A Love Note

Gentle reader, it is good to be back in your embrace. I have missed our moments together.

Perhaps, like me, the turbulent surf of life's currents has taken you away from your usual haunts, has tossed you, battered you a little and left you feeling a little bruised and thirsty. Perhaps you too find yourself wondering how the hours in each day have evaporated until it is nearly the end of another month. Those beautiful liquid hours that can be honeyed when we listen to wonderful music and watch clouds, or that can vanish in moments when a print deadline is looming over our hastily re-written copy and an image that just doesn't "pop". Perhaps you too have wondered why feeling busy can be such a burden when we love our friends, and love our social encounters and meals and movies but somehow come up for air each morning a little breathless, a little more wound up.
I have.

I have wondered long into the nights, and early in the mornings, and sometimes woken stunned and confused on the couch and sometimes thrashed into the early dawn entirely failing to sleep. This month I have consciously practised drawing long deep breaths into my belly to flush out the rush. It is starting to help. I have been silent, as you well know. Lost in oceans too wide to see across. I have been functional, my sister had her first child - a girl - and I have ferried food and nappies and messages. And I have been useless and angry, an empty woman wondering if there's reason to persevere. Here again and curiosity re-sparked for living inspired by Buckminster Fuller who decided that he had died and would see what came of things now that the pressure was off.

Tomorrow is the eve of the Christ's birth and a marker in my year towards the fabulous invigorating ritual of death and rebirth on the 31st and 1st. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I've had some time off and am thinking of you with love and joy in my heart.

I wish you a healthful, inspirational celebration of your own spiritual/intellectual persuasion over the next week and that twenty ten brings you a stream of infinite bounty.

Pitter Patter of Very Little Feet

I'm delighted to announce that we've had some new members of our family join us!
Last night, cogitating on the throne in the bathroom I idly mused "gosh, that bit of dust looks like a tiny weeny lizard!" dust balls being both common and dynamic in my my house.
When lo! the tiny weeny lizard did move in a non-dustball manner and prove itself to be a newly hatched Gekkonidae! Woot! I watched it for a moment, with a feeling of amazement - where could it have come from? Do they miraculously emerge from tiles if the grout is really festy? But, no, there in the corner was a weeny little egg cracked open. It was fresh! But then I was all concern - it was wading through dust and a long way from anything a baby gecko might be able to eat or drink. From a viewpoint about 3mm off the ground my bathroom would seem an immense, arid landscape, devoid of life.
So I tried to pick the little guy up. Hi-larious. My giant sausage fingers were skyscrapers and it just scampered between cracks I couldn't see. Eventually he ran up my hands and I tried to cup firmly but gently around a body like a cobweb and hustled him out to the parsley. At least there in the nascent herb patch he has some chance of getting insects and water before his egg sac juices run out. I went back to look at the egg ... and there was his little sister - even smaller, even fainter, even harder to pick up! But after a brief fumbling debacle which I fear tired her out considerably, she too was relocated to the teeming Gecko Forest that was once a simple parsley plant. I went back to the bathroom and made a slow scan just in case any other hatchlings were looking for a herbivore to bond with.
I feel that in some small way I have been able to demostrate my grief over the accident that took the life of my work-gecko some unknown time ago. I discovered his/her little body about 2 weeks ago, pinned by the bulky transformer on the powerboard that sits on my desk. The body was dessicated and I felt terrible that I didn't even know when it had happened. I took the little corpse home in a tissue and buried it in the yard.

This afternoon I'm thinking of the new babies and hope they're enjoying discovering the world in the leafy green shade of the herbs, and most importantly, that they don't draw the attention of the cat.