News of the fires made me uneasy, and then more and more and more uneasy. The fire in the Bunyip State Forest was getting bigger, and the expected cool change was bringing a change in wind direction. As such, Mum and Dad in Neerim East were under a CFA Urgent Threat Message: “…may be directly impacted upon by this fire”. I felt like I was going to be sick when their road was mentioned on the incident updates. Later we found it out it wasn’t their road at all, but this wasn’t until Sunday after they’d spoken to the neighbours. They had the sprinklers going on the roof and bags packed ready to go. Heavy smoke and ash and embers - bits of burnt bark falling from the sky 20cm and longer. They lost power and the landline phone.

Other towns were obliterated in separate fires. It seemed the entire state was on fire, east to west and north to south. So many lives lost and they’re still counting. The fire is still consuming public and private property and everything in its wake, despite the best efforts of the emergency services and volunteers. I don’t know anyone personally affected by the death toll yet, though I know people whose relatives have lost everything.

I’m my father’s daughter. Although the farm is now relatively safe (dependent on wind changes and the like, of course), thoughts of what could’ve been haunted me all last night. The wind is a fickle creature and if that southerly had kept itself up… When my parents ventured out on Sunday, to check on neighbours and their property in Drouin, they discovered if they’d wanted to leave during the night it would have been practically impossible with the number of trees over the road. What if…? I feel sick seeing pictures of burnt out cars, knowing many of them were not deserted. Dad felt the same, I know, when I left New Orleans 24hrs before Hurricane Katrina hit. I thank my lucky stars that they’re safe, and grieve for those who were far less fortunate.
Worse than Ash Wednesday? Worse than Black Friday? What will Saturday 7 February 2009 become known as?

Yesterday afternoon, hot day, meeting after work for a walk on the beach. I’m walking around with the biggest goofiest grin ever.
Tomorrow night? Dinner at his place. Will I be able to concentrate at work tomorrow? I don’t think so!

• Lobster and Swan
• Record the day

Both make me swoon. These! These are the little paper ephemeral bits of art I’d love to create. What would I do with them? It doesn’t matter - these thoughts come from the practical cautious doubtful side of my mind and get in the way of my actually creating.
So many ideas. You have no idea just how much paper and bits I have hoarded away. Soon.

Now, this may seem blindingly obvious to some people - the goal-focused people who have pretty much always known what they want and how to strive towards it. That’s never been me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I finished school. I didn’t have a job in mind when I finished uni (so much so that I put it off for another year and did an honours year). It’s not as though I haven’t achieved things in life to date because I’ve done plenty well in pretty much everything I’ve undertaken; there’s just few and far between things that I’ve said to myself, “Right-o! This is it, this is what I want and this is how I’m going to get there!” And when I have set and achieved a goal (the one thing that springs to mind is weight loss, when I lost ~30kg in ‘04/‘05), the steps to get there and end point have been all a little wishy-washy, and have been more about what I don’t want rather than what I do want.

All this thinking stems from a work/life balance seminar I took a few weeks ago. How can you achieve work/life balance (or any kind of life balance for that matter), if you’re not clear on what it is you want out of life?

This is still a work in progress, and there’s likely more to come on this topic.

I was relieved to discover I hadn’t killed the worms in my worm farm. I built it about a month ago, based roughly on this instructable. There didn’t appear to be a lot of action aside from a whole lot of fruit-fly type bugs each time I lifted the lid, and so I worried that I’d let it dry out, and then I worried that I’d over-watered it. This evening I discovered all good things take time (and I needn’t overcomplicate things; particularly things as simple as a worm farm). Really, what kind of action-packed excitement was I expecting from a worm farm? When I opened the bottom drawstring, there was plenty of compost / worm casing goodness. I sorted out the good dirt and put the worms back in the top; my plants will love this tasty dirt.

I’m grateful for my patch of dirt and to at least start creating some self-sustainability.

One tactic is to read before I sleep. It gives me someone else’s thoughts to think about - I’ve been reading a lot of chatty, not-particularly consequential, “fluffy” books. Nothing too taxing. It helps a lot that my sister (whom I now live with) works in a bookstore - hooray for uncorrected proof copies! (Therein lies the minor excitement of discovering a nonsensical sentence and all sorts of other grammatical errors… had I better prepared for my final high school English exam, lit or journalism or publishing may well have been a different career path. That’s another story all together.) Another tactic is guided meditation, which also works well but then there’s the effort of setting up the CD player in my bedroom. I simply need to stop worrying / analysing / indulging in mentally beating myself up.

