All of you who have texted or DMed or emailed or called; all of you who saw me and gave me a big hug; all of you who came to dinner and brought your kids and dogs; who dragged me out to ride; who said how sorry you are and what a shitty thing it is (it is); who sent flowers; who listened or held me while I raged and cried: all of you. I do not know how I would have gotten through the week without you. What did I ever do to deserve you all? Thank you.

My mum is brave as a lion, which we knew. My sister is magnificent. I wish they didn’t have to be.

My mum has cancer.

I dreamed that we and everyone we know had been drawn into a large corporate cult. We walked around the glassed atrium of a sandstone building with excellent natural light. I kept running up to friends – Shannon Lee, Shannon Engelbrecht – and saying “Cult! Cult!” They’d nod gravely but edge away from me.

I found a terminal and tried to message Jeremy, but the screen said: “Blocked.” I saw someone leading the a group of children outside, Claire and Julia among them, and I ran after them calling their names, but they had been told to ignore me.

I woke up in a panic. The cult is life itself, and when you notice that it is a cult: that is death.

Don’t listen to me, listen to Zed:

Suppose you have a job that was once the job of your dreams, but which for several years has ceased to feed your soul. What do you do? If you’re me, you accidentally read three books that form a strange, powerful trilogy.

The first book describes a young man who is paralyzed in an accident, and who goes on to become a yoga teacher. It speaks to you for months before you understand what it is trying to say: that some large part of your self, though you can’t feel it, is still part of you, and that you have ignored it for too long. The second book describes your predicament in more detail, the writer having dwelt there in the darkness herself, and gives you a passphrase that might open an occult door: “radical self-possession.”

And then you might pick up the third book, this book, which is so simply written that you might be deceived into thinking that it is simple. It is not. In fact, it recaps the earlier material:

Yat also talked about people who were cut off from sensing areas of themselves. ‘He has no arms,’ he would say, or ‘She has no legs,’ and you could see what he meant.

A ‘guru’ doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed.

Then it goes off in an altogether unexpected and impossible-to-paraphrase direction.

A story is as difficult to interpret as a dream…

This is the book that pioneered “Yes, and…”, the improv technique in which actors do not block one another’s offers but accept and build upon them. Doing this in the large, between actors, helps people do it in the small, with the many different voices in their heads. The walls come down and the energy flows in and out of the walled-off places. I can feel the blood running through my whole body. I can feel sleeping parts of my brain coming online. I can feel where I am blocking Jackson, and feel how to let go, and feel the energy flowing between us.

The titles in my accidental trilogy, by the way, are Waking, Depression and Impro. This amuses me.

My new job is great. And even if it all goes cattywumpus, it was worth it just to make the change.

I kinda wanna copy out the whole first chapter, but will restrain myself somehow –

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age – just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.

On Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) as the gateway drug to being a massive douche:

I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did.

On school as trauma:

My ‘failure’ was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.

On the importance of writing about something other than what one has read – ironically, the exact opposite of what I am doing here:

I had expected that there’d be a very gentle gradation from awful to excellent, and that I’d be involved in a lot of heart-searching. Almost all were total failures – they couldn’t have been put on in the village hall for the author’s friends. It wasn’t a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.

On aging disgracefully:

I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.

Reminds me of something – what was it – oh right –

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy…

We saw: mule deer, a jackrabbit, red-shouldered blackbirds, a scrub jay, turkey vultures, a kestrel, harbor seals, great blue herons, snakes, frogs, toads.

I read: Motherland, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, Telegraph Avenue.

Oh blog forgive me for neglecting you. There are so many stories I have wanted to tell you, like when I was driving back from Salome’s horse show and asked Najah not to eat his hot dog with his mouth wide open, and he said through a mouthful of hot dog: “MY PAPI SAID I COULD.” (Jack: is this true?)

And the time I realized we had left Claire’s wushu sword at Front Porch, so I went down to collect it and one of the servers was out on the sidewalk with it, getting his Errol Flynn on. (Later as Claire and I were walking home, a police officer called me over, asking grimly: “Is that a real sword?” It’s not, it bends, so I held it up and wiggled it in the air for him.)

