May 2024 Journal
chilly autumn tales of Aurora Australis, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and prog band TesseracT live in concert
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Morning Walks
I went out for a walk at sunrise this morning, accompanying my husband as far as our suburb’s train station, about a kilometre from home, before we parted ways. He took the train to work, and I popped into the local supermarket for a bag of salad, before taking the scenic tour home through the local sports precinct. The trees there have lost most of their leaves as the final week of autumn arrives, but a few remained on the maples and ash trees framed against the mist-shrouded mountains. The purple and pink sunrise was diffused through the thick clouds, but a break in the mist revealed the sharp angle of the edge of the mountain, with streaks of golden sunlight behind it.
My husband’s job in the rail industry takes him to a rotating assortment of depots and offices, most of which he can easily access by train. (Which I guess is not that surprising, really.) While normally he makes a coffee at home before leaving, as of recent months we have a new routine: if he’s taking the train to work, about once or twice per week, we will walk together to a local café for a soy latté, then we go our separate ways for the day at the station. It’s a nice way to begin the day: walking and talking together, as the sun rises, and flocks of galahs soar against the cloudy late autumn skies.
Walking at sunrise is another tool in my arsenal against the impulse to doom scroll, which seems to be my eternal battle: if I start the day with fresh, icy air, a hot coffee, and a pleasant walk in the morning light, I am less inclined to open my phone’s bottomless social media apps. And thus, I face the day with a mind full of vibrant pink azaleas, butter yellow leaves on the silver birch trees, currawong calls, and the life-affirming sensory enjoyment of the misty rain falling on my face while I sip a warm coffee.
AI Jesus Sculptures Swarming My Social Media
Take away coffee and walking is a much better start to the day than bleary-eyed scrolling my Facebook newsfeed, which lately consists of an alarming proportion of people resharing artificially generated images and marvelling at, for example, what they think is a definitely real hyper-detailed wood carving of Jesus Christ by some bone-thin malnourished child in a developing nation. [1] They will miss the fine details, like that said child has seven fingers on each hand, or simply that the image is so smooth as to be un-real. A particularly amusing set of images doing the rounds of Australian politics social media spaces around Anzac Day showed a group of stereotyped Aussie blokes with Ned Kelly beards and dressed in dark blue singlets and stubby shorts saluting the Australian flag. Alarmingly few people on my feed noticed that those purportedly real - but definitely artificially-generated blokes – included a figure with a hand protruding from his chest holding a beer, while his other hand did an American-style salute of an Australian flag that was missing some stars, all while his third hand cooked snags on the barbie. It was so absurd, and yet somehow it stirred a kind of patriotic intensity in a few people I know, who hadn’t looked at it for more than a split second before they smashed that reshare button.
Sneezes Offend Cats
I arrived home from this morning’s walk, a little rain-dusted, and rather cold, and removed my shoes. My elder cat Riker – an 11-year-old black, brown, and white tabby who most resembles a Siberian Forest Cat, and who we named after the Star Trek character – greeted me at the door with happy meows. I sneezed then, the combination of the cold damp air and the last dregs of a recent cold virus still working its way out of my system. My sneeze must have been the most profoundly offensive response to his friendly greeting, because he turned and fled out of the entrance, then spent a good ten minutes watching me from between the washing baskets, with an insulted expression on his face. Later, he emerged from his hidey hole, whence he tried to extract a piece of breakfast cereal from the sink strainer in the kitchen. He was happy after that, his obsessive desire for cereals satisfied for the day.
In the time since I last wrote on this Substack, life has been rather busy. I spent time at a Taizé-style prayer and meditation service, easily the youngest person in the room. Which is funny because Taizé’s main demographic is young adults.
Around that time, my son successfully passed his probationary driver’s test. Ideally, he’d have done this test a few years ago, but he reached the legal driving age in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns, when even taking one’s child out for driving practice was banned for Victorians [2]. Here in Victoria, a learner driver must accumulate 120 hours of supervised driving practice, and be at least 18 years of age, before they are allowed to drive without supervision. And even then, there are a few years of being on a license with certain restrictions. This year he scheduled a series of lessons with the same instructor he had in the pre-pandemic dark ages, and very quickly worked up his skills and hours. So, it was better late-than-never, and his being able to borrow my car a few times a week has been increased freedom for him, and it’s one less thing for me to think about. Now, if he has a late night at university, or wants to visit his friends, he can take himself, instead of negotiating a lift.
