Yoga Camp Part 2

So my dear friend Elizabeth and I went on our annual pilgrimage to yoga camp. This actually began with sitting in Friday night traffic on Bell St and snarling at the other drivers, "Move it, buster! We need to get to yoga camp!"

The experience continued with teeming rain, fallen trees and flooded roads, none of which inhibited our enjoyment. We didn't even find out what happened in the election until after we'd got home again, that's how cut off from the world we were. Bliss! Though I was so worried about missing early morning yoga that I leapt out of bed at the sound of Elizabeth's phone, flicked on the light and started getting dressed, until a sleepy Liz informed me (with admirable restraint) that it was actually only midnight...

This year, our course focused on meditation, which is something I know nothing about and feared I would be very bad at. During our 5.30am yoga class, the teacher told us that we should be still, and allow our breath to move through the physical body, without disturbing it; and suddenly I saw that in meditation, the thoughts should be allowed to move through the still mind in the same way, and suddenly it all made much more sense.

I think my favourite moment was when the whole class chimed ommmmm, the harmonies resonating, weaving in and out, and vibrating through us as if we were bells.

Om is the sound that created the universe, you know. In the beginning was the word, the breath of life, and the wind passed over the waters. And certainly all the dams were full. At the ashram, Swami Atma told us they'd been chanting for rain. She giggled. "Well, that worked!"

Library Update

Alert readers may recall that this was supposed to be the year of the library. Well, it has been a long and at times frustrating journey, but there is light at the end of the tunnel at last.

It turns out that the "purpose-built" library space is not, after all, particularly well-suited to housing a library, and the school has decided to use that big open space in the middle of the new Learning Centre (as we must now call it) as a double classroom space next year. (This means there will be six classes in the new building. I really hope it's not too noisy in there.) The same space will also double as an assembly hall, with students' desks folded away through some miracle of modern furniture technology.

Meanwhile, the library has been allocated one of the upstairs classrooms in the old building. It might seem that this decision has merely brought us back to where we started, but personally, I'm not unhappy with the outcome. The classroom given to the library this time is actually nicer than the original one, on the eastern side of the building, so not quite so hot, and with a lovely outlook onto trees and roofs. The room is spacious, light, airy and beautifully proportioned. I'm happy that the library has a discrete space of its own, a proper room, rather than a few shelves floating uncertainly in an ocean of multi-purpose space.

We're hoping to do a whiz-bang job of redecoration to really make the library a distinctive and inviting place; we want to incorporate some of the school's neglected heritage items, like some beautiful indigenous artifacts currently languishing in a glass case in the bottom corridor, and a huge collection of shells and coral that my mother remembers being at the school in the 1940s. It would be nice to use some of the fantastic archival material that was dug up for the school's 80th birthday a couple of years ago, too.

So at the moment, I'm feeling quietly confident that we can pull it all together. The best news is that the school has committed to a full-time library staff member next year. I hope we can show that it's a great investment.

Oh Dear

Look what happened to my glasses! I copped a ball in the face while playing cricket with Alice and this was the result (this, and a bruise on the snoz).

In thirty-odd years of being a glasses-wearer, I've never actually broken a pair of specs before. Though in retrospect I should probably have attacked those big owlish eighties frames with a hammer.

I've had to resort to my old round wire-framed granny glasses, which make my face look strangely naked. I think I will need to invest in some new specs. The question is, what next? I borrowed some thin, pinky-purple, rectanglar frames from a friend, but they seemed too square or something. My face is too small to successfully carry off those really emphatic thick frames ("publisher glasses," ahem!). What's the next trend going to be?

Woe is me. I hate glasses shopping.

Forcing the Issue

When I went to prise Alice out of bed this morning, both girls were waiting for me, waving these tiny placards. "No school today! No school today!"

I made them go anyway.

Evie has decided that the only food she can bear to eat is Fruity Bites. Not the only breakfast food, the only FOOD. Michael claims to have thrived on an exclusive childhood diet of Coco Pops, so I suppose there is family precedent. As a picky eater, Evie gives Lola a run for her money. I hope it doesn't last forever, because it is very tedious trying to navigate through the ever-diminishing list of foods she will deign to consume. (For a gripping account of Evie's infected toenail, and the successful treatment thereof, please see her blog.)

On the bright side, last night Alice heaved herself off the couch and announced, 'I'm tired, I'm going to bed.' This has never, ever happened before. Of course, she didn't actually go to sleep until about an hour and a half later, after numerous trips out of bed for hugs and pleas for her doona to be straightened, but still, it's a step in the right direction.

As parents, we are not very good at discipline (to put it mildly), but sometimes things seem to work themselves out anyway.

The Chip On The Shoulder...

So, I was at the presentation of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards this week.

It was a lovely event (nice lunch too), opened by encouraging speeches from both the new Minister of the Arts, Simon Crean, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard herself, mentioning that this was the first time that Children's and Young Adult Literature had been recognised in these awards, and how appropriate this was, given the strength of Australian writing across all genres and ages. Then the awards themselves were presented: to Eva Hornung for Dog Boy, Fiction; Grace Karskens, The Colony, Non Fiction; Bill Condon, Confessions of A Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God, Young Adult; and Lorraine Marwood, Star Jumps, Children's Literature.

BUT (and this is where the chip comes in!) it was disappointing to note that some representatives of the media packed up and left after the two adult awards were presented; they didn't even stay to hear the winners of the YA and Children's categories.

And apparently a prominent national radio book show did discuss the adult award-winning books in some detail, but barely mentioned the fact that there had also been Children's and YA awards. Let alone name the winners. Let alone talk about them.

For heaven's sake. When will the snobs of the literary world come to their senses and realise that without young readers, there are no adult readers? That kids read more books than adults do? Don't they remember that they grew up on kids' books too, that the books they first fell in love with, the books that taught them to love reading, were kids' books? Or did they all start straight in on Jude The Obscure and The Brothers Karamazov?

Here endeth the rant.

Something About Trains - by Jane Siberry

One of my favourite songs. And it goes a little something like this...

something about trains
something about love
something about this old earth
and the way it looks from up above

something about satellites
something about down below
something about the hissing of that old steam iron
as you press your clothes

beam it up, beam it down, across the world from town to town
most of the time when I'm walking the line, I'm looking at the ground

but every time I hear that whistle blowing
every time I hear that old black crow
every time I hear that whistle blowing
I find myself a-shivering in my soul

something about love
when things go wrong
when you can't find the one that you love
you keep movin' on

you walk the lonely valley
you walk the line alone
but this old earth is always there
you don't feel so alone

beam it up, beam it down, across the world from town to town
most of the time when I'm walking the line I'm looking at the ground

but every time I hear that whistle blowing...

but you wake up in the middle of the night
and a train whistle blows and a dog barks
and something's not quite right
and a cry is sent up from this earth
into the silent sky

beam it up, beam it down, across the world from town to town
most of the time when I'm walking the line I'm looking at the ground

but every time I hear that whistle blowing
every time I hear that old black crow
every time I hear that whistle blowing
I find myself a-shivering in my soul

something about trains
something about love
something about this old earth
and the way it looks tonight