Hey. Hello. It’s been a while.

Three years, to be exact-ish. I do love a good ish.

Despite my silence, many things have happened. Writing things. Non-writing things. Big things. Small things. Hard things. Harder things.

In fact, when I look at the date of my last post – 3 May, 2019 – it’s immediately obvious to me why the silence began. It was exactly a week later that my father died, bringing with it the many things that loss does. And then, as my breath was starting to return, almost exactly a year later that my mother died, bringing with it the many things, compounded now and layered, and in the midst of it all I flew back-and-forth across the country multiple times, sorting and sifting through emotions and things and people and feelings, and walking and walking through the bush behind my childhood home, the clay of Bendigo feeling, as it always does, so firm beneath my feet. The metaphor that has struck me so many times over the years returning to me again, even as I wondered whether all that is now changed, whether I’ll keep coming back to this place, whether I’ll ever return to those scribbled notes, write that poem that’s been sleeping in the back of my mind for so long.

The thing is – one thing is – I talk too much and say too little. I ramble. I endlessly circle and get lost in metaphor. I start and don’t finish, can’t find a structure, resist it. Words have been difficult the last few years. Plot has been impossible. I don’t know yet if that’s going to change but I’m taking little steps. I don’t think we need the firmness of clay; I think we can learn to stay steady on sand, to soften ourselves as the surface shifts beneath our feet.

I’ve returned to this space several times since my last post, stared at the wall of white and the silence and wondered what to do with it. Who even blogs anymore anyway? Isn’t all this stuff on Twitter and Instagram and ye olde Facebook, served up in banter and small palatable bites?

The truth is that I quite like banter and palatable things. I’m even fond of a little biting. But I also like talking too much and saying too little. I like rambling and endlessly circling and getting lost in metaphor and forgetting all about structure and throwing words out into the white silence. I have things to say and thoughts to ponder and so I’ve decided to return to this little room of my own – sporadically, self-indulgently, possibly sometimes nonsensically. When I think about it, those three ‘ly’s sum up some really important things about my creative life. Random notes and scribbles, moments scooped up and stored, then set aside. Maybe they become something or maybe they’re already what they’re going to be, in all their mess and formlessness. Anyway. It doesn’t seem like a bad place to begin again.