2013
Going to Daylesford regularly is important––it helps me reconnect to myself and reestablish equilibrium. I dreamt I was working in a bar in some capacity––I have these repeated nightmares of returning to the hospitality industry. My fear of not being able to earn a living to support myself and the children. Today we have no money and no food left. It is a bad state of affairs. I suspended my PhD stipend temporarily, so that I can be with the children more. I got up early, made bread and took some to N. I gave her one of my ritual flower drawings as a housewarming gift. Preparing for my Petal Wonderland exhibition at Bokeh Gallery. The children are telling me that they love me a lot lately. J & I watched the Judd Apatow film This is Forty––as I approach my 40th year. Terrifying parallels.
We watched Planet Earth series. I was struck by the underwater caves. It made me recall the time I visited the Hastings Caves. I wanted to go there to David Attenborough’s grail of mineral embodiments, see for myself, or rather feel what the divers felt; lithe bodies snug in closed-cell foam neoprene, synthetic rubber moving forward in hemispheres of propulsion into maw of life; grove of wonderment. I watched fascinated. Closest I got was Hastings Caves. Lauren our tour guide ushered us toward bare rock disturbed by a steel-vault entrance, a stairway cut throughout. We walked in, got a brief education about tapering structures, icicles hanging from the roof, ascending from the floor bed, formed from calcium salt deposited in water droplets. We continued down into the belly-of-cave, surmised about Indigenous custodians visiting this place, coming here to shelter in the distant past, perhaps give birth in this underway. Then Lauren turned out the mottled light, darkness expanded, until we drowned in its resonance.