I start a yoga class later this week. I’m hoping this helps me, amongst other things, to sleep.

“Happiness is more ephemeral than thought. It can’t be observed without changing its nature. Its ingredients are subtle, and there is no guarantee that a formula or recipe for joy can be written out or passed on or repeated even once again. Happiness evades capture, dissolving like a melody into the air, eluding even the most delicate, careful grasp. It frustrates any systemic search, responding better to random fossicking and oblique approaches, and its rewards are infuriatingly arbitrary, stingy or abundant by purest chance.
“Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change - sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once - and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.” Anne Giardini, The Sad Truth About Happiness

I’ve also been thinking about what I want from life - what I want for myself. I’ve never been much of a goal-orientated person, but I do know that I want to live simply. Comfortably but simply and content within my means and with the impact I have on the world around me. A few blogs I’ve come across recently remind me of this:

• Oh, Sundayschool reminds me of the simplicity of beauty, and to take note of the small pretty details that we sometimes forget
• On Down to Earth, Rhonda writes about the things I’ve always imagined my future being; self-reliant and focused on the simple things in life, whilst deriving simple contentedness from this lifestyle

- / / -

The roller coaster that is my life continues to flip over and under and around and loop-the-loop. I’m moving house. Not because the apartment has sold, but because everything that’s happened over the past month seems to be one catalyst after another pointing to this change. My sister, Erin, has been nagging me to consider moving in with her - she’s been unhappy in her share house too. We decided we’d do it, and would start looking, no rush. Last weekend we looked and we were sorely disappointed; Monday we had an appointment for a private inspection and applied, Tuesday we were approved, and Wednesday we signed the lease. Whirlwind much? It’s a unit (no more upstairs/downstairs neighbours!), newly renovated, floorboards throughout, air conditioning (!!), spacious, decking/porch out the front and courtyard out the back. Close to the beach, close to public transport, close(-ish) to work.

And now I have to pack. I’m a self-confessed hoarder. I keep things for a rainy day, I keep things because I might do something with them one day, I’m sentimental. I have so much stuff. Last night I started on the bookshelf, and I threw out a pile of papers that was waist high. I feel like I’ve hardly made a dent, and tonight it almost feels as though I’m going backwards - though I have packed most of my novels and CD’s, as well as non-essential shoes and non-everyday bags. Some things have found their way into the pile that’s destined for the op-shop, but not much. I’ve lived here for more than six years and essentially everything, except for what’s in my flatmate’s bedroom, is mine. I’ve booked a removalist but that’s a pressure in itself - there’s a fixed deadline.

I feel really alone packing up my life. Partially behind that is exactly what it is - I am alone, my current weekend-night state. Weekends (particularly weekend evenings) are the hardest and most lonely because almost every weekend for the past 18 months was spent with Fred. I know Kate would be here if she could be, but Nick has been very unwell the past week and a half (healthy 26 year old men should not be in and of hospital with heart problems). Also behind this loneliness, I think, is fear and anxiety - all to do with change. Will this work? Will everything be organised in time? Will Erin and I get along as housemates? Will the additional rent be affordable?

Last night in packing books, I came across a journal of mine from 2001. I was at uni and going through a major depressive episode, weighing up the pros and cons of taking medication. It details the subsequent break up of my first ‘adult’ relationship. It was a little eye opening because many of feelings I wrote about have been thoughts/feelings I’m going through now. Even a discussion I’d had with Kate at that time (and written about) is almost exactly what we’ve discussed this time around. Yes, a lot of the details are different, but the reactions are the same - or at least highly similar. I’d forgotten a lot of those feelings, but it strongly demonstrates that things can get better, it just takes time.

Saturday Fred came down to Melbourne, and we did the great exchange of things-left-at-the-other’s-house. There were lots of tears on both of our behalves, and some explanations and difficult conversations. It was a little bit of closure but still doesn’t deduct from my shock. As I said to him on Wednesday (through gut-wrenching sobs), he was the one I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with (my tears started again as I typed that).

My friends and family have been fantastic and I’ve been entirely grateful to each and every kind word or distraction they’ve provided. (Thank you.)