Tag: love

Markets, Maple Syrup and a Wide Open Mouth

Saturday mornings are for going to the market. Even when I don’t need much, I go because I enjoy the ritual. Many people need to change things up to find their vitality. I need repetition and ritual to feel grounded and truly present. It is the simple acts such as putting the harness on the dog, getting the bags ready and choosing to walk through the park that make the trip joyful. I pause to say hello to strangers and listen to snippets of conversation as people pass me with their bags or trolleys, all heading to the same place. Passing us on the other side of the narrow track are the early birds returning with their bounty.

Today, my aim is to buy fruit and transform it into delicious baby food for my granddaughter. She has become a voracious eater. Rather than buy processed food with additives, I have taken it upon myself to cook and bottle food that contains only fresh ingredients and an extra large dollop of love.

The dog is used to the routine. I tie her up to one of the posts as she looks across at all the other dogs, patiently waiting, tied up along the fence. Then I disappear into the fray. I already know where I will buy the apples and pears but, as they will be heavy, I leave that purchase until last. Before I buy anything, I walk down every aisle, getting acquainted with what is on offer and which of my favourite stallholders has come this week. Among the many bread stalls, I find my favourite sourdough halfway down on the left. Tempting as they are, I only look at the native plants. Maybe next time, if I manage to get on top of the weeding in the meantime.

After succumbing to Greek ricotta donuts, I head to my favourite fruit stall. It is run by an elderly, weathered woman with long grey plaits, who comes every week from Batlow on the south west slopes of NSW. Unlike supermarkets, she sells a wide variety of apples, some that haven’t been seen on shelves for years. She also sells cheap, misshapen fruit that tastes just fine and is perfect for stewing. She drives two and a half hours to get to Canberra, starting her journey at about 4am to arrive in time for the market. I am in awe of her stamina and her commitment to come each week.

The dog is on the lookout, searching for me as I come out of the hall. The rucksack is heavy and I feel my centre of gravity shift as I bend down to untie her. Our walk back is slower, but it still only takes ten minutes to get home. After a cuppa and two of the delicious ricotta donuts, I am ready to wash, core and slice the fruit. To give it a little zing, I add a generous amount of cinnamon, strawberries and some maple syrup. Once soft, the mixture is blended and poured into sterilised jars. It is delicious.

Later in the afternoon, I deliver the goods. The hungry little possum is rapturous. Her mouth opens wide as the loaded spoon approaches. She repeats the wide gape again and again until the contents of a large bowl disappear. Her delight is all mine.

Through the simple act of preparing freshly sourced food, I am strengthening the connection between myself and my daughter’s family. These meals provide sustenance for the body, but also carry care, intention and love. Making and sharing nutritious meals has always been my love language.

The shape of a morning

Walking in the park across the road is a daily ritual that offers both quietude and community. This suits me well. I have never been drawn to binary thinking, dividing everything into rigid oppositions. I need the nurture of nature and that of people. It is this interplay that holds my days together.

Some mornings I choose the short circuit, aware of time’s fiendish presence urging me to hurry so I can get to work on time. Yet the moment my feet touch the earth, I resist the urgency, keen to be present to whatever nature offers that day. It may be the sound of a dry stick breaking underfoot, the squawk of a parrot, or the swishing and swaying of stooping gum leaves.

Autumn approaches and the weather shifts. The cool air on my face awakens me to the beauty of the moment. A long blade of bent grass, the smooth bark of blue gums, and Majura mountain framing the vista quicken my spirits. A slow breath in, a pause, a slow breath out, and I feel lighter, part of this landscape, not simply an observer.

In the distance, I see the wave of a hand, and a dog I recognise bounds towards me. I wave back to a fellow dog walker who has, over time, become a friend. Morning hellos have drawn me closer to the people who live in this community. We exchange a few words, learn each other’s names, tentatively invite one another in for a cup of tea, and a friendship forms. Friends introduce friends, and a small community expands to take in another kindred soul. I feel privileged to be included in their company.

