Diabolical Clay

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I thought I would start a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky. Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selection” title and link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.

Remarkably like the softest velvet in fact but more about the snake I was stroking later in this post.

I haven’t had the time to respond to your emails and comments yet as time just slips through my fingers lately and I think, “I will answer them in a minute,” and then pffft it is suddenly two days later. So I wanted to take the time to say thank you to you all here.  All your comments made me smile and they have also made me realise that you actually do like what I am doing so thanks heaps for cheering me up.

Your response was just the kick up the bum I needed to make me realise that my words are important and if I say just one thing that touches one person then that has to be a good thing.

Now back to the story of the snake.

We live on a sloping block of land in the hills above a small Southern midlands town. Tasmania is unlike anywhere else in the world in that we still have most of our natural assets left, even though there are those in power who would like to cut down every tree on the island and flog them off as woodchips.

This is the view from the back of my house looking down towards the bush. You can see the young cherry tree is missing all its lower branches. That was the damage from those bloody cows a few weeks ago.

So you can see that I dont  live in suburbia even though I am only 45 minutes or so from the capital city Hobart. So snakes are part of my environment and I am sure my daughter Veronica can tell you a couple of snake stories of her own as well.

I had been helping The Spouse put a window in my studio.

As I walked back down to the house there was a tiny snake curled up, upside down in the middle of the driveway. I called The Spouse over to check it out because even though I was pretty sure the snake was dead, poking it to check, definitely fell in the category of  “jobs just for husbands”. After The spouse had confirmed that the snake was really dead and not just pretending, he picked it up and carried it down to the house for me to photograph.

I was really interested in the patterns of the snake’s skin and once I realized that the snake wasn’t going to come back to life and go for my throat I took lots of photos and daydreamed away about snake skin patterned pots.

I have been working with a glaze this year that is quite similar to the soft muted colours of the snakes belly. All I will have to do is change the amount of copper oxide in the glaze and add a bit of cobalt and it will be easy enough to reproduce the lovely muted colours of the snakes belly.

Once I had finished taking photos I placed the snake on a log near my frog pond, hoping that a bird would fly down and eat it so that it hadn’t died in vain. Two hours later the snake was gone.

You can see how small this little white lipped whip tail snake is by comparing it to the blades of grass in the photo. It was strange that even though I knew the snake was dead I was still quite hesitant about touching it. Our primal fears are really strongly ingrained aren’t they. Its skin was really like the softest suede and I was quite sad that it had died but at least I took some photographs and a bird had a free lunch.

I have been sitting here for about forty minutes, staring out the window and daydreaming away as I try and think of something to write about. Some days the words just pour out of the tips of my fingers and other days they hide away from me.

I am not that fussed by my mild bloggers block as in an attempt to cheer me up an internet friend on twitter told me even Mozart has quiet bits. That made me laugh out loud and did indeed put things back into perspective.

There are zillions of blogs out there in the blogosphere and I have been talking to you my dear internetz now for over three years, so a bit of silence from me wont be noticed in amongst the white noise of the internet.

I have been asked on more than one occasion why I feel the need to blog and the question has also been put to me that as an artist shouldn’t my blog be more serious and professional and just deal with my art? Aren’t I worried about people stealing my words, my ideas, my identity? How on earth can I expect to be taken seriously as an artist if “that blog of yours” is your public face? *sigh*

Why do I blog?

I had things to say, stories to tell and my circle of acquaintances, neighbours and friends weren’t interested in what I had to say. Sure people would ring me up when they needed to know why their broccoli had bolted to seed, or how to help a pig with a runny nose. If they wanted a recipe for simple ointment for eczema or needed to know what insect was skeletonizing the leaves on their trees I was sure to receive a call. But as for listening to what I was thinking about politics, society,ethical food production or my concern for the environment, for our survival as a species, there was no point even starting a conversation.

The women that I knew from the local school were interested in Michael Jackson’s nose not Michael Moore’s films. Don’t get me wrong I had  friends in the local community as well but for the most part I was lonely and frustrated, a tree hugging hippie greenie in a community of  graziers and poppy farmers, mill workers and liberal voters.(for my American friends liberal voters in Australia are conservatives not liberals)

I was different, my children were different and I would have been much much happier living in the hills above Cygnet instead of the hills above a small Southern Midlands town.

So I started to  blog because I was isolated and lonely and by blogging I  found my community. I have made friends and connections that ten years ago would have astounded me had I known the range of international friendships that I would develop crossing the length and breadth of  mainland Australia, America and Europe. My life is much richer for these friendships and I am not lonely at all any more.

As for being taken seriously as an artist. I don’t think that is what I am after. I am too eclectic a person to be pigeonholed into one small box and I don’t have the time or the energy or the money to complete an arts degree.

I am driven by passion. Passion for the environment, for education, for my family, for beauty. I am passionate about a lot of things and to try and stifle that passion in order to fit into some sort of prescribed box that someone else wants me to fit would be impossible.

