Two days after Dad died, my van broke down in the middle of rush hour in the centre lane. The blessing was that I wasn't in it - I probably would have had a meltdown. I feel like life lately has been dancing on a singing piano wire, the high pitched wail of my insides resounding throughout my cells, to the tips of my zinging fingers. There's the underlying worry the money won't last til we find work again, Jamie's incessant movement as he shifts from screwing boards into the back deck to ordering van parts to ripping up the fenceline posts we didn't need to pulling the engine apart on the van. It's all I can do to stop him doing more than two things at once. I want to scream at him to just stop, for fuck's sake. Ant there's this dull ache in my bones that insists there's little point in it all if we're just going to get sick and die anyway, but I push that to one side. That's grief talking. Thing is, you keep pushing it into the corner and the corner needs some seriously sweeping.

I can't help but think all this incessant doing isn't as important as the things that most people would say are traditionally not-doing. Lying on the back deck listening to raga with the pelicans flying over head and the clouds like a giant rib cage with the wind-breath cold between the white bones. Watching the sky to the west darken and shouting silently to the sky and have it shout back at you with lightning. In this, I find my father. He's transmuted now. He's the shimmering air.

Yesterday we decided to have a moliday. A moliday is a mini-holiday, a day stolen amongst the busy days. We packed the Defender and headed to the beach. It's our favourite spot when there's no surf - we can back the car in so the back looks out to sea, and make a picnic and read books and go swimming if we like, though it's too cold at the moment to brave that without a wetsuit.

I'd picked up a book at the library - a proper science fiction book unlike anything I've read for a long time. It took me a while to get into it - my head was abuzz. Like most of us, my attention span is not what it was. You sometimes have to try really hard, knowing you'll slip into that stream of words eventually and be mesmerized. Two chapters later and I was millenia in the future on a made planet caretaken by rangers who work for a company called Verdante who plan on selling chunks of it to investors, and intrigued by the world forming there. In the background, seagulls in the real world.

I make us sandwiches for lunch - rolls with fetta and pickled onion and lettuce and tomato. We munch on cashews, drink coffee. I beachcombed for a bit - not too far, as my hips can't handle it yet. We make the bed in the back of the van and we fall asleep for a while, listening to the sea.

When I wake the wind has changed. The storm threatens - we pack up and head home to sit on the front deck and watch for lightening, the thunder shaking our bones.

This is living. Stripped back to the best things - each others company, the sound of waves and cockatoos screeching, the scent of eucalypts in the air. One day I'll be the electricity in the air, the breeze licking the pollen from the banksia, the wind-breath through the rib-clouds of the sky. Everything else is nonsense.

This post responds to The Minimalist's weekly theme, asking us how we keep calm, relax and find peace in a chaotic, loud, hectic environment.

With Love,

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