As I near home, my thoughts turn to work and the day that awaits. I feel the urge to stop, to look back, to take one last glance at the pond, the trees, and the ever-present mountain. I feel held in its ambit, and it is this feeling I carry with me. It will guide me through the day. And if not the whole day… then at least until my first break.

A Threshold Moment

The mother of a Tamil girl whom I tutored invited me to a coming of age ceremony on short notice. I was off work, so I accepted the invitation. When I asked about its significance, she explained that when a girl gets her first period, they have a special ceremony to acknowledge her new state. While in the past this marked a girl as being of marriageable age, it is now seen more as a rite of passage on the journey to becoming a woman.

Out of respect for the family’s privacy, I won’t be sharing their names or images.

I arrived earlier than most guests, with no preconceived expectations. The house had been decorated with garlands and there were fruit offerings in front of the door. Once inside, I sat on a sofa and watched the adults hurrying to and fro, getting things ready for the priest and the guests who were yet to arrive. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

When her sister came out to greet me, I passed on my present, which I had presumed, correctly, should be jewellery. When the girl first appeared, she was wearing a lovely embroidered dress. She then sat on a stool and was blessed by various family members using coconut milk and a herb on her head. I too was invited to come forward and place some on her head. Several other rituals were performed before she disappeared to be washed. She later emerged wearing a half sari, symbolising the bridge between childhood and adulthood.

At this point, she had haldi kumkum applied to her forehead and other sacred pastes of turmeric placed onto both her arms and cheeks. Once more, close family and elders were invited to apply the balm and offer their blessings.

When the priest arrived, he performed a long ceremony, reciting Vedic prayers for well over an hour and a half. During this time, various members of the family were called upon to sit beside the girl, using incense, fire, leaves and flowers to purify her and shower her with blessings. While I sat transfixed, others in the room continued to talk, take photos and move about. This was something I found quite unusual. I was brought up to make a clear distinction between the sacred and the everyday. I wouldn’t dream of talking in church while the clergy performed their duty, yet here it was quite accepted that people talked and laughed while the ceremony continued not more than two metres away.

One of the guests streamed the event live to Indonesia, where the girl’s aunt lives. The family had visited her during the Christmas holidays once their application for asylum had been granted and they were assured of re entry into Australia. They now have Australian citizenship, which must feel like winning the lottery after years of living on a bridging visa.

When the ceremony was over, everyone shared a feast of vegetarian curries and special sweets. The food was delicious, albeit quite hot. I chatted to the only other older woman there, who also holds a special place in the heart of this family. She is a Christian Sri Lankan who has worked tirelessly with Tamil refugees in Canberra, helping them connect with organisations that support their settlement and sense of belonging. She was pleased to hear that I too would be attending the Palm Sunday Rally for Refugees.

I have played a small part in helping this family feel welcome, supporting two of their children with English and other school related learning. What I have gained in return is something far richer. I was welcomed into their family and given a glimpse into a culture very different from my own. And yet, I was also struck by what connects us.

For my First Holy Communion, I wore a white dress reminiscent of a wedding dress, not so different from the half sari. On Ash Wednesday, a cross of ash was placed on my forehead, while this young girl had white, orange and red markings carefully applied to hers. The meanings are different, shaped by different beliefs and traditions, and yet the gestures feel familiar.


I know they serve different purposes, grounded in their own histories. Yet I am struck by how instinctively we mark these moments in the body. With cloth, with colour, with touch, with ritual.

Across cultures, we seem to reach for the same things when something matters. We pause. We gather. We mark the moment. We acknowledge what matters.

Small Enchantments

This month I have been thinking a lot about my locus of control. Like the rest of the world, I have spent far too much time in the circle of concern, worrying about the war in Iran and what another conflict might mean for the world. The reality is that, as distressed as I feel by these events, I have no control over what will happen next. Spending time in that sphere leaves me anxious and full of despair. Yet ignoring it completely does not feel right either.

For the sake of my own sanity, I have been walking more mindfully and finding joy in small things. Watching my dog leap through the tall grass without a care in the world. Smiling and waving at neighbours. Remembering to send messages to friends. I have been revelling in the birds I notice along the way and the quirky things people do to bring a little joy to others.