So I have been silent here on my blog lately as I try and work out where it is I want to go with my blog.

When I first started blogging, Australian blogs were thin on the ground and there were only a handful of Aussie bloggers in my reader. Now it seems that every man and his dog has a blog and whilst I think that is a good thing it also leads to blogging fatigue on my part. I am simply unable to keep up with the amount of interesting new blogs out there and find myself leaving one random comment on a blog, or clicking the friend connect widget and tucking the blog away safely in my reader and rarely if ever commenting again even though I read regularly.

So I have been pondering away as I work in the garden, do I just keep on going as I am and write what ever moves me, write about my passions and see what happens. Or do I close down Frog Ponds Rock and just use twitter and facebook to stay in touch? I don’t know. I will see what happens.

As an act of solidarity with the St Kilda Schoolgirl.

I have been following the #dikileaks saga very closely and my heart goes out to the girl in the middle of this whole nasty mess. A young girl who became pregnant to a St Kilda footballer and was told to piss off when she asked for help.

A seventeen year old schoolgirl.

Who met some football players when they held a footy clinic at her school.

She was 16 when, in February, several Saints players visited her high school in Melbourne’s south-east for a community event. A month later, she was at an athletics meeting in Sydney when the Saints beat the Swans at home. She waited with a friend by the change rooms after the game to see the players.

“They didn’t even question my age from the start because they recognised me from the school clinic. When we went back to the hotel room, [they asked] how old I was and I said ‘I’ll be 17 in a few months’ and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, that’s legal,’ ” she says.

Two St Kilda players were later cleared by police and the AFL of any wrongdoing.

Are any alarm bells ringing yet?

I have watched as the St Kilda players have held press conferences and talked about invasion of privacy, shame and distress etc etc.

A word to the wise boys, if you had kept your dick in your pants none of this would be happening.

I have watched as the St Kilda Football club have vowed to pursue this child for the next fifteen years.

I have watched as a hungry media pack have pursued a minor and managed to successfully portray this young girl as a predator and malicious troublemaker and I am angered and appalled at the way this girl’s reputation has been systematically destroyed.

The only journalist as far as I can tell that has asked any serious questions about the whys and wherefores of grown men having sex with a schoolgirl has been Derryn Hinch.

The St Kilda schoolgirl is just that, a 17 year old schoolgirl and I have watched in dismay as some very powerful grown men have tried to bully her into silence.

That is why I have weighed into this debate.

I can’t stand a bully and The AFL and the St Kilda Football club are showing themselves to be bullies of the first order.

Shame on you.

I have never been one to sit quietly and accept things on face value. When my daughter began to get very ill in her early teenage years with a strange sort of flu like virus that lingered for weeks at a time I searched for answers. What was this horrible virus that Veronica never quite recovered from?

I wanted to know why my 14 year old daughter had a headache that would not go away? Why she was  constantly nauseous and at one stage of her illness only able to eat plain pasta, tomatoes and apples. Why was my girl totally exhausted and yet unable to sleep? Why were all her joints aching? What caused her to nearly pass out every time she stood up too suddenly, what caused the heart palpitations and the unexplained bruises? Why did a simple cold always turn into a chest infection, why was she quick to catch everything and slow to heal? Why was my daughter in pain?

I needed to know why this was happening to my first born child and so I pushed for answers. My hopes would rise with each new specialist we saw only to be shattered again when the results of Veronica’s blood tests came back as normal, except for one little marker that was always a bit higher.

When your child is sick finding out why does become like an obsession. A sick child takes a hell of a lot of energy and it is also a very isolating experience for a mother. I couldn’t really talk about how worried I was about Veronica with my general acquaintances because that sort of conversation very quickly becomes boring. My only allies were my mother and my best friend Tanya, who has lupus.

Mum and Tanya held my hand, soothed my fears and offered their ears. They would ring me with news of  rare conditions with symptoms that sounded similar to Veronica’s and encourage me to go to the Doctor to get this and that checked out. They were there to pick me up when I was at my lowest and I didn’t feel quite so alone with their support.

At the end of two years of illness we had exhausted all our medical options. I had been told by various doctors some kindly, some brusque and some indifferent that Veronica was faking, that she had a mystery virus, that it was probably worms, growing pains, sinus, psychological issues, anorexia and the list goes on and on. One doctor was very interested in her relationship with her father and another doctor was openly disgusted that I was so stupid as to allow this slip of a girl to waste everybody’s valuable time.

We were given a diagnosis of Chronic fatigue syndrome and told to get on with out lives and that Veronica would probably grow out of it.

All through this, The Spouse tried to be supportive but he is grumpy at his best and downright horrible at his worst. The Spouse was sympathetic to Veronica’s pain, as he is in pain all the time. He was sympathetic to Veronica’s nausea, as he always feels like crap himself.  His remedy was for Veronica to stop feeling sorry for herself and to push on through. He growled at me, that I was spoiling her when I let her stay home from school when she was having a bad day and his common refrain was that Veronica had pulled the wool over my eyes in order to have a sickie.

