Tag Archives: Pacific Ocean

Under My Umbrella

The world looks small from beneath my umbrella. It sounds small too. I can hear the fine drops of rain spatting onto the stretched canvas just above my head. I can see a few meters all around me. The greater world is there, always, but in this moment while I’m standing on the end of the floating dock jutting out into our lake, the world is small, intimate, within reach.

My scruffy shoes are level with the waterline. The dock is an old timber one and whatever sort of floatation there is to keep it afloat seems just as old. Water sloshes up between the slats and the windblown wavelets splat on top of them.

I can understand the fascination with ‘watery depths’ stories and monsters that might lurk beneath. (Jaws or The Posideon Adventure  anyone?) It’s an element that we humans, with our overblown sense of entitlement, can’t control … (oh, we can pollute it, build dams to contain it, we can freeze it, boil it, consume it in a gazillion ways, but ultimately it’ll have the last laugh) … and what we can’t control, we both fear and are fascinated with.

I grew up with the Pacific Ocean  in my back pocket. Land locked lakes are an unknown to me, and although I’m respectful of the brown-green watery depths right at the end of my toes, I’m also tempted to take one more step forward, just to see what happens.

Common sense tells me I’ll get wet, and probably lose my beautiful umbrella, (a present from Mrs Widdershins) but my uncommon sense asks, ‘what if’. What if it’s just another boundary between the worlds? What might be on the other side?

A wind sweeps the rain across the lake in shimmering veils, momentarily revealing the hills on the other side of the lake. I tilt my umbrella back and let the rain fall in my face. My world expands to include the whole lake. The hills and mountains beyond are all wrapped up in mist and summery, albeit damp, shades of green. The mist blows back in again and I feel like I’ve walked into Marion Zimmer Bradley’s, The Mists of Avalon. 

Maybe I took that step after all.

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“I am not feeling any better because I cannot stay in bed, having constant cause for walking. They say I leave at night by the window of my tower, hanging from a red umbrella with which I set fire to the forest” – Camille Claudel, French sculptor, 1864-1943

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The ultimate ‘Under my umbrella’ song.


The manuscrupt ‘n Me: Episode 4

If you’d like to catch up on previous episodes before reading this one, here are the links:

Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3

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… Then, something magical happened …

She read the battered old manuscript over and over again, making notes in the margins and on scraps of paper that she stapled to the manuscript, until she ran out of scraps and staples, and ideas.

She took out her stylish Smith-Corona daisy-wheel electric typewriter that she’d recently treated herself to …

(They’re actually still being sold!)

and started writing … and writing … and writing.

The story flowed from her fingers as though it were unravelling in front of her. She wrote through the night, stopping only to perform her staff-ly duties (feeding her furry companions) and snatch a few hours sleep. Her dreams tormented her with flashes of dialogue and scenes and plot-lines.

Her characters evolved from two-dimensional alternate versions of herself into their own fully fleshed three dimensional Selves.

In five excruciatingly intense days the 35 page double-spaced story grew into a fully-fledged novel with chapters and a prologue and an epilogue. (She has a thing for prologues and epilogues that she’s never grown out of)

The magic slowly ebbed from her fingers. Her mind released its stranglehold on her Muse, and she typed the title of the story on the very last blank sheet of paper she had in the house:

‘The Awakener’

The woman was wise enough to know ‘The Awakener’ was only a first draft, and that to take the next step to make it the best it could be, she had to learn a great deal more about this writing profession that had claimed her for its own.

She put the shiny new manuscript and the battered old pages back into a slightly less scruffy box and stowed it safely under her bed.

Something like ten years passed by without that box ever being opened again.

The woman shed her life once more. She flew from one side of the Pacific Ocean to the other, and began a new life in a country that had bears, and racoons, and moose-es, (oh my!) rather than wombats, kangaroos, and platypuses.

Of the wealth of possessions she’d owned, she only kept enough to fill two suitcases and three boxes. Packed securely in the very center of one of the boxes was the manuscript.

A few months later, on the other side of the world, when she finally emptied the dregs of the boxes, something magical happened …

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“You fail only if you stop writing” – Ray Bradbury