recharge

on parenting adults, camping and life giving rain

Roses picked just before the rain

Hello, my dear Musers, I’m glad you’re here.

I hope you had a good Easter break.

I’m back from four days camping out near Heathcote with friends and my eldest. It was exactly what we all needed. Long sleeps, sunsets, quiet, time to chat, hunt for good food and water holes to swim in, time to go slow.

As I write, I’m listening to the beautiful rain falling over Melbourne and, if I listen closely, I can hear the parched earth sucking the water. Over the last four days, I saw the effects of the lack of rain on the land. As an inner city dweller, it can be easy to miss the impact of the weather on the land, but it’s easy to see driving past paddock after paddock of crisp dry grasses, river beds with only small pools of water, low tide marks on dams and eucalypts tinder dry with limbs broken, collapsed like sun bleached bones. I hope this rain is reaching all the places that need it most.

Sunset at our campsite

I was chatting with someone recently about how the teen years are about letting go, preparing us for a new relationship with our offspring. It aches me, at times, that my eldest lives in another town to us and that our catchups are fleeting as he stops over as a pitstop to the next place.

It was a privilege to be able to spend time, slow time, with him over Easter. Parenting offspring in their twenties is a time of building a friendship as we move beyond the parent-child stage to adult-adult stage. It takes effort to protect this relationship so that our values and judgements are put aside as they carve their own life.

In my early adult years, my father said he wished I could learn from his mistakes rather than make my own. My response was that I couldn’t. I have held this lesson into my own parenting. I can guide, suggest, but I need them to have their own learnings, and most importantly, I need to celebrate them as they are and love them unconditionally.

Each night at our campsite, as we watched a garden orb spider weave her web only to pack it up in the morning, I thought of the work we need to do each day in all aspects of our lives. Keep learning, reading, writing, being friends, parenting, loving.

Celebrations and milestones

It’s been a busy month of pitching, learning and coaching.

I’m thrilled to have been chosen for a three week writing residency next year in France. I’ve never been to Europe (UK once, but never to Europe) and am looking forward to spending time there and potentially travelling after with M.

I took part in the recent ASA Literary Speed Dating. As a result of my pitching to two publishers, my manuscript is now sitting with both publishers who have three months to decide if they would like to talk more with me about it.

Karen Hollenbach

and I had a pre pitching session to workshop our pitches and it proved so useful for both of us.

Tomorrow I am being interviewed on a podcast about my writing retreats. Lisa from Writing Retreats Directory reached out to me and I’m looking forward to talking about the retreats and how helpful they’ve been to the participants so far. I’ll post a link to it when it airs. The retreats continue to fill and I am in the planning stages of a couple of virtual retreats.

I currently have five coaching clients who are already seeing success from their coaching. It brings me such joy to see them have a breakthrough that enables them to start the process of getting unstuck and carving their life so that it allows them to achieve their goals. Let me know if you would like to have a chat about whether coaching could help you.

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Five things

1. Amor fati

As I tried to recover from a broken heart after watching One Day, I watched the fantastic show Life after Life that raises that question of what would you change if you could live your life again. The protagonist Ursula is continually reborn each time she dies and in doing so, tries to reconcile a thought that she needs to do something better to stop the inevitable. She meets a psychiatrist who introduces her to the term amor fati — associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche called eternal recurrence, the idea that, over an infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely. Love is fate. To accept life as it is.

If you could live your life time and again, would you ever get it right? Ursula Todd dies one night in 1910, on that same night she is reborn, experiencing an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

2. The power of meditation 

I’ve been learning a lot about and am practising more meditation this year. Last week,

Jen Hitze

talked about the power of meditation in her newsletter. It resonated as I tame my busyness to have more calm.

Meditation isn’t just something you see on the outside; it’s something you do on the inside.

Meditation teaches us how to become aware of our attention and, in time, control it. During meditation, one “goes inwards,” shutting out visual sensors and lessening the ability for external distractions to dictate focus. To better maintain control of awareness, meditators often concentrate on inner focal points such as one’s breath, an “anchor” (e.g., the heart center or solar plexus), or a mantra.

She quotes an experiment where:

… study participants were seated in a quiet, empty room for 15 minutes, during which they could think or meditate without distraction. The only external stimulus available them during that time was a button that would deliver an electric shock to their ankle, if they so chose to press it. By the end of the 15 minutes, 67% of male and 25% of female participants opted to administer at least one electric shock to themselves rather than endure their own thoughts.

Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

3. Black and White

Did you know you can change your iPhone to black and white and in doing so, it makes the phone easier to resist. It’s buried deep in the settings for the iPhone in Colour Filters and I’m not sure whether other brands of phones have that capability. Have you done it? Does it make a difference? Tell me everything.

Learn more it here

4. Book launches

Last week I attended two book launches. It’s always a buzz to go to a launch and a great way to connect with the writing community. If you are writing in your bubble and are wondering how to find other writers, maybe this could be a way to find other writers.

One launch was for debut author (and ex-colleague) Ernest Price whose novel The Pyramid of Needs I devoured. Transphobia, a pyramid scheme and a dysfunctional family. It’s full of wry humour. A hard recommend.

The other was for Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist’s The Glass House, a novel about mental health. I haven’t started it yet, but get your hands on it if you can. I am sure it will be a great read with Anne’s vast knowledge as a psychiatrist and author and Graeme’s as an author. Keep your eyes out for their road trip (The Great Australian Bookshop Tour) that will bring the book to as many bookshops in Australia as they can. The royalties from the books sold at these events along the way will be donated to mental health.

5. Film Club

Family dinners (now being dubbed Dunley Dinner) have turned into a dinner and film club. The crew who turn up each week settle into a film after dinner and critique it at the next dinner (in case someone wasn’t able to make it that night). It’s unbelievable the amount of joy I feel on these nights.

Til next time

x M

PS Read Karen’s post retreat reflections here

I got out of my own way and I did a hard thing

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