It’s elderberry season … I foraged these from an abandoned yard in the middle of the city and there was a thick patch of red clover near by, as well, so I picked a big bag of that.
Every summer I make elderberry elixirs ahead of winter. It’s great for when I can feel myself getting a cold …a dose of this seems to stave it off.
The dark shine of the berries is so beautiful. Here they are soaking in my kitchen sink before processing.
My whole adult life I have kept journals, capturing bits of my life in words and images. I’ve also taught journal writing classes from time to time. Journal writing is a key part of my creative process as a writer and my self-care regime as a human. Journals get some bad press – sometimes seen as self-indulgent, angsty or just plain pointless. I can only share my own experience with keeping a journal, which has been positive, helpful and life-affirming.
Earlier this year I was part of a literary panel and a member of the audience asked us the question ‘If you were the only person left on the planet, would you still write?’ I had the microphone in my hand, so I answered first: ‘Of course!’ I said ‘I love writing, it wouldn’t bother me if no one else was going to read it.’ I anticipated my fellow panelists would agree with me, but instead the other three writers were looking at me incredulously and answered with variations of ‘Hell no! Why bother?’ and talked about how they write with an audience in mind.
This could be a factor in the journal or no journal divide, perhaps?
Keeping a journal is essentially writing to/for yourself. You either find intrinsic value in this, or find it as interesting as watching paint dry.
I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about journal writing for a few years but was wrestling with whether other people would find it interesting, or horribly self-indulgent? I decided to leave it to fate (aka, a panel of board members) by applying for a grant, figuring if the panel granted my proposal, it would be signal enough that there was some value in the idea. They liked it and I received a grant to create the book.
The book is nearly done and all going well with the printing process it will be released on October 15th.
I have gone through some real ups and downs during the making of this book..it is a very personal, vulnerable, possibly somewhat naive book…it is not the New Zealand way to be so ‘out there’ with emotions and sometimes ugly private stuff. I feel a little like I am about to walk onto a stage in a crowded auditorium, flash my undies and then cry….or something.
My journals aren’t ‘beautiful’, the visual parts are usually pretty haphazard, hastily daubed, scrawled or slapped together and the writing is not profound or intellectual…it is unfettered expression…and is offered as such. Now all I can do is wait for the publication process to unfold and hope that the book is met with open hearts, just as it was created with one.
Last year I received a grant from the Earle Creativity Trust to write a book about my life-long practice of keeping a journal. It was so wonderful to get the grant and I’ve been busy working on this time-bound project, which has to be completed in 2016 (a condition of the grant.)
I finished year one of a permaculture design course last year. I also had a go at making yoga teaching my main source of income, really didn’t like it and am back to teaching just two classes a week, which is just the right amount for me. I had a year’s contract working for an environmental trust, doing communications and events work, and now I’m back at Massey, teaching writing.
Working with the Palmerston North City Library, I edited this anthology – you can download a .pdf version here. I gave a talk about nature writing at the Massey University-based symposium, ‘Working With Nature: understanding entanglements of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene’. I have a lot to say about nature and writing and nature writing, so I really enjoyed being a part of this great event.
I taught at the 2016 Kahini Retreat – it was terrific, a whole weekend of being steeped in writing and writing conversation.
Me and my friend, Nga Taonga Puoro artist Rob Thorne collaborated on a performance combining poetry with music, called ‘Tohu’. Huge satisfying fun, and we hope to do it again soon.
I was part of Massey University’s ‘writing in / writing of’ talk series, in a panel about Manawatu writers.
In May, I read with Janet Charman, Belinda Diepenheim and Johanna Aitchison at the Palmerston North City Library. I’ve loved Janet’s writing for a long time, so it was a real privilege to read with her when she visited Palmerston North from Auckland.
Last Friday was National Poetry Day and I read with other Seraph Poets and friends at Vic Books in Wellington, Paula Green took some great photographs.
My most recent creative act, though, has been painting moons. My friend is opening a shop in town with a theme of earth-based and earth-friendly hand made things. So I’ve been making moon gift tags, wall strings and cards for the shop. It is so much more enjoyable than writing poetry, which is always kind of masochistic and gnarly for me.
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Another beautiful permaculture garden I visited recently, is the Paekakariki School garden. Lots of schools have gardens these days, but they are usually hotch-potch patches of vegetables gone to seed and a few calendula…not the Paekakariki School garden. It’s clearly lovingly and frequently tended, with huge compost and mulch piles, a working greenhouse and an effusion of vegetables, herbs and flowers. There is enough sowing and planting activity happening in this beautiful collective garden, that before Christmas they had a huge plant sale of plants they had grown in the greenhouse.
