Looky here … a Beardsley design!

And Deliverance on Movie Greats. And rain and an un-hot night (although the fan is still blowing on an unclothed me sitting on my bed). Finally a moment. It feels like I haven’t had time to scratch, for the longest time (well, starting with the pre-Christmas doings anyway).

I’ve been starting to feel restless again. I haven’t written for a long time (not even here, but in my paper journal) and I’m starting to feel the lack. And the lack of meditation. The time for solitude and introspection has come around again, quite aptly at this time of year. I usually like to spend New Year’s Eve alone, looking back, writing in my journal, looking forward.

Again the theme of friendship, who really is, who really isn’t, what I mean to people and what they mean to me and the inequities. What it is they want from me. The way people use each other, bitch about each other and the games people play with each other. Why do we think we are so above the REST of the mammals on this earth? At least with the rest of the animal kingdom, what you see is what you get. Sometimes, quite often, I feel rather disheartened and despairing over the way people treat each other. I understand hermits, yes I do. I spend times wanting nothing much to do with human beings. It’s all too overwhelming. Again that need for learning where boundaries are needed, where to say “NO”, to walk away and save my energies for people who treat their personal relationships with utmost integrity … for REAL. Perhaps a time for silence, reassessment (yet again), and action, or lack of as the case may be. And soulmates … are there really such a thing? To me it seems some people use the term to describe nothing but people who enjoy much of the same things. A pithy excuse for a term, really. pah.

Christmas … man I’m glad THAT’S over. Too much of some people is not a good thing… people who are better off taken in small doses, not day after day. Now I have a bare month before I will be forced out of ‘recovery’ and into job searching. And in a month I go to Western Australia for a fortnight, at the request of my sister, to look after her daughter while they fly to New Zealand, where I might have been going otherwise, myself. A kind of a suicide-watch trip. I love my WA trips. They are spaces for me, spaces for different air, clean space, pure meditation and thinking space.I

My final grade for last semester was a D (that’s D for Distinction here). Not bad, considering I’ve been out of school SO long and it was my first subject, and considering the toll chemo and tamoxifen have/are still taking on my brain. I’m very, very happy with that. I’m all enrolled for next year’s subjects. English and Music. Semester starts while I’m in WA unfortunately, so along with my art supplies, I’m going to have to take textbooks too. I’m going to have to pack as few clothes as possible!

My book list for this year is out of control. I’m going to have to go through my bookcases and note down what I have ended up reading. At the moment, I am reading “Travels with a Donkey” by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s a great little book, with some beautiful landscape sketches. This book was only his second, and a kind of little travelogue, like his first. Read the beautiful chapter “A Night Among the Pines” here. So enchanting.

I have no energy. I’m tired … I’ve been sleeping an average of three hours a night. I feel as if I have so much to say, here, albeit here may as well be to myself anyway, but I just don’t have the energy to think or say it. Perhaps, then, it’s best to say nothing, and perhaps even to the person I best like to discuss my favourite things with.