Category: Pensive

Book Review: ‘In Passing’ by Tobie Hewitt

“This delightful book opens with one of the best opening lines I’ve read in a long time …”

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‘In Passing’ by Tobie Hewitt is a thought-provoking story that explores questions we often have about life, death, and how we find those soul mates  we know we’re meant to be with. The characters are just gorgeous, and the struggles they face are ones that the reader can easily identify with.
This delightful book opens with one of the best opening lines I’ve read in a long time : “The air shimmered with a knowing beyond doubt.”
That line really made me stop and think, and visualise scenes where this could have been the case. From that moment, I was fully engaged with the story and completely hooked by Tobie Hewitt’s writing.
Five stars, Tobie. Beautifully done.
 in-passing

Positive Reviews!

There’s always a bit of trepidation when you do something new and you’re not sure how it’s going to go.

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There’s always a bit of trepidation when you do something new and you’re not sure how it’s going to go. ‘Leaf’ has been available for just over three months now, and I’m very thankful and excited to be getting positive reviews.

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I am really thrilled about these two readers’ responses  that I’ve received recently.

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Both of these people, and others who have given my writing positive reviews and ratings, have encouraged me more than they realise.  Sometimes being a writer is a really lonely thing, because there’s a whole experience and process you have to go through before you can know if anyone is actually going to understand and connect with what you’ve written.  To know that my poetry has had such an effect on people is both motivating and incredibly humbling.

 

Exhibiting the Courage to Care

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Today I was privileged to accompany 45 students on a visit to the Courage to Care exhibition in Portland.

We heard the personal story of a man named Harry, a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Harry’s story was incredibly powerful. So were the tears he shed while telling it. You couldn’t help but be moved by this first-hand account of the terrible things that were done during World War II. 

Courage to Care exists because they are passionate about telling many, many stories just like Harry’s. Given that we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, they know that it won’t be long before there are no survivors left to tell their stories to the generations that follow them. 

  

The message is not just about the Holocaust. It’s a message against any form of prejudice, hatred, intolerance or bullying. Differences between people are only ever superficial; underneath our skin, we’re all the same. 

Everyone who visits the exhibition is encouraged to be “Upstanders, not Bystanders”. It’s hard to leave without experiencing the conviction that you will never accept or condone discrimination again.

I cried as Harry told his story, not just for Harry but for every family who lived through the same thing. I cried for parents who lost children, children who lost parents, and siblings who lost each other.  

I cried again when I read the stories of two families in Rotterdam who worked with the Dutch Resistance and help save Jewish people from the Nazis. They almost certainly knew my grandfather, who worked for the Dutch Reaistance throughout the war, and was personally hunted by the Nazis as a result. 

   

My Opa told me stories about his experiences during the war when I was a young girl reading books like ‘The Hiding Place’ and The Diary of Anne Frank’. They were always very serious and quite emotional conversations. It was very important to him that I understood how important it is to oppose evil and to stand against hatred.

He told me more of his story when I was a little older and studying history. I guess he thought I could handle more of the horrible truth then. It certainly made my studies more personally relevant.

 It also explained why he would leave the room or turn the TV off whenever there was a scene where German soldiers marched or where Hitler addressed the crowd. I don’t know why I hadn’t made that connection before, but after that, I could not watch those scenes without thinking about how powerfully real and haunting it still was for him and, doubtless, everyone else who had survived it. I was very privileged today to meet Harry, to shake his hand and talk with him. I told him about my grandfather and the connection with the stories displayed in the exhibition, and cried again. He hugged me and we shed tears together.

Honestly, I’ve never been such a sook in public. The whole experience was very moving, and not just because it made me think about my grandfather. 

I saw the students responding in a similarly emotional way. They spoke up about bullying, booing at footballers, and the way different ethnic groups in Australia are perceived and treated. One of my students, a young man who generally seems to have not a care in the world, had tears in his eyes, just like I did. 

I saw the light in the eyes of the Courage to Care members as they were inspired by the responses of the young people in front of them. The conversations were serious and sombre. 

