It really felt like spring today.
The sun streamed in through the old roof of Beatty Park and made crystal shapes on the bottom of the pool. I streamed along, surprising myself with my lack of antiannatalk. I swam 1000m! A proud Bananarecord.
Then N I walked home and I made poached eggs with grilled tomato and balsamic red onion (diet, what diet?) and we drank coffee after and then did our make up like two big girls in the foggy bathroom mirror. I do like not being alone.
Then we walked partway to work together and I started another beautiful day.

Except slowly slowly the doubt creeps in. What if the answer is no? How do I go back? Do I go back? And then I grab my string and yank it and calm down again. Love the questions, right?
And be patient.

In a beautiful sun-spotted courtyard there was conversation about faith and what it means to be good, to ourselves and to others, about the nature of the soul and our own awareness of it. It made me conscious of time (as if I wasn't conscious enough already)...

I remembered those rushed nights; years and years worth of rushed nights when I had analysis work plus normal job plus waitressing, and there was no time for anything, and although I don't have much to show for it now, at least I'm not in a rush. I have time to pause and smile at the flush of freesias on a lawn, and let my head fill with the heady scent. I have time to pause and touch books and be glad of them.

Tonight Loo came and I drove us to Vic Park to Clare's house first and then to Crow Books where Liz Byrski was talking about writing in general and Last Chance Cafe in particular. She had interesting things to say about female aging, about the beauty myth and about how enslaved we are to popular opinion or at least that propagated by the media. Thin is beautiful (then why does cheese and bread and wine exist?), we must be sexy and smooth skinned and perfected etc etc... and I am glad that although I fight the lard wars like anyone else, I've missed that clenching terror of the mirror.
But I have not missed a little book obsession. I bloody told myself last time that next time before Crow books I should leave my wallet at home. Alas, I did not.
And while Liz was talking I dragged tentative fingers over spines of well loved titles. I have Durrell. And then I found a Cohen I have not read. Book of Longing. And then, while in the line to pay I found a Mr Men book: Little Miss Wise. Because I love my job.
I also saw a copy of Candy by Luke Davies, and I held it in my sweaty palm for a good ten minutes before deciding, very responsibly that that was out of budget. But oh the memory of that film...

And randomly, a poem I found in a volume I received from Kym in a difficult April:

What is a soul?

A soul quivers
in the palm of your
voice, is still when
a sparrow alights

outside. In the winter
sun a soul
twitches neck and
head, neck

buried in the pulse
of a round & thinking
flesh. Like any feathered
thing in its space

it does not try
to be noticed. A soul
pauses to witness
a magpie. Its body

is a lever, its
beak a chisel
prising bark from the trunk
of a myrtle. On the sky

a soul writes
itself. Winter
tosses a gauze
across a single crescent

jewel that fades
into day, watermark
of the fingernail that
lifted the scab. Then

The soul is a prayer
May a great
white egret
lance your skies.

By Anne Elvey