On a recent visit to Sydney, I took my dog down memory lane in Annandale. Thirty years ago, I used to walk another poodle along those same streets. The street I loved may have had a few more renovated houses, but essentially it was still the same.

Then I came across a concrete pillar box that someone had decided to paint, for no reason other than to provide a little magic for young children and for those of us who are still young at heart. I am quite sure they did not seek permission and probably would not have been given it, but they did it anyway.

It may have taken them an afternoon to paint the top like a toadstool, then add a tiny window and surrounds so that the pillar box looked like a fairy house, complete with a little garden at the front. In the midst of all the crazy things that humans do to each other, here was a small offering to the neighbourhood. An invitation for children to use their imagination and be enchanted by the world.

I took a photo so I would remember that moment. A reminder that even though adulthood can sometimes leave us disenchanted, a little magic still exists if we choose to notice it. And that brought me back to my locus of control. I could have walked past thinking about all the misery in the world. Or I could stop and admire someone’s small gift to their neighbourhood. That choice, it seems to me, is available to us all.

The gift

My sister gave me a gift the last time I saw her. She handed me a little red felt box and said, ‘I know this isn’t your kind of thing, but I want you to have it. And don’t sell it.’ When I opened the box, it contained a small brooch, possibly made of ivory. I recoiled. She knows full well what I think about the ivory trade. What to do?

There is a ten-year difference between my sister and me but it has often felt more like twenty or thirty. From a young age, she had to mother me and although we lived apart for many years of my childhood, she still sees herself in that role. I cannot see that ever changing. This has made situations like receiving unwanted gifts difficult between us. I did say that while it was beautifully carved, I would not wear it, but she still pressed it into my hands. So now I have it, along with a large gold pendant with a silver coin from my birth year, and a couple of German porcelain figurines, apparently collectors’ items, stored away in a cupboard.

I keep reading about baby boomers wanting to downsize and give their precious belongings to the next generation, to no avail. Nobody wants the things we have loved and cherished and it breaks my heart to think of my beautiful mahogany chest going to an op shop one day. Of course, I am aware that I will have no say in the matter. My daughter will have enough of a headache going through my books and personal belongings. Why should I burden her with ivory and kitsch figurines as well?

I am loyal to a fault and will probably keep things I do not like because I do not want to offend the giver. Or maybe I keep them because I really do not know what to do with them and cannot make the decision to try to sell the items or give them away. To whom? Many of my friends are of a similar age and certainly do not want anything else to add to their stash. They too are at the ‘Do you want this?’ stage of their lives.

When I think of our house when I was growing up, there were probably no more than a few hundred items in the whole house. I would have more items in my kitchen now than we had in that entire house. My wardrobe consisted of two pairs of jeans, maybe three blouses, a couple of windcheaters, two jumpers, a jacket and a parka. Footwear was a pair of sandshoes, a pair of leather shoes, sandals and a pair of treads. I wore them day in and day out as we had no uniforms at school. Now we would call that a capsule wardrobe.

Reminiscing about times gone by does not help with my present-day quandary. Do I keep the brooch, do I sell it, or take it to the op shop? I am not a Marie Kondo who can say arigato, think nice thoughts and then send it on its way. I have much more in common with the hamster I kept when I was eight. Keep stuffing it in even when it seems no more can possibly fit, then run furiously on the wheel, hoping that if I run long enough, I will arrive at a decision.

Love, Without Anaesthetic

Over the past year, I have replaced all my amalgam fillings. My dental visits from now on would consist of a clean and polish. Or so I thought.

I became aware of a rough edge on a back molar. No matter how much I tried to stop my tongue from exploring the area, it always returned to it like a homing pigeon with poor judgement. On closer inspection, I saw it was my favourite filling.

In December 1987, I was living in Berlin. I had met the man who would become my husband in August of that year, just before I was to fly to Germany for a year. We wrote to each other daily on blue aerograms, as thin and brittle as onion skin. Back then, the postal service worked and I received my replies within a week.

