Musings, September 2026

I walk through Thornbury’s blossoms

Yuma

From Naarm/Melbourne,

Where I have been retracing neural pathways in the city that built me. The city that I ran away from ten years and one month ago. Happy anniversary to leaving. To blossoming, blooming. What does it mean to visit home? To be home? To build a home? Questions my big Cancer heart and I have been asking with and for my whole life.

As I walk through Thornbury’s blossoms with my daughter strapped to me, I am shocked that spring will imprint differently on her. How could spring smell like anything but asphalt, flowering gum, wattle, old rubbish, cherry blossom, jasmine, lemons?

How could spring smell like anything but asphalt, flowering gum, wattle, old rubbish, cherry blossom, jasmine, lemons?

Naarm is a catch in my throat: a place I can’t leave behind and I can’t return to. Geography may always be enigmatic to my hermit crab soul.

I am learning another way to build a home: love. Family is not for everyone, but it is, it seems, for me. How easy to love you, my baby, and your father. How easy to come home as you fall asleep in my arms.

Audiophiles, you will find the recorded newsletter here.

Prescription for sweetness: collaborative meditation

Never in my life so enamoured. Your tiny hands. Your smile. Heaviness of you sleeping. Fierceness I feel for you: storge. The love of a parent for their child.

Discovering a new wild place: my matrescence: the ecosystem that is you and I changing each other. My sleeping body knows where you are. My breasts leak when you cry. Long nipple hours. The ecotone where you and I meet.

We are, you and I, an ecology.

I didn’t believe in innocence, fundamental clearness, clarity. Yet. You. You are my leaf of grass. My tadpole. You are my baby. You don’t need to be absolved of anything. I side with Plato: you have come into the world whole.

Meditating and sleeping with my baby on me, the same feeling arises in my body that caused me to fall in love with somatics: I experience differently. I rest differently.

You eat off me. The river between us. Our ecotone is defined by liquid. The great thirsts that pregnancy awoke. Hunger for wet dirt. Petrichor. Dramatic breaking of my waters. Hot rivers pouring forth. The milk. I am in a river when you eat off me. The nerves in my hands and feet softening. My belly softening, my throat, my eyes softening. Your eyes droop against my chest, and mine too begin to drop. The sense of water flowing out of my hands and feet. The sense of motion in my body. My legs as if a current is running over them.

We hold each other. Your increasing weight against my chest, legs. You fall asleep attached to my breast and your snores resonate through my tissue. I pray for us to stay this four-legged creature forever. A sweetness I thought impossible.

This is no monk's meditation. As you wake up, you pull at my hands and clothing. You suck on my fingers, and then cry because they don't bring you milk. You headbutt my chest until I bring out the nipple to feed you. This space between us, your lamplight attention, this messiness, is part of our collaborative meditation.

Want to be in my writing?

If you have a deep memory with petrichor, I would love to do a short interview (20-45 minutes) with you. I am also seeking to interview people who have experienced geophagy (dirt eating) cravings, particularly during pregnancy.

If you would like to see your experiences of petrichor or geophagy in my work, but don't have the time to be interviewed, please just reply to this email with your story.

I will give you full attribution, unless you ask otherwise.