How to forget what day it is

Dear Bowerbirders. How fitting that this is arriving late in your inbox because I had no idea what day it was, an oversight I hope many of you are also enjoying right now (aka ‘dead week’ as Austin Kleon recently posted about). This one is going out to all of you, paid subscriber or not, because next fortnight I’ll be in a tent by the Snowy and as far away as I can possibly get from my devices. Normal programming will resume in February as 2023 properly cranks into gear.

I’m writing this with impressively blistered hands because yesterday I climbed more than halfway up an enormous Cedar tree in a gorgeous shaded picnic area off the side of the Black Spur on Wurundjeri land. I wouldn’t say I’m not a tree-climber - I’ve been known to haul my adult body up various well-limbed trees to sit or hang with the kids over the years - but this was SERIOUS tree-climbing, complete with harness and pulley and a foot ascender (the thing that attaches to your foot so you can magically look like you are literally walking up the side of a trunk).

I didn’t think I could do it. Even with the pro-kit I was strapped into and the phenomenal expertise of arborist, tree lover & climber extraordinaire, Rebecca Barnes, the idea of pulling myself up a rope into the heights of the tree seemed to defy gravity (and the additional serves of prawns and pudding over the last few days). But they don’t call me stubbornly determined for nothing. Yes, the first couple of metres hurt. But then I started to get the hang of it: right leg up, hands high on the rope, haul body up til knee is straight, push the knot up til it locks, take a moment. And I really took the moments, sitting back in the harness hanging among the branches, wiping sweat and blissful smelling cedar-stuff from my face, looking down at my girls both determinedly roping themselves in with Bec’s help below me, checking out the creek I hadn’t spotted from ground-level babbling over the rocks through the bush.

I don’t know if Tree View is a thing. And maybe it’s not as transformative as the Overview Effect - “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus” - which has obsessed me since I first learned of it, but looking down from the branches of that tree did something profound to my brain and was certainly an easier adventure than flying to the moon.

A ‘state of awe’ is one I reckon I’m going to continue to look for in 2023. I found it lots in this past year, paying attention since reading Maggie Shipstead’s GREAT CIRCLE (a fabulous book for summer and one I interviewed Shipstead about) and Julia Baird’s PHOSPHORESCENCE. I found it on the top of the Tongariro Crossing, above towering clouds from an aeroplane, watching my fierce kids do hard things, being present at the moment my grandmama died.

We spend a lot of time looking down, or away, or at emails or our phone or the bazillion things on our to do list, or just not looking up. Mental note to self to not only pay attention to the possibility of awe, but, when I’ve noticed the feeling, to sit with it a while.

We couldn’t hang in the Cedar all day. It was hot and we were in need of a cold drink and to get on with the other adventures we had planned. But I wouldn’t have minded being at mid-tree level for longer. In fact I’m planning on going higher and if all things align, might even go exploring the Grove of Giants with The Tree Projects - a fabulous volunteer org committed to protecting the Big Trees of Tasmania, who our tree mate, Bec, introduced us to. (You can shop their stunning big tree posters or sign their open letter Calling for the Protection of the Huon Valley’s Grove of Giants).

I hope that whatever your inbetween days look like; whether you are beachside or still at work, you can keep an eye out for moments of awe, or just haul yourself partway up a tree and hang about for awhile. K x

Doing

• Serving the Christmas pudding for the first time without Grandmama. It was a tough one, found myself walloped with a grief I (perhaps naively) hadn’t anticipated on Christmas Eve. But there was also joy, and I hadn’t over boiled it, and my gorgeous cousin made us all cry with her words about missing our matriarch but having more matriarchs in the making. Grandmama would have been proud as punch of the lot of us.

• Uploading our Summer Series: 12 top episodes of The First Time Podcast you’ve loved (we can tell from the stats!). We kicked off by revisiting our first ever episode and interview with Claire G. Coleman this week and the eps will be dropping wherever you get your podcasts all through Jan. Look out for conversations with Helen Garner, Sarah Winman, Natasha Lester, our social media guru and advisor Shay Gardner and more.

• Subscribing to Highbrow, Lowbrow, Mediumbrow - the new newsletter from my very funny and talented and newsletter obsessed co-host Katherine Collette.

Reading

• Every Version of You - the debut spec-fic novel from Grace Chan has been on my TBR since it came out and I’m SO glad I finally got to it. She describes this as ‘soft-cyberpunk-with-feelings’ and it melted my brain in all the good ways. Hard recommend.

• My beautiful friend Penni Russon gifted me a copy of Aug 9 Fog by Kathryn Scanlan and I read it in the plaster waiting room while I waited for my daughter to get her sparkly pink cast. It’s a moving, evocative slip of a thing, assembled from the found diaries of an elderly woman. I loved it.

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is one of those novels I really should have read by now, but seeing as I’m trying to take ‘should’ out of my vocab, I’ll just say I’m very very glad I’ve now inhaled it.

• Lots of lovely 2023 bookmail coming in, all going straight into the book box for camping, but I’ve started with an early copy of Pip Williams’ new novel The Bookbinder of Jericho and loving being back in the world of Oxford and now bookbinders (even though I’m slightly unnerved that two of her main character’s share the same names as two of mine! Ah, the strange coincidental brain meld of writers).

Watching

• Finally making time for the second season of The White Lotus. Gee, Mike White is good. Gotta love a show where you can’t decide who you most want to end up dead.

Thank you, as ever, for reading and subscribing xx Look forward to filling your inbox with bowerbirding in 2023 x