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I never expected that a weekend trip to Dederang in October 2017 would spur a speedily negotiated farm purchase. I never expected that I would be a farmer, or that I would marry one. I never expected that I would be house-bound like most of the world during 2020 and 2021 and use that time to build a house. I never expected that I would like living a long way from many of the friends and family I’ve known for years and years. I never expected that all of that would make me happy, grounded, still. And yet here we are…

Photos of our house on the hill taken by the delightful Danii Forde at our 10 year wedding anniversay / house warming party in October 2022.

A Decade

I was 27 when I got married, just a baby.

When my younger sister got married just a couple of years later, I remember thinking to myself “she’s way too young to be getting married” despite the fact that she was actually the same I age I was.

Maybe I was right - 27 is way too young to be getting married - for me especially! I was a fledgling. I had sooooo far to go to figure out what kind of person I was - let alone who I wanted to be.

Our wedding was SO FUN. Perhaps especially so because most of our quite small list of favourite people in attendance already knew each other and very happily cross pollinated, danced and took the whole thing about as seriously as we did. There was no aisle, no white dress, no anxious ceremonial anything that wasn’t necessary. We had a blast.

I vaguely remember saying something or other on the night about not AT ALL expecting things to be easy breezy. Marcus and I were (are…?) very different. We have (had…?) different intellectual interests, different speeds, different friendships, different hobbies, and I think would have even said we weren’t exactly sure we wanted the same things from life.

Which is why I am so damn lucky to have him. He is such a grounded, consistent, diligent, caring, generous, emotionally self-contained, self-assured and independent person. He is the perfect counter-point and complement to my often impulsive, all-or-nothing, creative, emotional, wanderlusting, over-ambitious, naive optimism.

And over the past 15+ years - inevitably - we have rubbed off on each other. I have learned so much from him. I am now much more measured, steady, content. And perhaps he is more hopeful, curious, adventurous. And we’ve learned over 15+ years together, that at our core our values are the same - and perhaps we do want similar things… Not exactly the same, but the same enough that they can happily co-exist.

I am lucky too because in so many ways I am not at all the same person I was at 27 (let alone at 21 when we first met). I have changed so much in that time - and he has let me. But also I am still fundamentally the same person with the same quirks, frustrations, limitations and inconsistencies (we never really change that much) but I think he still likes me. And I still like him. Even more now than I did then. I had no way of knowing whether that would be the case, and neither did he. It certainly has not been easy breezy - far from it - but he was and still is my person.

We invited our loved ones to come and celebrate our new home on the hill with us 10 years after we got married just down the road. Here are some happy snaps (again by Danii Forde). So loved and so lucky.

To My Younger Self

6 years ago, as I emerged from the mess of my 20s and finding myself in a reflective mood as my 30th birthday approached, I asked a bunch of brilliant women for the advice they would share with their younger selves.

I was stunned by the level of insight and generosity offered by these incredible women. And I was really charmed by the diversity of perspectives, and the different things these women - all women I know and admire - found worthy of sharing, with their younger selves and with me.

For some reason, I never published it (I think I was being overly ambitious and got a little overwhelmed - very unlike me…)

Until today, when *one of my oldest and most brilliant friends* Becky McCann published her responses to my prompt on her own blog that popped up in a Facebook memory.

Finally, I've pulled the gems together for a long overdue post. I am so lucky to know so many incredible women. Safe to say their wisdom is still relevant. And happily, I’ve acquired just a little bit of wisdom of my own.

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Love your body and mind. Your body is your temple and your vessel that will guide you through life. Nurture it. Do nice things for it. Feed it well, give it the exercise it needs and be grateful to it. Try not to fight it or pick on it but accept it for it's beauty, whatever form it is. It is the only one you'll have in this life. What a gift!

- Loz, 31 - My high school friend and fellow closet hippy

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Never underestimate kindness. I’m not just talking about being kind to others either. It is so important to be kind to yourself. More than that, be consciously kind to yourself – then it will become sheer habit, that little voice playing on your insecurities will be a little softer, your soul will feel a little lighter, your mind will be a little quieter, and you will be able to listen a little louder (that’s another thing… real comprehensive listening is a dying skill, so many of us are too focused on what we’re going to say next to actually listen).

- Shannon, 34 - My friend and Marcus’ former housemate

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Don't be scared to change your mind. Don't die wondering - learn what you love to do by eliminating things you don't. And I like to trust the old adage, "do what you love and the money will follow". it's harder to break away from the societal norm and what's expected of you to take the road less travelled, but infinitely more rewarding to know you've made a conscious choice to do it the way you want. No one's judgement can touch you when you're secure in this knowledge.

- Bec, 29 - My first pen-pal and musical soulmate

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Life is mysterious, challenging and beautiful. Embrace the challenges and gain perspective by remembering that there is always someone else who is feeling more challenged by life than yourself.

- Chrystal, 29 - My high school friend and travel buddy

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The world doesn't owe you anything, you owe the world something. Don't expect not to work hard in order to achieve those things you strive for. And always try to find the best in a bad situation!

- Katrina, 34 - My friend and fellow football wagging unofficial bridesmaid

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Life's messy. There's no easy way round it. You can try and put it in a neat little boxes with tidy edges but you'll only end up on prozac or worse. So go with it. Laugh at the madness. Flow. Trust. Live your life. Life is perfect in all its madness.

- Alice, 34 - My systems / sustainability / twitter friend

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Celebrate and capture the small, positive moments in every day. It sounds simple, but over time this habit will bring more energy, optimism, stronger relationships and happiness - a cumulative list of so many reasons to be happy.

- Clare, 30 - My friend and leadership goal buddy

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Create a good relationship between yourself and time. I’m still not resolved about whether my over scheduling issue is a charming personality quirk or the core of my life improvement ambitions, but I think its a sign I desire being involved, active and connected to others. Rather than professing constant busy-ness and wearing it as a misguided badge of honour, take inspiration from the sloth once in a while rather than the crazed mouse running around the treadmill. 

- Kate, 33 - My friend and sustainable fashion mentor

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When things are difficult and you feel as though you are stripped back, pruned to you core, know that you can and will resurface - and quite possibly be better off and a bigger person for living through it all as well. Know that you are providing great service to the world as a woman by being courageous, compassionate, confident and smart. Keep speaking up with grace and dignity.

- Bec, 35 - My friend and professional / life mentor

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Know that you are the master of your own destiny. Wherever you find yourself, know that you are choosing to be there. If you don’t like it, change the story! Embrace the adventure, follow your bliss, and create a life that suits YOU regardless of what others expect.

- That one’s from present-day me, 35

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What advice would you share with your younger self?

Next Chapter

My 2020 started ahead of schedule. In the scorching hot last days of 2019 we were watching the emergency warnings closely. Though it felt inevitable when I was called back into the office early to man a bushfire relief centre in Tallangatta with fires raging all around the region, I already felt exhausted.

Then, just as the worst of the bushfires calmed down, we walked straight into another crisis. But this one was largely invisible, and unfolded slowly in the form of confusion and uncertainty.

In disaster recovery there is an accepted cycle - the disaster is followed by a high fueled by heroics as the community bands together and gets through the immediate aftermath. But then comes the extended period of disillusionment and despair as people grieve and deal with their fatigue, devastation and frustration differently. Mental health issues that may have otherwise gone unnoticed have been compounded, interpersonal issues left unresolved face too much strain, and this is often the time when communities fracture.

Mostly, this phase isn’t permanent. People realise that they need each other if they’re to come out the other side, and are able to grieve together and settle back into a new normal to get on with things.

Along a similar vein, I’ve seen the idea of “surge capacity depletion” referenced throughout the various stages of lockdown. This is what happens when the physical and mental mechanisms we use to deal with an acute crisis are called upon as the crisis is extended and becomes chronic. In an extended rolling disaster like COVID, it feels harder to distinguish when an acute crisis becomes chronic.

Perhaps because we’ve all experienced 2020 so differently. For some it has brought job losses, business closures, financial pressures. For many, remote work, remote learning and too many balls in the air. For others, new babies, new perspectives, and time to cocoon with family.

I was definitely one of the lucky ones - gainfully employed, able to work from home, and surrounded by green space with room to move. No kids to juggle, no care responsibilities to negotiate, and friends and family who - though distant - have made the effort to keep in touch. I’ve spent more time at home this year than ever before, and I’ve been so grateful to be able to slow down, and work on some things to keep me excited and inspired. I feel very fortunate - but it doesn’t mean this year hasn’t still been hard.

I’ve had a few conversations with friends and colleagues over the past few weeks about the feeling that the end of the year has come a month too late. Perhaps you’ve felt it too - that sense that you ran out of puff with one leg of the race still to run. Most of the year has been spent in a bizarre kind of holding pattern where work and home life are completely indistinguishable. The days have just kind of rolled together, one into the next, with no delineation between effort and ease. And so everything has felt like effort…

By any measure this year has been a marathon. But it has definitely forced a lot of us to think about what’s important, what to leave behind us, and what to take with us into the next chapter.

I’m SO looking forward to a break this festive season, and to starting the new year with fresh optimism and energy.

Point in time

For some reason, this past fortnight has been full of nostalgia for me. I think the strange holding pattern we’re in has skewed my perception of time. Given the uncertainty about what lies ahead, I’ve been looking back…

This has been reinforced by a trip down memory lane via some of my favourite tunes from a particular period in my life - that period when your identity is still entirely malleable, and your cultural references are a perfect blend of those around you.

In my case, this was the first handful of years of a new millennium, when the music industry was still booming, and the general vibe (at least in my own surrounds) was oh-so optimistic. Music from this period of my life feels like the perfect metaphor for my attitudes at that time. The time before adulthood, when I had friendships based almost entirely on shared musical tastes. (Of course, because music was such a deep and profound thing for me, these were consequently very deep and profound friendships.)

Give me any song on this list and I could almost pinpoint its direct source from one of the following categories:

• plenty of commercial pop and rnb from a specific time before tastes were fragmented by streaming

• stacks of local talent via the radio on Triple J 24/7 (much to the delight of my mother, and no doubt my college roomie)

• my obsession with Top of the Pops which gave me a bit of uk garage, a bit of britpop, a bit of ambient, a bit of eurotrash

• late night and early morning Rage viewing that opened my eyes to the taste of my favourite artists

• burned cd compilations of torrented songs from obscure acts, crafted for specific road trips with friends old and new

• seemingly universally beloved songs from slightly before our time, sung at the top of our lungs at college turns

• movie soundtracks bringing to life fictional worlds that at times felt more vivid than my own reality

• the dear friends and boyfriends who introduced me to a new collection of bands and influences

• those few formative summers when gigs and festivals were an essential slice of my social life

• solo travels and travels with friends, surreal moments in far off places and cultures that weren’t really mine, but I borrowed bits from anyway,

• tunes that signalled compulsory dance floor activity with specific groups of friends from the very specific summers between adolescence and adulthood

• songs and albums that are so much of a particular cultural moment that they take me right back there whenever they’re played like a sonic time capsule.

This was a time that moments (soundtracked by this collection) became memories. I was not-quite-aware that this would happen - that I would one day look back at this period through rose tinted glasses and remember it as the absolute best of times.

This was the time just before I met my husband - which I realise now created a firm before-and-after line. Everything before then feels inherently like “my youth”, and everything after blends with present day, and is part of my (ongoing transition to) adulthood. Many of these songs are so strongly linked to that before time that they are not necessarily still a part of my listening habits these days, which only serves to reinforce their nostalgic value. Rather than timeless classics, these so perfectly encapsulate those years where everything felt simultaneously transient and light, but also important and possible.

I’ve been thinking about why these songs have felt so precious to me over the last week or so. It is something the wonderful Sandi Sieger captures beautifully in her piece here, and this Anna Spargo-Ryan piece also articulates. All of these moments - and their associated soundtracks - are precious to me because of the people they include. Old friends, new friends, temporary friends, fictional friends, friends like me, friends completely unlike me, groups of people who despite our differences felt like me because we were all experiencing the same thing at the same time.

I think the kind of grief I’ve experienced over the last month or so is the sadness that COVID-19 means that I’m missing out on forming new memories. Instead, days go on and on, each one feeling as unremarkable as the last - perhaps that will be my prevailing memory of this. Any moments with friends and family are mostly happening virtually (and let’s be honest, that isn’t quite the same) and tinged with a sense of sadness and disbelief for the current situation, a nervousness that this reality might extend for longer than we’re prepared to come to terms with, particularly for those of us in Victoria.

Almost all of my closest friends have young families and are no doubt forming new memories with their little people during this time. I can’t even begin to understand how challenging that must be in this environment. I always wanted my new memories to be about travel rather than kids, but with that on hold like so much of our lives, these songs bring back such visceral memories that they act as a substitute for the new ones we’re not able to form together now.

In a time of individualised content, streaming and political fractures, collective cultural experiences like the one we’re all going through together are so rare. One day, we’ll look back on this time as an extraordinarily unique thing we all went through together - a strange mix of loneliness and isolation, and global solidarity. Whether we like it or not, this will stay with us - memorable experiences or not.

In the meantime, I have these songs - a direct connection to the time of our lives when everything we did was a memory waiting to be stored away for a future moment, ready to be recalled and treasured with the slightest reminder - sonic or otherwise.

This little walk down memory lane has reminded me that even in this strange eternal unknown that seems to stretch on forever I can cultivate precious moments, connect with friends old and new, and find ways to form new memories that I’ll be reminiscing about in years to come.

Drop the Facade

Like much of the world, I’ve been witnessing the United States combust over this past week. Many of us are still stuck at home and glued to our screens, searching for some kind of sense and stability in our new world order. What we’re seeing instead is the pointy end of the old world order collapsing.

I’ve been watching in horror as black people and their allies take to the streets to plead with authorities to stop killing them, only to have the police and the army from their own country turned on them by a dictator.

At the time I wrote about Trump’s election, I was also having lots of wide ranging / soul searching discussions with friends. I thought that he was the perfect figurehead to accelerate the collapse of the American Dream - the utter lie that if you keep your head down and work hard you’ll get ahead. Who better to shatter the illusion than a man who cultivated a bullshit reputation off a racist business model built on daddy’s money and absolutely no morals or intelligence.

