The Good, the Sad and the Beautiful of 2020

It's been raining here all week, the very opposite of this time last year. Last January we had 'unprecedented' bushfires in Australia which destroyed 3,094 homes, 2,439 of those were here in NSW. 33 people died, 9 of whom were firefighters. 6.7% of the state of NSW was burnt, the total area possibly the largest ever in a single recorded fire season for eastern Australia. 48% of the land on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast was burnt also. A large number of major fires burnt for months and air quality was terrible during this time. Estimates based on NSW and Victoria alone put the loss of mammals, birds and reptiles at over one billion, and that doesn't take into account those that died from injuries, lack of food or predators later on. This figure also doesn't include the loss of perhaps hundreds of billions of insects. *More details here.

While all this was going on, my five sisters and I had the 'unprecedented' loss of our mother at the end of January. Unprecedented, not because we weren't expecting her to die at some stage. She was eighty-one and had survived a couple of heart attacks in her fifties as well as the loss of her only son (one boy in the middle of six girls) from a brain haemorrhage. He was 46 and we didn't expect her to live through that devastation, but she did. Our Dad died a year before our brother so we weren't strangers to this sort of thing. In some respects I was closer to my brother and my Dad than I was to Mum and perhaps that was why her loss was so difficult. I grieved for all that had not been. 

I left home just before I turned seventeen and lived on the opposite side of the country to the rest of my family for years before most of them moved over this way. Before Mum died I visited her in hospital just after she had surgery to relieve her pain and she said to me, 'We haven't had much time together, have we, Carol?' During January she began to show signs of vascular dementia to the extent that one day she didn't recognise me. Unprecedented - I never expected to feel the extreme sense of loss that I did. And we certainly didn't expect her to die from an aggressive tumour when most of her life it was her heart that troubled her.

I started this post with the sad, now here's some good and beautiful. My daughter sent me this splendid bouquet on Christmas Eve for my birthday which is on Christmas Day - hence my name.

My husband had been working from home one day a week for about a year before the COVID situation and then in March work at home became fulltime. He has loved not commuting to work but he was doing his work at the kitchen table - conference calls etc. Very inconvenient for everyone else, but when one of our sons decided to move in with his brother who had left home about 18 months previously, we acquired a spare room. This was turned into a study and peace reigned once more.

In the early part of our COVID restrictions my husband and I got into the habit of going for bush walks regularly. We decided to support a local café to help keep them in business during lockdown so we'd go walking and get a coffee at the same time. Our regular activities such as swimming, orchestra, youth music practice and some other things, stopped for a few months so Hails and I decided to make a quilt for her brother. He turned 21 at the end of November and we hoped to have it finished by then. That didn't happen, partly because I needed some material for the backing and I wanted to be able to see the fabric for myself before I bought it, but it was finished by Christmas so he got it then.

Hails also had more time to spend on her art and I added her to my Instagram account so she could post what she was doing. This is her little spot.

She usually swims at least three times a week so in place of that we did a bit of walking and used some free Kathy Smith videos for some HIIT training. On her website you can sign-up for a series of posts which include links to videos, which is the easiest way to access them, unless you want to trawl through YouTube. One that's very helpful is her 15 minute total body stretch. The exercises are targeted to women over forty but anyone could do them. 

We've continued to have our two beautiful grandchildren at our home on Tuesdays and we have another grandchild we are looking forward to meeting in three weeks time.

Reading

My reading time increased significantly this year but my writing didn't keep pace. An area I focused on was nutrition and health, subjects I've had a long-term interest in. A friend of mine pointed me to Dr Michael Greger's website (thanks Betty!) and I found out he did podcasts so I listen to them fairly regularly. I also have enjoyed the podcasts from the Physician's Committee that discuss the benefits of  a plant based whole food diet and the latest news on medical issues. I'm interested from a health point of view because I don't have a great family history when it comes to heart disease and I am so frustrated by the conflicting advice on diet - eggs are bad, no, now they are good, etc. Low Fat, Keto, Low Carb. There is much misinformation, especially on the Internet, where anybody with a high profile and good physique can promote their own version of healthy nutrition.

