February & March : Polaroids

While the World Rages, We Wait...

Apr 09, 2024

(…much like parenting a toddler)

Summer Rest

Australia’s Southwest coast, a four-hour drive from where we live, is defined by orange-grey granite boulders. These gentle giants laze around sun-baking all day; heating rock pools, cradling bodies and warming cold sea-feet. It was crawling over the belly of one of these goliaths in February that my son and I found ourselves facing Antarctica—3,500 kilometres away. We sat north of the dark blue expanse before us, eating apples.

“Cheeky seagulls want our apples,” I said, watching three of them dip and dive around the boulder we were lying on. I bit off a piece of apple and threw it. A seagull scurried it into his beak. Our son followed; one bite for himself, one for the seagulls, casting his arm dramatically in the air as he threw the apple. White wings flashed against the bold blue sky. Beauty blazed before me. Abandon. Delight. Surprise. The warmth of the rock kept us from shivering as the winds cooled our skin and we were audience to our own private pantomime.

Antarctica was my unit of measurement that day. Once unfamiliar and distant, now closer. It was a daydream I could smell on my skin. It was a country closer than my home. It was an unknown voyage that seemed possible with patience.

My husband and I were 90s kids. We removed CDs from boxes, recorded music on cassettes, wrapped telephone cords around our fingers and scribbled on paper to post. Life seemed slower. Our world seemed bigger, less explored, more mysterious. Of course, our parents say the same, our grandparents too. They would show us the Holy Spirit’s evidence of self-control and patience : not the ability to wait, but how to act while waiting. They would also know that some of our scripture’s holiest were those who hurled their anger towards God and away from others.

We worry about how instant life is for our son and the immediate gratification our culture grants us. One day, the world will sit at his fingertips and he will understand how fast the icebergs are melting but how slowly the lichen grows.

Tomorrow, when he thumps his fists on the floor because he is learning how to be himself and he chews his broccoli and spits it out on the table and he runs circles around the yard flapping his wings, I’ll remember the day we climbed giants and even Antarctica seemed reachable.

Car Park Queues

I was shouted at by a man in his car, while I was in mine, and I heard his voice through his closed car doors and mine. His rage passed through two shells of steel. A woman sat beside him in the passenger seat, facing forward, stone still. I wondered how loud his voice was in her ear. I’d been waiting less than a minute for a car park spot to free up in front of us- the car in it was reversing out. Of all the things on earth to spit and scream about, he chose us that day. My anger burned. My adrenalin soared. My hungry toddler-in-tow with ocean light bouncing from his eyes, looked around his car-seat from where he was strapped in, searching for the raging voice. He looked at me. I sang something about seagulls or shells and not forgetting our sunscreen.

Men can fight. Men can yell.

If I drown, it will be spoon by spoon, swallowed.

How else can an angry mother be heard?

Words on War

I don’t know what I went searching for in attending some seminars as part of Perth Festival Writer’s weekend, but I don’t think I found it. The World As It Is?was a panel session with a poet, a newspaper editor, a novelist and a political columnist together making up a panel discussing the role writing and journalism play in responding to a world in crisis. It was advertised as a session with ‘bite’ and ‘frisson’. I turned up late and sweating, the first raindrops of autumn scattered on my glasses. I wedged myself into the only spare chair I could see in an auditorium of hundreds of people and sat down in-between ladies twice my age. The lady to my left was asleep. The lady to my right tutted “bullshit” when the newspaper editor said his paper didn’t have a political agenda.

I came with my own questions:

Have digital spaces increased compassion fatigue?

Has instant journalism given us a deeper connection to our world in crisis?

Is citizen journalism less objective than traditional journalism?

Has social media crippled our ability to “listen” and be united despite our differences?

Can stories and words change anything?

What, exactly, can we do when the world is warring around us?

AND WHEN WILL IT STOP, PLEASE?

(Oh, and, why does everyone want to save the world, but nobody wants to do the damn dishes?)

High hopes for a 45-minute panel.

Each panelist represented different roles as Storytellers. A journalist can hold a corrupt politician to public account but a novelist can ask, “What about the politician’s daughter? How does she feel about her father? What does she think?” While a news editor can train a newsroom to be agile and relevant to audiences with decreasing attention spans, a poet has the time to explore the complexity of paradox. A novelist can bring someone closer to the truth than a journalist. A journalist needs the poet’s sensitivity and empathy.

At the conclusion of the panel, everyone admitted they can make mistakes in their craft. Everyone talked about the importance of trusting people. Everyone admitted some sense of moral responsibility to inflame or distil fears. Everyone agreed that money complicates all the above.

As the panel ended, Tsiolkas, the novelist—and by far my favourite panel member by now— concluded with two thoughts.

The first was a short recitation of an excerpt from a poem by Anna Akhmatova1 documenting the trauma of Russian people under Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. Akhmatova conceived this poem in the months she spent waiting in line to visit her son in a Soviet prison camp. In the introduction, she remembers someone calling out her name as she is standing in the queue. Another lady standing behind her recognizes her because of her name -- and presumably knows of her reputation as a writer. The lady who recognised her, lips blue and shivering, looks up and whispers:

“Can you describe this?”

And [the poet] said: “I can.” Then something like a smile passed

fleetingly over what had once been her face.

What did that flicker of another mother’s smile hide? Relief? Justice? Comfort? Help? I still wonder. I wonder because of Akhmatova’s opening lines,

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger’s wing shielded my face…

Her words were a witness; anger channeled.

Here, she could document what she saw and honor what violence stole from her. Although this poem was never published in her lifetime, her words preserved memory. Her language survived when little else in her life did.

Secondly, Tsiolkas briefly cited Italian historian Vicenzo Cuoco. He read a quote about resting in paradox, embracing moderation without lukewarmness and not forsaking goodness in the face of suffering.

Revolutionaries do not have to be perfect, Tsiolkas suggested, but they do have to know how to wait in tension; able to hold opposing ideas together.

The Inuits

Known for their unflappable and patient parenting, one researcher2 found that inside the home of an Inuit family, small mistakes were ignored. Complaints and grievances didn’t exist. No one flinched during accidents or setbacks. When a child spilled a teapot of hot water which started to melt the igloo floor, no one fussed.

When you yell at children they stop listening said Inuit Sidonie Nirlungayuk3.

If a child isn’t listening, it’s because they are too young for the lesson, they believe.

Arguing with children is a waste of time, they say. Children are illogical beings and you are only stooping to their level if you argue with one.

If a child isn’t meeting expectations, change the environment, not the child.

Instead of seeing children as manipulative and testing, they recommend, see them as tiny citizens trying to navigate a world they don’t yet understand.

Writing helps me to realise how small I am and how big the world is and there is so much I don’t know and can’t communicate. Maybe our little ones feel the same.