A boy's brain at night poised for fight

Dear Finn,

Your brilliant human mind is much older than you are!  It is as old as all human time. It is designed for you still to be cave dweller, ready for action to protect yourself and the whole human species.

A bird starts calling out. But it is night time. Birds are not meant to call out at night time, unless…

Unless there is danger!  A bird at night will call when there is danger or great disturbance!

You are asleep. The bird calls and keep calling. It is worried because there are extreme winds, and those winds even carry a whiff of smoke from fires up North.

You wake, and your clever brilliant body and mind gets ready for action. You wake in a way that is fully energised and ready to fight a danger or run from it. The bird calling has told you of possible danger.

Then your modern brain does a check around and there is nothing in your room to fight. But that energy has to go somewhere.

You yell and yell, and the bird keeps you awake and ready to fight. So you fight your bed, your pillow, tossing and turning and full of that energy which has to go somewhere. It’s angry now, that energy. More yelling.

This is natural. It’s the clever part of your ancient brain. It made your body ready to fight or run. It also wanted to sleep!

As you grow up, the modern part of your brain will get better at really knowing when it’s just a bird outside worried about the strong wind and smell of smoke.  It will get faster at working out what you really need to do.

When you came to me for help, at first the headphones didn’t work.  When I gave you two pillows to block out the sound though, you even got back to sleep.

That was your modern brain working it all out and getting help. Humans are also designed to work together to fix problems and face a danger.

It is OK that your ancient brain woke up raging, you were ready for danger, because birds don’t call out at night for no reason!

Come and get help too, as each time you do this you let your modern brain get really smart as well.

Love, Mum

Art, Autumn.

Thirty-nine degrees yesterday, then thirty-four at 9pm.  

I swam and floated the mauve line of sea under animal clouds and grapefruit segments of sunset.

Still hot.

I’m sitting with music-man as he frowns his new arrangements, and I’m reading Anais Nin, sucking juice from the words and spitting out pips.

He is stabbing at the song like sex, calling and string-hitting so fast I can’t type in time, and this thing we call a process is  not a process but an attack on our arts; I see a dartboard that we each throw at, blind drunk, faster and faster, soon something will hit and hook and be that big score, the word, the note. But in the meantime, it’s a calling out blindly.

There is an atmospheric pressure, the jostling of seasons colliding; it is it furiously hot for Autumn’s first day, and in a month we’ll all be windscreen wipers batting back water, we will be drenched gardens and rotting leaves.

But today, oh today. The burn of the air, the jostling wind, shoving out Summer for Autumn just as Autumn will rot out to Winter and Winter will lie still even as we sleep cold and dream richly, all of it underground, all of it subliminal, cold and wet silently fecund.

He sings tremulous half-notes that will soon be sustained and pure, I type blindly, as staccato as he sings, blind and blind on our keys, we are frantic exhalations. Breathe, try, breathe, pant then later, slower, softer, when the drift and eddy can happen and thought twining in the leaves and sheaves, a sifting sorting time for the gold, the copper, the veins, the proteins.  But for now, the art as impulsive action, motor skills not enough - not brain to hand, but psyche to air, and the mechanisms we have in our bodies are striving and struggling to hammer it out.

Oh this season of jostle, Autumn the best time always, reading Rilke at 3am, reading prose and thrumming out poetics, and seeing it all as if the scales have been lifted from my eyes:  this season, this love, this music, these words, the art that is here and here we are - humble and hopeless in our straight pure love that wants only to arrow out and cloud-shoot for dreams.

Aloha from Aloha street

Hop shuffle click – a soft stutter and coo as pigeons dance in the tan-bark garden made hopeful with potted plants trailing.  From the clothes line hang two feeder trays. I put seeds in. The birds come and come, flagrant in their desire to have a soft slow eve, no foraging, just a take-away dinner of treats in the tray, like a fish and chips summer supper in shiny paper. 

In a quiet moment I relax and realise that I sow: home, seeds, gardens, ideas and love.

Well not so quiet a moment really, I have Samantha Brown playing, that late eighties blonded jazzy red-lipped siren. She sings: ‘I saw a bit of silver lying in a puddle, I went to pick it up, but I didn’t want to get my hands muddy.’

I got my hands muddy for the silver, then all muddied I began to garden. I sowed a seed in the office of my Lisa, my psychologist, seeded the plants that could have wilted or rotted, sowed the seeds of separating and leaving my long marriage.

I did not know if it would grow. I had so much fear. But I feared even more a future with who he had become, and me.

I daily grieved the house I would leave, that of the first clothes-line of pinned baby clothes size ‘00000’. Oooh, those little grow-suits waiving on the line!  Oh, the painting and fixing, the joy of cracks to be filled, plaster and dust, night ghosts and the morning garden, and my dad a-jingle with advice and tools.

I have a little house now. My Aloha, my welcome, to myself and all who come.

When I water, the butterflies are seduced, diving into the smaller sprays. With lavender and rosemary, the bees come too, and on the hottest days they crawled into the dish of honey-water and sipped and slipped and I had to tease one out on the fine point of a stick.

The washing whips and flutters; I share plants with my neighbour, I pay bills and keep passwords and details like a Mother. I book the lawyer, the plumber, the candlestick maker. I do it all because I can, and that realisation is like sapphires glinting, that my mind so sharp at work can do this love-building, this making of place and time and space.

Little altars abound, here the photos, tendrils green from plants, and my dad’s ashes. He is proud, it sings in my bones and muscles as I make and heft. Here the book-nook, the typewriter, the toys, the record player.  I will sing, I will play.

And such songs, art and weaving, cooking and feeding. Phone calls long overdue now long and late; the thrumming harmonics of old friendships re-found abound, tree-high new foliage that’s root-deep in trust. Muddy at times as we churn old earth over, then green glinted gold, as leaf-blooms of voice curl and unfurl through the long and lavender night.

I feel the stars get closer, an optimism sharp as light, a tumbling cascade of dreams and plans, a meteor shower of glimmering things, soft rain of light, soft rain.