Peter was coming to visit! I began to count down the days. He was taking a train from Frankfurt and would arrive at Bahnhof Zoo in the evening. Unfortunately, I had a scheduled appointment with my dentist, Frau Dr Quast that afternoon. When I arrived with my throbbing tooth, I explained that I would be seeing my lover for the first time in months that night.

‘You can’t arrive numb and dribbling!’ she said. ‘How will you kiss him? We’ll do this without anaesthetic. Tell me when you need a break, Ja?’

Frau Dr Quast kept her word. She drilled, took a break, drilled some more, took a break, until she could finally fill the tooth. It was meant to be a temporary solution until I could go back to have it capped. I thanked her for her forethought and gentleness. This was to be my first non-metal filling. Then, as the tooth stopped hurting, I never went back. That temporary filling has lasted 37 years.

Last week, I kept the appointment with my current dentist, Dr Park. That filling needed replacing. I recounted the story of that December afternoon appointment with Frau Dr Quast. He was impressed. ‘That’s the best dentistry story I’ve heard in twenty years,’ he said, ‘but the love filling will have to go.’

One word to guide me

We had a little laneway gathering just before Christmas where a good many of neighbours came out and mingled, bringing food and drinks for everyone to enjoy. There were people I knew reasonably well but also neighbours I had only seen from a distance. The ones I knew were the dog owners whom I had met at the park or had been introduced to previously.

We blocked off the lane so kids and dogs could run up and down to their heart’s content. When an unexpected downpour threatened to end our gettogether, we simply moved into one of the garages and continued there until the rain stopped. We visited each other’s gardens to see what people had planted and admired some clever renovations. It was a convivial and relaxed celebration of the year we had traversed.

Most of the conversation was small talk, focusing on questions such as how long someone had lived in one of the two streets that abut the lane, and whether there were animals or children in the household. There were pets to adore and babies were passed around that we cooed over. About an hour into the festivities, a neighbour’s son initiated a conversation with me. He asked whether I had chosen a word for 2026. I admitted that I hadn’t thought about it and we continued to chat about a range of subjects. He moved off to talk to other people but I kept coming back to his question and began to wonder whether a single word may not be a better talisman than a new year’s resolution.

I thought about choosing a word for the next few days and realised that I had in fact done something similar in the past. The difference was that I always chose three to five things to focus on and unsurprisingly, I’d forget by February. The only time I remembered was one year when my phrase was ‘Just do it’ and this was ruined for ever when Nike adopted it as their slogan. It doesn’t help to jump up and down and cry ‘I used it first!’

I tossed around quite a few words, synonyms for words, words that focused on intention and words that act as a charm. I remembered a bracelet I was given for Christmas years ago that had the word ‘fearless’ etched on the band. The colleague who gave it to me recognised that I was often acting out of fear and she wanted me to learn fearlessness.

I played around with this word but recognised that it wasn’t quite right for me. It is not so much an absence of fear that I need but the courage to face it. That’s how I came to my word for 2026.

I want to have the courage to speak up for myself and others, the courage to initiate instead of waiting, the courage to say no and the courage to say yes to what I want out of life. One word held lightly, to guide me through the year. Surely, that is enough.

A shared flame

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

In the Christian tradition, Jesus is referred to as the light of the world. His birth, which is what we celebrate at Christmas, is heralded by a bright star showing the way to Bethlehem. During Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, a candle is lit on each Sunday in anticipation of Christmas. In Scandinavian countries, the Feast of St Lucy on December 13 is celebrated with the wearing of candle crowns, bringing light into the Advent season. Similarly, Yule, the pagan festival marking the return of light, is celebrated in the Northern Hemisphere at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

In the Hindu tradition, the festival is called Diwali and it occurs at the beginning of winter to symbolise the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. Buddhists celebrate Vesak, marking the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha, with the lighting of lamps and lanterns. While there is no official festival of light in the Muslim tradition, lights and lanterns are prominently displayed during Ramadan and Eid.