I didn’t expect though that it would happen so quickly, and so visibly - complete with an uprising from those people the American project first imported as chattel, then systematically kept enslaved, depressed and marginalised - for profit - for hundreds of years. And I didn’t expect that this would happen while he turned off the lights and cowered in a bunker like the man-child he is, protected by all of the illegitimate pomp and circumstance the White House embodies - built on stolen land by stolen people.

The USA is more than just a canary in the coal mine - it is also a symbol and actual reality of corruption, entrenched inequality, and unfettered capitalism - and it is breaking open.

Russell Brand shared this week an extract from his conversation with academic Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University in the UK (below). They discuss the roots of racism - and the fact that these are intrinsically embedded in our shared history - and present day. This horrific recent record of deaths in custody is just the latest chapter in the centuries of devastation wrought on communities of colour over hundreds of year of imperial / colonial / capitalist rule.

And don’t think for a second that we are exempt from this. Our own horrific history mirrors that of almost every other country founded on colonialism > theft, dispossession, disenfranchisement, segregation and decades of entrenched systematic institutionalised racism. As has been well documented (but only really “heard” this week) there have been 432 deaths of aboriginal people in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. There has been no acknowledgement of unceded sovereignty, no aboriginal voice to parliament, no real effort at reconciliation, no reparations to the people our ancestors stole this land from. And yet we wring our hands and pretend to wonder why we’re not closing the gap.

I spoke with Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University to discuss in more detail some of the recent events in the United States an...

At the end of April, Gabrielle Hamilton - proprietor and chef of an eatery called Prune in New York’s East Village, wrote a piece for the New York Times about watching her beloved business of 20 years collapsing in the face of the COVID closedown. She talks in detail about the years working 7 days, adding extra shifts, of scrimping and saving, and doing her own deep cleaning of the venue so that she could keep things afloat. She also confesses that she, like so many in the industry have been fooling others about just how well (or badly) their businesses were faring - that they’ve been barely keeping up appearances, just pretending.

You asked, “How’s business?” and the answer always was, “Yeah, great, best quarter we’ve ever had.” But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: “Fire! Fire!” They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins. It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in. The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.

She’s talking about restaurants when she says “the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time.” But she could be talking about all of it.

If, like me, and like Hamilton, you are a white person in the developed world, you have won the life lottery when it comes to privilege. This privilege has diverted any pressure we might otherwise have felt as a result of this corrupt system to people lower on the imaginary totem pole - people in the developing world, people of colour, people of minority gender, sexuality, religious and ability. We benefit from their disadvantage.

This is what it feels like for many of us who are at the privileged end of the scale when the system tightens in on itself. How we define struggling is a very wide spectrum framed by what level of privilege or disadvantage we experience. Her experience is the tip of the iceberg. As a relatively privileged white person, she’s only experiencing a tiny fraction of what minority communities have known to be true for eons - the American Dream is bullshit. For black people it isn’t about being unable to afford to work hard and be your own boss like it is for Hamilton - it is about being able to assume that you won’t be the latest victim of state endorsed murder when you duck out to get some cigarettes like George Floyd.

We’re finally seeing it - but only now that the last bit of wealth has been extracted and wrung out of those minorities for the benefit of the rentier class has it really started impacting us. The warning bells rang when the the frustration felt by the poorer white formerly working- and middle- classes started crying out in the form of Brexit, Trump and a wave of right wing / white supremacist support throughout Europe. And apparently that’s where we’re up to.

An uprising among the black community, a new frustration among disaffected whites, ever increasing diseases of despair, and climate change are all symptoms of the same illness, and maybe that’s what’s actually hitting home for once.

My hopeful theory is that the pause brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the status quo just enough that those of us who are typically protected from any kind of disadvantage have experienced just a little bit of discomfort - enough to to realise that unemployment that is no fault of our own is real. It has meant that those who would never normally have to experience a feeling that things are out of our control have had just a taste of what it might be like to be a member of a minority or disadvantaged group. Maybe enough of us have seen the whole sham of it, and shattered the illusion that working hard and building yourself up from nothing is possible. We’ve learned in real time that there are external forces at play bringing you two steps back for every step forward.

At the same time, it has given us an external factor to point to that allows us to admit that so many of us are struggling. It has let us drop the facade. What has followed is a collective realisation and a sense of relief that we don’t have to hold ourselves solely responsible for our successes or failures. Iso-life has forcibly reminded us how interconnected we all are.

And the huge scale of these protests has reinforced the devastation of living at the extreme end of the disadvantage continuum - the alarming number of deaths in custody being experienced by people of colour (the most marginalised) in the US of A (the most extreme manifestation of the neoliberal ideal).

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The stoics called a feeling of connection to the whole sympatheia. Marcus Aurelius articulates it as “That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr knew it too, when he wrote a letter responding to critique from his fellow clergymen while imprisoned in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. (Read the whole thing at the link.) The letter includes the seminal quote:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Maybe a global pandemic and white people experiencing a little bit of instability is what we’ve needed for a sort of consensus to form that actually, things aren’t working - the balance sheet of the global economy just doesn’t add up - and that this is a feature not a flaw of the system. All of a sudden, we’ve seen a shift in orthodoxy around whether the global economy that governs us is really the best we can do. The evidence is pointing to the fact that the economy isn’t providing for the wellbeing of a large number of its participants, let alone the environment that supports us all. A stack of institutions, including the Australian Reserve Bank, have been sounding the alarm for some time now that the whole thing is built on too much debt, unsustainable and vulnerable to a shock - which has arrived right on schedule.

"When the revolution comes, where will you hide?" . . . . . . . . . . #blm #blacklivesmatter #eattherich

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Communities of colour have been dealing with this shit for centuries - they’ve been bought and sold, marginalised, and killed. They’re can’t just ignore it and get on with things when they’re being killed at an alarming rate just for existing. They know that if you happen to “make it” it is sheer luck - and that it could all come crashing down thanks to one traffic stop or stop-and-frisk. That like George Floyd, you could do absolutely nothing wrong and be killed by those who are supposedly there to protect and serve.

This system has allowed the developed world (and within that a very small group of hyper-billionaires) to amass more capital and wealth than has ever been seen before. They do this by oppressing people all over the world (hello slavery, subsistence tenant farmers, minimum wage jobs, and sweat shops for every possible consumer good the West could ever want), extracting everything they can from our natural environment (hello fossil fuel drilling, offshore mineral mines, and a booming waste export industry), and creating ever decreasing social value (hello the bloated finance industry, silicone valley unicorn speculation and convenience capitalism) for ever greater profit. They profit by intentionally building these externalities into their business models. The whole project is rigged in favour of the mega rich. The inherent inequality and injustice of it all is built into the system. Everyone feeling insecure and alienated is by design.

This isn’t to say that the issues impacting black and communities of colour are the same that impact white people - NOT AT ALL. Being at the visible end of disadvantage - where authorities are actively killing them with no consequences has triggered black people to do the work to save themselves and their own communities - and in doing so they’re dismantling systems that affect everyone’s ability to thrive. What is happening is that black people are (once again) doing the work that is the responsibility of all of us.

We should ALL be rising up against those who have the means to solve global poverty but are instead investing in ever more complicated offshore financial schemes that create nothing of actual value. We should ALL be rising up against big businesses making billions and still refusing to pay their (mostly black and minority) staff a living hourly wage. We should ALL be rioting in the streets to see a 46,000 year old sacred place blown to smithereens in the name of “progress”.

I am no expert on the experience of black and minority communities and their experiences of racism and disempowerment. At all. All I know is that I have benefitted from it. I also know that I have a role to play here.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We all have to do the work, because surely black people are exhausted.

Further Resources

• How White Australians Can Show Solidarity With First Nations Australians: A Resource Guide

• Anti-Racism Resources

• Will Coronavirus lead to fairer societies - Thomas Piketty on The Guardian

The Great Recalibration

I started the year manning a Relief Centre in Tallangatta during the bushfire crisis. I remember thinking at the time, "I had a feeling 2020 was going to be a big year, but I don’t think it will work out how I thought…”

Days later during a phone call with my sister, she told me the outbreak of a virus in China had delayed her planned work trip. I wrote it off as insignificant - we’re dealing with a seared and scarred Australian landscape!

Maybe I’m the only one who feels like we seem to be in a rolling cycle of crises and minimally effective recovery. When the worst of the Global Financial Crisis (or the Great Recession as it is known in the rest of the world) hit, mostly it was patched over so that we could stagger on as we did before. In Australia, we could almost pretend that things weren’t really that bad in the rest of the world, and go about spending our stimulus payments to divert the worst of it from our shores. The worst bushfires in Australia’s history (or the years’ long drought that came before) wasn’t enough to really force us to stop.

Flash forward to present day and it turns out its the measures introduced to slow the spread of the global COVID-19 outbreak that have prompted a three month shut down of most of the global economy might be enough to prompt a shift. But perhaps it isn’t the economic hold pattern that’s triggered this.

I've previously discussed with friends that in an era of increasingly fragmented public attention, experiences of collective awareness, consciousness - universality - are so rare. So it has been so curious to experience a rare moment of it when that universality is forcing us to pause en masse - and to go inward.

Once again, it seems Australia will escape the worst of the effects of the initial COVID-19 outbreak - that is, the health effects. I know the most vulnerable are likely to be the most acutely impacted by any major economic shock, and I count myself as one of the (very) lucky ones, but from this position of immense privilege I can't help but notice that this moment to stop and reevaluate seems to feel like a blessing for many. I think it is telling that this (forced) pause is prompting all sorts of really positive self-reflection, recalibration, and ... rest.

In my case, this period has also coincided with resets in my home life (moving house), work life (changing jobs) and health (clarity on some undiagnosed health issues). It feels impossible to continue as before with so much change. Time away from people has given me an enforced barrier - preventing me from absorbing priorities, stress, drama that actually aren’t mine. Instead I’ve been thinking about what MY priorities / values / focus will look like when we’re unleashed again on the world: more time for things that nourish me - creating, learning, being with friends. I’ve also been thinking about what I want to discard: stressing about things I can’t control, political hobbyism (let’s be honest, it’s just gossiping), mindless consumption of all kinds.

This crisis has unfolded in an entirely different way - quietly. This quietness has prompted us to examine our essence. It has given us the opportunity to actually think about what a new normal might look like - for each of us as individuals, and for all of us together. (Also, how great to experience that line between collective and individual becoming blurrier as our own experiences mirror others’.)

There's also an innate sense that perhaps when we start again things won't be the same. That the recalibration we're engaging in individually may also be taking place at a global level too, though it remains to be seen what that might look like...

I've been fascinated to witness the reflections of some very brilliant people who are documenting their musings, none better than Nick Cave. This extract from a recent Red Hand Files letter perfectly sums it up: 
"A friend called our new world ‘a ghost ship’ — and maybe she is right. She has recently lost someone dear to her and recognises acutely the premonitory feeling of a world about to be shattered — and that we will need to put ourselves back together again, not only personally, but societally. In time we will be given the opportunity to either contract around the old version of ourselves and our world — insular, self-interested and tribalistic — or understand the connectedness and commonality of all humans, everywhere. In isolation, we will be presented with our essence — of what we are personally and what we are as a society. We will be asked to decide what we want to preserve about our world and ourselves, and what we want to discard."

This crisis has exposed the giant gaps in the way we operate as a global collective. It has brought the need for action into stark focus, and shown just how hollow public discourse about equity, social support, and environmental impacts have become. It has created a sliver of possibility for new ways for our political, social and economic systems.

The thing about a disruption of this scale is that once the worst has passed, we need to reset. This time we have a really unique opportunity to do so in a way that serves us all. And the great thing is that now we actually understand what all really means.

Further reading

• The Coronation - Charles Eisenstein

• The World After Coronavirus - Yuval Noah Harari (Financial Times)

• Farewell workplace burnout: will coronavirus slow the manic pace of our modern lives? - Johanna Leggatt (The Guardian)

• This Pandemic Is an Opportunity For Radical Simplification - Andreas Kluth (Bloomberg)

• Surviving the Looming Mental Health Crisis - Mark Manson

• Overload in a time of coronavirus - Brigid Delaney (The Guardian)

• Climate Change Beyond COVID-19 (The Project)

Podwise

This isn’t the first podcast wrap up written during the COVID-19 crisis, and I highly doubt it will be the last.

It is such a strange thing to have all this time to stop. And when you’re done with sleeping and wardrobe culling (no? just me?) why not spend it listening to good, thoughtful content?

I’ve written a couple of summaries previously outlining my listening habits - and my efforts to wean myself off newsy, politics-heavy, serious podcast content. That endeavour continues - so head on over to my previous summaries from 2015 and 2016 if you’re after more of that.

Happily there are plenty around that fit the bill - hell, everyone has a podcast these days! But I think there are a few that really stand out, depending on your inclination.

I have previously mentioned a few that I’m listing again below - take it as a double endorsement and head there first. Or, skip ahead to the bottom to see a selection of the best of the best and start there if you’re new to the pod life.

Be aware though - listening to so much in the way of pod content seriously limits your ability to keep up with your to-read pile, keep in touch with people, or really achieve anything productive. You have been warned.

Happy listening.

Pop Culture

The High Low

A contribution from two British writers, this one really does what it says on the box - traversing pop cultural phenomena that burn bright and don’t last, but also diving into higher brow content - literary, creative, political. They’re really clever, self aware and articulate, and I kid myself that they have the kinds of chats I would be having with my friends if someone bothered to record it. Subscribe

Highly Enthused

Also a chat between two clever ladies - this time from inner Sydney, and it definitely shows in the content. They’re unapologetically cool, very keen on good food and wine, and blatantly millennial in their perspective on sustainability and consumption. I oscillate between finding this a real pleasure and unbearably hipster, which really just says I am old and not living in inner Sydney. Subscribe / They also do a newsletter.