Below – greenhouse to the left, borage growing freely everywhere, herb and vege beds…somewhat inexplicably, old fridges used for storing tools to the right…
I love how there are so many flowers – foxgloves, violas, chamomile, borage – growing around the vegetables. So pretty, and so good for the bees!
Below – chamomile….parsley seed heads. (Oh how I love a spindly seed head!)
Below – Fine looking garlic crop! Strawberries growing in tyres…
(Below) – This is intriguing – looks like they are constructing a greenhouse from an old jungle-gym frame and recycled plastic bottles threaded onto bamboo canes. Good upcycling, but looks very labour intenstive…
(Below) One perfect viola – so so pretty… What an inspiring community garden! I didn’t want to leave!
It’s quite the year for foxgloves – they have self-seeded everywhere and are growing tall and pretty, especially around the front porch.
People don’t seem to use front (street-facing) porches, but mine gets the morning sun, so I put a little table made from an old sewing machine base and chair there for morning cups of tea. Passers-by always startle if they spot me – as if I were lurking on my own property, ha ha!
Sun has been a rare thing around here this spring and I’m despairing a bit at my vegetable garden. Seeds I have planted are not sprouting (could it be because we’ve had an unseasonal frost every week since September?) and the summer seedlings I’ve planted are either not growing at all or are withering. It doesn’t look like a November garden.
But on the mornings a bit of sun does show up…
So yesterday I turned 40.
Here is me at three years old.
This is my favourite photograph of me as a kid.
I’m holding a quail that my father shot. I thought it was asleep.
I carried it around and played with it for three days. Mum snuck into my room on the third night, took it off me (yes, I had it in my bed) and buried it. It was starting to smell. In the morning she told me it had flown out the window in the night.
It sums up my character – I quite often will only see what I want to see, and I usually want to see the best-case scenario. This has led to a lot of battering by life, but I think it also makes me compassionate.
My thirties began in my parent’s house in Taupo with an 80s party. The theme was ‘Come as yourself at 15’. There were lots of naughty schoolkids, punks, protestors and 80s fashionistas at the party (I mean the costumes of course…) I spent the night pogo-ing and 80s two-stepping to New Order, The Specials, Duran Duran and The Smiths. It was ace. Even more fun than the party was the next day when we all got up hungover and spent the whole morning eating breakfast and lounging around in our pyjamas. It was before everyone had kids and big sleepovers started to become too difficult, logistically.
At thirty I had a two year old child and a nine year old marriage.
My thirties have been so intense. They started fairly happy and then got quite dark and rocky for the latter part…but now the sun is returning.
I feel like my latter thirties knocked the stuffing out of me quite a lot.
I’ve felt forty for a few years, actually, so I’m happy that my chronological age has caught up.
Things I wanted at the start of my thirties included:
-to teach myself to knit, sew and grow vegetables
-to buy a house
-to become a yoga teacher
-to publish a book
-to have another baby
-to learn to drive again (I stopped for many years – nerves!)
-to conquer my irrational phobia of hospitals
-to keep chickens
-to walk the Tongariro crossing
-to do collaborative community art projects
-to find a spiritual community in Palmerston North
-be part of a community garden
I’ve done all those things!
YAY!
Here are some thoughts about all the stuff I wanted to achieve which I did achieve…
-owning a house is wonderful when you have kids. After living in three different flats with baby Willoughby from when he was 0-2, having our own place felt heavenly and still does. I love being able to provide this security for my kids and am grateful everyday.
-teaching yourself practical skills is empowering and fun
-community projects are enriching, rewarding (at times frustrating) and worthwhile
-your children really are your teachers. really really
-publishing a book is nice. very nice. but at the same time it is also pretty meaningless and did not provide me with the sense of fulfilment I thought it would. I now see that nothing does, except your relationship with yourself!
-Driving is very useful. Especially when you have kids. I am still a nervous driver. I have never driven in Wellington or Auckland. When I drive in the countryside at night I feel like I am in a horror film!
-Chickens are wonderful companions. They make me practice chicken meditation – which is to throw them a bunch of kale or silverbeet and then sit in a patch of sun and watch them peck at it. I love my chickens.
Thanks for reading this very ponderous pondering.
I’m working two jobs, my garden is a weedy mess, in a week it is the school holidays, I have nearly 100 essays to grade, I’m training to teach yoga, lately I only get to see my husband at bedtime…
…golly gee, I think I might publish a book.
While I’m at it, why don’t I start a new blog?
Some of you might say ‘why start a blog right now, Helen?’ and cynically think that it is just to publicise the book, that it is all about self-interest and the blowing of one’s own trumpet…
You’d be right.
The book is coming out with a wonderful small press, Seraph. When you publish with a small press you are accepting that there is little marketing budget and everything you can do to promote your own book is going to help a lot.
Welcome to my self-promoting soap-box.
Helen Lehndorf 