Live Music and Art Gallery Adventures
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
The annual Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert series - that my husband and I are attending again, having enjoyed it so much last year – began in mid-April. Thus far this year we have been to two MSO concerts, and they truly are a highlight on my calendar. When I’m in the midst of medical appointments for my chronic illness, being able to channel my mental energy into looking forward to a concert is an effective way to reduce my anxiety. My most recent blood test was unpleasant, and it left some spectacular bruises on my arm – but, at the very least, I had an MSO performance to look forward to on the following day. No matter what happened in my blood test and subsequent results, I’d still get to dress up for one evening and enjoy some beautiful music.
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After the first of the two MSO concerts so far, we attended the post-concert discussion with the conductor, composer, and soloist. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I love the music, but I appreciate it so much more when I get to hear the performers’ understanding and analysis of the pieces they played.
During the intermission of the second of the two concerts, by a very happy coincidence, I bumped into one of my old high school friends. She was attending the same show with her son. I can’t even recall how long it’s been since we last spoke to each other, though it might be well over twenty years at this stage. We had remained in-touch with each other online, but it was good to see her in-person again. We were both rural born-and-raised, and excelled in similar subjects in our high school years, and here we both were, living in Melbourne, as mothers of young adults. As I get older, I see that it is the friendships I made in my teenage years, at high school and university alike, that have stood the test of time. That makes two separate occasions this year in which I’ve seen a concert in the company of an old friend from my teen years. It’s such a nice feeling to connect with old friends. The intervening two decades have left us all a bit greyer than we were, but under all that, we’re still the same folks who laughed our way together through those wild teenage years.
Magickal Art Outings
As autumn’s vibrant colours peaked in mid-April, my husband, our daughter and I attended the Dandenong Ranges Open Studios weekend. We chose a gallery in Kallista, ‘Leaf Studios,’ for our outing. I was so inspired and had a wonderful time chatting to one of the superbly talented artists-in-residence there. The studio hosts several women artists working in mythic, folkloric art. There were many nods to the style of faery artists Brian and Wendy Froud. While there, I purchased a cute miniature Baba Yaga’s hut sculpture that now lives on my bookcase with my collection of Slavic mythology-inspired novels. It was a reminder to me to pick up my sketchbooks and keep trying. As the artist I spoke to told me, even doing a tiny painting on a 1-inch square piece of paper each day is a valid art practice. She then pointed me in the direction of some online art courses I might like to try. I was very grateful for her encouragement. Since then, I’ve been trying to more frequently pull out my mini-watercolour sketchbooks and do some simple paintings using my Derwent pan paints.
The following day, my husband and I took a very cold, steep walk in a section of the Dandenong Ranges forest that I hadn’t before visited. It joins up with other walking trails we are more familiar with, but my husband knew it mainly from driving past this particular picnic ground carpark en route to his two-monthly naturopath appointments. As I huffed and puffed my way up the steep hillside on the final leg of the walk, I wondered at how everyone else on the trail that day seemed to be handling it more easily. I was passed by an old Indian woman powering up the hillside with her hiking poles, a few trail runners, and an elderly Anglo-Australian lady who had the physique of someone who hikes several kilometres as her casual daily routine. I was almost relieved to overhear one guy say rather defensively to his partner, as a trail runner gazelle-leaped across the rocky paths, “At our age our knees wouldn’t cope with running like that.” He was objectively incorrect – I’ve spectated enough trail runs over the years that my husband competed in the sport to know that age alone is no barrier to trail running – but I could sympathise with his defensive impulse to explain why he wasn’t as fit as the lean runners passing by. I’m a lot more active nowadays than I was two years ago, and yet I still have a long way to go before I could contemplate trail running. It doesn’t mean I want to rule running out from my future, either; but for now, bushwalking, going to the gym, and workouts from home are challenge enough.
