This is an essay that I have been playing around with for a few months. It’s kind of lengthy, but I hope you see that the length is necessary for the ideas that I wanted to convey – namely that a curse can indeed be a blessing; the importance of following your dreams, step by tiny step; the absolute necessity of taking complete ownership and responsibility for your life and how sometimes the longest journeys do not go past your front gate.
Clik here to view.
The view off my back verandah.
When I stopped to think about it, I had never really spent much time at home. As a child I went to school five days a week, then when I left school, I went to more school (university and college), as well as working and socialising. I was rarely home during the day, only sometimes at night – and I could count the days or nights I had spent alone at home on one hand.
When our first child was born, I found myself face to face with the prospect of learning to stay at home. In my mind, it was all fairly simple: I would undergo an education intensive at Mum-versity, before accepting a permanent placement as Mother at my new workplace, The Home. How well I did at Mum-versity and The Home would depend upon how hard I worked and how dedicated and disciplined I was, just like all the other work and education I had done in my life. Of course. The modern woman’s attitude to child raising. Well, I was right about two things – I was certainly going to get an education, and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for several years was most certainly intense.
Clik here to view.
Visiting my Dad, 2004.
At first, the thought of leaving the house with a new born baby was completely overwhelming. The Bag! The random breast feeding, crying and pooping! Just getting him in and out of the car without banging a head, his or mine – seemed nigh on impossible. That wasn’t the only challenge – I remember blithely reversing through our gate one morning and ripping off the back door that I had completely forgotten to close. You had better believe that I had that smashed door removed and new one ordered and attached by the time the Bear got home from work (with the help of my mechanic brother-in-law).
Still, even the insane seems normal after a while, and the urge to get out of the house was stronger than my fear of packing a bag that needed the mind of a military strategist to accomplish well. Where could I go? The place where I live is not a friendly place to walk. There is just an open country road, hilly, hot like a BBQ plate in summer, wind blustering belligerently off the mountains in winter. There is nowhere to go and nothing to see on foot; so we drove. We visited friends and family near and far, went to the park, the library, shopping, and cafes – wherever I could think of, really. I couldn’t stay at home for longer than a day without getting restless.
Clik here to view.
Alani and I, off to a wedding.
Four years later my daughter was born – cue another parenting intensive. Strangely, knowing how to parent one child does not necessarily give you the skills to parent another one. Who knew two children could be so different? My daughter had very specific dislikes – men, especially untidy looking ones, being separated from me by more than 30cm, and sleeping for more than two hours at a time. Her dislike of men made it difficult to socialise – if she saw one that she didn’t like, which was all of them, she would scream, crawl up my face and head for home.
As time went on, I had more reasons to stay close to home, if not actually at home. I had decided that if my community did not have the things that I wanted, then I should go ahead and make them happen. I became a member of the P&C when my son went to school, I helped out with home reading, cooking and craft with the children, I set up and ran a fortnightly Growers Market at the school, organised yoga classes, got funding for a community website, wrote the content – and a whole lot more besides. I had friends nearby who had children of similar ages and we gathered, as women have for time immemorial, to cluck, gossip, scold and remind ourselves that we are not alone.
So, I was busy. My radius had decreased, but my focus was still almost completely external – the school, my community, friends and family. I didn’t really give much thought to what it was that I wanted to do or be, other than of service. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wondered what my future held, but nothing came to mind. It was less a mystery and more a terrifying blank.
When my son was 7 and my daughter 3, a series of events occurred. The first thing that happened was a landslip – after some heavy rain, part of the main road fell blindly off the cliff and lay there like a drunkard out for the count. For nine months, the only way to get in and out of the valley was via the winding, corrugated, dirt back roads while the Council wrangled with the Government to get emergency funding. This made even small journeys a hassle and an inconvenience.
The second thing that happened was a dream. It was such a vivid, colourful dream and the meaning behind it was so potent, that now, years later, I still remember it clearly.
I was floating down a beautiful river with someone from my past and someone from my future. They were having a conversation that didn’t interest me – which didn’t matter because I was captivated by the incredible beauty all around me. There were trees along the river bank, heavily laden with all kinds of delicious fruit, colourful birds and insects were flashing past, and a heady fragrance of blossoms intoxicated me. I was in Paradise, and I was completely spellbound. All of a sudden, I realised that I was wearing all of my clothes, even my boots; I was having trouble staying afloat – and my friends had disappeared. Distracted by all the beauty around me, I had somehow failed to notice that I was all alone and slowly but surely drowning.
