I’m feeling more than a little overwhelmed. Begin with Climate Change, nothing from COP26, add 2 years of COVID, then mad Putin’s war on the Ukraine, more refugees and top it all off with mind blowing amounts of water flooding Queensland and NSW. Throw in an election or two with all the relentless campaigning and I’ve reached the stage where I want to turn off all media and go hide under the doona.
But instead, I’ve got my “To Do List” – I think I can cope…
“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
When we were kids, my sister and I had ballet lessons once a week. There wasn’t enough money for music lessons as well, so I never learned to play the piano, or the guitar, or the drums… But the music got inside me anyway – music with movement attached.
Perhaps that’s why when I hear music I can’t stay still – my feet and fingers tap and snap, my body sways in time wherever I am. In the car, with something lively on the radio, I bounce and bop, tap the steering wheel with my fingers, and sing along if I know the words. At a symphony concert I close my eyes and sway, nod in time, beat a rhythm with hands in lap. Why, I wonder, is everyone else sitting immobile, apparently unmoved by the wonderful music? It flows through me and I can’t stay still.
I can’t even stay still in church, so I love it when we sing something with a beat and I can borrow Mary’s tambourine. You don’t need lessons to play the tambourine! I love to dance too – “ When the Spirit of the Lord is in my heart I will dance like David danced” ( but dressed more appropriately!)
And then, sometimes, the music carries me away, lifts me up, takes me to another level. Music is one of the thin places, where you can be halfway to heaven.
“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”
My Christmas present this year is an Ultrasonic Possum Deterrent. But really its for the possum that gallops noisily over our roof at 4am or thereabouts and eats all the new growth on my treasured Pierre de Ronsard rose bush and strips all the leaves off my struggling small apricot tree. Lately I hope the possum has been really enjoying the garlic and chilli mixture I’ve been spraying on the leaves – it seems to be working but is labour intensive. Just when the new leaves seem to be big enough to survive, if I forget my nightly spray routine, the next morning branches are bare!
Hence my new possum disco, complete with motion sensor, strobe lights and ultrasonic sound track.
A Traveller's Tales 