It has been twelve years since I swapped coasts. An unfair trade of fiery sunsets that gracefully dissolve into the Indian Ocean, for lush rainforests + whip birds + stormy summer evenings.

One should never have to give one up one of these things for the other.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we make a place our home. I’ve travelled to so many incredible places in my life, but only a few could I call home.

Surprisingly, pulling together a Bio or About page on our websites can have us hitting a wall. Some clients say the process feels triggering, inauthentic or even flat out narcissistic. We scramble for the perfect words that will make us sound legendary; like we have it all figured out + really know our shit. But just like photo filters shield us from the real deal… so it does with filtered and phoney written copy.

Ah, rebirth. She has a knack for sauntering into the party unannounced + uninvited, angling that godforsaken mirror to reveal all we did our darnedest to overlook. She is promise of a thousand new worlds, and where certainty goes to die. She is beautiful + bountiful.

But before that, she is compost.

I have brought my kids into this world with all intentions of giving them the best life I possibly can. Of course, there were always going to be obstacles. I am not so naïve as to believe otherwise. I signed up to motherhood with no crystal ball, no safety net and ALL of my own unturned stones. Challenges, for sure, abound.

But did I underestimate the magnitude of challenges in raising babies in such a time as this?

I believe so.

At the culmination of a capricious year, it is hard to shake the desire to crane our necks for a sneak peek of what could possibly be waiting around the corner. Most of us, whether we know it or not, seek an exit strategy of one kind or another from the madness. Whether we are nostalgic for easier times, ready to revolt at full pelt or somewhere in the middle, one thing is for sure: we are ready for the new, the fixed + the functional.

Clunkily, we manoeuvre our way through the weeks, weary but on keen lookout for a divergence from the debris.

The noise, the mental stimuli is prolific. Someone or something, somewhere has us outraged; the sensitive are crushed; emotional needs of the children overlooked, the inquisitive, chastised; the unsure, bullied. Acquiescence is the new black. The way forward as we once knew it to be, now appears illusory, unbound with all that it once promised. In the depths of pandemonium, we learn the hard way how constructs can, at a hairsbreadth, crumble.

And so, it is time to start creating a new world, accordingly.

It started with the conspiracy theorists. From the depths of their rabbit holes, they warned us, repeatedly. Be prepared, they said. It’s coming, they said. Things will never be the same again, they said. We laughed at their silly notions and went about our day. But if we were honest, we’d admit their warnings made the little hairs on the back of our neck stand to attention.

At school, my concentration span is extraordinarily short. I struggle to comprehend the junk that is being taught to me by teachers who give the impression they’d rather be elsewhere. Eventually, my mind drifts someplace else, until their words are blissfully mute. Here, in this sweet spot, the words literally go in one ear and out the other.

Sun spills into the window of my tiny kitchen as I sip chai slowly, trying to wake up. From his high chair, my six-month old son throws much of his breakfast onto the patchy linoleum that is as old as me, possibly older. The state of my house is cringeworthy + the state of my head is an emergency.

I was not raised a ‘good girl’.

I’m pretty sure mum engineered my fiery sass from day dot. As a child, she was unheard, invalidated + powerless. As a mother she learned that she was not. All the freedom and wildness that had been stifled in her, she fiercely instilled in me.

As the freight train of twenty-twenty gains steady momentum towards the finale of what can only be described as a spectacular fiasco, it would be almost rude not to give a standing ovation. It has been a hell of a show.

"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell

Civilization is only a series of victories against nature ~ William Harvey

If we allow it, a civilized life will swallow us whole. Our precious minutes will be engulfed by society’s tenacious tendrils, with any further minutes absorbed by thinking, planning + worrying

Twenty-twenty you ruthless, fiery shrew.

Some days we see the gifts of the rug being pulled out from underneath us, and other days it is as if we sit in a room, abrasively + awkwardly sharing space with all of our bad decisions, bad hair days, and bad dates….

Welcome to the guts of the tornado. It’s unusually quiet in here. On any other April, this town is inundated with tourists, travellers + musos. But the streets + beaches + forests are empty havens. For introverts like me who dream of a world without crowds, it’s almost paradisal.

When everything falls apart, I run.

I run, fast + far, with no intent on returning. I had meticulously orchestrated every facet of a “grown-up” life and had the tax returns + shoe collection to prove it.

As we catapult into a new year + decade, it is seemingly a whole new ball game altogether. The rules, as if overnight, appear to have ruthlessly changed - the consequences to our fuck-ups more dire + foul than ever. While many partied into the new year, it is safe to say that this year, many did not.

I am seventeen when I find myself at a job interview in a brothel.

As I ascend the dilapidated stairs in a mostly vacated building, I am however rather oblivious to the fact that it is indeed a brothel. I check the suite number before entering a sparsely furnished room.

The Storyteller draws us in, captivating us until the noise of the outside world is but a faint murmur. With every word, inflection and plot twist, we find our hairs standing on end, hearts expanded ... breath held.

I squint into the horizon as we wade out into the Indian Ocean. The sun bites into the turquoise and turns it silver like a magic trick. Mum’s hip is snug. My fingers dig into her skin and I eye the rise and fall of the oceans swell: it’s like the lungs of a sleeping torso.