Chat 10 Looks 3

Still a firm favourite - and I can’t see that changing any time soon. As with the previous two mentioned (I have a type, clearly) the pleasure of listening to smart women talk about the things they love is just so great. Stacks of books, films, recipes, but there’s something extra with this one - they’re so quick witted and hilarious - I think it is actually the chemistry that keeps their legion of fans coming back. Subscribe

Creative People

Anthropocene Reviewed

I think of John Green and his brother Hank as kind of the big brothers of the internet. They have done stacks of great internet things for people who like thinking. John is also a really lovely writer (and so say a LOT of YA readers). This podcast is his close look at all manner of specific things related to life on a human-centred planet. They’re beautiful little vignettes of life in detail. Subscribe

Sydney Writers Festival

Those of us who aren’t able to get to Sydney for the festival are lucky that they podcast a good number of sessions each program. This is extra useful given this year’s festival will be decidedly less festive (global pandemic and all) and we have an archive of really great content from some of the best literary figures from around the world ready and waiting. Subscribe

Lit Up

Australian writer Angela Legderwood used to write features for Esquire, and Cosmo before she became a full time book nerd. She now interviews stacks of really smart people about their books and ideas. As with SWF, this is pretty much a who’s-who hit list, and the content is really thoughtful and considered. Great inspiration for the writerly, or writerly-adjacent. Subscribe

Philosophy

On Being

Given its focus on faith and its place in the world, you wouldn’t necessarily expect an atheist like me to be so enthusiastic about On Being. But it is just so good. I’m all for content that asks the bigger questions, and I just don’t know of many secular spaces that do it half as well as Krista Tippett does. So thoughtful, gentle, perceptive. And with the most unexpected and insightful of guests. Subscribe

Under the Skin

I am an unashamed fan of Russell Brand. I love watching how his practice as a leader and thinker is evolving. He has really interesting YouTube content that you can explore for free, and his early podcast archive is available publicly, but he has shifted his newer content to subscription-based platform Luminary (which houses a stack of other great creators and content too). Worth it I reckon. Subscribe

The Minefield

I love Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly’s approach to unpicking the ethical intricacies of everyday life. Their conversations include experts in social theory and philosophy who really get to the crux of issues, and why we encounter points of ethical friction in our modern existence. They’re erudite, and the perfect balance of circumspect and cynical. Subscribe

Tara Brach

Tara is one of the world’s most amazing spiritual leaders. Her podcasts touch on spiritual awakening and nurturing on an individual and collective level. She also publishes a weekly meditation and she just has the most beautiful voice and presence (so much so that it is clear via podcast), and some really worthy reflections and messages. Subscribe

Social / Psychology

Reply All

I resisted this one for ages before I finally came around to it in 2014, and it is now absolutely one of my favourites. Ostensibly about how we interact with the internet, the content is actually an examination of modern life and its peculiarities. And it is so insightful and thoughtful that it has you examining things that you wouldn’t otherwise give a moment’s reflection to. Subscribe

Invisibilia

This show bills itself as being about invisible forces - they’re talking about invisible forces within us (not, like the invisible hand of the market, as I first misunderstood). The storytelling here is really lovely - enough to have me empathising with an AI. It serves to make under-appreciated elements of life more visible. Subscribe

Rough Translation

Podcasts like this seem to me to be the magic ingredient in a recipe for more global empathy. It looks at situations across the world and unravels how a similar situation might be experienced by someone with a different cultural background and experience from you. So many varied perspectives, so many worthy lessons, and such good storytelling. Subscribe

Unique insights

You’re Wrong About

Sometimes I remember a thing in history and think “we would have looked at this whole thing very differently if it happened now”… That’s pretty much the premise of this show - looking back at historical phenomenon with a modern perspective to see just how wrong history got it, and just how far we’ve come. Subscribe

Against the Rules

Michael Lewis is the creative / analytical mind behind so much great stuff - and you probably don’t even realise it. The former finance journalist and author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker (among others) uses his genius to unpick why we have all of a sudden become so angry at the “referees of the game”. He explores declining trust in government, police, and others. So insightful. Subscribe

Ezra Klein Show

I know I said I’m trying to wean off politics, but the difference with Ezra Klein is that he deliberately stays away from the newsy side of politics in favour of the meaning of it (and he did an episode all about this). He looks at the bigger picture of the trends we’re seeing in global politics. (Side note: the closest thing in Aus politics is Katharine Murphy on Australian Politics Live.) Subscribe

Classics

Shit Town - one of the most incredible pieces of digital storyteling ever. Go back and listen to it again. Subscribe

Desert Island Discs - intimate, personal and always insightful, especially for a music nerd like me. Subscribe

Conversations - empathetic discussions that remind you that most people have a fascinating story to tell. Subscribe

New Yorker Radio Hour - the best coverage of pop culture and current affairs you can find in pod form. Subscribe

Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell takes a new look at things you mostly thought were boring. Subscribe

Hidden Brain - social and behavioural psychology that’s full of insights and mixed with narrative. Subscribe

Central Australia

Every time I have an international visitor / friend staying with us in Melbourne, I’m quite jealous of their adventures to parts of my own country I’ve never visited.

For that reason (and so many more) our visit to the Red Centre in June felt so long overdue.

Following our gentle foray into hiking holidays with our trip to Maria Island 18 months ago (where it rained THE WHOLE WEEKEND and therefore there are very few photos to prove we ever went and had the best time ever), my mum was very keen to take us girls on another holiday that didn’t involve churches, watching people drink wine or disagreements about each day’s itinerary.

Through a very tenuous personal link, she came across the idea of hiking with a company called Epicurious Travel. Sue will very happily admit she’s far more keen on camping if there’s gourmet food involved… Especially if she can drag a few people into joining her (in this case - Gretta, Dad, Marcus and I).

Hiking the Larapinta TRAIL

I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I didn’t really know much about the Larapinta trail before we talked about hiking it. In the end, this 220km stretch of walking track along the West Macdonnell Ranges - starting at Alice Springs in the east and finishing at Mount Sonder in the west - is pretty incredible.

Unfortunately for us (and photos) a good section of the trail is scarred from bushfires in January and February this year. The stark landscape combined with good sections of scorched earth mean there are areas that feel really eerie and kind of alien.

But there are also so many stretches of vast skyline and rugged geography that are unbelievably beautiful.

Oasis

Maybe as a result of the land feeling extra parched (even for a desert), it was such a pleasure when we found these beautiful oases of calm and cool. Water completely brings the desert to life, and after kilometres of sparse, stark earth, these lush green spots felt like such a relief…

Each day, we would walk from breakfast until mid afternoon. We would wander through landscapes that were interchangeably beautiful, desolate, vast, craggy, lush, and harsh. Some sections were flat, some were hugely steep. Some sections were loose underfoot, some were sharp, some were sandy.

The days sure as hell were more varied than my usual day to day - and that is a wonderful thing.

Ormiston Gorge

Unfortunately for me (but probably fortunately for everyone who had to listen to me incessantly blowing my nose and complaining about it) I didn’t do the hike to the top of Mount Sonder for sunrise.

Instead, the photographic highlight of our time on the trail for me was at the end of our last day of hiking - wandering through beautiful Ormiston Gorge with the most incredible colours on full display.

God the world is amazing…

Our time on the trail was really rather lovely (blisters aside). The fact that this amazing natural wonder exists in the middle of our huge country. I’m really pleased that sections of traditional owner management seems to work, and that there seems to be a real sense of respect and stewardship.

I wish though that we’d found out a little bit more about how this all works - and that I spent less time looking down at my feet as I tried not to fall on my bum. A good metaphor for real life, I guess.

King’s Canyon

After 6 days on the trail, we headed toward Uluru. The drive is long, but has in its favour the possibility of a stop at the incredible King’s Canyon.

This place is unlike anything I’ve seen. The shapes, colours, shadows and curves.

Uluru and Kata Tjuta

Really, visiting the national park at the heart of our country is a pilgrimage every Australian should make.

But be warned that when you do, you’re fighting a good number of tourists to get there. For such a beautiful spiritual place, they sure have managed to make the surrounding township feel like an American resort destination. I just don’t know if hooning around the rock on a segueway is really the best way to understand its spiritual significance…

The rock itself is pretty spectacular - with nuances and textures the whole way around, and so many stories and histories woven through it. The geological forces at play when Uluru, Kata Tjuta, King’s Canyon and Ormiston Gorge kind of blows my mind and reminds me why I wanted to be a geologist for about five minutes during high school - it is such a fascinating way to look at the world.

Despite listening to lots of information about the Uluru Statement from the Heart on our drive to stay just nearby, I don’t feel like my time there really gave me a good handle on the significance of the rock in the broader sense. I know the current co-management arrangement between the National Park and the Traditional Owners is considered a great success story which is amazing, but I would love to know how the local indigenous people feel about the luxury hotels just down the road from their most sacred place.

That said, the Cultural Centre in the park is well set up and contains a lot of information and hence well worth a visit. It sounds like a lot of effort was made to make sure this space was co-designed so that this important information is shared with visitors in a way that is culturally sensitive.

I don’t know what I was expecting with this trip.

Maybe that because we were literally walking the curves of the landscape that we would have a better understanding of the place by the time we left than we might have with other destinations…?

Maybe that because this I have some idea of the cultural significance of this landscape that it would feel more profound than a trip to yet another quaint european town?

Maybe that my feeling of spiritual disconnect with Australia would be solved by landing in this place which is supposed to signify so much?

I posted while we were first looking at Uluru that it is an amazing spiritual landmark for a country that really doesn’t have a lot going on in terms of spirituality.

I think I was hoping for a sense of connection that I know is missing in my daily life, and I naively hoped this place might give it to me. In reality though, the way we live our lives is still very separate from the land we live on - and a few nights in a cold tent won’t change that.

As much as I can appreciate the strange aesthetic beauty of Central Australia, I kind of feel like I can only appreciate it in the same way I might a church or a historic town on any other trip.

Getting under the skin of a place is still going to take a whole lot more when we’re still white visitors to a land that isn’t ours.

For now, I feel a strange mix of guilt and luck that we get to walk on it though.

Southern Italy, 2018

I’m not sure why I do this, but after a trip I really procrastinate with editing my photos and distilling the experience into a blog post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always very happy to share my photos and thoughts on my adventures with anyone who is willing and interested, but I think the delay might have something to do with the fact that to do this you have to create a kind of distance from this thing - which means accepting that it really is in the past. It kind of means accepting that it’s over - at the same time as reliving just how wonderful it was… It really is a very particular kind of unusual cruelty, that post trip nostalgia…

But here I am - delighting in the memories at the same time as yearning to relive them, and absolutely wishing they weren’t memories at all but ongoing and permanent delights.

This trip is particularly difficult to distance myself from. Because for many years now, when life has felt like just a little (or a lot) too much for me, I’ve dreamt of throwing it all in and moving to Europe to take up residence in some obscure town in the middle of nowhere to drink wine and take things at the slower pace that they seem to be renowned for… Ever the fantasy of someone suffering from that all-too-typical Australian middle class white person affliction - Cultural Cringe.

The thing is, I’m effectively the opposite of a homebody - more a restless soul. So much so that when we had some beautiful illustrations commissioned as a wedding present, while Marcus’ spiritual home that he wanted to immortalise on paper was his beloved family farm (and our soon-to-be-home), my equivalent was a non-descript town of my own imagining, somewhere in Europe…

This trip was an opportunity to test this speculative eventuality, with 3 and a half weeks in the south of Italy. The occasion was actually a family celebration for my Mum’s 60th - so we were an extended McPherson party for most of the trip. The last time we travelled all together was our African Safari holiday five years ago. And given we’re now all living in different towns / cities / countries, that trip did seem very long ago indeed…

Sicily

We started our adventure in very southern Sicily - a tiny little town called Sant’Alfio, nestled at the foot of Mount Etna. This tiny town is connected to other tiny towns by narrow winding roads that all seem to run back on each other as they curl around the mountain. As the crow flies nothing is far to get to, but winding roads and hilly landscapes meant a decent drive to the major towns of Catania and Taormina. It also meant our daily walk to the coffee shop in the town’s tiny piazza was more what I’d call a hike - downhill and then back uphill, with some serious inclines and cobbled stones. With such gorgeous sights to see on the trek, and some strong italian coffee waiting though, this became the best part of each day during our stay.

We stayed at a beautiful villa sitting in the hills. As gorgeous as it was, the best part about it was leaving to snake around the winding roads to adjacent towns - and especially to sample the produce and wine dell’Etna is known for. As a sadly misguided consequence of this, I hardly took any photos of Sant’Alfio, except on my phone. Oddly, this format seems to suit the little vignettes of Sicilian life we encountered every day.

When we did venture out, we found more gorgeous little streets in a delightful combination of tradition and modernity, and plenty of colour and movement. Our first trip was to Catania - the second biggest city on the island, after Palermo, a more tourist friendly city on the north coast, a fact that is apparently the cause of some tension to locals - similar, I imagine, to the Melbourne / Sydney rivalry. Catania remains the commercial centre of Sicily though, with a mix of low-fi traditions that are exactly what I imagine when I think of Sicily, and modern day economic activity (even if they do seem slightly behind the times by our standards - I’ve never seen so many tiny shops for printing in one place).

Architecturally it is spectacular - if feeling a little worn. And everything has the strange sense that it is exactly where it belongs that can only come from having been in that precise spot for a long, long time. Life in Catania seems to work in perfect unison with the buildings, streets and social spaces that house it. Things seem to happen so well at street level - a sure sign that the city came to be in an era when people were the primary design consideration, well before cars and commerce were shifted up the priority list.

Catania

The iconic fish market in the centre of town doesn’t just sell fish. We snapped up beautiful fresh produce, Italian (specifically Sicilian - as we were often told) charcuterie, cheese, and fresh and preserved fish that just looked so glossy and shiny that it almost looked too good to be true.

Castelmola and Taormina

Next on our Sicily itinerary was Taormina, and the ancient castle at Castelmola, just close by. After driving up and down the mountain many times (!!!) we finally figured out that we needed to catch the cablecar up from the coast to reach this beautiful spot. Medieval towns sure were not designed to accommodate street parking.

Castelmola is perched on the mountain top, with views across to Etna and down to the water. Though there isn’t too much left to show for the building itself these days, the views back down over the country side were spectacular and the quintessential bougainvillea bushes make it ideal for happy snaps.