The standard conversation that Mum and I had was that if Veronica had a broken leg, her father would wait on her hand and foot, he would build some amazing contraption to make her incapacitation easier and nothing would be too much trouble at all for his pumkin, but because Veronica had an invisible illness he wasn’t very sympathetic and the atmosphere was tense. I am sure that he thought that chronic fatigue syndrome was just another name for lazybones.

Veronica and I pieced together a family history of similar unexplained ailments on her fathers side of the family. There wasn’t anything that we could really put our fingers on apart from, The Spouse’s sister who also had been told she had chronic fatigue syndrome and his mother who had some of Veronica’s symptoms as well. It was hard with a sick child and I was never satisfied with Veronica’s diagnosis of Chronic fatigue syndrome.

In 2007 I started blogging and one of the first blogs I subscribed to was Benefit Scrounging Scum, a British writer who had a rare illness called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Over the course of my first year of blogging Bendy girl and I became friends and she suggested that Veronica might have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as well. I was horrified at the thought that Veronica might have EDS as the illness looked awful and when Veronica also said that she thought that she might have EDS, I was very quick to dismiss her with a firm no, no you don’t have that at all, because quite frankly the thought of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome frightened the shit out of me.

Of course Veronica does have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and this was confirmed by a visit to the geneticist.

When Veronica received her formal diagnosis from the geneticist, The Spouse’s initial reaction was that the EDS must have come from me as I had a recurring dislocation of my knee from 1993 -1998 and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. If I tried to talk about the EDS coming from his side of the family I was angrily dismissed and told to stop nagging him. The Spouse did not want to hear about EDS and it took a month or so before he could begin to accept that Veronica’s EDS had possibly come from him.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. 

Twelve months after Veronica’s diagnosis, The Spouse and David were also diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

It has been a long journey.

Has had me feeling like crap. I don’t have a tree up, the decorations are still stuffed in a cupboard somewhere and I haven’t even started to look for my Santa hat.

I am a mixture of pissed off and really really sad.

I have bloggers block because everything I write sounds like a bunch of self piteous crap. Oh Woe Oh Woedy Woe Woe.

I have an “Ehlers Danlos and Denial” post brewing and that is taking a lot of energy to write.

Artistically I am having a mud month, I was told by someone I respect that I am aggressively over confident and made to feel that my work is crap.

When I was growing up my father repeatedly told me that I was stupid. That I was lazy, worthless, fat , stupid, stupid, stupid.

I would argue with him every step of the way and cop a hiding for my trouble.

From my father I learned to never stay down and to never shut up because you will still cop a flogging if you are silent and feet hurt more than fists, so you may as well make the hiding worth while.

Somedays the echo of his accusations of stupid stupid stupid are  loud in my ears even though he has been dead for thirty years.

See, I told you I was full of woe this week. Gah!

Louisa at everything is edible is organising Christmas gifts for the over one hundred and fifty children that are incarcerated at Christmas Island. The fact that there are over 150 children in just one detention centre makes me feel sick and very,very fucking ashamed that I have let my government get away with this shoddy treatment of refugees. Arseholes.

In the words of Richard Flanagan

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question. Not that Australia has a refugee problem. Last year just 5,500 people sought asylum – less than 2% of the migrant intake. Yet Australia does have a dismal public life largely bereft of courage or humanity, and it has created a national myth that now poisons all sides of politics. The myth is that of the boat people. It is the idea that hordes of refugees will overrun Australia unless harsh policies of dissuasion and internment are employed.

Louisa has a paypal button on her sidebar and overnight has raised $480 towards her goal of $930 to pay for the courier fees to Christmas Island.I think that is a spectacular effort and it is the Louisas of this world that make me feel less sad.

Louisa’s Christmas Island Appeal click here to help.

Also a chance to show that not all Australians are racist twats.

Louisa at Everything is edible has had an idea to help the children on Christmas island.

On her blog Louisa says,

“What sprung from a prayer I heard in church yesterday and the idea that I could send a few toys from my cupboard has evolved to having 5 businesses providing toys, a courier company letting us send them at cost and a blogging community coming together to show that these families are not forgotten.”

I reckon that you should go over to Louisa’s blog and see if you can help as well.

Go on, off you go. clickety click

The article has been removed because of copyright issues.

Bugger.

You can still read it here on the Tasmanian Times website. or here at the The Guardian.

I remember when I was a surly teenager whining at my mother about the cruel injustice of having to dry up the dishes or clean my room. Whine, whine, whinge, whinge, when  my mother finally lost her temper and snarled at me that she hoped that one day I would have a daughter  just like me.

Her words always stayed with me, probably because it was also one of the few times that my Mother slapped me. I was an incredibly self centred and selfish teenager who then veered off the rails into extreme misbehaviour once I had escaped from school.

It isn’t my daughter who is like me, though Veronica and I are very alike.

It is my son David that reminds me so very very much of my teenage self.

We even had similar haircuts at the same age.

Shoot me now.