The View From my Couch: Winter Sun.

So tired at the moment. Fatigue has come to bite me big time. Thinking, standing, breathing is all so effortful. The idea of washing my hair or even simply holding a conversation is overwhelming. I guess that's what happens when you heart decides to slow down to the 40s. It seems that puts a bit of a cramp in my style. A heart that goes blah......blah......blah is not all that useful on the energy front.

But today was a lovely Winter's day here in Melbourne. Little spots of sunlight falling through the thick tree canopy in our yard. When it's been so dark and dreary those little spots of light are truly beautiful. The season is changing and slowly the plants are awakening. Little blooms sprinkled all around the yard. I don't even know what these are called, but the little bonnets glow when the small shafts of sunlight fall on them. The smell of the Daphne is everywhere on the breeze at the moment making everything just a little easier.

I've always been drawn to forests and the earth. Maybe it's a Taurean thing, but they have always been my place of peace. Even when I meditate I visualise being in a forest. Lying on the ground looking up at the dappled sunlight trickling through the trees above. The smell of the earth and growing things filling my lungs. And so it is with where I live. On the edge of a temperate rainforest, complete with loamy earth and a multitude of ferns and mountain ash. An explosion of vibrant green and birdsong. Life and peace all rolled into one.

Tired or not, sitting in my backyard listening to the magpies warble and seeing those little spots of light and colour revives the spirit. I need to make an effort to sit outside more often. Just to sit in silence and soak in the life force that is beginning to hum in our garden once more. It may not soothe my body but it certainly soothes my soul.

Simple pleasures are desperately needed when life is so complex and overwhelming.

Michelle :)

The View From My Couch: Daphne

It's a miserable Winter's day here in Melbourne.  Even loving Winter, there are times when I am simply over our squelching driveway.  When receiving a face full of icy water when the wind catches one of the fern fronds is no longer humourous, or refreshing.  We are in the true heart of Winter.  When the house will no longer truly heat up, and the crispness of the air takes your breath away.  Even our randy and raucous possums are less likely to bash across our icy roof top at night.  Instead, taking their nocturnal frolicking to the warmer realm of our roof space.

I still enjoy the ethereal beauty of the thick fogs that smother sound and shrink the world.  Even yesterday driving home on our windy hills roads and not being able to see the bonnet of the car, was more adventure, than annoyance.  The hills take on an otherworldly beauty in Winter that I would never change.  But wet, chilly days, day after day, and a back yard that is now a bog, does wear on the nerves.

Just as I was ruing the mud that seeped up through my thongs yet again this morning, I caught a whiff of perfume.  Over near our bins, of all places, we have a variegated daphne bush.  It's a resilient little bugger.  It is surrounded by weeds and smelly bins.  It is frequently hit by boxes and bin bags swung by pouting children who feel that bin duty is below them.  It has been chewed on my possums and swallowed by vicious blackberry canes. Yet here, in the midst of this wasteland and a miserable Winter's day, it has flowered.  It's sweet perfume is caught on the wind, and seeps peace into your pours.  It's a smell of my childhood.  Up there with the jonquils and freesias of my grandmother's garden.

Now a little piece sits on top of my cabinet.  The strength of the perfume, incongruous with a bloom so tiny.  Yet the fragrance fills the room.  And I sit in my lounge room, breathing in the sweetness, looking out the window at the mist and damp boughs, and Winter seems wonderful again.

Michelle :)