Fear underlies much of the modern Western experience. We fear failing, at anything. We fear that the mask of our multiple persona's will slip, revealing nothing, or much worse. We fear not having what our neighbour has, or of his or her getting what we now have. We fear the ladder we have climbed so we try to kick it away. We fear descending that same ladder. We fear drugs but also the missed experience of not having taken them. We fear for our children yet we fear our adequacy as custodians of their future. We fear not being liked or loved and we fear abandonment.

Fear is endemic. We have time to think, more time than any previous generation in any era or place. This freedom is the perfect conduit for positive thought and reflection, but also a bi-way for dark introspection. It may be a choice or it may not. If we have evolved to deal with threat, very particular threats that concern the finding of food, water, shelter and of survival against predators, then what happens when the fundamentals change? For most Westerners, they have changed, and so radically, that the consequences have yet to work their way through.

This does not speak to the inevitable. Self-awareness and empathy can help us understand the new environment and explore ways of adjusting. Fear doesn't have to rule us, even if it abides within us.

Sitting at the China Visa Application Service in town today, my mind did a temporary and entirely unexpected flip back a decade or so. Maybe it was the array of customer booths. Perhaps it was the rows of chairs with anxious-looking applicants. It could have been the view across Hyde Park or even the fact that I was just in an office building on the fifth floor.

But there I was again. At the Kobe Immigration Office. Reams of information in hand. Passports and application notes and a steady drip of misinformation from our boss ("Of course you won't need to leave the country to validate your visas") allied with the stern looks of guards, attendants and clerical staff. Well, flooding back it is, together with a large dose of the excitement and culture shock that Nadia and I felt at the time. But we got through, with a trip to South Korea, of course.

The CVAS could not be more different really. Well organised, easy to navigate, friendly staff, a short stay. Admittedly I was only getting a tourist visa, but still, how different two seeming similar things can be.

Nelson Mandela

less common Light
klaxon of freedom's sweet disarray,
dancing in eternity

Xiaoyu is the name of my lady friend in China. She lives in the south in Nanning, the largest city in Guangxi province. We have been writing to each other for about seven weeks now, emailing pretty much every day. Her English is very limited but I can see that she is doing her best, what with not having much time and no internet connection.

It's hard to say where things might go. I haven't been short of a date this year and there are other options perhaps easier than doing it the hard way. And this is, relatively speaking, the hard way. Even though we are slowly building a small body of knowledge about each other (being at an advantage language-wise, she knows more about me) it will still be a huge leap into the dark if I fly to see her early next year. There are a dozen or so photos exchanged, what we have written about - but no telephone or skype-style communication.

But I'm up for an adventure. Since returning from Japan six years ago, my life has been pretty staid. If you'll excuse the glitch of a marriage breakup, somewhat routine and safe. You know, I'm not one for straying far from my comfort zone. And this is, undoubtedly, straying.

First there were months of dry. Now we have had a lot of rain. Huge storms occasioning the loudest claps of thunder I have ever heard. Or can remember hearing. The gutters by the road (or what passes for gutters in Hazelbrook) have been like crazy rivers, swollen and dashing erratically.

Today the sun is out again. The grass, which for a very long time was a mere yellow crust on unwatered earth, is turning, well, green. And trees in the mid-garden area are in collision, so strong is the growth. All good. But for the strangeness of the weather. Pressaging what, I don't know.

I have been writing to someone in the south of China. This surprises me a lot. For a start, her English is quite poor, though improving. Nor is this my usual modus operandi. I guess time will tell whether opposites and difficults can work out. I have an open mind about it.

Weather and romance are dancing in a surprising symmetry.

typhoon haiyan

autumn's entrails,
unwrapping grief's giant spider,
wordless, this watching.

bushfires

ash on my car,
untimely this cauldron of
winged misfortune

your letter comes:
a wintry jihad intercepting
the spring's unlocking

Bob G.O.

On September 11, 2007, Robert Mumford went missing. On a day pregnant with reminders of recent catastrophe, a humble Defence Department employee never returned to work from lunch. Robert had been with Defence since leaving school, and my acquaintance and friendship with him extended from about that time, though I do remember him vaguely from school.

Robert was a kindly, self-deprecating soul. Never mean-spirited, always obliging and wonderfully eccentric, Robert never really seemed to settle into life. To take a hold of it. Those things that he most craved, marriage, children and a life shared with another, never materialized. In truth he never came close and his life, or so it seemed to me, was like that of a lonely wanderer. When I first met him, he would happily drive hundreds of kilometres of the NSW countryside with no other purpose than just driving. Around that time he had a penchant for visiting anyone with whom he had a short acquaintance. He would appear unannounced on their dinner-time doorstep, an eager if hapless mendicant.