Every student took a wristband and put it on immediately, proud to be an Upstander. 

There is hope yet for our nation and our world. Young or old, we can make a stand against hatred and vilification.

All that is needed is the courage to care and to stand up for what is right.

  

The perils of creativity.

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I’ve had a really productive and creative month, especially in my writing. This is a good thing in one way, but I’ve often observed that I am at my most creative when I feel oppressed or angry about something.  This has, in fact, caused me to wonder what sort of mood I’d have to be in, and for how long, if I were to actually try to write a whole book.

Perhaps luckily for my family and friends,, that’s not what I’ve been inspired to write. More than ever before, I’ve become really serious about writing poetry. There have been times when the ideas and words just poured out of me and landed on the page rather effectively. There have also been plenty of times when the writing and crafting of meaning was far more labour intensive because I wanted to make sure it was exactly right.

Last week, as I was driving home from somewhere – I can’t quite remember which day it was – the thought struck me that I should try my hand at a more conventional classical ballad style of poetry, like so many of the longer poems that I know and love. I’ve spent my life loving the work of poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth, and while I am not pretending for a moment that I am anywhere near as good as them, the rich narrative style of their poems is something I thought I’d like to try to emulate.

Inspiration struck as I saw a picture in my mind’s eye and decided to develop it as an allegorical ballad with a fairy tale feeling and style about it.  Parts of the poem have flowed quite naturally, and others have been painstakingly written and rewritten.  At one point, I nearly threw the whole thing away and gave up on the whole thing as a ridiculously bad idea. I had hit the cold, hard barrier of writer’s block, and for several days this unfinished piece taunted me. Who was I kidding, anyway? I might be good with words, but I would never be that good.

In typical fashion, this famine of ideas turned out to be the ironic part of my life having a good old laugh at my own expense.  At the end of a week where I had three very long days at work, survived a stressful meeting, and was playing cordial host to a four-day-long tension headache, my brain woke me at 2am on Saturday with some lines that I had to either write down that instant or lose them forever.

I wrote those lines rather clumsily into my phone, hoping that autocorrect and my headachey,sleep deprived eye-finger coordination didn’t play merry hell with what I thought I was writing. You can imagine my surprise the following day when those lines actually turned out to be just what I had wanted. 

The poem isn’t finished yet. I am not sure how long it will take before I am happy enough to publish it. When I do, though, it won’t matter if nobody else likes it or understands it, or if it is not hailed as a work of literary genius. I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. What matters is what the poem means to me. 

For now, it’s a labour of love.  Hopefully I will be ready to share it with the world soon. 

My Canadian brother from another mother.

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I have a friend that I love a lot. We live thousands of kilometres apart, but we spend part of every day talking with each other. It’s a beautiful friendship that has grown out of a chance meeting, a random response to a random tweet.

When I visited Canada last year, I spent some time at Sean’s house.
I remember we were both nervous about finally meeting each other after talking online for so long, but that first hug was just incredible. The next few days were proof that our friendship was real. Even our partners commented on how it seemed like Sean and I had known each other forever.

On the morning that we left, the mood was sombre. Goodbyes were tearful. As I was about to go, he said, “Please don’t leave.”

My response was immediate and honest. “I’ll never completely be gone. You’re my brother now. I’ll be back.”

When I do go back in September this year, Sean and I are going to have our own little adoption ceremony. What we have is a friendship more valuable than we ever realised it would be when we started joking with one another on Twitter way back when.

Today, when I signed into the instant messenger that we both use, I found these words from him.

You Just Rock Jun 19 2015 ©2015 WordyNerdBird

He may have known how timely his words were, but I don’t think he realises just how healing and restoring it was to read these words after a tough week in which I had confronted some tough challenges, both professionally and personally.

It’s so incredibly good to know you have someone who has your back, no matter what critics and problems life might throw at you. Sean is by no means the only one of my friends who does that, but I wouldn’t want to be without him. He has his own very special place in my heart, and nobody could replace him.

Thank you, Sean, from the bottom of my heart, for your words and for being an amazing friend and brother.

Broken.

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You did… what?
That was you?

