Recovering my scattered wits.

Scattered wits take a long time picking up.~ Charles Dickens.

The band plays on.  We are now playing musical beds.  Theo went.  Liddy has gone.  In their place we have a friend of Dino's & my Sydney friend, Siano. My fried brains are slowly recovering.

The problem is that having had to put all sane & reasonable thought on hold for a month I now have so much whizzing round in there bringing order out of chaos may take some time.  It is very simple. I only have 2 speeds: run like a maniac or dead stop. I tend to run on coffee & nervous energy so I like quiet spacious intervals where I can hear myself think & make sense of the internal rumblings.  My roots are in the quiet things: the pound of the surf behind the big island to our east; green growing things in rich black soil; the loud rumbling purr of a contented cat.  I am not made for concrete & noise, for rush & bother & city traffic.  I still shudder about all the driving!  My nerves may never be the same. I may never be the same.  I have dropped the spooled thread that holds my days, the meditative pools wherein one may hear the silence of God, the unharried spaces that allow for a deep contentment.  As my Star has been loudly proclaiming, That's show business for you.  She would happily spin like a whirly~gig forever.

Travelling late at night with the rain bucketing down, an anxious eye on the clock gauging the frantic run for the last boat, is not sanity making but that little stretch of water is also a sanity saver. You get on the boat & the world just stops.  Immediately the pace is different.  The air is cleaner, cold & salty. The boat chugs along carving its way through the darkness with stately slowness. Over here no~one knows what a star our Star is.  She can paddle round in her ratty~tatties, go scurfing & crabbing,  walk round the block, sit in the upended tinny with her guitar singing her songs to the cats & magpies & no~one cares.  They may consider her a little odd & question the end results of homeschooling her but there is time & space for a little oddness. It is very grounding.

The idea of running Hannuka into Christmas, as I wanted to, fell by the wayside.  Liddy & Dino were the only ones who even made it to a church service of any kind. Does it matter?  For the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed Christmas.  When you consider population in terms of hundreds then the several thousands extra in the city are neither here nor there.  It is all totally overwhelming anyway.  Yet in a strange & convoluted way our emphasis was on giving.  We gave of our time for the carolling.  We gave of ourselves.  Christ was proclaimed in the city mall & I was so proud of our kids who coped admirably with the hecklers & occasional drunk [& yes, security moved them along pronto] & who turned up despite the rain & over tight schedules.

I have things I am thinking through & reading & that I will get around to chatting about sooner rather than later.  It is going to take a while to detox from The Gothic but that too will happen sooner rather than later.  Auditions are looming & Star is having a meltdown ~ though what she thinks I can do about it I do not know!  This is the year Star gets her L~plates.  Oh my!  Clear the roads! Lock up your children!  We are down to the wire academically. Just where did the time go? Life moves on. I will detour on the bye~ways & the back roads & only occasionally, & only when I have no other choice, venture out onto the highways.  As Star says, " Just breathe, mother!"  Breathing...