I woke up with the images from this dream plastered in technicolour on the walls of my mind and with the sure knowledge of what it meant and what I needed to do. I knew I had to go inwards and focus on myself for a while, because truly, I was drowning under the self-imposed weight of my community. I audited all of my commitments like an accountant with a red pen on an efficiency drive and dropped everything that had I should in front of it – including the Growers Market which had become more and more burdensome to run, especially with the main road closed.
Just in case I didn’t have a full understanding of what I needed to do, the Universe arranged a third situation – our finances dictated that we were only able to run one car, and the Bear drove that to work five days a week. For the first time in my life, I was at home in the truest sense of the word. At 35 years old, I was burnt out, confused, frustrated and disappointed, with no idea what I was supposed to be doing with my life. Add to this a rocky relationship, a smart but emotionally demanding child, stretched finances, and a half finished addition to our tiny house funded with money we didn’t have – and you have the recipe for the perfect storm – from which none of us were going to come out the same as we went in.
I found myself wistfully remembering my childhood dreams of becoming a writer. I had spent all of my teens and most of my twenties studying one thing or another – Environmental Science, Massage, Nutrition and Homeopathy. I had studied part-time for years, spent thousands of dollars and hadn’t finished a damn thing. I could no longer avoid the fact that my life was littered with half-finished endeavours and decidedly lacking in vision, purpose and passion.
Apart from vision, purpose and passion, the other think I lacked was my own space. I was desperate for a room of my own, a place to retreat and regroup. We had a little studio a stone’s throw from the house which we kept for visitors; I decided to make it mine. I launched a takeover bid and set up a yoga space, and then a friend helped me to connect the internet so that I could have my computer set up over there – my first office! Always an early riser, I now had somewhere to be in those tender pre-dawn hours. Here, nobody asked anything of me, and I had only to please myself. It’s hard to overstate the importance of a sacred space.
At about the same time a friend and I went to a 10 week social media course where I discovered blogging, amongst other things. It was love at first sight. As soon as I arrived home after that class I set up my own blog, Smells Good Feels Good, which later became The Practical Mystic (the blog you all know and love <3). The excitement of having somewhere to write that was all mine, to tell my own stories, share my insights and participate in a community of other people who loved to write was beyond exciting. And, get this – I could do it all from home.
I decided that maybe it wasn’t too late to become some kind of writer after all, so I enrolled in a two year Communication and Media course – which I completed, with Distinction. With the help of Kara-Leah Grant’s Forty Days of Yoga, I developed and maintained a regular home yoga practice, something I had never been able to do before. So now I had my own space and I was studying, writing and doing yoga and all of a sudden my life was beginning to develop depth, purpose and passion – all from home.
I began to identify more and more as a writer – along with my blogging I had articles published in online magazines such as The Yoga LunchBox and The Elephant Journal. I joined a local writer’s group and started attending writing workshops and festivals. My writing and social media skills enabled me to find employment as well – I even worked for nine months as an online social media manager until I realised that working in marketing was like having the devil suck the will to live out of my soul with a straw.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that we scraped together some more money and made the extension to our house liveable if not finished, the Bear and I separated and then reconciled and I was offered work at the local school as a teacher’s aide and later as website and media officer. When I look back over the last four or five years, it feels a bit like I have been the recipient of a thorough digestive scan, from top to bottom – enema, scope, scraping and burning away of lesions, another enema and then re-inoculation with healthy bacteria. In the aftermath there is relief that it’s over combined with a feeling of lightness and intestinal fortitude :).
After three years at home, I am now an expert on myself. I know what I like and what I don’t. I know what works for me, what makes me happy and what doesn’t. I am very strict about what I become involved in, making sure that anything I take on is for the right reasons. I am also very strict with myself – I hold myself accountable and take responsibility for my own life. Finally, I have taken my life into my own two hands and am now driving my own bus.
Mainly, I just feel lucky and so grateful to have had the opportunity to mould and shape my life in this conscious way. I look around me and see people rushing around, avoiding their lives with all of their might; and I remember how only four years ago that was me. Now I am standing on the precipice of my next big adventure – a degree in Media and Communications majoring in Writing and Publishing. Who knows what will come next? I know this though – sometimes it takes having your freedom taken away from you to discover that inside your Soul you are always free.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