The China Study by .T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D and Thomas M. Campbell, Ph.D - I have to say I didn't really engage with this book although parts of it were interesting. I didn't like the defensive tone of the writing and there were a lot of statistics that weren't really helpful to the average layperson. As with some of the other books I've read on the Whole Food, Plant Based way of eating, it looks at the health issues that occur when people move away from their traditional diets and start eating a Western diet.

How Not to Diet by Dr Michael Greger - I like this author's writing. It is engaging, humorous and full of puns. I wanted to read another of his books, How not to Die, but I found this book at the library and read it first. I plan on reading How Not to Die this year. How Not to Diet looks at the latest medical and nutritional research regarding health, disease, weight loss and premature death. He explains how nutrition and lifestyle changes can prevent certain diseases or reverse them and how some foods may be more efficacious than medication. This isn't some lifestyle guru dispensing his own ideas. 176 pages of reference notes, an introduction that outlines the inspiration behind his decision to study medicine and the long and winding road that brought him to where he is now. Excellent book.

Paul: A Biography by N.T. Wright - I listened to this via an audiobook over about 6 months after my eldest son recommended it. I've listened to the author on the Ask NT Wright Anything (podbean.com) podcast and respect his intellectual prowess coupled with his humility. This biography of the Apostle Paul was inspiring and presents him in a way that brings him and his times to life for the modern reader. There is a very good review of the book here.

I'm starting the year with a book a friend gave me for Christmas, Beholding and Becoming, the Art of Everyday Worship by Ruth Chou Simons. It is an exquisitely lovely book illustrated by the author.

In the Steps of the Master by H.V. Morton is a book I thought I'd schedule for Hails this year either as a devotional and/or for geography. I have enjoyed it so much and am about halfway through its 375 pages. It is set in Palestine, written in 1934, and is so wonderfully evocative of Biblical times. It's a great book for an older teen and a good companion while reading through the Gospels.

'It was the habit in ancient times to treat any stranger as if he might be a wandering Christ, and this beautiful courtesy still exists in out-of-the-way parts of the earth. We have lost it, and with it something fine and beautiful has gone from our lives.'

 

2020 Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Final Post

This year I've read quite a few non fiction titles but the following are the only books I've written about so far. I've liked to my reviews/thoughts on them.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald - Memoir: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

To Sir With Love by E.R. Braithwaite - To Sir With Love by E.R. Braithwaite (1959) Non-fiction (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan - Come, Tell me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley - Non-Fiction: Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley (2018) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Linking up to Book'd Out

Memoir: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014)

H is for Hawk is a beautifully written memoir detailing the author’s struggle with grief after the sudden and unexpected death of her father. It is also a richly descriptive piece of nature writing because Macdonald’s way of dealing with her pain was to purchase a wild hawk and go through the process of taming it.
As a child she had been determined to become a falconer and had read all the classic books on the subject, one of which was The Goshawk by T. H. White. Now years later as an adult, the idea of taming a wild bird became an obsession, and her memoir is interspersed with extracts from White’s book and reflections on the man himself.
Like T.H. White, Macdonald isolated herself and became almost feral. As her hawk, Mabel, grew tamer, she became wilder.

'The hawk was everything I wanted be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of life.'

On the day she first took Mabel out to hunt she realised that what she had done was akin to gambling. She’d poured herself into training a hawk and then had to relinquish control over it. She lost herself in it...

‘I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return.’