I’m stunned. I am horrified.
I don’t know what to make of this.
I never would have believed that of you.

You’re the one who speaks of unity and trust.
You’re the one who is supposed to look after us… to look after me.

You’re the leader. The protector. The mentor. The guide.
At least, I thought you were.

How can I trust you now?
There are shards and splinters of faith scattered all over the place.
The fine, toxic dust of of doubt is still in the air, settling slowly, tainting everything, choking the life out of the relationship between us.

You lied. You cheated. You schemed.
You took every opportunity to work things for your own benefit.
How carefully you wove the web of deceit, trying to camouflage your actions and to conceal the heart behind them.

As for unity… you chose to break that, too.
It was no accident. You knew exactly what you were doing.
At some point, you decided that your own interests are more important than our interests… that your future takes precedence over any shared future that we might have had.

Maybe you hoped that you could do what you did without anyone knowing.

Maybe you hoped that you could evade the consequences that were always going to be inevitable.
Maybe you thought that people would just trust you to do the right thing, and  that you wouldn’t face any questions.Could you really have believed that such betrayal could go unnoticed?
It’s impossible to imagine how.
Maybe that’s a confirmation of just how different we are.

Don’t tell me I don’t know anything about it.
Don’t tell me that it has nothing to do with me.
This has everything to do with me.

This has everything to do with how I look at you, how I respond to you, how I respect you.
Only now am I beginning to realise how little I ever knew you.
I always assumed you were genuine. I never questioned your integrity, or my loyalty to you.

That’s all changed.Everything has changed.
I don’t even want to be in the same room as you.
I don’t want to hear you try to rationalise what you’ve done.
And you certainly don’t want to hear anything I have to say to you.

Don’t tell me everything will be okay. It won’t.
Things will never be the same again.

Acc-cen-tu-ate the positive, e-lim-in-ate the negative…

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I was reading a newsletter in my school staff email this morning when one paragraph really caught my attention.

“Can you remove yourself from people who are negative or holding you back?
The quality of our lives will depend on the quality of people with whom we surround ourselves… It is a sign of our maturity to identify any negative effects of others and then have the courage to remove ourselves from that influence.” (Vital Staff, 2015, 14)

This is a truth that many people don’t realise.

I’m not just talking about people who don’t like your haircut or the way you dress. I’m not even talking about people who don’t share your views on politics or religion. I’m talking about those people who bitch, backstab, undermine, conspire and manipulate so that people they perceive as “powerful” will see and treat others in a negative and often quite destructive way.

I know the effects certain negative people have had on my life in the past, both personally and professionally. I’ve seen friendships and relationships eroded gradually until they no longer exist. I’ve seen different people nearly bring down a church, a school, a family. It’s ugly. It’s an incredibly awful thing to experience.

I’ve also experienced the benefits of removing those people from my life. It hasn’t been easy, nor has it been painless, but it has been totally worth it.

Negativity is a cancer that attacks and weakens from within. We often can’t detect it working away under the surface, threatening to overtake and kill the very thing it’s feeding on.

When we do realise it’s there, the best way to treat it is to cut it out and leave it behind. We can’t afford to allow it to continue to grow, because it will gradually choke the joy, and then the life, out of us.

I can hear some of you thinking, “But wait. You’re a Christian. Aren’t you supposed to love and forgive and all that?”

Sure. Love and forgiveness are at the top of the list of ways in which we’re meant to treat other people.

However, that doesn’t mean we have to allow people to continue behaving in ways that are hateful and harmful to themselves and others. How is it showing love to someone if others just let them destroy every relationship they have? How is it forgiving or restoring them if there’s no stand against the behaviours that will eventually destroy both them and other people?

So, when it comes to my friendships, relationships, and interactions with other people, I will continue to choose to surround myself with the positive and constructive, and excise the negative. I can, and will, continue to remove the negative people from my life.

There’s no compulsion for you to follow suit. There’s no obligation for you to keep me in your friends list if you think I have a negative effect on you.