Taormina is very tourist friendly - ticking all the “sicilian” boxes and walking very close to the kitsch line, but with lovely boutiques and quite special restaurants (and not just trattorias and pizzerias). The picturesque cobbled streets and buildings, the beautiful piazzas…

Photo by Gretta.

The waves of migration and occupation - from the Greeks, Romans, Byzantine, French - for thousands of years mean the town is comprised of layers upon layers of tradition, which is encapsulated by the ancient theatre - originally built in the Greek style, but eventually covered over to capture the Roman style. It is still in pretty incredible shape and hosts operas (we just missed the season) and performances. Unfortunately the short time we spent exploring it coincided with what was apparently the most incredible downpour of rain our guide had ever seen. Still pretty spectacular though, especially when you consider most of the rock used to build it came from the surrounding mountains in probably the third century BC.

So with the rain, our time in Taormina was almost the only less than perfect day we had all trip. As the heavens opened and the hoards of tourists readily purchased the ponchos and umbrellas on offer from opportunistic street vendors at inflated prices, we found ourselves a place to huddle undercover (beers, wines, snacks, etc - shame about the smokers). Despite the weather related hiccup, Taormina was good to us, with some beautiful scenery and exceptional food. Plus a few items from the boutiques…

When we weren’t visiting quaint little towns, we were availing ourselves of iconic sicilian wares (let’s be honest, mostly wine). We visited quite a few agrotourismo spots to sample honey, wine and other local delicacies, and I was blown away by their sense of ritual, heritage and terroir.

The most special was Benanti’s stunning winery, which housed a palmento - a pressing basin traditionally used in wine making. The thing was so cool - a whole big room / shed designed for the once very manual processes of extracting, pressing, fermenting. The setting was pretty stunning, but the best part was the food and wine, obviously.

Unexpected added bonus - Sascha used her legendary cheating tendencies (without our endorsement or cooperation) to score a bottle of prosecco! We may not have enabled it, but we were happy to share in the spoils!

While we were in Sicily we also visited a few seaside towns where we (again) found beautiful food and wine. Outside of the city we had to look a bit harder for it, but when we did track down a gem we were not disappointed.

Oddly it was here more than in the cities that the economic situation in the south of Italy felt really evident. If you’re keeping an eye on Italian politics at all (which is an absolute circus) you’ll know that many of the populist issues facing the country come from tension between the more affluent northern regions and a push for their secession from the rest of the country which is much poorer, but apparently also culturally more laid back (aka lazy, from the perspective of the northerners). The whole country is not in a good place economically really, and we definitely saw glimpses of this in Sicily, despite the beautiful buildings and masses of tradition and heritage.

The final day of our time in Sicily was also my birthday. We spent the day wandering up and down the peak of Mount Etna. And truly it is spectacular - alien and other worldly - the black volcanic soil tipped with snow.

We were reminded often (especially in the context of conversations about wine and food) how much the region owes to The Etna or dell’Etna. It feels kind of like it ominously hovers above the mortals below it, constantly active and permanently threatening to erupt at any moment. The Sicilians have cleverly figured out how to live in happy co-existence with this - appreciating the mountain for the beautiful soils and the food and wine it can produce.

The week after we left the mountain started misbehaving. Hard to believe we were wandering around up there with barely a care…

Sicily Recommendations

• The best part of every day when we were in Sicily was our wander down to the piazza duomo of our tiny little town for espressos (80c) and maybe a breakfast snack (1€). Given most locals would have their espresso and get on with their day, they didn’t quite know what to make of us just sitting down to have our coffee and a chat. The Italians may have started coffee culture in Melbourne, but we’ve definitely improved on it. Although perhaps if we were quicker about it there’d be less need for a takeaway coffee… (Ok, maybe we haven’t improved on it.)

• Quattro Archi in Milo - a great example of sicilian slow food. Beautiful seasonal food, abundant produce, and lots of locals as a testament to the quality of the food and the authentic surrounds.

• Benanti Winery in Viagrande - a good pick if you want to see a palmento which is hundreds of years old, eat a beautiful multi-course lunch and sample a heap of stunning local wines. Benanti are certainly at the top of the list.

• Glass in Riposto - we loved this hidden treasure. Amazing tapas style food, lots of specialist local wines, and a great set up.

• Kisté in Taormina - the sister restaurant of the Michelin starred La Capinera which was really special for a degustation with lovely wines.

• Chiara from The Thinking Traveller was exceptional - recommending some great experiences and managing bookings, times, etc for us. Well worth tapping into the local knowledge of an expert - especially if you’re keen to go a bit off the beaten track.

Amalfi Coast

Our week in Positano was actually a bit ridiculous. We stayed in the most amazing villa with the most gorgeous views you’d ever want to see. The thing we had to get the hang of pretty quickly (ie, when we arrived at 11 pm) is that to get the views you have to make the climb - in this case 100 steps up to our villa. Tricky with a massive suitcase (a lesson to pack less for every trip we ever take in the future) and especially if you take a wrong turn.... But holy hell it is impressive when you get up there.

And plus - more steps = more pasta!

Our terrace overlooked Positano’s iconic tiled duomo, with views beyond of the gorgeous houses seemingly stacked on top of each other… The perfect spot for a communal meal of salad, pasta and proscuitto. Or stacks of aperol spritz and local wine.

Positano was instantly very different to our experience in Sant’Alfio. When we toddled to the beach, we paid tourist prices for our coffee (5€) which came with an opportunity to watch all the instagram “influencers” taking their perfectly posed and styled photos. They needn’t have bothered with all the effort because it is almost impossible to take a bad photo in Positano. Those terraced houses… That colour… Those beach-side bars… That filtered light…

Our days were mostly filled with wandering the shops (plenty of linen, leather sandals, ceramics and limoncello to be had), discovering unexpectedly beautiful pockets in the winding back streets, afternoon drinks on the beach, and spectacular dinners at many of the towns restaurants. Being a tourist in a tourist town is such a funny thing. I was so conscious that the town is engineered for this kind of leisurely indulgence, but that this is not at all reflective of the lifestyle of the locals who all seem to be working busily to give us a seamless travel experience. Once again, I cursed myself for not having come better prepared with more of the local language under my belt (especially beautiful italian) - but in such a tourist friendly environment it was rare to meet someone without lovely (and endearingly accented) english.

The path of the gods

When we weren’t imbibing either coffee or alcohol, we were off adventuring along the coast. The iconic Path of the Gods was an incredible half day hike from Bomerano through the beautiful scenic terraced paddocks, dotted with vines, houses and cobbled walls. The walk was gently undulating, with pockets of green shelter giving way to expansive views of the countryside. The ocean beyond meant breathtaking views at every turn.

A vital lesson learned though - the 1000-odd step walk back downhill should not be taken at a run, or you risk some seriously sore calves for at least a week, which can be a struggle when the whole town is made of stairs built on stairs.

Capri

Capri is a beautiful little island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, just off the coast from Positano. We walked from the port up to Capri, the island’s central town which has a handful of winding streets filled with beautiful high end boutiques, expensive restaurants and gelati shops. It definitely feels more like a resort than an island. It is beautiful - picture perfect - and chockers with wealthy tourists (many of whom seemed to be American, and stopping over on a cruise).

A half day on the island of Capri was enough to reinforce why the Mediterraneans are so healthy and seemingly content despite their love affair with the pizza, pasta and bread we’re petrified of in the west - and their affection for plenty of drinking. We saw older locals hiking up the hill in the heat at a very respectable steady pace, while tourists wilted from the warmth and exertion. They greeted their neighbours politely and went about their business, navigating the tourist hoards deftly and patiently. We saw quite a few propped up appreciating the view at particular vantage points - and what a view!

The second half of our day trip to Capri was a ride around the island on a luxury boat. We visited the Blue Grotto (which was cool, but a total tourist sausage factory), swam in secret caves, looked at prehistoric rock formations, and generally behaved like toffs.

RAVELLO

The beautiful town of Ravello was our final day trip destination during our stay in Positano. Once the playground of the rich and famous, there are beautiful estates, gardens, views, and a tradition of art and music that seems kind of surprising to me - given it is a coastal town tucked away on the side of a cliff… But you forget that these guys have been doing it for thousands of years.

We wandered the grounds of Villa Rufolo, which was built in the 13th Century and refurbished far more recently. The beautiful grounds and gardens (not to mention the views back over the coast) were spectacular. It is kind of hard for Australians to get our tiny minds around how old some of these buildings are, and the fact that the engineering that created these very permanent structures was sound enough for them to endure all these years later. It really makes me think about how we conceptualise our past. When the vast majority of our history in Australia was without these kinds of permanent structures, what does it say about us that we have a hard time coming to terms with it? How do we get better at this if the way we think about heritage in the west is so strongly linked to physical, long term reminders of what came before us… That said - when the landscape is such a big factor in how you construct these permanent structures, you can’t help but consider it too… (And we haven’t even made it to Rome yet!)

AMALFI COAST RECOMMENDATIONS

• Definitely worth spending a day to hike the Path of the Gods. If you’re game you can do the walk there and back (probably the best part of a day if you want to take the time to enjoy it), or take a bus or taxi to Bomerano to start the walk back from there. The walk from the bottom of the stairs back into Positano is still a little bit of a wander, so don’t do anything like silly like running down the stairs which might risk blisters and / or sore legs.

• Late afternoon on the beach in Positano was just so lovely. The perfect time for a cheeky drink and a pizza at Ocean Bar.

• We ate at some really lovely dinner spots in Positano. Next2, Da Vincenzo and Ristorante Max were our highlights, and as a general rule the seafood was the winner. The only place we went that we really didn’t rate was La Tagliata. Cheesy and touristy IMO, but I know many other people who have enjoyed it.

• Babel wine bar and gallery in Ravello was super lovely.

• Casa E Bottega - a beautiful little cafe and boutique in Positano with homewares, glassware and ceramics. I think we particularly appreciated their breakfasts after a couple of weeks away (eggs and avocado for the win).

• Elisir Di Positano Cafe - It might not look like much (don’t let the resident cat throw you off) but his place sells the best calamari fritti ever. According to Andrew it is the best thing to be put in a cone since gelati.

ROME

We had some slight confusion in our scheduling which meant that rather than visiting a few other spots in Italy (including travelling north) we ended up sneaking in a 4 day visit to Paris instead. Perhaps the topic of another blog post.

We stayed in the PERFECT spot for a short visit to Rome. Just outside Trastevere and close enough that everywhere was walkable - with the most incredible views of the city at every turn. We also got SUPER lucky in that friends of friends are living in Rome and gave us an amazing list of great places to eat / drink / see organised by category and location, plus we got to hang out with them at some of their favourite local spots. We had absolutely sensational weather. Couldn’t have asked for more for our first visit (except maybe some more italian under our belts).

Mostly we wandered around Testaccio and Trastevere, with a day at The Vatican to see St Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, etc. We ate ridiculously well, we looked at ancient things, gardens, churches… We fawned over the beautiful fresh produce, we ate gelati, we drank espresso, we drank italian beers and italian wines - we’ve got the italian thing nailed really, especially where food is concerned. I think Rome really suited us. We could settle in quite nicely here.

ROME RECOMMENDATIONS

• Angelina Testaccio - gorgeous rooftop terrace restaurant. The food was sensational and they custom make cocktails to go with your order, or recommend matched wines with each course. The interiors were also beautiful, with a collection of vintage and contemporary furnishings which felt perfect for the location.

• Masto - unbelievable bar for charcuterie, fresh local produce and incredible wine. The owners really care about the quality of their produce and recommend items and dishes depending on what you like. We also bought some incredible local wines here, which are from the very best in the region lists.

• Tram Depot - a quirky little bar in a park. Great for a stop off for an aperitivo before dinner. Great cocktails or beers. Tables or bench seats for a casual drink. A really great mix of demographics, ages, nationalities all hanging out together in a really informal setting.

• L’Oasi della Birra - amazing tiny little shop that was jam packed each time we visited. Stacks of local beers, wines, and a selection of eats. Positioned next to a great piazza, so you can buy a bottle and they’ll give you glasses to go and enjoy it sitting in the open while you people watch.

• Panna & Co - the best gelati we had all visit. My favourite was fig. Mmmmmmmmm…

• Testaccio Market - super lovely little market that is like a micro version of Prahran Market. Some absolutely beautiful fresh produce, but also a few little cafes and preprepared food including some incredible pizza by the slice.

• Campagna Amica / Circo Massimo Market - an absolutely delightful find with incredible fresh produce - slow, organic producers - mostly selling fresh produce, but Marcus also had an amazing pork roll.

• Vatican City - definitely worth a day visit, but jam packed with tourists and super slow to get around. Apparently it is quieter in the afternoons (and so is the Colosseum).

I found Rome fascinating in a completely different way than I was anticipating. It is spectacularly beautiful, but not the kind of beautiful we’re used to I think. The thing I fell in love with is the years and layers of history that are not even below the surface - they’re features, and a huge part of the city and its economy. It just seems so at odds with how things work in Australia - where we have so much scope to start from scratch and build from first principles, which has such a huge impact on daily lives of romans. Traditions mean so much more when you’re talking about thousands of years of connection to rituals and ideas. When the ways things are done were cemented decades before there was a technological solution to abbreviate the process, doing things the long way for the sake of tradition means so much more. When these things were embedded at a time when a sense of place and a connection to the land / landscape and community around you were absolutely necessary, you can’t help but have those things still in your mind when you observe these rituals. I found it really easy to conceptualise contemporary Rome as just one moment on the time continuum of what’s come before and what will come after. How can you ignore that sense with so many many years of history so physically evident with every corner you turn and every street you walk down. The idea of throwing out the old to replace it with a newer, shinier version just because it will make your life easy seems kind of mad in this context. History and comfort seem to be held in some kind of precarious balance (or tension). It’s like the perfect amount of necessary friction that brings you into contact with history, and with the others around you, and also with the processes that stop us from unnecessarily overcomplicating (or oversimplifying).