The day of her father’s memorial service came and she had to speak. As a university professor, she had given so many lectures and talks but this terrified her. Her father had been a very well-respected photographic journalist and there were hundreds of people at the service. As she forced herself to look out over the audience of his colleagues and friends she lost her fear and began to tell them about his early life and what a wonderful father he had been.
The singing of the choir, eulogies praising her father’s skills, a reading of a poem prefaced by the words ‘He was a Good Man,’ washed over her and broke her.
After the service drinks were poured in the Press Club, stories were told, hugs and kisses exchanged. Helen felt that her family had expanded by about two hundred people.

'All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’
Now I know this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold.'

There was so much about grief and loss to relate to in this book. It was an unusual setting for a theme of this sort but the idea of fleeing to the wild or separating ourselves from human company in order to heal from a great hurt can be a powerful urge. I was struck with Helen Macdonald's words above, 'Hands are for other human hands to hold.'
We need each other, '...the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.'

H is for Hawk is a poignant reminder that life goes on in the midst of loss and that memories play an important role in recovery and growth.

'There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.'

Update: H is for Hawk was a timely read for me. I wrote about my own experience with grief and loss here.

Linked to Book'd Out Non-fiction Challenge: Nature

The Moon is Always Round by Jonathon Gibson; illustrated by Joe Hox

This lovely picture book uses a natural occurrence, the phases of the moon, to illustrate the goodness of God. There are times when we can’t see the whole moon as it orbits the earth, but the moon is always round, regardless of whether we can see it in its entirety or not.
There are times in our lives when things happen to us that make us question or doubt God’s goodness, but although we may not see God’s goodness during hard times this doesn’t mean that God is not good in those times. God is always good, just like the moon is always round, even when we can’t see all of it.

Ben was about three years old when his Dad held him up to the window one evening and Ben pointed out the moon which was a crescent shape that night. His Dad explained that while the moon can appear in different shapes, it is always round.
From that little episode, his Dad developed a simple catechism for Ben which went like this:

Q. Ben, what shape is the moon tonight?

A. The moon is a crescent moon, or a half-moon, or a gibbous moon, or a full moon.

Q. What shape is the moon always?

A. The moon is always round.

Q. What does that mean?

A. God is always good.

One day Ben’s Dad told him that he was going to get a little sister. That night the moon looked like a banana, but his Dad reminded him that, ‘The moon is always round.’ Later on it looked like a slice of apple, then a shrivelled orange, and always his Dad would say, ‘The moon is always round.’ Even when Ben was told that his little sister wasn’t coming to live with them after all their waiting and Ben wanted to know why, his Dad said, ‘I don’t know, but the moon is always round.’

Ben’s little sister was stillborn at 39 weeks and his Dad’s simple liturgy opened up a way to talk to him about God’s goodness.
The author also points to the events of Good Friday as a concrete example for teaching children about God’s goodness in difficult times:

‘On Good Friday, when Jesus died on the cross, he experienced the most difficult of times. That day, the sun was blanked out and the whole world went dark - the darkest it has ever been. No stars twinkled. There was not even a sliver of the moon in the sky to give Jesus some light. And yet in the darkness, God showed the whole world that he was still good. Because in that moment, Jesus died for our sins, so that we could be forgiven. It’s why the day is called “Good Friday,” because even though Jesus died in the darkness, God was still good - just like the moon was still round, even though no one could see it.’

When I saw that this book had been released this year by New Growth Press, I approached the company and requested a review copy, which they kindly sent me.

I think there’s a real need of good books for children that address the grief and sense of loss that occurs when a baby is miscarried or stillborn. In my own experience, each child can be quite different in their reaction to loss. Some ask lots of questions while others don’t or aren’t able to articulate them.
I would have appreciated a resource like this to read to my children, the older ones and the younger ones. When you are dealing with your own pain it can be hard to initiate a conversation but I think that reading a book like this aloud would have helped me.

I appreciate the author’s use of a natural event with its certainty and regularity to reflect a spiritual reality, for addressing a difficult topic with clarity and tenderness, and for sharing his own story of loss in order to help others who are grieving.