The Unbearable Joy of Not Thinking
Looking For Gemstones in the Dirt
NB: Apologies in advance for the audio this week. I am suffering from a head cold.
My father was an opal miner, mainly. He did many jobs over his lifetime but it was opal miner that was written on his marriage certificate and it is opal miner that is written on my birth certificate in the space that says Father’s Occupation. When my brother and I had flown the nest, Dad returned to the opal fields of Glengarry in western NSW. It is hard living out that way. The kind of living that normal people work all of their lives in order to avoid. Out there people choose it, the deprivations are a way of life. No running water. No electricity. No supermarkets. Not without a three hour round trip anyway. The people on the opal fields wouldn’t have it any other way. Not many of them are there to find something, most go there to lose something, themselves.
Dad went back to the mines in the early 2000s at the age of sixty two. Every morning he would be up at 5am to light the wood burner stove and put the kettle on. A quick breakfast of toast and strong tea and then down the mine. The mine was a 60-foot-deep hole located at the back of the camp, accessed by a ladder that was pegged to the wall. He would dig dirt till 11am, then scurry up the ladder, stoke the fire, put the kettle on, a bite to eat (corned beef and cheese mainly) and then back down the hole to dig away the afternoon. The digging was done with a handheld jackhammer. The dirt he carted by hand, using a modified, wheelbarrow-like contraption that he designed and built himself. The dirt was dumped into a bucket that would then be hauled to the surface by a mechanised hoist and deposited into the waiting dump truck.
At the end of each day dad would crawl out of the hole and set about cutting wood, not for the wood burner stove but for the little hot water system that he had built, perched on top of a mound of white opal dirt. As he waited for the water to heat up he would rake the leaves from around the front of the camp and if he managed to finish that before the water boiled, he might treat himself to a bottle of beer, salami and olives.
At some point over dinner dad would proudly tell us how much dirt he had moved that day. Half a truckload wasn’t great. A truckload and a half and he was beaming. “What about opal”? my mother would ask. “Nobody’s buying dirt last time I checked.” But dad didn’t care, he was always so proud of how much dirt he had moved, the opal would have been a bonus, and he went to bed no doubt dreaming about how much more dirt he would move the next day.
The Island of Lipari is one of seven Aeolian Islands that lie off the coast of Sicily. My grandparents migrated from Lipari in the early 1900s and they weren’t alone. Locals on the island refer to Australia as the 8th Aeolian Island, such was the size of the migration that took place between the late 1800s, after phylloxera all but wiped out the local wine industry and post World War II, when fascism all but wiped-out Italy.
Today, island life continues at a slow pace. Early morning sees the tuna fishermen returning to the little harbour and its verdant waters, the day’s catch cleaned and gutted and sold to the shopkeepers waiting onshore. And through the narrow cobble stone streets that wind their way between brightly coloured buildings, locals go about their morning rituals, just as they have done for centuries on this little string of volcanic accidents.
It was an easy rhythm to fall into over the week that I spent there. Each morning I would stop at the harbour to watch the fishermen come in before moving onto the bakery where I’d buy two small loaves of bread, then a few doors down I would stop at the delicatessen to pick up prosciutto and cheese. After that it was the fish monger to find something for dinner, today fresh squid, tomorrow a sailfish steak, and finally the fruit and vegetable store.
I did this every morning and every morning I saw the same locals, engaged in this same ritual of buying only what they needed for that day, for the next meal. Watching them go about their shopping, giving the same answers to the same questions asked by the same shopkeepers as the day before and the day before that, complaining of the same ailments and expressing their same hopes for some more good weather, I couldn’t help but think of the crowded supermarkets back home in Australia and the people with their overflowing trolleys doing the “two-week shop”.
Time has always seemed to have a schizophrenic quality to me, as though it cannot decide at what pace it should proceed; minutes can sometimes seem like years and then suddenly whole years have passed in what seemed like minutes. Being out of office has given me free reign over my time, and being master of my own time, I have come to appreciate both the beauty and necessity of ritual. Whether they be daily, weekly or monthly rituals are a device for gaining some kind of control over the passage of time.
Rituals are stepping stones in time; solid, familiar places where we can stand for a moment, beacons up ahead that guide us out of uncertainty, something to look forward to. They are energy savers, and by that I mean mental energy because rituals require no real thinking, just the pleasant familiarity of repeated movements and moments, moments for our overstimulated minds and bodies to relax and recover, to take a minute.
I find the modern world overwhelming, all consuming, a constant barrage of information and demands that I can no longer process, control or understand. Confronted constantly with situations and concepts that are new and difficult to understand, I tire attempting to make sense of them. For that is the primary role of our minds, to process and make sense of the world around us, of our lived experience. And in an increasingly technological world, I find that exhausting. I don’t understand the algorithms, I don’t know how to stop my telephone from listening to my conversations so that it can bombard me with advertising. If I am being completely honest, I still don’t really know television works.
And in a world like that, little familiar rituals are safe havens, and whether that be doing the daily shopping one loaf at a time, squid by squid or feeding wood into the wood burner stove or boiling water for the shower, these rituals are little pockets of breathing space. And so, I have started to collect my own set of rituals to get me through the Australian winter. Each morning a pot of porridge cooked on the stove top before the fog has lifted from the driveway, a walk around town with my little dog, mornings and evenings, bringing in the wood for the fire to get me through the night, and of course the writing.
And the more I think about the writing, I see now that I am no different to dad and his digging. We are both after something that we can hold up to the sun, something that can catch the light and dazzle, for dad it was gemstones for me it is words. That rarely happens, if at all, but in the meantime there is beauty in the digging, there is beauty in the writing and there is peace and it is that which gets me through the day.
As always if you have enjoyed this post please hit the like button, share it with someone else you think may enjoy it or leave a comment. I would be interested to hear what are the little rituals that you use to get you through the day, week, the year. And as always, thanks for reading.
BOOK BONUS: This week I picked a fight with Australia’s most famous writer. Just a normal week really. You can read the article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-03/afghan-cameleers-ryan-butta-henry-lawson-abdul-wade/101276766
One of your best. Purpose is what we want, not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
One of my favourites so far!