I know not everyone will like me. I realise that even the people who like me don’t like everything I do or say. It would be naive of me to think otherwise.
You know what? I’m entirely okay with that. I don’t need to be liked by everyone. I don’t need a fan club. And I am more than happy to accept that there are some who will be much happier without me. That’s life.

I do not desire to be everything to everyone. At some point earlier in my life I did, but I have long stopped trying to achieve that, because I found out the hard way that it simply isn’t possible. That’s a sure-fire recipe for heartbreak.

What I do desire is for the people close to me to continue to be positive and constructive in my life.

I relish the freedom to choose who and what will speak into my life and influence my thoughts and actions, and the freedom to be who I am without always looking over my shoulder, afraid of the judgement and negativity of others.

Tired.

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I am so very ready to sleep throughout the entire three hours’ drive home from Melbourne.
I didn’t sleep much last night. It was a hot almost-summer night and my pain levels were beyond the stupid end of the scale. Truth be told, they still are, even though I’ve been throwing drugs down my throat whenever I’m able to.

I’ve spent most of today either wishing I were asleep or actively trying not to be, given that I am at the hospital with family again and sleeping on the job is not likely to prove too popular with the others, given that they are all pretty beat too.

It is an enormous blessing that the immediate threat to my father-in-law’s life appears to have passed. Now the family must begin to consider questions of care, ongoing assessments and rehabilitation. We have no idea what he will or will not be able to do.
What does seem clear is that the short-term future is going to become a new “normal” of more routine hospital visits once he is moved to a hospital closer to home, which is infinitely better than the ICU waiting room vigil we’ve been keeping since his accident a few weeks ago.

We’re on our way home. I’m off to sleep. ‘Night.

Tiny, huge victories.

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A week ago there was not a lot of hope. The doctors thought that there was insufficient progress or response to indicate any great hope of recovery.
That changed in the blink of an eye – literally.

We stood by the bed and my husband spoke to his father.
“Hi Dad, it’s Fred.”
Eyes that had been closed for ten days opened a little.
I saw it; so did the nurse.
We didn’t know that the same thing had happened to my brother-in-law a couple of hours earlier.

Those two responses were tiny, but huge. They were enough to show the doctors that there was response and possibly recognition.
Feeling encouraged, we all sat outside in the courtyard and talked.
We looked at a patient across the courtyard, under a tree in his reclining chair, and commented how nice it would be if we could do that with Dad “one day”.

Since then, there has been significant improvement and more direct response. He has nodded slightly for yes and moved his head sideways for no.
Then, this morning, there was a golden moment. I commented to him that the family were being noisy. He raised his eyebrow in a “What’s new?” expression. Everyone saw it and we all laughed.

I could have cheered. This was the first time since his accident that he revealed his sense of humour. This was more than I had hoped for this early.

A little later I was holding his hand. I talked with him and gently squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. I had to swallow my tears. I am so thankful I don’t even know how to express it.

And now, Dad is in his reclining chair outside, in the sunshine and surrounded by his wife and sons and a few other family members. He turns his head when his son speaks to him. He dozes off and wakes again, and looks up to see blue sky and sunshine. He nods when I ask him if the sunshine feels good on his skin.
Was it really only a week ago that we thought this was a pipe dream?

We don’t know what the future holds or how he will progress, but it’s such a blessing to see that the man we know and love as our dad is still with us. His body may be a bit broken but his spirit is not.

Even through the pain, fear and despair of the last few weeks, we can see that we have been very, very blessed. Every victory is tiny, but huge.
Thank you, God.

Well, this sucks.

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There are times when admitting that you can’t physically do something you desperately want to do really hurts.

Just when you think you’ve come to terms with chronic pain and the physical limitations that go with it, something new crops up to remind you, yet again, that some doors close to you when you have a physical disability.

It’s not that other people tell you that you can’t do it. It’s knowing that trying will cause you physical pain and misery, and that you’ll end up regretting making the effort the minute you realise you can’t give it 100% and do the job like you used to.  So you don’t take it on.  You just internalise the disappointment and keep doing the things you can still do, without telling anyone how much it sucks for your own body to be the source of your misery.