A slice of orange floating in the bath oils....
There is peace in my heart these days: or, to be less religious-sounding, there is a certain peacefulness in my heart lately. I almost hesitate to mention in it; not because I think that saying it will make it go away, but because I have claimed at other times, to myself and others, that I am happier, calmer, these days; and it hasn't really been true, yet, or the feeling has faded again.
The short-term version is: I have finally gotten over the overwhelming, frustrated rage at being sent out of Australia four years ago; that, although I had embedded so many older and newer dreams in the image of that one job, that one new life (that sunny, happy life, warmer and more entertaining and sexier; a fulfilling job working with people who more closely share my ideas and interests; head of department, and I heard last week that the woman who took it in my place is soon to be Director of the Conservatory; and, of course, the little house in Woolloomoolloo, with the boyfriend working in the garden – all of which assemble many of my experiences and hopes from San Francisco and Los Angeles in one package, and gave them an antipodean spin I found irresistible), I have finally gotten over losing all those dreams for a different life, a different scale of expectations. Something that only time could have done.
But there is a longer-term aspect, because frustrated rage has not been unusual for me, ever since I was seventeen – I have often felt cheated; I would like to say 'obscurely cheated', but I have tended to be obsessively specific about what went wrong with my life at various points. Wrong university, shabby jobs, AIDS, Reid dies, shabby jobs, failed composer, failed performer, yet more shabby jobs, and of course debts and forced moves. A long and tiresome whine....
But I simply don't feel much that way any more. It is interesting that my goals are increasingly inner ones – to write, to think; I have always been concerned with my inner world, but now perhaps I am trying to make my outer world match up with the inner one, rather than the other way around. Maybe it's just age, maybe it's just time – maybe it's even this opportunity to write freely and yet connect to reading eyes. I would want some specific event to have made this change, if it is one, happen, but probably there isn't one – as my analyst said when I went through Jungian analysis between 1987 and 1992, if it actually works, you won't know why or how.
I don't mind that I don't know. It is the holiday season; I have certainly had a fair number of holiday seasons alone, but this one doesn't bother me – I'm not steeling myself for anything; the small pleasures are just fine with me: dinner with friends, parties here and there, buying a few gifts. The small but living tree, decorated with ornaments many of which were made by my sisters (in some cases as much as twenty years ago). And especially all those things we use to bring strong tastes and smells into the dead winter landscape, the gifts of a stronger, waxing earth: the dates, the almonds in honey, the chocolates: the winter apples from a colleague's tree, the oranges.
The holiday – all the holidays, in a slice of orange....
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