didn’t go in and I had to go up there to get to the far side and start my descent! Continue reading “Top 10 day: Montmartre I’m pinching myself”

Monet’s Sunday is worth the wait

So Sunday arrived and I actually got to get on the bus to Giverny and Monet’s Garden and House. Oh WOW it was certainly worth the wait. What a blessed gift, and not just how you’d think.

Along with several hundred close friends (physically at least) we arrived in Monet’s water garden. Hmmm, I struggled. I am a woman not gifted with patience, and what I have I’ve earned painfully. I count it credit to those lessons that I did not punch anyone. Nor did I push anyone into the water. It does not count that I wanted to.

I also felt odd for the water. So constrained. So controlled and limited, directed between walls of bamboo. I was unquiet.

Of course it was beautiful, and atmospheric under the clouds. Did I mention that I love French clouds? I just felt so unlike how I feel when I’m immersed in Monet’s paintings.

Still feeling odd I determinedly pushed my way around every step of path! Stubborn? Moi? I was that nutter woman. I talked to the flowers. I wanted them to know that I saw them as equal subjects, that I was not reducing them to flat objects of entertainment, an attitude which I angrily attributed to others. Commodities placed to be consumed I wanted to restore them their living-ness. Their independence of the possessing gaze. Continue reading “Monet’s Sunday is worth the wait”

Walking into yourself

Can words truly ever describe that feeling? A feeling I know, but I’ve never heard anyone else try to describe its sensory overload. Well not that I remember. Maybe I was blind to their words. Do we all feel it, most conceding the failure, the abject inadequacy of words to convey something simultaneously so real and utterly unreal. Or are we too scared to try to reduce something so precious to words and risk shattering the crystal intensity of the moment.

I tried once to describe it as being as though you’d woken while your soul was still off dancing with the faeries. Your body functions but your mind is in cotton wool, like the analgesic afterglow of codeine. And so you walk and walk and walk until somewhere on your walk your soul finds you. Your skin tingles and everything is ultra real, your senses heightened. You’re still separated from everyone else, you don’t want anyone else to break the magic of the moment. A moment when only you can be so agonisingly aware of the perfect reality of everything around you.

I’m still not sure though that it might not be the opposite to your soul being missing, maybe instead you have too much soul and it dislocates you just out of phase in your time space continuum. Out of phase you are separated and so can see everything. Isolated in an etic un-reality that is the most real, but most external perception. You are totally safe out of phase and so you walk and walk and walk. And you experience the world of the others as if for the first time in the most vivid, exquisite skin tingling intensity.

And you are utterly alone. And that is part of the bliss.

The clarity of your thought and expression is agonising. The silence is tangible, the profound silence within the music of Mozart. But it’s Mozart in your heart strings, a cello vibrating on your skin not your ears.

You want it to stop because you can’t function. You have things to do. Did someone steal your soul? Are you even still alive? But you don’t want it to ever stop because it is so peaceful, safe, so terribly real. It will stop, you cannot hold back the time forever so you revel in it. When you stop being afraid you plunge in. Total immersion.

I said maybe it feels like you woke while your soul was away dancing, but sleep is not all that induces this feeling. Walking on the beach, alone, maybe in the rain, always wind and crashing waves. Walking. Walking. Walking at the interstices. Your soul relaxes, stops trying to hold you together in space and time and convention. Waves pound. Your soul breathes. It flies up up, dancing with the clouds, flowing over the skin of the ocean to roll full of joy in the breaking waves, drenched in spray rising up and up, shaking laughing like a sea sprite. Racing alone along the sparkling silver roads of pure reflected moonlight. Invigorated. Cleansed. The dirt and condemnation and strictures of civilised life are washed away. You flow to your own shape. Exhausted. Refreshed. The salt spray and sweet rain sting your skin. There is utter clarity in your bubble of life, of vibrant livingness that extends to the horizon. And that tremulous hyper sensitivity is safely protected by a force field penetrated only by moon and waves and wind.

Sometimes it happens when I travel. Maybe it’s why I travel alone. I walk. I observe. But I am separate, other, I don’t quite belong. I feel like I see everything, absorb everything, taste the texture of everything. I am in my safe living bubble. Is no one else truly alive? Can no one else see? People are rushing, speaking a language I don’t understand. I have none of their pressures. I’m inside but outside. Some smile at me, I must still be alive, still visible, still real. I speak to buy chai or coffee, eye contact, smile, touch finger tips. But I am different and my difference keeps me separate, safe, aware. And so I walk. And walk Watching. Tasting.

I think Hildegard got it when she described herself as a feather on the breath of God. And John of the Cross, the exquisite joy of relinquishing all else, embracing the empty darkness of night that your soul may bathe in the balm of God. The mysterious power of the empty tomb. Arjuna letting go outcomes and being the arrow he was created to be. The sublime insight of expectations obliterated and release of simply being, flowing into a nothing that is everything. Expectations, desire have no place here. I am simply totally alive.

The woman I’m learning from this week calls it returning to yourself. Some clever men whose work I respect called it liminal, leaving behind familiarity, being open to see the world inverted, and to return changed. That sounds so prosaic, so orderly, I hope they smelt it sparkle.