Ancestors

I've decided not to refer to myself as caucasian, white person, whitey etc, any more. Actually, I think the whole idea of race is ridiculous and I really wish it would fall out of fashion and be replaced with something like cultural heritage, or ancestral heritage or something like that. My 23andme DNA data keeps being updated, every time I check in with the site, it's like an unfolding story. When the results first emerged, the data showed that I was 100% European, which at the time was a bit disappointing, because a few family members and I felt that we had some indigenous origins in there somewhere. I figured, however, that DNA doesn't lie and was resolved to accept that I was pretty white bread. It was interesting enough to read about my maternal haplogroup being native to Central Asia, from 40,000 to as recent as 3000 years ago. Now it seems that I have more diverse ancestry than the DNA first showed. It's not much, but it makes me realise we are much more mixed than we think we are. Through my paternal grandmother, I have .3% North African DNA and through my maternal grandfather, I have .3% Asian, including South Asian (Indian) and East Asian (Chinese) DNA. It makes me so happy. I want to be connected with the rest of the world and this is proof that I am. I think it is more than a coincidence that when my daughter was born, a thought flew threw my head, as she lay there looking around alertly, that she looked Indian. Then when my son was born, the same kind of insight came to me, but in his case, I thought he looked African.His midwife said at the time that she thought he had reached far back into his ancestral heritage, to manifest in the world. Her wisdom is proving to be more true than we all realised at the time.

Life Lessons for My Kids

Here is a list of life lessons I hope I'm passing onto my kids. I am not polished at all of these things, but I value each of them and hope they will help my children be well-rounded adults. 1. Be aware of your body, how it feels, how it's functioning. Notice how what you do and what you ingest affects your body and mind. Make changes to your lifestyle and diet if what you have been consistently doing, doesn't feel like it supports you any more. Fine tune your diet. Be honest with yourself about your addictions and learn techniques and steps to change them into life-supporting habits. 2. Know how to feed yourself a healthy meal and to clean up afterwards. Know the joy of cooking/feeding or sharing a healthy meal with others. 3. Be aware of your environment. This goes for the small and the bigger environment. Notice your surroundings. Does something need your attention, because it needs repair, cleaning or some love? Take care of that. It's a good way to feel like a custodian of your environment. 4. Get out in nature. It's how we feel connected to god. Then we don't feel so lonely any more. All the beauty we observe is a reflection of what we are. It makes us feel better about ourselves to connect with natural beauty. 5. Know how to connect with others by being a good listener and by learning compassion for all we meet. This can be done by putting ourselves in the shoes of others, if only for a moment. 6. Be a part of a community. Humans do not do well in isolation. Learn how to work in collaboration with others to achieve something of benefit to a wider group. Learn how to accept help-not to be an island. 7. Know how to be still and quiet and how to make a regular retreat from life. This is important for reflection and rejuvenation. We become tired and weak from constant bombardment of stimulation and interaction with the mundane. 8. Be brave and stand firm for what's deeply important to you. Don't feel pressured to compromise core values, for fear of treading on another's toes, or not conforming, or being a nuisance. 9. Be aware of your needs for a flourishing life and learn how to peacefully express these needs, without force or anger. Putting other's needs ahead of your own for too long is destructive of your life force. 10. Be aware of co-dependency in relationships. Take steps to make sure that you do not forget who you are, what your passions are and what brings you joy and indulge in this as often as you can.

My ejector seat.

My home has always been a sanctuary for me. I love making it a peaceful, beautiful place, where I offer healthy, tasty meals, where I practise meditation and do all the little things to make it clean and comfortable and beautiful and relaxing. Before this year, I could never have imagined feeling uncomfortable at home. It's my base, my nest. It's my family's base and nest. These days, however, it's a relief to escape from home. As soon as I do my chores, I try to get out, just to escape the presence of our puppy. Life with the puppy has improved in only one way. I no longer have to clean up pee and poo all day, since we installed the doggy door. All the other bothersome, tiring and utterly depressing activities still exist. Watching my floors get muddied up with every in and out trot of the puppy to bark incessantly at the neighbour's dog outside, makes me give up on the idea of cleaning when it gets messy. Listening to the incessant barking makes me give up on the idea of peaceful surroundings. Having to shut doors behind me wherever I go in the house, keeping the puppy restricted to one puppy-proof room and having to spend most of my time in that room, to stop her from whining and scratching at the doors when I go into other rooms, makes me give up on the idea of personal freedom. Having to control her every time someone comes to the door, makes me give up on the idea of pleasant exchange with others who come to the house. Having to control her each time I step outside, from barking at the neighbour's dog, or the neighbours, or any other sound/person she encounters, makes me give up on enjoying my surroundings when outside. I can only think that getting this dog was my sub-conscious mind trying to project me out of this home, like an ejector seat in 007s get-away cars, into the outside world. My subconscious was trying to tell me that it was getting too comfortable at home. Everything was too peaceful, too calm and lovely. Because now, home sucks! I never felt like this when the kids were little. I could never understand women who went back to work even when their children were still so little, not for financial reasons, but because they couldn't handle the drudgery and isolation of life at home with babies. Now I understand them. I understand them completely and I cannot judge them for making that choice.