This sense of historical continuity brings so many positives: the city of Rome seems to have been conceived at human scale. Everywhere is walkable, everything is community sized - the piazzas, the cobbled streets and the small shops mean everything is well engineered so that people have a sense of living in a community - with a bunch of things in their immediate locality. They’re close to their neighbours, houses are compact, and there is plenty of civic space to be occupied - everything feels oddly communal, but in a way that still has a sense of privacy. It also feels like there’s a much greater appreciation of quality and permanence, which makes all kinds of sense.

In our visit to the Colosseum, we learned that new technology has recently led to the discovery of more ancient buildings hidden under what is the world’s oldest botanical garden. Apparently there’s a debate raging about whether digging up these gardens can be justified if it means excavating the site to uncover the built structures beneath. This feels like a perfect metaphor for Italy’s current predicament - to what extent do we hold on to what we’ve got when it has been honed from years of history and tradition. Can we let go of the way we’ve always done things to potentially uncover else, and what do we lose if we do so..?

With that in mind, we had some very interesting discussions about where Rome is at right now - which is very much linked to how Italy as a whole is faring. The issues with civic spending and local government (particularly in Rome) have been well documented, and are so clearly problematic (particularly with waste collection, which you can’t ignore). The economy is not going well - and the tension between Italy and the EU (and the EU and several other countries) is an ongoing topic of conversation. Days after we left there were mass demonstrations in Rome to protest management of the city. Given this is our first visit, it is hard to distinguish what is unusual about Rome right now, and what is just how Rome is all the time, but things certainly feel a little unsettled.

We happened upon was a huge Five Star Movement rally happening in the centre of Rome on one day of our visit. The vibe felt more like you might expect of a food festival or a sporting event in Melbourne, and it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was a political rally. There was such a mix of generations, and nothing that gave away their politics (though maybe we just didn’t recognise any telltale signs).

So fascinating, and no way we could get our heads around all of the complexity in just 3 weeks. Super interesting to have spent so much time in the south of the country as Lega Nord (the Northern League) are continuing to demonise the south and kind of normalising their version of right wing populism, anti-EU and anti-migrant policies. I couldn’t quite make sense of how people feel about the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord running the country. But I don’t know how they make sense of the last 30-40 years of politics in Italy at all…

No doubt it will take many years and many return visits to get my head around it. For now, I’ll take some seriously lovely memories with me, and try (as I do every time I return from time away) to borrow the best elements of what they do in Italy for my daily life. Nothing like a holiday to slow things down and get a little perspective…

Cuba

This past July I returned to visit the wonderful sights, smells and spirit of Havana. 

It was the first time I'd travelled on my own for a long time (12+ years), and it made for thoroughly different experience than the last time I visited. Plus, Cuba is a different place than the last time I visited. Or maybe it's more that I'm different...

Habana Vieja

This time I stayed outside Old Havana, but still made the time to wander through. The fact that I was there during peak European Summer, combined with an increase in American tourism made this tourist magnet feel completely different than the last time we visited.

This time, I felt guilty getting my camera out, for the shame of feeling like all the German and American tourists who are here for the pretty colours, vintage cars and cheap rum. Despite the fact that my urge to document this beautiful place came from the same place of wonder and curiosity as the last time I visited, I was putting myself in the same category as those sitting on the roof of the newly instituted double decker bus for a whistle-stop tour of all the major photo spots of Havana. Because, really, who is to say I am all that different from them.

Arriving without a map and of course without internet, it was easier to make my way back to the area we became familiar with on our first trip. But even so, to some degree I judged myself for making a beeline for the familiar streets, where my very rusty spanish poses less of a challenge, and I know how to find my way around. Again, I was eternally grateful for the beautiful public parks and plazas throughout the city, where life happens, and the spaces seem perfectly designed for people watching.

But things didn't feel quite the same. I found it a little unnerving as a solo female traveller to constantly have (mostly male) spruikers trying to hustle me. The ban on advertising in Cuba means signage is minimal and people actively sell to passers by in the tourist hot spots instead. With not much confidence in my spanish, it was hard to shake people off, and it seems like the locals have lifted their hustling game since 3 years ago. Even if they are harmless, the "hola, where you from?" or "hello beautiful" quickly becomes exhausting. Mostly because it is a reminder of how separate we are as travellers from the locals who's home we're borrowing for our leisure time and discretionary spending. Experiencing any place is a completely different proposition when you can throw some money at any inconveniences in urban planning to ease the pain. And it is completely uncomfortable to be constantly reminded that your privileged whiteness means you're essentially someone's meal ticket. But I guess regardless of how much you love or hate a place, at least you can leave at the end of the trip. This is a particularly strange thing to have in mind when locals will likely never leave their whole lives...

Old Havana is beautiful, there's no denying it. The mix of old architectural wealth and unavoidable ruin looks as though it has been put there for perfect contrast and contradiction. But the number of (let's be honest, mostly women) tourists I saw waltzing through the city in perfectly styled "Caribbean flavoured" outfits for the benefit of their Instagram feed was a shock this trip... And the number of local women I saw in "old-style" Cuban costumes for the sake of a 5 CUC photo op for the benefit of a tourist Instagram feed wasn't something I remembered from last visit either... Honestly, it makes me feel a little ill to think of us white people treating these people and their home as a backdrop for our personal branding. But again, who is to say I'm any different...

It feels oh, so, strange to realise that the vast majority of "restoration" throughout this pocket of Havana is in areas that few locals (beyond those working in tourism) see on a daily basis - while the residential areas of the city mostly haven't had the same treatment. Homes of locals come with no guarantee of hot water. It is also perverse to realise that in a very well educated country, where the state regulated income is only 17 CUC a month (equivalent to approximately US$20), the smartest people (especially those with some english under their belts) turn to tourism for some supplementary income. In a country with world class doctors, teachers, and other highly skilled professionals, taxi drivers are the ones earning good money.

Once again, I was annoyed at myself for not having put more work into my spanish before I left, because I know this would have made it so much easier to get under the skin of this magical city. It really is the epitome of white arrogance to expect people in your destination country to speak english, but yet that's the exact situation I was in. I remember feeling in Vietnam that much of what I was seeing was perfectly constructed for the white tourist, and Old Havana felt more like that this visit - or perhaps I was just more aware this time around. I know enough to know that a lot of the great hospitality available to tourists isn't available to locals - at least not on a local salary... To say nothing of the architecturally beautiful but entirely inappropriate luxury mall right in the middle of Old Havana.

Centro Habana

Centro Habana instantly feels more like the Havana the locals know. Its like as soon as you cross the threshold away from the grand hotels you're able to see Havana life at street level rather than a constructed approximation of Havana life. We saw so many groups of young people gathered - and not for the benefit of the tourist hoards. It feels quieter, and like life is lived more at the pace that suits cubans.

Sunset by El Malécon

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Cuban night life happens in the bars and paladares of Old Havana, and this may well be true. But it looked to me like the night life of the locals happens along the water - with dancing, pop up street food, cheeky drinks and socialising happening as the sun sets behind...

Vedado

I stayed in a private home just off the main streets of Vedado. My host was incredible, and persisted with me despite my broken Spanish and her limited English. I'm amazed by how these people open their modest homes to (mostly) rich westerners, giving them the best of what they've got, and never complaining that they've found themselves in a life of servitude purely by circumstance.

Walking anywhere was busy with locals, but the kinds of locals who were happy to let you mind your own business, rather than those who wanted to sell you something. Wandering through Vedado I was constantly mystified by how locals knew what was sold at each shop or restaurant, with minimal signage but often long queues - particularly at the places selling "helados" in the very humid summer weather - at all times of the day or night, or the spots for fresh crusty bread in the morning.

The caribbean colour and the gentle discolouration of the buildings mean that texture and personality are in abundance, but it is in the people that you see this absolutely overflowing. Even after all these years, I can't bring myself to photograph people like they're displays in a shop window, so I avoid doing this, but the cuban people are so friendly, respectful, and joyful that you definitely take a little bit of this attitude away with you when you leave...

Viñales and the Pinar Valley

I was so pleased that I managed to fit in a day trip to Viñales this visit, complete with vintage taxi and the suspension to match. My driver was lovely, but had limited English, so it made for an interesting adventure with no doubt a great deal lost in translation. 

The highlight though was something I'd heard much about - no doubt constructed perfectly for tourist spending, but still managing to feel like a peek into Cuba's complex history - and present. I was lucky enough to visit a local who hand rolled cigars, showed me where they dried their tobacco and their home grown coffee, and assumed I understood his Spanish explanations for the processes involved. He told me he had begun smoking cigars at 16 and had smoked 10 a day for 60 years. He was wearing a t-shirt which read "Actually I'm in Havana". I want to be him forever.

Viñales is ridiculously beautiful. I was surprised how big the tourism obviously is in the area, with guest houses a plenty - all painted a riot of Caribbean colours. I guess that's the benefit of being only 2 or so hours drive from Havana. But it seems they've managed to keep the World Heritage farming region happily coexisting with the influx of visitors, complete with horse-and-carriages often competing for road space with the vintage corvettes and bikes.

I left feeling a little conflicted by this trip to Cuba. I still feel disappointed in myself that after 2 trips I've hardly managed to scratch the surface of this mysterious place. I'm disappointed because I know it will be unlikely that I can return again soon, and I know the place is likely to be very much a different place next time I visit - although perhaps people were saying that in the 80s and 90s...

More than anything I think I still feel conflicted about life in Cuba. I know life would likely be a lot more comfortable for Cubans should a free market system be allowed to flourish in this long protected economy. And I know many Cubans very much want to be allowed access to the opportunities for wealth building that seem to come with being more active participants in the global marketplace. But I still feel strange about the fact that most of their opportunities are likely to come in the shape of tourism. And then it becomes yet another country curated for the benefit of wealthy westerners...

But as as global capitalism seems to be unravelling at an ever increasing rate, I still think there are a great number of things that Cuba has right that the rest of the world simply doesn't. As an outsider looking in, the social, family and community lives of Cubans seem enviable. Their wellbeing seems to have benefitted from far less of a presence of the "digital universe" and I definitely felt calmer after 5 days without "promotional messages" interrupting the public space I moved through. Cuba is renowned for it's health care and education systems, but there's no denying there are fewer opportunities for young people to "forge their own path". For me, there really seems a lot of sense to socialism - even if it means less of a sense of individual freedom. Even though it is an inaccurate representation - if the two poles we have to choose from are the US, where on paper, complete personal freedom is the ultimate goal, but the collateral damage for many are any sense of equality, community and quality of life - and Cuba, where a sense of community, shared endeavour and curbed freedom are daily reality, I think I know what I'd choose. But that's easy enough for me to say after 5 days visiting, from many hundreds of miles away, sitting on my comfy couch while typing on my internet enabled laptop.

I really do believe Cubans have a right to self determine, and it seems undeniable that their "democratic" system isn't necessarily enabling that at the moment. But I don't know that the American ideal they've been kept away from for 60 years is as great for them as they might have been led to believe. The sweets you've been told you're not allowed to have are rarely good for you.

Cuba is far too complex a place for me to get my head around in 2 visits totalling 10 days. I think this place will continue to mystify me for many years to come... And no doubt I will continue to think of it as my spiritual home, long after their political ideology I naively idealise has been consumed into the global mess.

FURTHER READING

• How Havana has changed with Wifi - Alice Driver for Citylab

• New Mall in Socialist Cuba - The Guardian

• Only governments can stem the tide of tourism - Elizabeth Becker for The Guardian

• Cuban tourists keeping food of locals' plates - Azam Ahmed for NYT

• The Cuba tourists never see - Matt WIlson for The Guardian

• Cuba is poor, but who's to blame - Helen Yaffe for The Conversation

• Social care in Cuba - Castro's legacy - Sam Jones for The Guardian

• Stale bread with ham and rum - Alice Driver for Vice

• Cuba for Sale - Oliver Wainwright for The Guardian

• One family, myriad views of Castro's revolution - Damien Cave for NYT

• Talented Cuban photographer and clever local for an insider's look - Mari Daniella

• Havana: A Subtropical Delirium - Mark Kurlansky - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Innocence

I've found myself browsing through old photos these past few days, reminiscing about the days of ill advised hairstyles, questionable outfit choices, silly friends, and ridiculous behaviour...

Remember that time when you were so blissfully unaware that things should be done a certain way and that growing up came with an unwritten rule book and a long list of harsh realities? When it didn't occur to you to think you should be anything else other than what you are? When you felt utterly uncomfortable in your own skin most of the time but you kind of loved yourself anyway? When you lived in the present, were free to experiment, get things wrong, and felt so damn sure that you could make something happen, because youthful optimism is a real thing?

I'm not sure when it started to evaporate - possibly the day before our year 12 results were released and my parents told me they'd charge me board unless I went to university. Possibly when I got my first job post uni which numbed my brain and primed me for a life full of professional boredom. Possibly when I realised I'd gained too much weight to wear singlet tops without being judged. Possibly when I bought my first apartment and regretfully settled in for a lifetime of mortgage repayments. Possibly when I took all my piercings out and cut off my long hair because that's what grown ups do.

Maybe this is what it is to get older - to feel nostalgic about days in the recent past when you felt different - lighter. When the sense of possibility was palpable and it didn't occur to you that it might one day not be there.

I feel like that's a lot of what our cultural obsession with youth (youthful looks, youthful identity, youthful thinking) is all about - selling lost youth to those who wish they could hold on to it for just a little bit longer. 

But I think what I'm realising is that the things we're missing from our long ago (or not so long ago) age of innocence should belong to us at any age - this is the natural human state. Living in the present, making impulsive decisions, coming from a place of possibility.  

Granted, life can be hard. Adulting is hard and there's a lot of fucked up shit happening in the world. But the "hard" we're worried about isn't the real hard stuff. Not really. And the difference is that when I was young I had unbounded energy to tackle obstacles and take on new challenges. I lived life with the attitude that everything was surmountable, or even if it wasn't we would have fun coming to terms with reality.

So that's what I want my 2017 to be about - that youthful feeling of possibility, energy, lightness. And holding on to the youthful optimism I had as a teenager and hope to have for years to come.

Stretching

In 2017 I'm sticking with tradition and changing things up ;)

This week, I made the decision to leave my job – to prioritise my health, to build a life around our farm, our friends and the things we love close to home, and to commit to working with regional communities like those I grew up in. I’m finally getting comfortable with the idea of my working life looking different to the type A “career” I thought I wanted, and beginning to think through what life might look like if I step away off this trajectory – maybe just a little way, or maybe completely.

