Spring

The next person who tells me my home town of Brisbane has no seasons should wake before dawn, which, although they may not have noticed, is an hour earlier than it was a couple of months back. They ought to listen to the pied butcherbird that starts around 4am in the top of a big tree in our front yard, seeking a mate through a gorgeous song “under the cover of dark” – he stops with the sun. Then there are the noisy miners, more noisy than minor at the moment. And the kookaburras, seeking a village to raise their chicks, evicted from everywhere by the over-populating miners. And soon, the brash parrots, chattering about their own chicks in the trees, and all the other birds that put spring in our spring.

Those seasonal naysayers should get on a bike and ride to the city gardens where they’ll be dive-bombed by magpies protecting their young, or watch scrub turkeys, crazed in every season but manic now when they must finish building their huge mounds or lose the chance of a family this year.

Brisbane definitely has seasons but perhaps it’s not surprising some visitors don’t notice. I checked out a couple of internet sites. The first said we get most of our rain in the winter. We do? The other did make the point that Brisbane “has got the four usual seasons” (and the unusual ones?). Instead of looking at the internet, the doubters ought to take a walk in my neighbourhood where native wisteria, callistemon and silky oak are raucous with colour. And hello, it’s hard to miss the jacarandas, which were green two months ago and are now purple.

I know they’re not native, but jacarandas signify late spring in Brisbane almost as surely as the temperature of the sea increasing by three degrees signifies the coming summer. Our most famous jacaranda, painted by Godfrey Rivers, was the first in Australia, the seed from South America planted in the botanic gardens by the canny Scottish horticulturalist Walter Hill in 1864, surviving until a 1979 cyclone. Ask anyone who grew up in Brisbane and they’ll have a story involving a jacaranda, whether it’s trashing their uni exams that one year, visits to New Farm park with a grandparent, or spending hours in a childhood treehouse. I’m glad Hill though to plant the non-native. If there’s a more beautiful sight than a jacaranda and silky oak in bloom side by side in the late afternoon skewed spring sunshine, I don’t know what it is.

I spent a cold winter in Canada a few years back. We saw few creatures other than humans during those long monochrome days and nights. In the spring, our friends took us birdwatching. We saw some wonderful birds and the stories of their long journeys to reach us were astounding. But we stood around in the cold for a long time before we saw those few birds, and their calls, while lovely, were muted, nothing like the pure unbridled joy of the chorus that wakes me every morning at this time of year.

But if I could play the season doubters just one bird’s song that tells me spring is here, it probably wouldn’t be a local. Instead, I’d listen out for that herald of summer, a migrant himself as it happens, arriving at this time every year from New Guinea. The jet black koel is the bird you hear early morning and late afternoon, a call full of feeling, often prescient of a summer storm, a heartfelt “ko-el” over and over that some people hate. He’s already telling us what’s ahead, a long hot summer where the earth will bake, the grass will need cutting every week and there will be plenty of passion in the sky.

I love spring. Our sleeping jungle wakes suddenly and finds the world in love with itself. I know our trees don’t lose their leaves, and our winter hardly deserves the name, but the seasons are still different from each other, and all more recklessly alive than in other places. Spring is the most lively of them all. Bring on summer, it says. Bring it on.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 19 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Please drive more slowly around school children

When I was seventeen and first allowed to drive, I drove too fast. I was in half a dozen crashes, mostly single vehicle, before I realised I was driving beyond my ability, not to mention outside the bounds of safety. I didn’t kill anyone, and for this I am grateful. The reason I’m confessing my shameful driving history here is that I’m about to give a little lecture, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do in these pages, and before I start, I want to put on record that I’ve been in the bloody idiot camp when it comes to being in charge of a motor vehicle. And now, to the lecture.

I read recently that so many drivers are speeding in school zones the State Government is considering stiffer penalties for breaches. Over 300 drivers were clocked at between 70 and 80kph in 40kph-limited school zones in the last year in Queensland, and 43 drivers were clocked at over 80kph. While the seventeen-year-old me would be blithe in the face of these numbers, happily accelerating, the mother-of-an-eleven-year-old me finds them hard to believe. Surely not, I think, not around a school where on any day I might see six year olds on scooters bunny-hopping from the footpath to the gutter, toddlers running suddenly, unexpectedly out on to the road, my son and his buddies so unaware of cars they cavort down the street throwing a ball.

