Let me start this entry by expressing my appreciation for my small pool of paid subscribers: I think of you with gratitude every time I buy myself a coffee, imagining you sitting with me by the river for a long, animated conversation about our favourite shared topics.
To all of my free subscribers, I appreciate your presence for the encouragement it offers, propelling me to continue writing.
Note: I am in the very final stretch of my PhD thesis collation before submission, so just a heads up that my posts will be a bit more sporadic over the next two months. After that, I will resume a more regular publishing pattern. Now, take my hand and come along as I meander through a mental labyrinth of interlinking themes…
It is springtime in Western Australia, or, Kambarang according to the Noongar calendar of six seasons—a calendar which makes most sense as it follows distinct, observable and sense-able changes in the hyperlocal context.1 The bush is pregnant with all manner of fragrant wildflowers and blooming shrubs including freesia, wattles, banksia and many I don’t yet know names for (taxonomical, indigenous or otherwise). Each day as I leave or come back to my current residence, I’m blasted with the sun-warmed, heady scent of flowering trees in the yard. Along with the overt proliferation of blooms, this fecund period is when snakes emerge from hibernation.
Interestingly (and unique) for me this spring, despite being a Canadian with lifelong attunement to northern hemisphere environments, my psyche seems to be transitioning to copacetic with my current locale (Boorloo/Perth)—I’m between hemispheric dichotomies, but, straddling dimensions isn’t an uncommon sensation for me.2 My present transition is not merely a matter of biochemical flux (as with changed melatonin production), but symbolic alignment through dreaming as I, too, have emerged from a certain psychological hibernation.
This morning I woke from a dream of having autonomously delivered my own baby in the bathroom of a medical clinic I’d visited for an unrelated appointment. This was a completely unexpected birth, the surprise culmination of a cryptic pregnancy since I did not look nor feel pregnant.3 I marvelled at the flatness of my stomach as I held my new son’s vernix- and blood-covered head over the open bowl of the toilet, and his torso and legs slithered out from between mine. I’d felt no pain, only an urge to urinate, and the baby had started to crown while I relieved myself. I carefully cradled his body and scanned for all signs that he was fully alive and healthy—feeling bewildered, but also utterly enamoured with his dark, dark hair and eyes. I held him against my body with the umbilical cord still trailing from me, waiting for the afterbirth. As I stood in this slippery embrace, gelatinous blobs preceded the placenta which eventually flopped onto the tiled floor (yes, I dreamt in viscerally graphic detail). By this time, a nurse had come in to discover my predicament. I set the baby down on the floor, but as I did, it grew cold and shrank to the size of a homunculus, or small, waxy doll. I moved to snatch him up again to warm against me but the nurse assured me that the cold feeling would not affect the baby as she carried it away in her hand to be examined by a doctor. I began to wail loudly, enough that it echoed throughout the entire city, as I realized that a vulnerable part of me had been appropriated for an unknown purpose: “Give me back my baby!!” It was this deeply resonant dream-shrieking that woke me, though I physically made no utterance.4
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