Selma In The City

Writer. Teacher, Misfit. Sydney, Australia

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Still imagining other lives, still turning the worlds in my head into stories, still trying to pronounce incontrovertible. Holding on to hard won hopefulness.

    • CONFLUENCE

      When I write online whether it be on some form of social media, or on a blog or website, a question always enters my mind which is ‘Am I just screaming into the void here?’ Nobody would be wrong for thinking that in the age of a never-ending carousel of social media influencers and content creators. Millions of them, in fact. It can be very easy to get lost in the crowd, to falter, to convince yourself that you are somehow insignificant.

      And then something unexpected happens, a moment of confluence.

      I live in a part of Sydney next to a park that is of great historical and ecological significance. It contains 19th century buildings that are heritage listed and more species of trees than there are in Central Park, New York. There are Aboriginal sites in this park dating back thousands of years. The park flows down to a bay that is part of the Sydney Harbour foreshore. The park is called Callan Park.

      I walk in Callan Park every day. I take lots of photos, many of which I post on Instagram along with my myriad musings on life. My posts were seen by a local community action group who advocate for protecting the park from being sold off for development, conserving the unique ecology and history of the park and to educate the community about the irreplaceable value of Callan Park. This group is known as Friends Of Callan Park.

      Last week it was NSW History Week and Friends Of Callan Park ran an exhibition following the theme of Keeping Stories: The People Of Callan Park. It was a beautiful exhibition held outside in the park, beside trees and heritage buildings that you could look at and enjoy as part of your daily walk. Through Instagram, I was asked to participate in the exhibition.

      I forgot to mention that Callan Park used to be a Psychiatric Hospital, so many of the exhibition panels were about former patients and medical staff. I wrote about the wonderful Australian poet, Michael Dransfield, who was a patient in the hospital in the 1970s. Due to popular demand, the exhibition is continuing until the end of October, which is fantastic and reveals that people still value learning about history. The fact that I was involved in the exhibition just goes to show that when it comes to the creative life, you never really know what lies around the corner and that you should always keep an open mind and not give up.

       

       

       

       

       

      slowly, ever slowly, we edge forward

    • That Old Celestial Force

      * For my dearest friend, Ms Karen, the most integral part of the Writers’ Collective –

      When I look back on my life I know I have made mistakes, everyone has. Sometimes those mistakes pertained to  my perception of my life or of myself. I often carried myself with a lament sounding in my head, struggling to refer to my life as being a glass half full, seeing that glass sitting on the kitchen table covered in fingerprints so thick they became interlayered, backpainted etchings, the hopes I held for the hours, the days, the weeks, the years of my life flying up, out and  into the ether. Until the glass was half empty.

      I tried to change my outlook a lot. Focusing on what I could do, instead of what I couldn’t. Staring up at the skies at night till the veins in my neck were straining, hoping for some kind of response from a celestial force. But there was nothing.

      Or so I thought. There was a celestial force at work and it was slowly changing my view of my life, of myself. That force gathered as many positively charged ions and free electrons, bits of stardust, as it could so it could send me what I needed. The people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the ones who became friends, to show me, encourage me, pointing like signposts, that the path I had found myself on was the right one. They were the golden years where we engaged so vigorously in our writing and creative pursuits we formed an unspoken writers’ collective. It was a family, we knew each other’s ins and outs, there was a comfort and ease to it as familiar as the way the sunset casts a golden glow on water , so enveloping we knew it would always be there. We hoped it would be.

      Time can pass in the cruellest of ways, throwing boulders in your path that impede your progress, making you lose sight of the horizon. When the boulders are there they trap you in a mundane world – eat, sleep, work; eat, sleep, work – it’s all you know how to do when you’re trying to survive. And before you  can remember how long it has been, ten years have passed, fifteen. All you can see in the midst of this passage of time are the shadows cast by the boulders, the golden years, the golden light, the golden times are so distant it’s like they happened to someone else.

      One thing I have learned in my time on this planet is that you should never underestimate that celestial force. It is tenacious and persistent, always waiting for the path to clear. And it has to clear, right? It can’t be blocked forever. It’s like one of Newton’s  Laws of Motion ‘ “For every blocked path that is intraversable, there is an equally traversable unblocked path.”

      I got tired of the path being blocked. I was really over it, so I cleared it physically and emotionally. And not long after I noticed the golden hues of the sunsets.  I could see the horizon and the people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the friends, waving at me. They hadn’t left. The golden years hadn’t happened to someone else, they had happened to me. The people who get you, get you no matter how long it’s been. As if time hasn’t passed at all.