At this risk of becoming the total embodiment of a white girl "Eat Pray Love" cliche, I'm kicking this off with some time in Bali doing yoga.

This Yoga Life

I’ve had a kind of distant love affair with yoga ever since the first classes I can remember, during my first weeks of college when a friend and I discovered it as a Saturday morning ritual and a great way to escape the cultural haze that consisted of hundreds of people in varying stages of drinking, drunk, and hung over. Those early hatha classes were an awkward pleasure – a way to learn to navigate the adolescent body I still didn’t understand, and a way to find stillness and ritual in a crazy and uncertain stage of life.

My next exposure to yoga came when my mother and I accompanied my boyfriend to classes while he undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The intended distraction may have had that affect for him, but I found myself lying there during the final savasana with thoughts racing through my head. I must admit it was nice to have the time to just let them…

The closest I’ve come to yoga monogamy is when I discovered Bikram Yoga at 22. That first class was possibly the hardest physical thing I’ve done, when my instincts were working against me, and it took all my focus to remain upright. I ignored instructions and followed my instincts – leaving the room to catch my breath and prevent the contents of my stomach from ending up all over the mat.

Bikram became a welcome relief from the daily chaos of my life – self-employed and studying full time while completing the CSL Fellowship Program, I would fit my regular Bikram classes in around my morning CrossFit session and my bike commute. The routine of the same 26 postures and 2 breathing exercises over and over freed up the headspace I was lacking, and let me stretch, sweat, and feel like I could achieve something in just a 90 minute session.

For a period of 5 or so years, I would dabble in other styles of yoga, but I craved the routine and the adrenaline rush that I got from Bikram. I ignored the fact that the ethos and ethics of the Bikram Yoga business (and the man himself) didn’t quite jive with me. At one point, a friend remarked that I was such an overachiever that even my yoga was full on. But by this point it was a full-fledged addiction, just like my habits of overworking, overcommitting and overeating.

It wasn’t me who put the brakes on in the end – my body did it for me. With what can only be described as burn out arriving unceremoniously just weeks after I got married. After slogging it out in the lead up to the wedding, trying to shed the weight I was gaining despite many hours in the gym, on the bike and on the mat, I’d hit my limit. I worked all through my honeymoon but when I came back I found I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get out of bed, and I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.

My doctor told to me my adrenal system was under too much pressure, and that it was buckling. She told me to give myself a break, focus on my health, and to avoid anything that wasn’t gentle and restorative. I tried to comply. Sometimes. But reverse programming the things I'd been doing proved to be a challenge...  

It took time to kick the habit of Bikram, and even today I still crave it, and indulge my cravings from time to time, but I've also found vinyasa and yin to be an ideal substitute for the adrenaline rush of the hot bikram room - challenging my body in all the right ways, and giving my brain a chance to rest, restore and find focus, and my soul a chance to open softly.

My first steps into vinyasa were at a studio that suited me perfectly and settled into a daily ritual of vinyasa, flow and yin. For me, Amy's beautiful morning vinyasa flow and hot yoga classes at Yoga Corner were very special - helping me find a practice that nourishes my mind, body and soul, rather than making my body stronger to the detriment of my emotional and spiritual wellbeing. The consistent routine didn't last long, but left me feeling nurtured and refilled. 

Changing

2 years ago my husband and I made the decision to dial back the hustle and bustle and move from inner city Melbourne to central Victoria, close to where I grew up. He has been working locally ever since, but I couldn’t quite let go of the pull to climb the career ladder, so I’ve been commuting for 4 hours every day into town for work, all the while feeling jealous of the lifestyle he was living close to home, and building up resentment for the situation I’d created for myself. Sadly the choice to follow the “corporate career path” has meant my physical and mental health have taken a back seat for the last 2 years and I’ve witnessed my habits, mental health, body and energy tracking in a direction I wasn’t happy with.  

I've tried to carve out time for yoga, with visits to Yoga 213 and Le Yoga closer to home, as well as the occasional Bikram class satisfying me in grabs. But my tired body and mind knew it was time to shift gears a little...

Next steps

From mid-January, I'll be spending 5 weeks in Bali doing a 200 hour Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training at the very lovely Serenity Yoga in Nusa Lembongan. I must admit, the teaching part didn't initially appeal to me - this time was more an effort to re-embed a more regular yoga practice into my routine (which has dismally failed since I've been commuting these past two years), but the more I think about it the more I think perhaps I'm under-appreciating the potential of being a teacher.

A month with Serenity is a huge first step. I’m so looking forward to focusing on the theory, the practice and the methodology. I’m craving the reset and recalibration opportunity it presents. I also see it as an opportunity to start unpicking some of the thinking and habits that got me here in the first place. I know I have plenty of work to do in this regard. I’m excited at the prospect of making a regular yoga practice a central part of my life again, and I know this will be a core element of an ongoing investment in my physical and mental health.

In anticipation, I've got a long list of materials to get through before I fly out. Here's the hit list recommended by Caroline at Serenity.

• Light on Yoga – B.K.S Iyengar
• Teaching Yoga – Mark Stephens
• Yoga Sequencing – Mark Stephens
• Yoga Anatomy – Leslie Kaminoff & Amy Matthews
• Bhagavad Gita – Easwarn/Stephen Mitchell
• The Yoga Bible – Christina Brown
• The Women’s Health Big Book of Yoga – Kathryn Budig
• The Key Muscles of Yoga – Ray Long
• Yin Yoga – Bernie Clark

I also picked up Duncan Peak's Modern Yoga after a thoroughly incredible Power Living class in Manly recently. Adding it to the list. 

Despite this (somewhat intimidating) list of work ahead of me, I know that the majority of the work I do during this period (and forever really) will be internal. There's an awful lot of reverse programming to do, a lot of rethinking to happen, and a whole stack of challenging my assumptions that I need to undertake unless I want to find myself back in the same position at the same time next year.

I’m very much looking forward to the adventure.

So tell me yogis - does any of this sound familiar? Is there hope for me? What have you found most challenging about getting past this point?

Onward

So when reality started to set in yesterday I can’t say I was entirely surprised. Kind of devastated. Despondent - but mostly in a way that felt like this outcome was the only logical conclusion to a period of peak craziness. I’m not sure... There are a lot of feelings…

Part of me is heartbroken for the fact that a woman like Hillary Clinton – possibly the person most well qualified to hold elected office in the United States, ever – has been beaten to the post by a man who has no such qualifications.

But the rest of me knows it isn’t about gender, or about how qualified she is to do the job, or that it’s time for there to be a woman in the White House.

It is yet another indication that things are not working. Trump’s election is nothing if not a sharp departure away from business as usual. The whole thing is ready and ripe for disruption. And I don’t mean in a business buzz word kind of way that really doesn’t really change much of consequence. More in the way that the system isn’t working for most, and needs a major shake-up. Like things will probably never be the same again – but maybe not in the way we think.

The cynical side of me thinks Trump making it to the White House won’t even change anything. If real change through the traditional channels of democracy (ie, elected office) was even possible, surely we would have seen this with the first black President. But Obama himself has admitted to being frustrated by the lack of progress made in his two terms in office. It turns out democracy in a wildly capitalist global society full of embedded allegiances and legitimised corruption has its limitations…

The significance of the fact that Trump – a racist, bigoted, sexist human, legendary for his shady business ethics, who deals in the currency of exclusion and holds grudges like no-one else – has managed to capture the imagination of 120 million people in what was formerly the most affluent country in the world should not be diminished.

Image via the New Yorker

But isn’t it inevitable in a global culture that teaches us that our success is the most important thing? And that our success is relative and disconnected from fulfilment? The thing is, this is a feature – NOT a flaw – of the system. Wealth is supposed to concentrate in the hands of a few. This wealth is supposed to embed and reinforce cosmetic and other kinds of power. Disenfranchisement is supposed to prevent everyone else from organising and developing a sense of agency. This has happened by design, not by accident.

Trump’s election is just the last in a long line of these kinds of indicators that have been building for many years now. We should have twigged in 2008. The rise in deaths from so called “diseases of despair” (suicide, drug and alcohol misuse) in the developed world should have alerted us. And climate change, the ultimate canary in the mine, could have prompted us to act – if we could.

And now such indicators are too many to ignore. Here in Australia, the resurgence of Pauline Hanson could have triggered some soul searching, just like the election of Tony Abbott before her – not because of their political allegiances, but because of the values that brought them to power. The Brexit vote was a big one. But perhaps it took this big American “shock” to finally wake us up. (Everything is bigger in America, after all.) Perhaps it took a global circus of insanity to focus our attention.

Despite the examples I’ve called out here, I don’t think this is a question we can solve by choosing the better one from the political ideologies of the left and right at all. Indicators suggest Bernie Sanders would have done well in this election despite nominally sitting on the opposite end of the political continuum. In fact, like Stephen Colbert discussed in his Election Day show, the idea of political polarities is part of the problem. The fact that we’ve forgotten that we’re all in it together has magnified the cracks that are now showing. We’ve become bitter, full of blame and resentment - directed at everyone but those like us.

And I think if we’re going to successfully emerge from this still intact, we need everyone on board. For this to work, we need all the contributing factors to realign – beyond self-interest.

I imagine many in the media will be having a good hard look at themselves in the coming weeks, wondering how they didn’t see the signs. The reality is they created the signs – the wrong ones. They focused on the fact that stories about how Hillary’s email woes made her seem untrustworthy would attract clicks, and ignored the bigger story – the huge scale of personal and public dissatisfaction emerging globally which appointed Trump as their Pied Piper. It’s harder to write a good click bait headline for that.

I can just see the political class wondering how they got it so wrong. How an election campaign for an unqualified caricature that ignored all the conventional wisdom managed to succeed despite projections. I wonder if the idea that a political class exists in the first place will strike them as at all problematic. I’m intrigued to see how the GOP react to this unexpected victory – whether it will give them an incentive to rethink and really work to understand what makes a difference to the people living a long way from the halls of power, or whether they’ll take it as permission to be ever more dogmatic about their pro-market, pro-life agenda.

I suspect a lot of the wealthy business elite are quietly confident, happy to be sitting pretty where history has put them in - the best possible position to be able to buffer themselves for what comes next, and better yet, to profit from it. But I wonder which industries are most vulnerable to the inevitable shocks that will come (just like they did in 1929 – a year after the last occasion when Republicans controlled all 3 levels of US office) and whether they’ll adapt their business model to capitalise out of altruism or pursuit of profit.

I imagine many of Trump’s supporters are relieved that their hero has swept to power, just like many people were thrilled when Obama was elected proclaiming a different kind of change. (The irony that many Obama voters supported Trump this election cycle is crazy, but goes to show just how much the idea of change counts for these days.) But I wonder if they realise that the real work happens with them – that their hero is unable to change the way things look at the ground level, unless they themselves work to change it too.

I’m going to spend time with the people I love, build up energy and empathy to put into my community. I'm going to constantly remind myself that I'm not someone who will be most impacted by this decision - and work to love and protect people who have more to lose than I do. I'm going to have many conversations, exercise patience (or at least try), work to understand what motivates people who think differently than me, and focus on sending everyone love and kindness.

Further reading:

• Stephen Colbert's Election Night coverage
• Post Election Thoughts from John Green
• Russell Brand makes some valid points here and here
• History as a cure for our times - School of Life
• The Audacity of Hopelessness by Roxane Gay
• 10 reasons Donald Trump might be right and what that means for Australia
• How did the media get this wrong - New York Times
• Why Trump will win - Michael Moore and his to do list
• An American Tragedy - New Yorker
• Globalisation is dead and white supremacy has triumphed - Paul Mason
• Be Gentle, Be Bold
• How progressives must react - Yanis Varoufakis
• Who will rise up to become Australia's Trump?
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
• Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
• Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level

California

This September my husband and I spent a couple of weeks in California. We were there for the wedding of a very dear friend, but we also made the most of the trip to explore San Francisco and Yosemite. So predictably, this whirlwind trip was mostly about photographing murals (SF) and nature (everywhere else). When in Cali...

For the most part San Francisco is a rather lovely city with a really exceptional history - many waves of immigration brought on by various booms and busts (gold rush, tech rush, etc), geographical and natural disasters (fires and earthquakes), the emergence of social movements (gay rights and the hippies of the summer of love), and a generally quite liberal outlook. But as is happening in what seems like every major city right now, gentrification seems to be accelerating well past the normal rate of "change" and hurtling headlong toward alienating, marginalising and / or hiding those who can't keep up. If we were on a different kind of trip, I would have liked to have focused my "getting to know the city" activities on understanding the housing crisis there (the housing minister quit while we were there because she could no longer afford to live in SF herself), and interviewing some of the folks affected by it. And it seems there are many. The downsides to the tech boom..

Speaking of which - there was a major tech conference on (which added an extra 70,000 heads to the already difficult hunt for beds) making it a very expensive stay. Thank god we missed Salesforce's major event by two weeks. It apparently adds an approximate 170,000 people to the city, and they bring in cruise ships to add temporary accommodation capacity to the city.

We got our tourist on. We ate our hearts out and made up for it by riding the hills of SF. We were again disappointed by American coffee and lack of breakfast game. We were again impressed by their ridiculous burgers and exceptionally good martinis. We tried to get a sense of the city without getting cynical about the impact of the tech industry. Not sure if we succeeded there.

Be dangerous, It's careful out there...

We made our way to wedding adventures via a quick stop at Muir Woods. The experience of staring up at these Redwood and Sequoia trees was brief and calming. Nothing like a wander through a forest of hundreds-of-years-old trees to help you get some perspective...

The wedding itself was lovely and picturesque. It was such a pleasure to spend time with a great bunch of people from all over the world - most of whom I hadn't previously met because they're friends my global traveller friend has gathered from all across the globe. I will say that it's nice to know that good people find each other wherever they are. But I'll leave all that because it isn't my (love) story to tell. And because I have no doubt there will be far better photos than mine...

