I’ve been writing this last couple of weeks. Not just putting down a hundred words here or there, but sitting here for hours at a time. Hours when I don’t feel like sitting here. Hours when I’m not sure what needs to be written next. Hours when I rather desperately want to be... anywhere else, really. I’m aiming for five thousand words a weekend which, for me, is an extraordinarily ambitious goal that I couldn’t even hope to meet if my mother wasn’t rather busy in Australia at the moment planning my wedding.

Unreasonably, though, she has refused to make every decision. Yesterday we had a conversation that went like this:

"But muuuuum. You asked me last week what you could do to help me with this next book, and I said you were already doing the best thing possible by planning the wedding."

"That might be," she said sternly, "but I am NOT making the final decision on catering all by myself. You talk to Mike about this... Lisa... are you paying attention? Pay attention. Write this down. You talk to Mike about this and email me back and tell me what you want. Did you write that down?"

“I can’t talk to Mike,” I sulked. “Mike’s in Vanuatu doing fieldwork. I don’t know if he’s going to have email during the next two weeks. Or cell phone reception.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” Mum said, unmoved. “Did you write it down? I’m not going to do anything else on this until I hear from you again.”

I did write it down, or I wouldn’t have remembered it long enough to write about it now. First drafting is a weird, weird place. The story takes over every spare corner of your mind, and some corners that aren’t spare. I’m having a hard time keeping track of the rest of my life at the moment. Thank the good Lord for mothers who were born event planners. 

So while I was thinking about fictional characters in Thailand this weekend instead of catering, I spent some time dwelling on these words from Rilke which have found their way into the first draft. First drafts being what they are, goodness knows if they’ll stay there, so I thought I’d share them now so you can think on them too should you be so inclined:

“Oh, not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. 

…Ah, but what can we take along 

into that other realm? Not the art of looking

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness, 

and the long experience of love, just what is wholly – 

unsayable.”

Thanks for stopping by,

lisa