I worked on a review of school transport safety some years back, and one of the more gruesome pieces of research we looked at related to speed and the likelihood of fatal injury when it comes to hitting pedestrians. In summary, when you drive even a little faster, you become much more likely to kill the pedestrian you hit. At 30kph, it’s five per cent likely. At 50kph – a speed 100 drivers a day are caught doing in school zones – the likelihood increases sharply, to 40 per cent. At 70kph, the speed one driver a week is caught travelling in school zones, you are 80 per cent likely to kill a pedestrian you hit, and at 80kph, the speed 43 drivers were caught travelling, it’s almost 100 per cent. If you think you can stop in time when a child does something unexpected, as children will do no matter what their parents and teachers tell them, you’re wrong. You can’t stop. You can’t even slow down. Maybe you were rushing somewhere important, maybe you arrived on time, but it’s dumb luck that you weren’t the person who met the six year old on the scooter, the toddler on foot, the ten year old who chased a ball, you weren’t the one who’ll have to live the rest of life, knowing.

When I was in primary school, an older brother of one of the kids in my class used to pick his younger siblings up in the afternoon. There were no school speed limits in those days. Cars came into school grounds. Three o'clock was crazy, dangerous, although none of us knew it. The kids in my class, including me, thought the big brother was really someone, driving a car like a grownup. He had a thatch of blond hair and big hands and he drove a light blue Holden Kingswood. One rainy day, he hit and killed a grade 1 boy. As an adult, I’ve often thought of him, that big blond boy, how his life must have turned on that one experience.

How do you tell someone else to take care? My younger self – the one who sped through stop signs with abandon – wouldn’t have listened to the bleating me now anyway, would have laughed in the face of the statistics on speed and death, would have assumed she was immune to harm and harming. I suspect drivers of any age who speed in school zones won’t read this or care, and maybe they don’t even realise what they risk. If stiffer penalties will work, I’m all for them. A short prison sentence might be a good start, together with an enormous fine and a naming in the paper with a very big photo. If that’s what it takes, I say, bring it on.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 12 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Learning to MEDDDDDDITTTTTTTATE!!!

I've never been able to meditate. I don’t have the meditation gene. I am pathologically incapable of sitting still. Instead of noticing my thoughts non-judgementally from a calm centred place within, I’ve always preferred to become my thoughts and skitter off, mostly into regrets about the past or some future catastrophe, propping myself up, getting right into my big juicy ego to confirm that I EXIST!!!

My inability to still my mind – what I prefer to call my gift of lateral thinking (baha) – didn’t start in adulthood. It’s been a gift my whole life. In kindy, when they had rest time for those nine hours after lunch, my cot was in an isolated room so that I wouldn’t interrupt others as I told stories to myself. In school, I spent more time outside than inside classrooms. I grew up with what I would say was a severe meditation handicap.

In fact, I’ve probably put more energy into finding out how to meditate than actually meditating if it comes down to it. I did a yoga course in a proper ashram in my twenties. I didn’t relax, not even in corpse pose. In my thirties, I bought a book by a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, called When Things Fall Apart, that had meditation instructions involving the posture, the eyes and the hands. It was a good book but the meditating nearly sent me crazy. I found myself hating Pema Chodron unreasonably. Then I did a course with a meditation expert in Canada, after which I made myself sit for twenty minutes every day for a week. It was excruciating. I can’t tell you how excruciating. Imagine being at the dentist without anaesthetic during a root canal and you’ll start getting the idea.

The Buddhists call it the monkey mind and the name fits for me. My mind is a monkey. I’ve always told myself that it helps me write (she said) because it will make unexpected connections among seemingly unrelated facts (even I don’t believe that). It goes from one thing to another to another without ever stopping to rest or consider. It’s constant and exhausting… and I’m completely addicted. The internet has made it so much easier to indulge my monkey mind. I can check social media, see whether baby George has burped today and be into a story on the future of feminism, all before breakfast.

I’d consigned meditation to the great big bin of life lessons that just don’t work for me, along with running, sewing and civil engineering. But then came this year when my life revved up a gear in terms of personal stresses. When I woke one morning after another night of only an hour’s sleep, in which I dreamed I was going on a trip but oh dear, I haven’t packed and the car I need to drive to the airport is locked in the parking garage and ooh, I don’t have a passport, and goodness, the plane’s leaving in twenty minutes and I won’t be on it – I knew I needed to do something. And then, through a writing buddy, I lucked onto a site called My Diamond Days. It’s run by another Brisbane writer Kathy Wilson who has her own cracker story about why she started meditating that makes my sleeplessness look churlish – but that’s for another day. For a small monthly fee, My Diamond Days sends me an email every morning with a ‘guided’ meditation, which is someone talking to me or playing music while I sit (or mostly, frankly, lie down) and do what I’m told.

My Diamond Days isn’t for everyone, but it works for me because I’m paying a fee which the Scot in me won’t waste but also because of the mixed bag of meditations, everything from Sri Sri to ocean sounds. For me and my little monkey, this is the appeal. Meditation’s like a box of chocolates. I never know what I’m going to get. I’ve been doing my ten minutes a day for over a month now. I’m sleeping better and finding I’m just a little bit more focused at work. And occasionally, just occasionally, I sail off into a zone between waking and sleep where anything is possible, even peace.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 5 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!