Anzac Day Drives
In late April, on Anzac Day, my husband, our kids and I, drove to the town of Macedon, some 90 kilometres from home, to visit Honour Avenue, a street lined with beautiful deciduous trees (mostly oaks) to honour their war veterans. We hadn’t anticipated that half of Melbourne would have the same great idea. It was unexpectedly tricky to find a carpark in the town, eventually securing a spot at the football reserve, then walking to the avenue. We rounded the corner to see dozens, if not hundreds, of other tourists taking photos along the entirety of the 1 kilometre-long street. We were ourselves, of course, there as tourists, but were somewhat amused by the intensity of some of the families there. Many of them had arrived in carefully curated matching autumnal fashions, their children in elaborate clothing that looked far too thin for the freezing cold morning, barking orders at their children to toss the leaves in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Others had laid out picnic blankets on the footpaths in front of people’s houses, which seemed rather random – especially as the picnic ground was on the adjoining street. Several groups even had tripods, reflectors and ring lights. I saw at least one man use his wife as a tripod, getting her to crouch down, his phone propped on her back, as their child tossed leaves in the air. I would love to see some statistics on how many photos were taken on that specific day, in that specific location, of children throwing autumn leaves in the air.
Suddenly our taking a single DSLR camera (but no tripod) and wearing comfy, non-special clothes, seemed decidedly un-fancy. Now, I appreciate the desire to get nice family photos and the process of travelling then setting up a scenario to attain said photos. We were there for the same purpose. But it was a strange thing to see this activity en masse, with multiple groups of people posing in the exact same ways, dotted all the way up and down the tree-lined street, while the local residents had hung multilingual “do not park here” signs on their front gates, with a kind of collective desperation that the locals must feel having their tiny rural town inundated with tourists. After we had seen our fill of the little town, we drove to nearby Gisborne for a walk in their Botanic Gardens, and a coffee and vegan slice at a big café there.
More Live Music
In early May, my husband and I went to see the British heavy prog band TesseracT at their second Melbourne concert in Thornbury. We’ve been listening to TesseracT’s music for about a decade, appreciating their complex bass guitar lines and soaring, heart-wrenching vocals. But it was their 2023 album War of Being that propelled us to actually see them live in concert. The show was magnificent – an instant favourite live show experience, and one that I will remember for a long time. I have seen countless bands over the years, but this night was marked by a transcendent kind of power and storytelling that I have rarely seen. It was most reminiscent in atmosphere of when I saw Tool at their Fear Inoculum tour in February 2020, and there was definitely a crossover of fans of both bands there; but it also had the intensely excited fan energy of Finnish metal band Wintersun, when I saw them in November 2017. (How on Earth has it been so long since Wintersun blessed us with their presence?!) The beautiful, emotive TesseracT song ‘Legion’ was incredible to hear live; when the singer hit the high notes, the whole crowd broke out into cheering and applause. In my past life as a bass guitarist (by which I mean, my all-too-brief stint as the token girl 5-string bassist in a Slipknot-inspired metal band in my university days), I dreamed of being the kind of skilled bassist and performer that TesseracT’s own bassist is. I was so happy to see him play live. (I’ve embedded the video clip for ‘Legion’ at the bottom of this post.)
The week that followed the Sunday night TesseracT show was one of those weeks that is crammed full of happy activities, but to the point of utter exhaustion, so that by the following Friday I resorted to spending a whole afternoon in bed, trying to rest. I am not a fan of daytime naps, but they are an option when I’m too desperate to wait until bedtime. But I was completely wrecked by the combined forces of the midnight hometime after the concert on the Sunday, three 5 am starts to watch the Eurovision semifinals and grand final live, two separate café outings on different days with some friends, and a busy day out for Mother’s Day. It was enough that I was worried I was coming down with an illness; but in hindsight, I was just doing too much on too little sleep and with too much caffeine. A note to my future self: don’t schedule anything – even positive things like café outings with friends - during Eurovision week!
Eurovision 2024
A word on Eurovision: I love it, and it’s one of the highlights of my annual calendar, but the nasty political tones were a dampener on this year’s show. I loved many of the performers, and I feel sad that so much great music was lost in the unnecessary drama. I have many opinions on it, and about who I think could have been excluded (and not excluded) - but I don’t want to wade into debates I am not informed enough on. Despite the drama, I’ve added several of this year’s artists to my regular playlist: the winner, multi-genre pop-rap-opera artist Nemo from Switzerland; the Gothic and Celtic paganism-influenced industrial and highly theatrical music of Ireland’s Bambie Thug; the joyful folk of Estonia’s Puuluup; Ukraine’s beautiful singer Jerry Heil; Croatia’s fun and endearing Rammstein-influenced singer Baby Lasagna; and the excellent Norwegian folk metal band Gåte, to whom I gave most of my votes, and who are most like the other music I normally listen to. It was cool to see Australia send the popular duo Electric Fields, who sung in a mix of English and the Aboriginal language Yankunytjatjara, which is a dialect from the Western Desert region of South Australia. Sadly, it didn’t make it through to the final, but they were up against some solid competition this year.
