Don’t worry, says the poet Mary Oliver, things take the time they take. Then she says How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine? And that’s it. She leaves it there, it’s four lines, (three really - she gives the word worry a line of its own). The poem hangs in the ether, the place in between the poet and the thought, the place I sit.
I have often made hard work of this. Things take the time they take. I could apply this thought to raising children, to sowing tomato seeds, to writing a book.
(Geoffrey, our young Smithfield, who is not yet an essential member of staff, but would like to be).
Yesterday I woke early to do my ‘pay the bills’ work, which is to transcribe specialist doctors letters from a busy gastroenterologist practice in Sydney. I made coffee. Let the dogs out. Stoked the fire. Outside the world was dark and cold. When I whistled at the back door the dogs rushed in and, though they were bejewelled with flicks of rain and full of the news of the morning, I hushed them and came into my study. I was still heavy with dreaming. I’m at the end of this book I’m writing. I can’t set it down. Can’t leave it alone. It’s like a scab between me and the world. I’m always distracted, terrible company, and it's only at night in the quiet that it unfolds in my head. I get up twice in the dark to scrawl connections in my notebook. Then when my alarm goes off at 5am I’m deep in sleep and find the dreams hard to shake.
I type doctors letters as the light pushes against the east window of my study. It’s my favourite thing to listen as the birds start their morning chorus. We are within sight of spring. This week the garden has grown busy with birds. Our winter population consists of pardalotes, thornbills, silver eyes, grey fantails, 2 pairs of scarlet robins, 1 black bird, a grey strike thrush and 1 pair of swallows who refuse to migrate, and instead spend the winter in our wood shed. But this week, literally between the last time I wrote to you and today, the garden has leapt with birds. I have 2 eastern spine bills, a golden whistler, there must be 6 pairs of swallows who have returned, the robins are fighting everyone, and the black bird, thank goodness has a mate. It’s busy out there in the morning.
The day gets going. We are crutching the wethers this week. For those of you not familiar - a wether is a male sheep without his breeding bits. He’s a tolerant soul (absence of hormones helps his outlook on life). If you’re a wether you don’t often see the best pasture on the place, but you do get to live out your days with your mates. You get bothered twice a year when you’re mustered into the yards to be drenched, have your fringe cut, so you can see, and the wool around your butt shorn off so you don’t get fly struck and then you go back to the paddock with your mates until it’s shearing time. Not for you the hassle of a raising a lamb. As long as you stay out of trouble, life is a breeze.
My day unfolds. I’m looking forward to a few free hours in the afternoon to work on this newsletter. I type letters until I get a call to help usher a mob across the highway. No problem. Later I drive down to our local IGA and shop for lunch. (It’s a thing in Tassie, we still feed our shearers smoko and lunch - or dinner as its called here). I buy a couple of chooks to roast, some supplies for sandwiches, a packet of biscuits. Then laundry (obviously). Some more doctors letters. An hour writing notes on a novel I’m reading that is feeding into my manuscript and after all this I think I need a quick ride on my lovely horse Frank to reset and think about what I might like to write to you.
Over in the yards there’s dogs barking, gates clanging. J is shedding up. (that is putting the sheep who will be crutched in the shed for the night). All as it should be. I lead Frank out of the stable. I’m just about to get on when I hear J calling from me from the yards.
Can you come and help? There’s been a box up, he says.
I ask no questions. Just tie Frank to the fence.
What’s a box up you say ? A box up is what happens when two mobs of carefully sorted sheep somehow (and there’s no fingers being pointed here) get in with each other. The result is that the boxed up mob has to be sent back through the yards and sorted. Folks, a box up, derails best laid plans. Frank stood at the fence and watched while I leapt and yelled, pushed and shoved. The sheep, with their wooly fringes obscuring their vision, propped and baulked as the late afternoon shadows deepened. J stood at the drafting gate and I worked in the middle and Zig was a small black and white blur hustling from behind.
The sun sank. The support staff, who had been put back in their pens, except for the ever dependable Zig, yelled their support from the sidelines. A kookaburra sat on a fence post and surveyed the neatly sorted sheep. My black Labrador Dusty quietly raided hidden hens nests of their eggs.
We finished at last. The sheep were strong and healthy and had not wanted to go back through the race. I felt tired. The darkness of the morning and the promise of the day was gone. J waved his thanks and I left him to put the sheep in the shed ready for the morning.
I almost unsaddled Frank and called it a day. This letter to you wasn’t even started. The wood box was empty. But then I remembered that need to reset. So I gathered up my reins and Frank and I went out onto the mowed green and carved some shapes in the earth. We are getting to know each other. We are working on our understanding. Above us a sea eagle soared. At the end, we stood, the little brown horse and I, under the dome of the sky. The stupid guinea fowl, who I adore, fussed and fluttered around us. The smaller birds were quiet because the eagle was circling. A couple of crows rose from the pines to harass it. Newly arrived swallows swept low over the grass, chasing the last meal of their day. I pressed my fingers against Frank’s neck, clucked a little and he relaxed. We walked up the lane. The little birds hit the rising insects our passage stirred.
I’m carrying the words of the last section of my books. I haven’t put them down yet. I’m dreaming them. I’m finding the connections. I’m following the little traces. To make the obvious comparison, I’m like a wool blind wether, making my way forward, leaping at shadows.
Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
Thank you Mary Oliver.
Reading
I finished Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand, which is a novel about an expedition in Antarctic gone wrong. It’s a page turner, but not a book I would normally pick up. I’d ordered it because it’s also about Aphasia - loss of language. The novel changes direction when the central character suffers a stroke. I’m always fascinated by writing that deals with someone who cannot speak and I loved McGregor’s construction of the fragments of recovered words woven into something almost like a sentence. It’s a book about care and grieving for someone still alive but changed irrevocably. Here’s a proper review of the book if you’re interested.
I read this lovely essay about swimming and grief in Island's new online platform. Then switched from swimming to whales and read an extract of New Zealand poet and essayist Ingrid Horrock’s new book Where We Swim.
Then I fell down a rabbit hole on the Brainpickings. I totally missed that Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick had edited a collection of letters called A Velocity of Being, letters to a young reader. It’s a collection of 121 original, illustrated letters from artists, writers, poets, musicians, scientists, philosophers and adventurers written to children about how their lives have been shaped by reading. There’s Annie Lamott: “Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits.”
And Deborah Millman:
Dear Reader,
I want to tell you that everything will be okay.
I want to tell you that it will get better.
I want to tell you that it all works out in the end.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
Most times it is hard and we usually end up getting used to it.
But there is something you can do in response: read.
And then there is the extraordinary letter from Laura Brown-Lavoie:
Dear Reader,
Did you ever read a sentence you loved the way you love your favourite animal? ….
I’ll leave it there. But I ordered the book, supposedly for my 11 year-old niece, but really for me.
Listen…to this extraordinary short story by Louise Erdrich.
Writing
I’ve got my eyes pinned on the finish line for my manuscript. But if you’re interested in a sneak peak the gorgeous regional magazine Graziher is about to hit the newsstands and I’ve got an extract from the diary I kept during the drought around which this new book is based in there.
Thank you for reading. This is another free issue of The Sit Spot so please share with anyone who you think might enjoy.
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I better go. The sky is red and I’ve got egg sandwiches to make and a couple of chooks to roast.
Beautiful, Maggie! It’s another world you inhabit there. Sounds both peaceful and exhausting at once. Certainly good for writing.