Our final stop was a few days of nature in Yosemite. After 3 hours of driving on the wrong side of the road, we arrived unscathed and ready to relax. Exploring Yosemite National Park was spectacular. There were cars and people everywhere so it was hard to find any kind of stillness for a moment to truly appreciate the landscape but it is truly awe inspiring. Like everything in the US, everything seems bigger.

The biggest thing I learnt from this trip to remind myself just how good we have it in Australia.

Driving through California, I was genuinely stunned to see so many Trump signs in front yards. Isn't California supposed to be quite politically progressive? But when you stop to look, is it really so surprising? I found it so depressing to drive from place to place and see only multiplexes (complete with budget supermarkets and fast food restaurants) as the cultural landmarks. I found it so interesting to see what happens when cars are a a key causal factor in urban, suburban and rural design. It doesn't leave a lot of room for organic social touch points or serendipitous moments of connection with others. I wasn't entirely surprised to see a burger joint functioning as a kind of surrogate community centre. It doesn't seem to be a unique phenomenon across the country.

And Australia seems to be evolving in the same way. I remember reading Denniss and Hamilton's Affluenza many years back which essentially articulates that the more a country is like America the worse it fares in life satisfaction indicators. Surely the US is more a case study in what not to do? Yet why do we seem so keen to follow in their footsteps...?

So while I'm happy to visit, but America just feels like a less good version of Australia, and therefore doesn't make much sense to me. I'll have to satisfy myself with marvelling at their astounding natural landscape, and remind myself to do more of the same back in my own country.

Podlite

I've written previously about my long running and fully fledged addiction to podcasts, and I'm happy to report it has not subsided.

It has, however changed shape a little bit.

For some reason this year I decided I needed a little more levity in my listening habits. I also decided I want to hear more from literary and creative types, and a bit more narrative storytelling. My day job can get a little heavy from time to time, so it can be nice to have something a bit more playful and indulgent to plug in to, rather than being aurally hit over the head with all the problems of the world after a long day thinking of all the problems of the world...

So my listening roster has altered accordingly. Below are a few new or rediscovered listening indulgences I'm happy to recommend, for your listening pleasure. I hope you find something here you like.

POP CULTURE

Nerdist

I'm happy to report I have picked my way through much of the Nerdist backcatalogue. Granted, most of these folks are celeb types, but there have been a few interesting insights among them. Try this if you like Here's The Thing or WTF with Marc Maron. Stream / Subscribe

Mamamia's The Binge

Rosie Waterland is so great that I started watching The Bachelor just for her scathing wrap ups. Here she is talking TV, and it is gold. Even if you're not a fan of Mamamia, you might get a kick out of this. Try this if you like Pop Culture Happy Hour or The Rereaders. Stream / Subscribe

Switched On Pop

If you're a music fan, this has got to be the best podcast out there. It mixes musicology, history, pop culture, and analysis to deconstruct pop songs in a clever, insightful way. Try this if you like Song Exploder or All Songs Considered. Stream / Subscribe

New Yorker Radio Hour

The New Yorker's audio companion which pulls apart current day events and speaks to those "having a moment" on an international scale. Never fails to make for interesting listening. Try this if you like This American Life or Fresh Air. Stream / Subscribe

Monocycle

Honestly I don't know what category Monocycle fits into, but I find it very interesting. Sometimes fluffy, sometimes a raw and emotional overflow of emotion due to Leandra Medine's fertility battle. Always good. Try this if you like Women of the Hour or Chat 10 Looks 3. Stream / Subscribe

LITERATURE

Shakespeare and Co

Recorded readings from the iconic Parisian book shop which has hosted many a literary icon over it's long history. Some recordings (like some books) are better than others, but there are a lot of good ones. Try this if you like ABC's Book Club or The Rereaders. Stream / Subscribe

Slate's Audio Book Club

This has been going for quite a while, and there's a good backcatalogue of titles to choose from, whether you've read them or not. Choose from literary giants, contemporary highlights, future classics. Try this if you like Chat 10 Looks 3 or The Rereaders. Stream / Subscribe

HISTORY

Rum, Rebels and Ratbags

It's been a persistent gaping hole in my knowledge, so I've been on the hunt for a good podcast on Australian History for a while. This one is very much about the history of colonisation, and has left indigenous history alone. Try this if you like Stuff You Missed in History Class or Stuff You Should Know. Stream / Subscribe

Lore

I'm intrigued by ancient folklore, and I love this narrative exploration of some of the foundation narratives of our civilisations. Plenty of greek and norse gods, but also chinese and middle eastern legends and more recently history. Try this if you like Memory Palace or Stuff You Missed in History Class. Stream / Subscribe

Revisionist History

A relatively new podcast, this one comes from Malcolm Gladwell, and looks at somewhat unexplored or misunderstood moments in history. Promising so far. Try this if you like Freakonomics or RadioLab. Stream / Subscribe

RadioLab's More Perfect

This one is also new, and given it is an offshoot from RadioLab the quality shouldn't be surprising. The difference is it is looking specifically at historical moments in the life of the US Supreme Court. Try this if you like On the Media or RadioLab. Stream / Subscribe

SOCIAL SCIENCE / PSYCHOLOGY

Hidden Brain

Another firm favourite, Hidden Brain deconstructs unconscious biases and patterns behind our human behaviour. A mix of science and storytelling that feels fun and informative. Try this if you like Freakonomics or Reply All. Stream / Subscribe

Only Human

This one explores health in a very personal way - stories of people with unique physical and mental health stories. It makes for pretty compelling listening, and I hope a greater appreciation of health as our greatest asset. Try this if you like RadioLab or Note to Self. Stream / Subscribe

DOCUMENTARY

Embedded

This is how radio documentaries should be. Reporters go deep into a specific and unique situation, and deliver insightful interviews with those affected. Really good stuff. Try this if you like Serial or Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People. Stream / Subscribe

SBS True Stories

I'm so grateful for SBS's ability to highligh these wonderful stories that simultaneously feel so specific and personal, but also so universal. Australia is such a wonderful place. Try this if you like Conversations with Richard Fidler or Modern Love. Stream / Subscribe

WORTH A MENTION

Women of the Hour

If you're a Lena Dunham fan you probably subscribe to Lenny Letter, and you're probably eagerly anticipating the last ever season of Girls. Get this first season of her podcast into you in the meantime. Try this if you like Chat 10 Looks 3 or Desert Island Discs. Stream / Subscribe

Code Switch

Given where things are at with the race discussion in the US today (and here in Aus, might I add), this has quickly become essential listening. When they start with "we need to talk about whiteness" you know they're serious. Try this if you like This American Life or Death, Sex and Money. Stream / Subscribe

Subtle Disruptors

Adam Murray, the man behind Subtle Disruptors, has a lovely way of exploring people who are quietly making change in their own way, just beneath Melbourne's surface. Try this if you like On Being or She Does. Stream / Subscribe

ALSO

Podcast Broadcast

If, like me, you are constantly on the look out for new listening delights, you would be well advised to subscribe to this regular newsletter featuring recommendations and weekly highlights from the world of podcasts. Subscribe

I'm always on the hunt for other recommendations. Do you know something I'd like? Do you have a podcast obsession I haven't come across? I'm particularly on the hunt for any locally produced gems. TELL ME!

Touristing

Marcus and I took ourselves on a little mid-Winter adventure in June, timed to coincide with the football season break (of course). To Vietnam - a destination we arrived at by a process of elimination. Not too far to fly, not too expensive, not to far from beaches. It wasn't particularly high on either of our travel hit lists, but it checked the boxes.

It was a quick visit - a whistle stop tour from the top to the bottom of the country, hitting up the major destinations of Hanoi (with a quick interlude out to Halong Bay), Hoi An (with plenty of beach time), and Saigon (with a day trip out to the Mekong Delta) - all in just 10 days (which is just long enough to defrost from the Central Victorian winter, incidentally). Classic tourist stuff.

Distracted by the daily rhythm, I kind of forgot we were going on holiday until just a couple of days prior to departure. It was a bit of a strange experience - completely different to how I would normally approach a trip - with planning and research and language study. (NERD.) We had nothing more to go on than what we knew by travel folklore, a lonely planet we swiped (temporarily) from the local pub, and a post it note of recommendations from some friends who had recently returned.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don't feel like we really got under the skin of the place. Our lacklustre pre-trip planning meant getting comfortable with feeling like tourists. (Travelling with giant bearded white man also amplified that sense...) The tropical weather also meant getting comfortable with the eternal need to wipe sweat from your face. It was like two white people in a 10 day Bikram class.

It felt like the Vietnamese don't particularly love Westerners (which, by the way, is entirely understandable - especially given the history), but it felt very evident that parts of the country are very much engineered for the benefit of white tourist dollars. 

One thing is for sure - the food didn't disappoint. We were already well aware how lucky we are to have the Melbourne Vietnamese community at our door step. But we now know that even Melbourne's Vietnamese food is no match for the real stuff. So. Good.

Best. Pho. Ever. Pho 10 in Hanoi's Old Town.

Took a bit to get my head around eating noodles for breakfast. On the street. From a kids picnic table.

Accidentally ate our first Vietnamese Banh Mi from what is apparently THE BEST Banh Mi in Vietnam according to Anthony Bordain. It was good.

Vietnamese BBQ.

Wonton Pizza - with pumpkin and pineapple. Surprisingly delicious.

Com ga. Accompanied by corn milk. Not so sure on the corn milk.

Hen Xao - tiny baby mussels and peanut-y delicious goodness.

So all in all, a bit of a funny trip. It was a nice holiday, but it felt like just that - a holiday, rather than anything close to an immersive adventure. Perhaps we had glimpses of local life, but even then, it felt like an approximation constructed for the benefit of tourists. I left feeling a little bit disappointed (in myself) that a visit to a country with such a colourful, contentious history felt like not much more than a tropical beach holiday. Complete with sunburn and serious bout of food poisoning. The thing is, I don't know that more proactive planning would have changed that?

I will say this though - it's not too bad for photos. There sure is a lot of colour to play with! (I am clearly a little out of practice though...)

Cruising around Halong Bay.

Pearl farming...

Sung Sot Cave. Lots of colour.

Hanoi Old Town.

Tropical colour in Hoi An.

Perfect mix of old and new / east and west. Too hot and rainy.

Just after the downpour...

Tips:

Airbnb was a big winner in Vietnam. We loved all of our three mini-hotels. I'd highly recommend it if you're planning a Vietnam trip.

We did a few food-related activities with the good people from Urban Adventures Vietnam. Even for experience travellers, I'd recommend it early on in your time in a new city as a way to drill a local for good recommendations, context, history - and excellent food! Highly recommended, particularly if you're keen to go beyond vietnamese coffee, pho and spring rolls. These guys do a great street food tour.

The cities are very much engineered for motorbikes and scooters. We found it difficult to walk around in Hanoi and Saigon, and we were very grateful for our villa-supplied bikes in Hoi An - so if you're game you might like to hire some wheels. 

While Vietnam is still nominally a Communist country, as a traveller you wouldn't necessarily know it - with quite a bit of development, international investment and elements of a thriving market system on display. The set up does seem to still impinge on the freedoms of local people and based on our conversations the appeal of a centralised economy has all but worn off for most Vietnamese, though they may not speak of it openly. 

There's so much more to Vietnamese history and culture than the War. Hundreds of years of feudalism and dynastic rule. Colonial disputes between the Chinese, French and Japanese. Ideologically fuelled wars and political coups. Many culturally diverse tribal groups. Not to mention the consequent religious diversity. Even still, we found it quite difficult to get to the bottom of it all beyond the touristy stuff. Ideally, do a bit of reading before you go, and make the most of the people you meet along the way to dig a little deeper.

If you do fancy finding out a bit about it the last days of the Vietnam War, read Viet Tranh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathiser. (Read this glowing NY Times review.) And listen to his chat with NPR Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

So what do you think? Do we put our trip experience down to being lazy and inexperienced Asian travellers? Or did you have a similar experience in Vietnam? Or should I just be satisfied with a bit of beach time and be done with it? Thoughts? Feels? Opinions? (As always, play nice.)

Little ones

It's happened all of a sudden that family christmas is filled with little ones and water pistols, sprinklers and pulling faces, nudie runs and horsey races... of a different kind.

Gee they're good for a giggle.

On Purpose

You know that feeling when you spend two entirely life-affirming days with a bunch of people who totally get it?

No? Then you clearly weren’t at Purpose - the brainchild of Wildwon co-founders Sally Hill and Yvonne Lee and their incredible team.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a bit of a junkie for these kinds of gatherings. For me, it is so important to spend time with people who understand where you’re coming from, and this is especially true for people working to make the world better. It can seem an insurmountable challenge when you’re working in isolation - and sometimes (actually, often!) you need an injection of energy and perspective from others moving in the same direction.

Unsurprisingly, I have lots of thoughts / ramblings / opinions about the goings-on of the last two days, and in the interests of sorting through the mess of them - and creating some kind of sense - I’ve written some things down here. There were a few key themes that resonated for me, many of which are threads of ongoing conversations, some of which were entirely new (and very timely). If you were there too - or equally, if you weren’t - I’d love to hear what you make of all this…

Let’s break this down from the top…

The Global Context

We’re in a period of immense change. We know this. If you’ve read arguably the two biggest books of the last couple of years (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything) you’ll know that the systems that govern us are at breaking point - and the two big feedback loops (the economic system we created and the environment we rely on) are sounding major alarm bells.

Matthew Bell from EY threw some macro trend stats around in one of the first sessions. There are a lot of us. We’re younger and more connected than ever. Almost 50% of occupations will be replaced within the next 20 years. We’re becoming highly urbanised, and the shape of the global economy is shifting quickly away from the West. It’s predicted that global water demand will outstrip supply by 40% within the next 15 years. Ballpark cost predictions for climate adaptation are in the $70 - $100 Billion range - per year. And really, the only ones with the capital and agency to do anything about this are a bunch of rich (mostly white) people (mostly men) who own most of the world’s assets and capital, and who seem pretty comfortable in their ivory towers (my words, not Matt’s). Our very humanity is being challenged by inequality.

Back to First Principles

Piketty, Klein and many others argue that we’re faced with a HUGE opportunity to reengineer the systems we’ve created so that they actually serve us. I couldn’t agree more.