Buddhist Relief

I went to a Buddhist talk last night held by the Canberra Kadampa Buddhist Centre at the CSIRO Discovery Centre. The talk was given by the spiritual director of the Kadampa Buddhist Society, Geshe Rabten, who is normally based in Hong Kong, but is visiting Canberra for talks. The meditation was great. I think I was really ready for it, after the last few weeks of puppy-related suffering and I dropped into a wonderful state of peace. It was actually pretty timely. It made me look at the last few weeks of pain in a new way and it reminded me of some key ideas in Buddhism about the nature of suffering. He talked about how when we're in a difficult situation, our attention becomes very narrowed, so that the problem becomes massive in our minds, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else. This causes even more suffering. He talked about how the painful situation makes us feel very isolated from others, because we think we are the only ones going through it and this also causes even greater suffering. These two ideas really resonated with me. He talked about how important it is to find ways of feeling at peace even in the midst of suffering, otherwise the situations that cause us suffering will keep recurring again and again, until we get it. This made me very clear about what is a major cause of suffering for me, that recurs over and over. I can sum it up in the following phrase: I suffer when I feel left holding the baby. Our new puppy is the most recent baby. There's a great episode in Spongebob Squarepants, when Patrick and Spongebob find an orphaned clam, which they adopt and agree to raise together as a couple. Pretty quickly they fall into traditional roles, where Patrick goes off to work each day and Spongebob stays at home with the baby clam. There are hilarious scenes as they play out cliched parts. Patrick comes home later and later, promising each day to do his share of the child-minding, but obviously has no intention of doing this. He usually comes home to a scene where Spongebob is desperately multi-tasking while holding the baby clam. Mountains of diapers pile up, with Patrick promising again and again to do what he never ends up doing. Finally the couple get a shock when the clam decides to fly out of the house through an upper storey window, thinking that they have been negligent as parents, when in fact, the clam is actually old enough to leave the nest. It's a great episode. Even though, in this day and age, the cliched roles are less relevant to many couples, I do believe that even in families where both parents are working, the mother is more often-than-not, left holding the baby. When an infant is really young, this only stands to reason. This excuse becomes less and less plausible as the children get older, however. I have felt many times in the last fifteen years, that I've been left holding the baby. Each time Brian has got work far from our home, I have needed to be the main carer. It's a role almost genetically inherited. My mother did the same thing, as did hers (sadly, my grandmother never managed to fulfil the role and subsequently my mother being the eldest, was left holding the babies) Then there was my paternal grandmother who raised five children during World War II, while her husband was away in Papua New Guinea. Towards the end of her life, she became very bitter about how she never knew where he was, because he didn't write much. She found out afterward, that he was often based in Sydney, where she believed he must have been enjoying bachelor life, since he failed to tell her of his whereabouts. When he came home on shore leave, she usually got pregnant and it would be several months, if not years, before he came home again, at which time the events would repeat themselves. It's not a unique cause of suffering, in fact I would say it's a universal one, an age-old one, one that women have endured for as long as there was no extended family to help share the responsibilites of child care. So, the meditation we learnt, is designed to stop us from feeling like we are the only ones suffering as we are, to reduce the focus on the suffering and improve our karma, by actually helping others in an energetic way. Here are the steps: 1 Get calm and quiet in your mediation space. 2 Get in touch with the painful thoughts and feelings associated with a particular situation. Really feel them. 3 Think of others who may be feeling the same pain, who may be in the same kind of situation, or worse. Visualise them in their suffering. 4 Imagine their suffering leaving their bodies as thick black smoke and entering into your heart. 5 Imagine the thick black smoke mixing with your pain and suffering, dissolving and disappearing as it mixes together. 6 Imagine yourself giving, or sending feelings of peace and happiness to those people you have been imagining. That's it. I felt great afterward and today actually made some changes in the house to the puppy arrangement, that are giving me a sense of space again, which is a huge relief. The puppy is now contentedly sleeping outside of the laundry screen door, after a morning where I puppy-proofed our back yard. I intend to let her spend more time outside of the house from now on. This gives me space, where I am not being followed around the house all day long and reduces my poo/pee cleaning duties. Maybe the meditation even helped another woman somewhere in the world who is suffering because she has been left holding the baby. I hope so.