But the other lede I have been burying lo these many months is that I just left my job of thirteen years, a job I loved at a company I still adore. I don’t blog about work here because I don’t want any of my employers scarred by my anarchism and poo jokes, but that was a hell of a gig and a huge episode in my life. Leaving it was, in the end, very melancholy.

Here’s to the next thing, which has the potential to be just as amazing.

We neither won nor placed. But Jackson was delighted to be at the show with the fancy horses, and we didn’t disgrace ourselves or the barn, at all. (Two clear rounds, one with one rail down and one elimination.)

For the first time I understand how horse showing can fit into horsemanship, into the kind of rider I am trying to be. The round is a snapshot of where the two of you are at that moment in time, what you can do, what you struggle with. It yields information you can take home and work on.

If the horse is the hardware and the rider the software, the show is the test.

The brilliant Sumana made this exact point to me two weeks ago:

Butler creates woman protagonists (such as Lilith in the Xenogenesis trilogy) who are seen as traitors for consorting with their enemies or oppressors. Her stories have the capacity to make the so-called traitor’s motivations understandable, often showing a willingness to negotiate as the product of a stubborn sense of hope for the future that can take the form of a commitment to nurturing a new mixed race.

From the book I cannot put down, Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling. Cvetkovich has also introduced me to Jacqui Alexander’s phrase “radical self-possession,” an idea that instantly caught fire and ran down every blood vessel and nerve in my body like music or healing grace. I asked myself what radical self-possession would look like, and Future Rach (who drops by occasionally to give me hints) said:

“Like me.”

I’m playing with Goodreads a bit – interested to see what y’all are reading, but perplexed at my own rating system.

Five stars means, this book changed my life!

Four stars means I liked it.

Three stars means yeah, I read it.

Two stars: it was bad.

One star means: it was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

This makes for some very strange bedfellows.

Took home the high points ribbon :)

Passages I could have written myself:

Although it was very inconvenient, the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was the fact that I had been able to ignore the initial pain. By ignoring it, I had made it worse. I was able to recognize this as a warning sign – a notice about my inability to pay attention to the sensations of being in my own body – but I didn’t really have any idea what it would mean to live differently.

Dental care is something of a metaphor for the state of other affairs in my life. Taking care of the tooth disasters involves an act of faith that when something is wrong it can be fixed and that it’s possible to move on… Health maintenance has become for me a sign of self-love, although it also gives rise to some nagging questions about class. Regular dental care seems to be part of the secret life of middle-class domesticity that passes as normal – one of those things that no one talks about but everyone is supposed to do…

When you’re depressed, and all you want to do is sit still or curl up in a ball in bed and never get up, putting the body in motion is a major struggle and a major accomplishment.

I sometimes feel the need to touch the land of my childhood in order to remember myself to myself. I’m not recalling a lost paradise; I’m acknowledging the troubled history that led to my departure as a part of figuring out what it means to go back. My own history of dislocation connects to the histories of immigration and displacement… My “ancestral home” is the site of many histories, both happy and sad, both my own and those belonging to others.

(Note that I am not depressed right now and have not been for years. This book is giving me an opportunity to reflect.)

I like to think that my grandfather was this kind of soldier.

As Jeremy points out, it’s a good basis for a more general code of conduct. Have some moral courage.

Back in SF. Jetlagged as hell. Someone said not to make any big decisions but I cut off all my hair.

I cried a bit today, because of everything but specifically, I realized, over missing Alain. We spent two weeks together 24/7, including eight hour car trips and reasonably heavy physical labor, and we didn’t so much as get annoyed with each other. I love him so much. To me, he is perfect. Really not kidding about the twin thing.

I’ve realized that my cooking techniques reduce to a very simple flow chart:

Is it a salad vegetable? Eat it raw with olive oil and lemon juice.

Is it a bitter green, or possibly a whole chicken? Roast it in olive oil and salt.

Is it a root vegetable or cauliflower and DO YOU FEEL FANCY? WELL, DO YOU, PUNK? Roast it, add stock and blend it to make soup. Eat it with sharp cheddar and a spoonful of brandy.

