I’m wondering if objects have a critical mass. A point at which they, not I, start to have the upper hand. We’ve been in our new rental for 3 1/2 months now, and for most of that time I have felt like I was on top. The benches stayed relatively uncluttered. The hallway was navigable. The cushions all seemed to stay in their usually places.
But lately, after multiple trips away, I’m starting to feel like the objects in the house have reached critical mass and are starting to take over. For instance, that little huddle of screws and a lone nail on the bench wondering where the other emergency fasteners are. For instance, the pile of papers on the kitchen table that was once just a shopping list and is now a collection of school newsletters, read mail, pamphlets, and blank paper. For instance, that mound of fabric in the hallway that belongs in a cupboard but hasn’t quite made it there yet.
This week I’ve been reviewing some old poetry. Looking back over the years to the time when I was sick with anorexia. It used to terrify me then, this sense that I wasn’t in charge. That the stuff in my life had the upper hand. Including the stuff of my body. I had a distinct sense of my needing to shape things according to a plan, but those things that needed shaping were well beyond my scope or ability to mould. So I became my own little project. Its no different now, only, my awareness of the aliveness of ‘things’ has expanded and my capacity to shape has been directed to where it is more useful and wanted.
Earlier in the year, when I was toying with the possibility of my being bi-polar, I read the most beautiful piece of work by Jami Nakamura Lin called ‘The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir’. From Jami, I learnt about the tsukumogami: common household objects that gain a spirit, self-awareness and come to life when they reach 100 years. I don’t know that anything in my house is yet that old, but I wonder if its a gradual process, that there’s a kind of cumulative self-awareness rather than a sudden awakening, and if so, many of the things in my house are on the journey, for I am notoriously bad at buying things new.
Besides, when I think of the lives and aliveness of all that goes into fashioning an object, its no wonder that my picture frames, food processor, coat hooks, ironing board, iron, kettle, shoes, adornments, beds, tables, mattresses, coat hangers, carpets and cushions seem to move around and take on different attitudes and angles and generally keep me on my toes. Not to mention paper.
I’ve been ignoring the trees lately. The house we moved into backs onto a reserve chock full of trees. Big blue gums. Scraggly black wattles. Pines. Cursed pines. (I shouldn’t say that, I’ll get in trouble with the Black Cockatoos who came to feast on them after three days of high winds) The big oak who loves to be loved. But trees are insidious. They exist in so many forms these days that I can’t get away - paper, tables, chairs, the handle of my pastry brush, even my toothbrush is made from bamboo. Ignoring doesn’t get me far because the more I ignore the big leafy, growing ones outside, the more I start to wonder if the stack of papers on the kitchen table is talking to me.
At some point I just have to admit that I am not in charge. At all, ever. Thats why I loved living the life of a traveller. Travellers understand impermanence. They understand movement as a way of life, as a necessity of being alive. Its hard to remember this when you are settled in one place and your day to day existence looks more or less the same, week in, week out.
Moving gives me something to be in control of, something to order and map out and navigate. Moving takes the focus off things and puts it on, well, movement: where the next step will be, how to balance my weight on the terrain so as not to fall, what’s up ahead that I might need to steer around.
This week I completed my 6 month training to work as a Forest Therapy Guide. My mother asked how it felt and I said it was somewhat of an anti-climax. An intensely beautiful immersion in Canberra, no scheduled sessions for the last month, and then a final slow fizzle out. I’m sure that’s a good omen. It means good things are coming. But omens or no, I’m glad to have finally found a practice, a way to guide others, into that slow, gentle release. That place of being settled, but not needing to cling so tightly to order, to sanity, to holding-it-all-together. It is in the space of a forest therapy walk that I finally found the courage to let life be. Allowing, if only in my better moments, a kind of uneasy truce with all those objects that for so many years have terrified me, confounded me, frustrated me, confused me, and tortured me to starvation, with their insistence on having a life and taking up space in mine in a way that is uncomfortable, grievous, saddening, maddening, because of them signifying a system of values quite strange to my innate, inner ones.
It seems that we’ve been in this house long enough now for the objects to have gained the upper hand. To be beset by the curse of the staid. Now it will take all of my strength, training and perseverance to live and let live - to be gracious with that pile of papers, gentle with that awkward huddle of screws, stern with the mound of fabric - ignoring all of them for a bit so that I can stare at a screen and fiddle with words and letters in a truly satisfying way.
This is a new era unfolding.
Thank you for reading A Peasant’s Kitchen. This was a weekly publication, that turned into a fortnightly publication, that turned into a monthly publication, that has been on hiatus for the last year. I am doing away with recipes - expect perhaps the odd one - hoping to include more pictures in the episodes to come, and have set my goals towards ‘occasional writings’ in whatever form that takes. If and when I do get back to regular writing, I look forward to receiving your support in the form of a financial contribution, if you are able, in order to make it sustainable.