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Aurora Australis
And, like much of the rest of the world, we were treated to Aurora activity. We wouldn’t normally see the Aurora Australis this far north of Antarctica, but the skies above our suburb took on a distinct pink and green tone. My son is studying astrophysics at university and so we went out together to find a clear view of the Aurora, settling on the footy club. A 3-second long exposure photo on my iPhone 15 sufficed to show the range of colours in the sky. My friends who live on the southern coast of Australia, some 150 km south of where I live, were treated to much more intense colours in their skies.
Small Joys (and nuisances)
And then, in the week that followed, I had a string of appointments, which are my least favourite thing in the world at this point, but somehow seem to dominate my life. How grateful I am that this week has had a clear calendar, as does most of the week to come. My only obligations have been wonderfully mundane: filling the car with petrol, cooking some dinners, and a little “spring” cleaning while binge-watching Aurikatariina cleaning videos for inspiration.
Our old vacuum cleaner broke, a mere 6 months after the warranty expired, so we took the opportunity to buy a newer, lighter weight model that will be easier to carry up and down the staircase. It arrived yesterday and I was so excited – then felt a little silly at how excited I was. It seems that adulthood is like that: the peaks often seem to be things like getting a new vacuum cleaner, or the psychologist saying she’s very happy with my recent progress, or making the kitchen bench look shiny after a cleaning spree. Today, the happiest thing is pondering the fact that because I made double the amount red lentil and tofu “ricotta” lasagna we needed for last night’s dinner, that I don’t have to cook again tonight, beyond stirring a little salad dressing into the bag of salad I bought on this morning’s walk.
In between all the obligations, I’m trying to carve out space for positive things. Cold autumn nights lend themselves to cosying up in the chocolatery with a hot mug of dark chocolate mocha with a sketchbook. The rainy Sunday mornings are good for a ride on the stationary bike in the gym, followed by a marvellously relaxing 15 minutes in the dry sauna. I had the sauna mostly to myself last time, and it was amazing. I can understand why the Finnish folks I know swear by sauna as the answer to all of life’s ills.
Sometimes I go to bed early just to read. Or I will watch a replay of the most recent Formula One or Formula E race while working on my latest embroidery projects. I’m trying to make a more conscious effort to mindfully engage in these small joys, rather than always relying on the big concerts and events to get me through.
I’m making an effort to read all the books on my to-be-read pile (and there are a lot of books). It’s taken me around one and a half years but I’ve nearly collected all 37 of Christine Feehan’s thus-far-published Dark Carpathians series, as well as the spin-off novellas in various collections.
Back in July 2023 I wrote a Substack post about how reading Gothic and vampire-themed paranormal romance was a part of my deconstruction journey out of a high-control religious community. I still think that’s the case. If you missed it, you can read it here: July update: sleepless nights, compulsive reading, and religious deconstruction + bonus bedbugs! (substack.com). Deconstruction is a hot topic for a lot of people in my life, and I think we have all approached it from unique directions.
And so, autumn draws to a close, with freezing cold weather. The mushrooms are everywhere, and the first sprigs of wattle are blooming. The last cicadas and crickets of the season fell quiet a week or two ago. The sunlight still shines, but it is a weak and low sunlight that slants sharply from north-to-south. The lemon tree is finally bearing a few fruits, that are nearly ready for picking. And the first bulbs in the garden are sending up their shoots. A few times recently, I’ve seen a pair of wedge-tailed eagles soaring high above the neighbourhood. They are incredible birds, with a dinosaurian hugeness and apex predator confidence; I can see why the Aboriginal people of the Kulin Nation that call this region home personified Bunjil, the wedge-tailed eagle, as a creator deity and ancestral being. It’s the small joys (and the big, eagle-sized joys) that make the passing days meaningful.
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References
[1] On a related note, this article is hilarious but highlights this phenomenon: Why AI Images Of Shrimp Jesus Have Taken Over Your Timeline (pedestrian.tv)
[2] Can L-platers still drive and have driving lessons during the coronavirus pandemic? - ABC News (article from April 2020)