Robert had a photographic memory for license-plates and a mind for calculating esoteric quantities. He once told me how many Navy F4 Phantoms it would take, nose to tail, to stretch from the Earth to the Moon. He may well have been the most knowledgeable person in the universe on Beach Boys trivia. He had a brief if infamous career as a stand-up comic. He once hit a tee-shot backwards across a four lane highway. He was intelligent and had a mind that might have done great things if only he had had faith in himself.

I write in the past tense about Robert because a death-notice appeared last week in the Blue Mountains Gazette. I don't know the exact details, but its clear from his listed age that he passed away not long after his disappearance six years ago. The world is poorer for the loss such a decent man as Robert. In life, he often lived a tortured existence.

But now Robert, you can rest in peace.

well...

There may be a theme that emerges from the last half dozen posts. They amount to thin offerings, considering the passing of months. But it's only time, after all.

In explanation, I offer love. Yes, I had a shortish love affair with a lovely woman, one in which the exchange of poems, principally haiku, became the coin for denominating absent affection.

More I will not say. Everything is too recent. Perhaps another time.

old late-fall light,
flaws of leafy incandescence,
floor of my heart


purple-panted elf,
you slide through autumn's
unravelling self,
crumbling me


stripe-tighted siren,
singer of lip-spooled
symphonies,
kiss
bringer

daily, these gaps interrogate
me, this vast atomisation of
space, tiny unseen territories
that say,
you are there and
I'm over here, somewhere.
unquiet air anticipates our
wendings.
it's always been just so - love
trespassing like a blind
unspeaking giant,
bright in all that shining void.



dark rain sideways
with you, a caffeinated
drenching of us, and
her

fall sun flush
against these steel strings,
falling for you

oh, to jump across this
pond of darkening space
and fall into you

grape-dark clouds gather
winter's old light tightly
unfolding,
your triumphant smile

smoke, hot glass, your gaze-
unseasonal coincidences
leave me smouldering

ridges and gorge, I
linger for sweet March rain,
lost for words

sweet blossom of midnight
swirling blaze of autumns unbecoming
unraveling your text

this prince of men

For Signor Berlusconi, a corrupt haiku.

bunga bunga bun
ga bunga bunga bunga
bunga bunga bun

last night's weather

unbidden blades of wind
unshackled at the midnight corrugations
of my mind

Strangely enough, someone actually reads my blog. Or she claims to. That someone is a bit of a blast from the past and I have often wondered where she is and whether she is happy. I have some reason to think that she is, and that her life might start to settle down into more familiar patterns. So I will pray that she is blessed and, even though life is difficult and unpredictable, she will find joy and satisfaction in the small and the momentary.

Healing Ankh

Sometimes my mind takes a little excursion back to Japan, and rather than the places that I somewhat prosaically catalogued a few years ago in this blog, I recall the people. Today, for some reason, Miho popped into my head and I was flooded with recollections.

Miho was a middle-aged woman who lived with her parents not far from our place in Mukogaoka. She had decided to take English classes with us, though I'm not sure why. She worked for her brother in a curious new-age style shop in Takarasuka called the Healing Ankh.

It was a curiosity because of its location and its business practices. The shop, which sold CD's, polished stones and other new age paraphenalia, was on the fifth floor of an apartment building that was largely residential. It was my custom to ask students about their day to get them to locate their English in the real world. I always asked Miho how business was at the shop and she always replied with the same response. "We had no customers today." Now I knew that Miho was being paid a wage and that there would be a hefty rent too. So I couldn't figure out how the business stayed afloat. Perhaps neither could she.

Dismissing pet theories about yakuza shop-fronts and the like, it dawned on me that her brother had a regular job that paid the bills and subsidized his loss-making enterprise. When I last checked, the Healing Ankh had moved to a sensible street-front shop, a far better location. Though whether it had any customers - who knows?

Well, it's starting to look like the rose cupboard is going to be bare this year. Allowing for the last minute delivery, which seems very remote from this standpoint, I will just have to wait until a fresh blooming of love in the future. That love that I alluded to briefly in my last post.

One might think that after a number of relationships and one marriage, I should have tired of the whole process of falling in love. But no, I find that, with over 12 months having passed since the end of my marriage, I am very open to whatever might be. By which, I don't mean just anything for the sake of it. Rather, something desirable, mutual and enduring.

I am not really comfortable on the dating scene (whatever that is), though I've had a couple of dates recently. In the past I have been accustomed to relationships falling from the sky. And the proverbial tap on the shoulder. That's made it all too easy for me. Maybe I have to face the chasm of rejection and know that I can bounce back. There is no joy without some attendant risk.

Tom is back at school and now in second grade. His school pools the first and second years into a composite that works around stage one. Which does mean something, but I've forgotten what. He seems happy enough with the age mix. He is just not at all keen on work and understandably inclined towards play with his friends. Nor does he like boredom, hardly a modern affliction, but one seemingly suited to modernity. Unreflected life, I would like to tell him, is hardly worth the effort. Boredom is part of that self-examination.