And so we come to the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah. The eight days and nights of Hanukkah commemorate the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of the oil used for lighting that lasted eight days, while the temple was fought for and won back from the Greek Syrian Seleucids who had defiled it. Over the years, Hanukkah has come to symbolise resistance against injustice and oppression or, to put it another way, good vanquishing evil.

As humans, we are drawn to light for safety, warmth and the provision of food. Is it any wonder that light, especially candlelight, is a shared symbol across cultures? Light has always been a metaphor for all that is good and just in our world. This is why the murderous acts at Bondi Beach were such a shock for us all. Both secular and religious Australians wish each other joy and peace for the year ahead. We believe that good will triumph over evil and, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’

This Christmas, let us all light a candle for our brothers and sisters as a sign that we will not allow darkness to prevail.

It takes a village

My granddaughter was born two and a half months ago. She’s generally a ‘good baby’ (as if any baby could be bad), but she does struggle with sleep. In this regard, she reminds me of my daughter as a baby. She was a wakeful child, who would become overtired and then unable to sleep at all.

Now, of course, my daughter wishes she could sleep. Even a ten-minute nap is bliss, and she catches rest whenever she can. Her husband is a hands-on dad, which means both of them are running on empty. Nothing can prepare you for parenthood. It can only be understood through living it. I look at them and marvel at their resilience, but I also recognise that fine line between coping and breaking point.

One unfortunate inheritance I’ve passed on to my daughter is chronic migraines. She remembers me lying down with a bucket beside the bed, waiting for her father to come home and take over the evening routine. It probably happened once a week, certainly often enough to leave an imprint. Like me, she can only lie down, hope to sleep, or ride out the waves of pain. I know what she’s going through, but all I can really do is empathise, bring her medicine, prepare food, and care for the baby so she can rest.

Today she called me in desperation, asking where I was. After hours of trying to settle the baby with multi-day migraine, she had reached her limit. She did the wisest thing she could, put the baby down safely and walked away to her bedroom. I remember the guilt of those moments, when I too had to step back. Yet that distance, that breath of space, is what saves both mother and child. No-one can prepare you for motherhood and the contradictions it carries: joy and frustration, love and exhaustion, light and shadow.

She’s fortunate to have a close friend nearby who stepped in until I arrived. Together we cared for the baby, giving my daughter the reprieve she needed. Watching her, I thought about how difficult it can be raising a child in a nuclear family. How much gentler it might be if grandparents, aunts and uncles lived nearby, ready to lend a hand or a listening ear. There is much to be said for the extended family networks that are woven naturally into other cultures. As for us, we simply muddle through, doing our best, one tired, love-filled day at a time.

What Might Have Been, What Still Is

It is seven in the morning and I’m walking my dog. There are a few people about; a Border Collie here, an Oodle there, a Kelpie in the distance. As I come to cross path, an older couple appear without a dog in tow. This seems odd. At this time of the morning, most people walk briskly with their dogs, giving them a quick outing before work. Over time, most of these people have become familiar faces which I acknowledge with a nod and smile, or with whom I exchange a comment about the weather.  

Ever curious, my eyes follow the older couple as they walk in-step, hands in pockets, elbows lightly touching. As I watch from a distance, my heart aches for the familiarity and affection I sense from their movements. In their steps, I glimpse the path I imagined for myself long ago. This is how I always wanted my old age to be; my husband and I, walking along with a dog running ahead, enjoying companionable silence, or the conversation that makes up a lifetime shared.

Watching them, my heart aches but there’s also joy in my sadness. Joy, because they beat the odds of divorce, death or the malignancy of indifference. They have not ended up in a law court fighting out a bitter dispute or learned to loathe each other in silence, bickering away the fleeting moments of their lives. I celebrate this couple and all those who stood the test of time, those who have learned to love through pain, heartache and oh so many joys that life has to offer, to finally arrive at old age together, whether it be by luck, good fortune or good health. And as I watch them go, I know without doubt and without sentimentality that this would have been us, had death not severed my beloved from my side.