So if that’s the case, I think it’s really useful to step back and think about what we value. What is actually important? What do we want to happen? What are we working towards?

The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, to the detriment of equality, the environment and actual wellbeing? Because that’s what’s valued in our current economic system… And Piketty and Klein have shown that these outcomes are actually part of the design of the system (and Marx actually articulated this long before either of them did). So if they’re not the outcomes we want, we need to design a new system that supports what we actually do want. Amanda Keogh’s simple question about what we’re actually working towards - what is the metric we’re trying to shift? - was a killer. Jeremy Mah’s innocent question about whether we had defined “Purpose” for everyone in the room at the event touched on this too. They’re smart those kids. 

Measuring Up

You know that old saying “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”? (It was William Bruce Cameron who said that, not Einstein by the way. Thanks Matt Wicking for that little tidbit.)

As the wonderful Jane Gleeson-White explained to us in her opening keynote, we’re dealing with the result of many years of outdated systems. Accounting frameworks that were created to keep track of the financial and manufactured capital of Agrarian England, Medieval Italy and the Industrial Revolution are not working for the world we live in today.

Social capital, human capital, intellectual capital and natural capital need to be added to our accounting frameworks. Unless we learn to value what is actually valuable it is really hard to make values decisions. Without metrics and measurement, we’re flying blind, and prioritising outcomes that aren’t financial and/or measurable will continue to be a challenge. 

Sharing is caring

One theme that came through loud and clear (much to my delight) is the need for organisations to become better collaborators. We’ve seen over and over how easy it is for profit based organisation to find a way to collaborate - it’s easy when there’s money at the finish line, but we need to get much better at doing this for the benefit of shared values.

Some great examples of that were showcased over the 2 days of Purpose. I am super excited by the work being done by the Future Business Council, the B Corp movement, and Conscious Capitalism, but I think it is really critical that we get better collaborating on issues based work too. Collective Impact is more than a buzz term, and it should be getting air time beyond the NFP sector. There’s no reason purpose-led for-profit businesses can’t be supporting Collective Impact goals in a more substantial, collaborative way. The whole of Purpose was a testament to this - and I’m so grateful for the amount of work that organisations like Wildwon put into the ongoing development and facilitation of this space. Forums like this are so critical if we’re going to succeed on this front!

Community Service

It is so easy to forget that an organisation is a part of the community, not apart from the community. It’s also easy to forget that unless an organisation can truly provide value to the community it serves, it won’t be around for long. I was delighted to witness many a conversation which totally flipped the “build it and they will come” mentality into something far more interesting.

Lauren Capelin spoke in detail about what it means to harness the power of community to build something meaningful, and this is something we’ve been talking about a lot on the work I’m doing currently. There’s no denying that doing this kind of work is much harder than the “transmission model” we’ve become familiar with over the last 50 years, but it has the potential to be so much better! 

One of the greatest things about operating in any business right now is that you can have real, meaningful connections with the people you’re working for - your community. Make the most of these opportunities. Get to know them, and not just in a “market research” kind of way. Start a dialogue, and be grateful for any lessons you are able to learn.

If the lessons aren’t quite what you wanted to hear, you have to be flexible enough to change tack. You’ve got to work where you find yourself and be humble enough to recognise that being in business is not a static exercise.

If you’re to actually have impact you need to lead, support, enable - build capacity in your community. If you’re lucky you’ll gain a whole cohort of long term committed brand ambassadors. If you don’t succeed on that front, then with any luck you will have still built something great.

One gem that was echoed a lot by the likes of Ben Burge, Simon Griffiths, Abigail Forsyth, and of course The Unfuckers, is that the “holier-than-thou” model of cause-led marketing is a dead horse. It does your organisation and (and the sector at large) no help to be continually relying on the heart strings to sell an inferior product or service. Whatever you’re selling needs to be superior to the alternative on as many possible fronts - quality, price, transparency, brand + identity, value. If you’re struggling to get there, then you’ll struggle to hit any kind of scale, because the market for bleeding hearts is small and shrinking.

Organisations need to change

Uncle Jason Clarke, the founding father of the Centre for Sustainability Leadership, and the “mind” of Minds at Work, talked about how organisations that exist to serve egos, to build status and to create hierarchy are entirely at odds with actually doing good work.

The business world is certainly not alone in this. There are so many “impact” organisations who trumpet “values”, but get tripped up by the unspoken stuff (shadow values) that are really driving them. It’s only when you call this stuff out that you can set it aside and actually move on to doing the work. This is an uncomfortable process. It takes leadership (which seems to be desperately lacking across the board) and it takes courage. But as Hello Sunday Morning’s Chris Raine explored, we’re in a hugely fortunately position - and we can afford to take some risks for the sake of our collective future.

But this shift is easy to talk about and much harder to do. Many excellent speakers talked about how much easier it is to start from scratch with values at the forefront, rather than trying to bolt a values framework on to an existing organisation. The classic Buckminster Fuller quote applies here. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Build your best case scenario. This goes for culture, business model, or system.

Do Something

Something that I know resonated with everyone in the jam-packed Eternity Playhouse Theatre at the end of a very intensive 2 days, was Jason Fox talking about finding ways to create a sense of progress in the work you’re doing, and Kyra Maya Phillips talking about pirates.

The blessing and curse of doing purpose-based work is being one of those people who questions - everything, incessantly. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to question the value of the work you’re doing on a many-times-daily basis. 

Find a way to create a sense of progress. Create feedback loops (metrics and measurement if possible) so that you can see it. Help yourself to get a sense of momentum and strive for continuous improvement.

But what do you do when you’re in overwhelm mode? When you feel stuck or unsure and you don’t know what to do. You do something. You have to do the work. Chunk it down systematically and move through the steps in as logical a fashion as you can. And then give yourself a high five.

I loved Kyra's advice to move your thinking away from SHOULD - what should I do - which comes loaded with a sense of obligation and fatigue before you've even started, and towards CAN - what can I do with joy, passion and drive.

Freedom comes from focus - my new life’s motto.

Press Pause

For me, the final session of the 2 days was an absolute killer, with truth bombs exploding right in front of my eyes. Matt, Kyra and Jason got right into what it takes to sustain ourselves in doing this work, and this was a surprisingly common topic of conversation at the after party.

Having lived through a pretty horrendous burn-out experience (and I continue to work through the impacts on a daily basis), I really can’t reiterate this one enough.

You have to pay yourself first - and not just in cash-money. If we’re to be able to truly sustain the kind of change we want to see, then I think we have to model a more conscious way of working. Fast-paced, hyper-connected, convenience culture is leading to an awful lot of negatives. The antidote is not more and faster - it’s time to unplug and reconnect - with ourselves, our values, the people and the world around us. 

I didn't make the most of it (silly me), but I was delighted to see Walkshops in nature as part of the 2 day program. The wonderful Jane Spence from the Hello Nature Project and the crew from The School of Life Australia, and my dear friends from The Centre for Sustainability Leadership were the perfect antidote to a full on couple of days. The wonderful Josi Heyerdahl from WWF spoke about this in more detail in one of the main sessions, and it made an awful lot of us think about exactly why we're here.

Remember to schedule moments of quiet. Build in mini rituals. Celebrate when you knock over a goal - big or small. Do things that make you happy - no matter how small it is in the grand scheme of things. One thing’s for sure - it doesn’t matter how much good work we do - if we make ourselves miserable, cynical, strung-out assholes in the process it’s not going to be worth it in the long run…

Ancient Wisdom

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately - which was nicely crystallised in some beautifully articulated words from Jirra Lulla Harvey - is how late to the party the western world is to a lot of the ideas that indigenous cultures have been using for years. 

I feel like you if you look closely enough you’ll find the germs of much of the thinking embedded in the latest business literature is stuff that people much older than us, and much more connected to themselves, each other, and the land have known for millennia. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

I’ve got the nugget of a project along these lines forming. Will see how it evolves…

And along the same train of thought, I was really impressed with the effort Wildwon had made to acknowledge a diversity of opinions, particularly with regard to gender balance. I think we all know that by excluding a bunch of people from the conversation (unconsciously or otherwise), we’re the ones who lose out. There is no lack of talent out there, if you know that it might look different to what you expect. It is so important to acknowledge your own prejudices - often - and to get comfortable with staring directly at them. I’d love to see this continue to be proactively tackled by us as a Purpose community. Affirmative action can’t go too far in my view.

The elephant

The one thing we didn’t discuss at Purpose (not that I’m suggesting we should have necessarily, that certainly wasn’t slated as something that was to be discussed in this forum - it is an ongoing conversation in other forums) was the lack of leadership at a policy and government level. In my opinion, just like the thoroughly outdated accounting systems we’re dealing with, we’re also dealing with thoroughly outdated modes of government. 

I saw Yanis Varoufakis speak at The Wheeler Centre’s Interrobang recently, and I feel like this was the central thesis of his talk. He can see that a globalised society needs vastly different governance, feedback loops, accountability and responsibility than what was required in the past. He spoke at length about the difference between being in power and being in government, and the fact that the influence of our economic system seems to be trumping our political system. Democracy is a tricky thing, and so far it has been incapable of dealing with the huge challenges thrown up by how fast we’re running at our environmental limits, and the slight inconvenience of discovering at the exact same moment that our economic system certainly has it’s limits too.

In the absence of a government (national or international) to articulate our goals as a society, I think it is super critical for us to do this as a community. This is an ongoing iterative process, and I think the media have a super important role to play here, but I’d love to see our little emerging community taking a stab at it too. I feel like everyone is hesitant to take ownership of this as a task - and understandably in a lot of ways, it’s a big one and I don’t know how anyone acquires the kind of credibility required to do it with legitimacy and a sense of collectivism - but it’s worth having a crack, isn’t it?

The other (related) elephant

I have a HUGE amount of respect for many of the amazing entrepreneurs who spoke at Purpose. There were some really great companies represented. Marque Lawyers, Who Gives A Crap, Keep Cup, Powershop… We heard many, many tales of successful entrepreneurs folding purpose into their business and they are to be hugely commended. *rapturous round of applause*

BUT I feel like the challenge of running a successful business, that meaningfully delivers impact, pays their staff enough, hits scale, makes money, markets itself well (without guilt tripping), measures their impact in a transparent and integrated way, and finds the time to bring other fledgling impact entrepreneurs along for the ride, while avoiding career burnout, is an entirely unfair responsibility for individual entrepreneurs with limited resources to have to shoulder.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m trying to shirk responsibility - I know we operate in a space of immense privilege, and perhaps I’m giving our power as individuals too little credit here, but I really feel a far greater degree of responsibility has to fall to the large corporations and wealthy individuals who have benefitted most from the mess they’ve created, and to the political bodies that have let them get away with it.

And as proud I am to see each of these guys up on stage talking about their successes, I can’t help but feel that it is just like a bandaid covering up a slashed artery. I want to know what real game changing stuff looks like. What does it take to actually hit the systems level and see real change? Perhaps it is already happening around me, but I’m just struggling to see it? 

What I do know is, we can do both - and we can definitely be better on both fronts if we’re pulling in the same direction.

Next Level

Based on the conversations that have taken place over the last two days, we know that purpose-led business is the future of business - no longer just a fringe modus operandi. At a time when there is such a high degree of cynicism of the business community, it is incredibly inspiring to hear from a bunch of people who genuinely care about doing good in the world, about doing it at scale, and about finding a way to do it for the long term. Purpose 2015 genuinely feels like ground zero for a cohesive team of people taking this to the next level here in Australia - and making the most of the incredible good fortune we have in this country to expand the Purpose way of doing things far and wide.

So I put it to you - Purpose 2015 attendees: How do we build on the momentum of an event like Purpose - how do we meaningfully facilitate collaboration opportunities to scale this kind of purpose-led thinking from fringe to mainstream? What role can you play in helping Wildwon and others make this happen?

Good Peeps

I was seriously impressed by every single person who was in the room at Purpose. From the attendees, to the suppliers, to the sponsors, to the volunteers donating their time to be a part of it. This was by design too - with Wildwon taking a very curatorial approach to getting good people on board. I was so happy to see so many CSL Alumni. A real family reunion!

I need to make mention of a particular few though.

Matt Wicking - for facilitating the whole event with authenticity, empathy and beautiful sense of quiet humanity he brings to every room.

Jason Fox - for really putting things into perspective, and bringing a great sense of humour to what could be a heavy conversation.

Sarah Fortuna - for her lovely, effortless facilitation and conversation throughout the two days, and for some delightfully honest chats.

Elusive ladies that I desperately want some more face time with Jess Scully, Alex Iljadica, Sarah Ladyman, Jane Spence, Amanda Keogh, Jane Gleeson-White. #ladycrushes

And finally, to the ever wonderful Sally Hill (and her partner in crime Yvonne Lee, and their incredible team). For being such an amazing human being, for leading a movement with quiet determination, grace and such a clear vision and sense of self. And for one of the best possible speeches on the subject of #justinbieber #myreasonforbeing #myonetruelove #purpose2015.

Further Reading

• A more in depth wrap up of Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference and the Storify by the Wildwon crew.

• An actual reading list of books mentioned throughout the conference compiled by Pablo Gil

• A beautiful chat between Pico Iyer and Krista Tippett for On Being

• A great podcast by RadioLab about how anyone can justify their values - even Rhino Hunters

• I swear it wasn't that type of event, but the Communist Manifesto was quoted

• Learn about Purpose-led business models

• Learn more about the Natural Capital Coalition

• Learn about the Science of What Motivates us - 2010's leading business idea as raised by Jason Fox

• Get some Charles Eisenstein into you - with his Sacred Economics

• Read about the Gross National Happiness work being done in Bhutan
  

All image credit goes to the amazing Jarra Joseph McGrath for Wildwon. Whatta guy.

Illusory

After 6 months of photography study at PSC, I totally understand why they warn us that our photos will get worse before they get better.

I feel like I've learned a great deal. The Dunning-Kruger effect also dictates that I've also learned just how much I don't know - how much more there is to learn. Any sense of illusory superiority has been thoroughly shattered - but that excites me! 

Here's a handful of shots from Semester 1.