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We’ve been in a pressure cooker, these past two years. More than a score of historians had memorably described 2020 as the sixth-most ‘stressful year ever’. Predictions and speculations look ahead; I looked at the past trends of the past two years and make these humble observations. With the stage set for dire times, here are six trends to look for in 2022. Here’s hoping.
The neighbour says, So sorry. And sir, / you are the last paesano on this street. / Maria you promised me. I could go first. / Ti perdono, I forgive you, amore mio. / I sit in our backyard under lemon shade, amongst / the hens tomato plants and capsicums. I fall into each / wishful memory. We danced, those ad-hoc strolls / and laughter, you hummed our favourite songs.
There is a curious world called LinkedIn, a social media site for people trying to nurture their careers. The problem with it is that the participants are expected to take themselves more seriously than they might in what we used to call real life. LinkedIn has a culture of self-importance that cracks me up every time. There is nothing quite as funny as utter humourlessness.
Come the next set of lights, you won't remember what I look like. You'll all go back to your lives thinking about your wives, girlfriends, kids, parents, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends, husbands, boyfriends, whoever, not me. But I needed a night out in the city and the city spoke back to me when I had no one else to spend the night with.
The shepherd wife has one word for her cosmos – isychia: here is isychia, she tells strangers. Without amenities — no water, electricity — her house clings to a small crease in the hills, a tortoise shell; sea forces strips of blue between the planks of outer walls that have no windows to admit the sky, the hills’ harsh beauty.
Pope Francis’ latest encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti is, as we might have anticipated, a reflection on our times. The burden of the encyclical is to commend fraternity and social friendship and deplore selfishness and hostility in the response to the crisis.
Over the weekend in most Australian states, rules requiring people to stay home were relaxed somewhat. The country has commenced its easing of the significant restrictions on venturing out in public. As we begin to reacquaint ourselves with life outside, it is useful to reflect on the new resonance of ‘home’ — but also on its inherent limits.
I have been with friends and lovers and have seen them in difficult times, emotionally and physically. The same way people have seen me in distress, seen me cry. But I never saw my dad in tears; not as a kid growing up, nor much later as a young adult.
I keep going back to a short story, by Carmen Maria Machado in her book Her Body and Other Parties, called ‘Inventory’. In its simplest terms, the story is a narrator’s list of her lovers loved: boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbours, strangers. From this inventory emerges, bit by bit, the story that has made the list necessary: an epidemic is ravaging the world’s population.
One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.
I circle the huge granite standing stone sunwise three times, as my ancestors did long before the designs of cranes and coins, of theory. ‘Tell me how and what they thought.’ No answer but the wheeling murmuration of a thousand starlings. A stubble field.
Before that first September, my experience with grief was fairly limited. I was no stranger to death, but I hadn't yet felt the type of grief that makes you ache in places you never realised sadness could reach. My first experience with this was September 2014.
25-36 out of 200 results.