Puppy Landia

It's been a while since I had to care for a newborn or toddler, so maybe I don't remember that time of my life clearly any more, like it truly was. I wonder about my failing memory, because my current experience of raising a puppy reminds me in many ways of that early time in my children's life, but feels much, much worse. How could a small puppy be worse than raising kids, I wonder? My memory is that babies sleep a lot. They don't have razor-like teeth that destroy everything. They don't need a constant supply of new chewable objects to stop them from destroying everything. They pee and poo in diapers, minimising clean-up effort. They are completely portable in most situations (except workplaces) and can be taken most places, without too much trouble. Breastfeeding a baby releases lots of bonding endorphins, which helps to build loving feelings for the baby, within the mother. This chemical bond can help to relieve the stress caused by having a totally dependent creature taking total control over your life. Sometimes it's not enough though and I'll be the first to admit that I suffered mild to moderate post natal depression, at various times. What nobody told me before buying a puppy however, is that the experience of having a destructive, completely dependent and very demanding creature in one's care, can induce a sudden and horrendous post natal-like experience, that is not relieved by the wonderful chemical endorphins that come post-childbirth and can leave a woman feeling absolutely devastated. Last week, I told everyone it would have been easier to have had another baby. Last week I yelled at the dog, called it a shit of a dog, told it I never really wanted it, that I only gave in to pressure from my daughter to buy it. Last week I told myself that it was my husband and mother-in-law's fault for making me feel guilty for never wanting a dog. I told myself that frequent comments in favour of dogs always make me feel like I am somehow deficient, that I don't have enough room in my heart for a dog. That I am a lacking parent for not wanting a dog. As you can imagine, it's been a torturous, emotionally draining time. I think mostly, I am angry. I am angry that no one would listen to my pleas of "But who will care for the puppy while everyone's at school/work?". I am angry with myself for not really thinking this through. I applied for a job a few weeks ago, before we got the puppy. I am going for an interview soon and I think I have a good chance of getting the job. I am hoping that the dog will have developed enough bladder control to last for the five hours a day that I will be absent for this job, otherwise it will be sitting in pee all day, in its crate. I'm also hoping that the RSPCA is correct in asserting that a puppy feels comfortable and safe in a crate for several hours and that the experience won't turn it into an even more psychotic and destructive creature than it already is.