Is it some other kind of vegetable, such as for example broccoli, or a pulse such as for example peas, corn or haricots vert? Steam it. Eat it with gobs of salted butter.

Is it a fruit? Make a compote by stewing in water. Is it rhubarb? Add a little sugar. Eat it with gobs of heavy cream.

Now have a nice glass of Marlborough sauvignon blanc. You deserve it!

Today the sword of Not Trying To Fix Everything brought a wheelbarrow full of horse manure up from the back paddock, put it all around Mum’s roses, planted pansies between the roses, washed down the back deck and then oiled it with tung and linseed oil. So, you know. That happened.

I am in rural NSW. Tonight I went to a community meeting with Mum and Dad. I took my needles and yarn and got my Madame Defarge on, knitting and glaring at various scoundrels who have wronged my Dad. “Glad to see you getting into the spirit of small town life,” said Sarah’s awesome friend Jane: “I promised I’d take notes or I’d be putting some rows down too.”

The community meeting was to oppose the plan. The plan is to cut down all the London plane trees and close down three more store fronts along the main street. Poor little Barraba. Tamworth Regional Council might as well just nuke the site from orbit.

It is strange, strange, strange to be here without Jeremy and the children; strange how effortlessly I fall back into my childhood rapport with my brother Alain, twenty months older, my twin. When we do the washing up we are still one person with four hands. With him and Mum and Dad here I am at home but also not; I wake in the icy dark before dawn with my heart racing, not knowing whose house I am in, or in what town, or in what country. I’ve traveled too much this year. Among other things.

Here is the lede I have been burying for five months. My father has been diagnosed with a rare condition called semantic dementia. It is a malfunction in the language processing centres of his brain, which is difficult for him to understand because of the malfunction in the language processing centres of his brain. It is the Eater of Meaning. I used to joke that my father was a genius but I couldn’t prove it. Now I have proof: he has had this condition for months, if not years, and he is still himself, still putting the pieces together, still trying to solve puzzles, still trying to understand. Reaching out, as Ursula le Guin once put it, to be whole.

I have a bunch of mantras which are supposed to help me through this interesting time. Focus on his abilities, not his deficits, I say to myself, and that helps me to be grateful for his undimmed sweetness and affection, for his unaffected memory, to ask him about his childhood in Papua New Guinea, his memories of his mother. Attack this with the hammer of unconditional love and the sword of Not Trying To Fix Everything, I say to myself, as I am interrogating his gerontologist in case there’s a drug treatment we just happened to overlook, as I weed the living hell out of the flower bed in front of his and Mum’s house.

What can I possibly tell you about my father, who showed me the Galilean moons? Love is such a little word for a feeling so big. When I climbed to the top of the highest shell in the Opera House in January, I found a fire panel that had been made in his factory. It was a garden factory and in the garden was a deep pond, with frogs and herons; after watching it for years he realized that it was a spring. He is my source.

Me and my da.

Posting mostly to try to keep myself awake. Local time is 4.43pm and I am not sure how I will make it to my goal bedtime of 9pm. We shall see!

I did sleep all the way from SF to Auckland, and the flight from Auckland to Brisbane went quickly because I was enchanted by Bear Grylls, especially in the Iceland episode in which he and Jake Gyllenhaal put the Bro in Brokeback Mountain. Alain winced when I mentioned this, because apparently Bear is a big ol’ hatey Tory Christian who spoke at Hillsong last time he was here. And it turns out he is also a big fakey faker!

Alain and I found each other at the airport and headed out into the greater Brisbane area for flats white. I had to get a SIM card for my phone, and this turned into an epic ordeal as there was already an angry mob of villagers in the store brandishing pitchforks at the Telstra staff, who were being sheepish. Ever since the Regrettable T-Mobile Incident of ’04, Jeremy has done all the talking to phone companies for me, so when they started explaining the details of my plan it was as if they were speaking the language of crows: “Caw! Caw! Caw!” Alain said my whole face glazed over.

Now we are at Alain’s flat and his Bourke’s parrot, Monty, is circling my head and from time to time landing on me and giving me kisses. His feet are cool and he is careful to keep his claws away from my skin.