So things have started up again after their long antipodean summer sleep. I'm back at Anglicare doing what I love and the cafe is providing the weekly dose of getting my musical act together. Moo choir began last night with much joy and hilarity. I'm wondering what this year has in mind for me - for work, life and love.

Yes, wondering.

Back from a weekend trip to Canberra. My old school friend John Hawkins has finally made the journey to the altar, having married Elo. A simple ceremony at The Knot, an eponymous metal sculture at the the National Gallery, followed by a reception in the Black Mountain tower. Congratulations Hawk and Elo. May your lives together be blessed!

I stayed The Mercure, near the War Memorial, and did quite a bit of walking. Canberra readily lends itself to such pursuits, being flat and systematically planned. One day I'll remember to bring my bicycle. Down Anzac Parade, large installations memorialize every major conflict that the nation has entered, including the Boer War. I may be wrong, but I don't think that Australia has ever entered a war on it's own steam, that is, without being asked or in some way influenced. First the British, now the Americans. Perhaps its time to grow up and let go the hand of the parent state.

A day of mundane, yet still worthwhile achievement. Tom had his penultimate swimming lesson this morning, in which he continued to improve, now swimming underwater and splashing vigorously in what passes for an approximate freestyle.

Called Centrelink and after 30 minutes on hold finally cleared up the lag in my Family Tax A and B application. Took down the Christmas decorations, washed my new sheets, entertained the child and his friend Reilly. Vacuumed and cleaned somewhere in between.

Even got in a little practice on some new songs for the cafe.

Yes, it feels good to be useful.

I find that I am liking, on average, the kid's movies that I see with Tom more than many adult movies. Today we saw Wreck-it Ralph at The Edge and I wasn't actually bursting to see it, though I organised it for Tom.

As it turns out, it's a clever movie that works, as many of these movies do, on multiple levels, allowing savvy adults to reference aspects of popular culture from past and present, and kids to just be entertained.

Not being savvy myself I was just entertained. When we got home, I loaded the Wreck-it Ralph game onto my ipad and Tom is trying it out as I write.

How quickly and almost seamlessly media intersect with each other. This morning's movie seguays into this afternoon's video game which slides effortlessly into this evening's interactive toy.

Easy. Or is it?

Inside this quiet, somewhat silly and eminently different summer holiday period, I find it hard to take a grasp of anything truly solid. Its over a year now since the end of my marriage and despite a few (brave) efforts on my part, I just don't feel like dating anyone. There are a few women I have liked, maybe even had teeny crushes on (or what I thought at the time were crushes) but the truth is, there is just nothing there.

Aha, I hear you say! What if these women had taken a liking to you? Such a question makes we wonder whether I have any substance at all, because it is certainly possible that I could have fallen in love. I do like relationships and I feel like I'm built for them. But I don't just want any relationship and never, ever one just for the sake of it.

So here I am at the very top of the year, wondering how things will be at the bottom of it. Not apprehensive, strangely blithe, and strictly unhurried.

And trying to find the crushed grape in every passing moment.

pride before a fall

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Shelley's poem, Ozymandias, came oddly, into my head, while I was swimming laps this morning. I think it emerged from a conversation I had had minutes before with another swimmer, who was reflecting on the pointlessness of NYE, with it's inevitable anti-climax of fake cheer and plastic optimism. Well, maybe that's my spin on the event and what he said. But it could be a time of genuine reflection, a weighing of where we are and where we might be going. There's no reason why it cant be fun either.

It's just that the huge collision of booze and fireworks gets in the way and becomes the whole thing. I'm pretty optimistic by nature and love seeing people enjoying themselves. I just wonder if there could be more to it.

Happy 2013, however you say it!

good bye to this day forever

While New Years Eve is much hyped in our time as being something of significance, in effect it is merely another day that will never come again. I think that fact makes every day important. Perhaps if we considered the implications of how unique each day was, we would live with greater purpose. We would probably sleep a little less, rise a little earlier, eat and act more thoughtfully, love better and hate less. There would certainly be more purpose-driven activity.

I could be wrong but the best palliative for discontent and boredom is knowing that we are passing through times that can't be repeated, those times being there for the making in new and imaginative ways. This is not an exhortation to live for the moment, which might be the hedonists take on my words. But in the moment, absolutely.

How much time is wasted waiting for something to happen, for life to change, for things to get better? Could we even quantify it? Would we not be frightened to do so, knowing that our hourglass holds less sand, and that the sand already spent has been so egregiously misspent.

I don't know. But during the countdown of countdowns, the waiting for midnight and its forced celebrations, it might be worth thinking about.