A Year in Canberra

Yesterday marked exactly one year since we started the lease on our house here in Canberra, although we didn't move in until December 29, so our real anniversary is still over a month away. I haven't written much this year, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to digest our experiences over the last year. As far as Canberra goes, it's definitely a place that's hard to get used to. There are many wealthy people living here, paying exorbitant prices for all living costs. Housing, food, petrol and utilities are much higher than other places we've lived. Supposedly the average income is higher, allowing Canberrans to afford these heavy costs. However, the fact that Queanbeyan exists just outside of the city limits, as a cheaper, if not seedy and run-down alternative to Canberra proper, makes me think that not everyone here is on big wages and increasingly people are choosing to live somewhere more affordable, yet commutable to the city centre. Organic food supply is tenuous here. One week there is a choice of organic meat at the local supermarkets, the next week there is nothing. The organic stores are pretty much unaffordable. I only go there for a few items and usually only get what's on special. A locally grown supplier has a couple of stores in town which are much more reasonably priced and which have a small selection of organic fruit and vegetables, but being locally grown, the variety is usually very limited for much of the year, especially the organic produce. I really miss our weekly organic market at Northey Street in Brisbane. The food was abundant, with great variety and very affordable. I also miss the atmosphere of the Northey Street market. There is nothing quite like it here. Weekly markets are huge, housed in monsterous steel sheds, with little to no atmosphere. There are no buskers, nothing in the way of entertainment and kid-friendly activities. There's definitely nothing like a green, leafy hippy vibe anywhere in sight. It's all a little too clean-cut for my liking. Canberra is a very conservative place and many people have very narrow perspectives here. It's like living in a goldfish bowl. There are lots of government workers who are locked into long term superannuation commitments, who would never leave their jobs, even though they know that the entire system is extremely inefficient and broken. They feel powerless to make any changes, so just keep turning up, getting paid to die a slow death of boredom and meaninglessness. Attitudes toward health and wellbeing are very disappointing, because of the level of conservatism here. I was reading an online thread in the hopes of finding information about local GPs who practise with some tolerance toward alternative healthcare. I think I googled GP with Naturopath qualifications, or something like that. The poor person who asked the same question in that thread was basically abused for accepting quackery and made fun of in a horrible way. It opened my eyes to the level of blinkered thinking here. On the upside of life, the kids seem to have found their places in the school and although it was touch-and-go for a while there, especially for Sophia, I believe they are happy there now. The school itself has a lot of problems. It suffers a mixture of politically charged negative behaviour from parents who seem to have no experience of the bigger outside world, financial stress due to its size and perhaps some financial mis-management. It also shows signs of the negative outcomes from being based on a philosophical foundation which is subject to individual interpretation and the conflict that arises when this becomes a wedge between families with differing practices and attitudes. Basically it's the old division due to religious adherence debate. I saw the same shit happening in the homeschooling groups we used to be a part of. It seems that people can't base their lives on an ideal and not come head to head with others that do not share the same ideal. I actually feel quite free from all that conflict, however. I think it's because we've experienced so many different schools and environments, that I don't feel so hung up about whether we are a 'true' Steiner oriented family or not. Basically we live for ourselves and I don't really care what others think of this. We have settled into a manageable life here, with the comfort of some friends and support, as well as oppportunity to enjoy the more beautiful aspects of Canberra, especially the natural environment that changes dramatically with the change of seasons. We will be in for some change next year, however and I am trying to not feel anxious about it and trust the coming experience. Sage's class is losing ten of its students, three of whom are Sage's closest friends. I want to trust that this will work out well for him and that he will make new friends again. The other change will be in Brian's job, which may not exist after June next year. I want to trust that he will find other suitable work, if this happens. Finally, in many ways, this year has been a good experience for me. It's always good for me to have some distance from my mum's family. The drama that surrounds it is usually very intense and takes its toll on my mum, who then spreads this around to her children. This year was no different. One of her brothers passed away from cancer just last week, causing a great deal of anguish. Aside from the normal grief that comes with losing a family member, the loss of my uncle was intensified because he was estranged from my grandparents before he died and for most of his life, he was quite a troubled guy. As a teenager, he contributed to younger member's experiences of childhood trauma and as an adult, he lived a boozy, drug-addled and sometimes violent life. He was angry and mean, even at the end. I'm so glad I was not close by to all that. The other good experience for me has been in setting up yoga classes and also working for three months as a support worker for elderly people through an agency. I once again feel employable, skilled and capable outside of the home setting and it's been very positive to get good feedback from those I have been working with. Support work is basically relatively unskilled nursing. It's hard, it's depressing and it involves a lot of showering and wiping bums. I don't think I will ever make a great nurse, so I can't see a long future in it for me, but I'm glad I did it. It can be the most humbling experience, to brush someone's teeth, because Parkinson's disease has taken away their ability to do it for themselves. When I shower these people, I see that their bodies were once strong and healthy and it reminds me that like everything else in this world, nothing is permanant.

Change of Seasons

Winter has been long and cold here, but at last it seems to be losing its grip on the countryside. Last Saturday was officially the first day of Spring and a drive around town will show that at least the cherry trees and plums seem to agree. Everything is in bloom. I must have pollen in my system, because my throat is so itchy and I'm sneezing all the time. The snow this season has been especially abundant and they say the ski season will extend until the first week of October, at this rate. We took the kids to Mt Selwyn snow fields last weekend and we all got to toboggan on the slopes and Brian and the kids went tubing a few times each. They were unsuccessful in getting me to go along with the tubing and Brian was trying hard to coerce me into doing it. "It's my Father's day wish" was his petulant response to my refusal to go hurtling down a snow slide on a rubber tube. He knows I hate speed. I think it's an inner ear thing-it actually makes me feel sick. It didn't stop him from putting a big guilt trip on me though! Sage impressed us all with his excellent balance, as he stood up on the toboggan and gracefully 'snow-boarded' down. I think we'll have to take him back and get lessons in snow-boarding. You wouldn't have guessed that it was his second time ever on snow. Sophia also loved the tobogganing and tubing. She loves speed in all kinds of vehicles. In the last holidays, I took them go-carting at Queanbeyan and Sophia was a real lead-foot, lapping me several times. I was finding it very uncomfortable in the tight rattle-trap, so was taking it very slowly. We're going on a cherry blossom viewing picnic with friends this weekend. I'll include those photos in the next post.

The first two shots are at Corin Forest, about 45 minutes from our home. There was about ten centimetres of snow and lots of families had driven up there to check it out.