Strengthening spirits

Living in process

Here on Wangal Country, the warm winter continues. Apple blossoms, wattle blooms and newly leafing robinia trees have shown up a month early, evoking an uneasy mix of dislocation laced with delight. At the same time, the winter bugs have turned up not at all put out by the warmer than usual season. In the last 2 months, I have had two viruses and a chest infection, each bout worse than the last. Only now I am back on my feet, can I appreciate that while my body buckled, my spirits have strengthened through the surrender of sickness.

Before the bugs, I had not realised I had been travelling at speed, although I did register that my spirits were low. I put this down to various sadnesses and stresses, including a fresh wave of grief about the worsening climate mayhem, as I wrote about in my last post. I brought out my usual strategies and kept going, managing but not flourishing. When virus number 2 hit, I kept pushing on. After ten years of working on a solar installation for our strata complex, it was finally happening. I coughed and spluttered my way through the week, dealing with last minute paperwork and decision making, the delight of our shiny new rooftop solar array distracting me from the state of my body. But by the time solar energy was pumping through our cables, I had a chest infection.

Clearing my diary, I finally relaxed. I spent an hour each day basking in the Sun on my balcony, listening to the calls of the currawongs, studying the health and positioning of my pot plants, chatting to the nosy miners checking out my blossoming blueberry bush. Other times I knitted on the sofa, listening to podcasts on permaculture. And when I didn’t feel up to even this, I lay in bed dipping in and out of two nourishing books: Bruce Pascoe and Ray Norris’s Big Sky: when the emu left the earth, a fascinating study of Aboriginal astronomy, and Dr Sharon Blackie’s delightful collection of European fairy tales, Wise Women. Both took me to places and perspectives that heartened and delighted me.

My balcony garden with newly installed solar cable running along the balustrade

Meantime the emails kept rolling in from the various groups and projects I am involved in but now listening to my body, I was released from the feeling that I had to respond to them all. “Is it really necessary to answer this now?” I asked myself. Mostly the answer was no. I could wait until I had enough energy to respond with full attention. Without being conscious of it, I realised I had been increasingly run by an inner dictator barking commands at me about all I had to do, that it had to be done today, and how hopeless I was for never getting on top of things. Inevitably, this is when I would start scrolling news sites and Substack, in a futile attempt to put off stress by picking up stress, becoming ever more disorganised and scattered.

My chest infection put an end to this cycle. Each day of illness felt spacious, as released from my demands of constant task completion, I could focus on what supported my healing today. What is it my body and soul is asking for? The allure of scrolling disappeared as it became obvious to me it was lowering my energy and spirits rather than restoring them. Each day became a process of restoration, and each day I managed to do what truly needed to be done, much less than I had assumed before.

Now that my lungs are pumping nicely again, I am determined not to return to the suffocating litanies of “everything I have to do” and “it’s never enough”. Instead, I tell myself there is plenty of time to do what I really need and want to do each day. And to my surprise, my days now do actually feel both more spacious and productive.

My dear old Dad is with me in this process. Mick lived, much to his delight, to the age of 91. A highly active man in body and mind, my memories of him as a child was of a funny but often anxious and highly active man, stressed by all his responsibilities and activities as a pharmacist, small business owner and breadwinner. Dad had frequent migraines and constant back pain, rarely stopping to relax. But as he got older, he consciously set about changing his patterns of stress. Dad gave everything a try: yoga, jogging, meditation, self-hypnosis, chi gong, playing piano. And over time it worked. His migraines stopped and he mellowed, as he learned to moderate his perfectionist tendencies. He perfected the fine art of pacing himself, interspersing his tasks with times of piano playing, watching sunsets, taking strolls around the neighbourhood.

Mick Gillespie, always happy at the piano

One thing that stays with me vividly from Dad’s final years was his pleasure in pulling up 10 weeds from the garden each day, working within the capabilities of his by now frail body. He would tell me with delight, “10 weeds doesn’t sound like much but it’s surprising how effective it is when I do it every day”. I admired both his discipline and his pragmatism. So now, I hear him reminding me that whatever the big overwhelming task is I can chunk it down into small daily actions delivering daily satisfactions.

Each morning, I work for 30 mins in my large balcony garden which had become very messy and neglected over winter. Already I’ve binned the rubbish, moved some pots around, planned where our pond will go, planted out rocket seedlings and added native ground covers to the raised bed. Now when I look out my kitchen door, I see an inviting space, not reproach and failure. Similarly rewarding is the 30 minutes I spend in my allotment garden each afternoon. In between these gardening bursts, I have an hour or two for my writing, another hour on editing Jon’s book on Climate Technologies (about to be handed in, hooray!), peppered with short bursts of answering emails, organising the community garden, attending meetings, exercising, cleaning and reading. Plenty progresses but nothing feels overwhelming in the way it did before I got sick. Each day I remember to breathe, and appreciate the generosity of 24 hours.

Helping me hold to this spaciousness is my growing understanding that most things in life can be approached as a process, not a task. Process encourages participation, pacing and an appreciation for keeping things alive rather than the deadening pressure of the tick off box. Last week, completing the final documentation for the payment of our strata solar installation grant, I gave myself permission to do this a bit at a time over several days, rather than launching myself at it with gritted teeth to get “this done now”. And it worked. I found it much easier that I originally thought, simply because I took it slowly, a page at a time, avoiding my usual panic and overwhelm at the sight of a barrage of forms.

Our challenging and complex times require fortitude and stamina. The more we can approach the disruptions and threats of this era as a process, rather than as a problem to be fixed, or a failure beyond all repair, the more we can commit to and enjoy being part of collective care for Earth and all her beings. It’s both a process and a lifelong call, so let’s heed my Dad’s advice to pace ourselves by committing to sustainable daily actions, transforming overwhelm into grounded progress and a love of life.

Our strata solar array, the result of a ten year process !

These days I am always on the look out for nourishing reads on Substack. Here are 2 great articles on the power of daily sustainable actions for a thriving world.

A little patch of ground

THIRTY WAYS TO BUILD A COMMUNITY

While this podcast offers rich and steadying wisdom for the process of attending to our world with love:

Deepening into the discipline of care, ft. Norma Kawelokū Wong

I write on Wangal and Gadigal Country, whose sovereignty has never been ceded. I pay my respects to Elders, past, present and to come, who hold vital ecological knowledge, wisdom and love of life here, and everywhere.