b a t t l e c a t . n e t

In some ways it’s a little bit like being back in high school.

So exhausted by those thoughts I stay tired and the thoughts hang around for a long day longer.

In those situations, if I ignore my Mindapples, my mental health 5-A-Day I’m even more vulnerable. I’ve recently started running the C25K program which is helping. If nothing else I can say to the thoughts “Writing? Designing? Sure I kinda believe you when you tell me I haven’t got a chance, but running… I haven’t given that up AND I love it.”

And who knew that drinking large amounts of water helped to keep you sane? Well, I do, now. So even though I feel guilty about BUYING water, I figure that the ethical vice of one 1.5 L bottle of sparkling mineral water per day is a minimal vice compared to an over reliance on chocolate, shopping or booze.

So yeah. Thanks to water, exercise and going outside I still fill sane. And primarily happy. But there are these heavy boots that make it harder for me to take steps to improve my life, particularly along the borders of creativity and career. Forget about the odd hints that I could write professionally, for the last month I’ve been quaking about writing for myself and the nebulous audience of this blog.

It took days for me to sit down and write this. And honestly I didn’t want to share too much of this motivational challenge. As is the way with words, they do come out eventually as if with a life of their own.

I wanted instead to talk about the small things that gathered together to fascinate me today:

Everything that I’ve read by Barbara Kingsolver has entranced me, so when I saw Prodigal Summer on a friend’s bookshelf I had to borrow it.  Based on what I knew of her previous books I knew that family, food and nature would be part of the experience.

“Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning of an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

And oh! Prodigal Summer was amazing. It was about nature and food and sex and love and evolution and family. I could practically smell the crumbling wood humus of the Appalachian forest and felt the ponderous, ent-like movement of life and change. However I was reading the novel so quickly that I had to take a break and go running, just so I could prolong the ending of the story.

As I walked my cool down along the canal, I noticed that even though it’s halfway through November, there were still beetles living on tree trunks. There were harlequin beetles which totally give me the heebie jeebies when they swarm, but there were also the fattest glossiest ladybirds (Marienkäfer) that I’ve ever seen.

Prodigal Summer had put me in an even more noticing mood than usual, so I payed particular attention to the varieties of ladybirds, red with black (9?) spots, a yellow version of the same and then most excitingly a variety I’d never noticed before, the Twice Stabbed Ladybird which is black with a large red spot on either wing.

Oh. They were beautiful.

On the topic of beauty, while I was reading a line from a song kept on going through my head, “the beauty in everything, the beauty in everything”. It took me a while to recall that the song “Woman’s Touch” is by No Through Road, a band from my hometown, Adelaide.  Their latest album, Winner. has been one of my favourite records over the last year.  When I actually relistened to the song I realised that the refrain is preceeded by “I can no longer find the beauty in everything.”  Despite having felt low for weeks, I was reminded that while I might feel terrible, I can always see beauty in the world and that counts for so much.