What does ‘a lick and a promise’ mean?
Just that I have one tiny hour free to write this blog before life drags me away, yet again. I’ve made a pact with myself I’ll pull whatever I can together in that time and promise to allow myself more time in the future. At least I’m writing.
It’s a bit like the splurges I promote in my classes when I tell the students to knock the critic off their shoulder and spend the next fifteen minutes writing anything they like. It’s to get them writing. I tell them it may be a childhood memory about their parents, old aunties or sibling rivalry. Some write about sport, a bag of lollies, two brollies or one folly.
Okay, why don’t I do a splurge now. It’s a great way to find out where your heart lies at the moment. The timer is on. fifteen minutes to write nonstop about anything that may be lurking inside my head waiting for an opportunity to get onto the page.
My splurge
Why do this splurge this morning. Am I game to share it with others online. What is different about this day. So much to do with papers all over the floor but it is time to move on, to begin that book that has been simmering in my head and heart for the past two years. Make it fiction, creative non-fiction would be more the term but write it, tell the story of then and now. Ayers rock rises from the desert floor, bold, beautiful, sturdy, the same, not quite the same as forty years ago. But then I’m also different. both of us have aged over the years, The old pickup camper nestled in the shade of the rock protected by its strength. I was aware of its spirituality. Was that a humming, even throbbing I felt or heard coming from it. Why the pull to go back now? see it again. Why this urge? I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed that it will have changed, terrified to look at how much I’ve changed. Am I strong enough to tackle the next forty years of my life. I am again walking into the unknown but this time I’m aware that time is short and physical disabilities may lie ahead. I’m not trying to recapture my youth. I return as a waratah woman, a matriarch, an elder. I want to touch my roots and feel connected to this country, to this heart of my country, to reconnect and be at peace with the younger me, to forgive what I now see as things I did wrong as a wife and mother and come to a sense of peace with my younger volatile selfish self, to give thanks for the blessing of those two boys and a husband who embrace and love me in spite of my faults, to learn not to judge others but to live with compassion……DING. Pen up and time to read what came out of this scatty brain.
Oh, the temptation to edit, improve, remove mistakes in grammar, tense, adjectives…on and on. What will I do with it? Who knows. At the moment it will stay here as is to remind me of what is important to me today. a splurge done tomorrow will be different and somehow there is a sense of freedom in simply writing from the heart.
To play with words often reveals your hopes and dreams. It is a way to communicate with your higher self and learn how to cope with life.
Australian Aboriginal Proverb
‘We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love…and then we return home.’
