Midnight Melancholia

I can't sleep. A heavy blanket of 'nothingness' covers me in damp weary sadness. I feel alone here at night, while my dog snores in his bed, and the far away highway sounds closer, and filled with truckers. I can hear the fireplace cooling in the living room, and the creaks of our old home's bones. I'm so far from family, but know that even if I were close, I'd still feel alone. I don't know that I'm ever going to find 'my people'. Maybe there's just me, for me.
No one seems to hear Me, or know Me...or trust Me, or love Me. I'm too hard. Too bitchy. Too....something.
Too alone.

Country Rain

On a wet rainy day here in The Barossa, the smell of woodsmoke pervades the air and adds a misty mystery to the atmosphere. Its at times like this that my minds turns to two things....the library, and baking.

As my lovely big 900 mm stove is now absent its oven, due to catastrophic gas connector death, and whilst I await my NEW cooker...one day....soon...(maybe) I have had to come up with new ways to get my fix. The microwave has been used to make some seriously yummy sponges, mud muffin/cupcakes and even lamingtons but they lack that baked taste. My new stove can't come soon enough! But I'm pretty happy with my fiddled recipes.

Plain Vanilla Sponge style cake

1½ cups SR flour
3 tblsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tblsp softened butter (I use vegan shortening)
²/³ cup milk ( I use lactose free)
2 large eggs
Add combined wet ingredients to sifted dry ingredients, and mix well until smooth and creamy. Add to microwave safe cake pan/ cupcake pan and cook, on high, for 5 mins.
Easy. :)
* For mud cake I add ¼ cup of cacao powder or cocoa powder, and chocolate hazelnut spread to your preferred amount before baking. After baking and turning out the cake, I spread a ganache over the warm cake.
Ganache:
1 tblsp Coconut oil, 300 g dark chocolate, 1 cup thick coconut cream melted to a thick pouring consistency.

Baking by microwave takes far less time than I'm used to, so after making lamingtons and two types of chocolate truffles, I still had lots of time in my day, so off to the library I went!
I now have lots of inspiring books to immerse myself in if it rains again tomorrow! Which is great because, if I keep cooking sweet things, I will become unable to fit in my car!

HEARTS

The heart knows no fear - it swells and fills and smiles at everything. It is the imagination which suffers from the nightmares that can cause the heart to break.

Shopping Centre Poetry 2

Carry yourself with pride - woman.
You have navigated your way through trials most people would be ruined by.

After years of abuse from my FIRST ex husband, yep. I've got two. (Oh my god). I have become an abuser myself. I see myself as a survivor, but the 'skills' I learned surviving, have made me a mini monster. I am a bitch. I am mean. I'm hard and cold and almost maniacal in my pursuit of injustice against me. I am a cobra, a venom spitting, fast moving hell worm. And I have to stop. :(

No matter how much trauma I have suffered, I cannot be this person who hurts others....my trauma is real, my suffering is real, the abuse I suffered is real. Its all real BUT it does not give me sanction to cause pain, to eke out revenge toward anyone. I have to get help.
My inner self is so beautiful....so vulnerable and kind, so absolutely lovely that I need to sto stop hiding behind the snaky saviour I invented, and let that part of me shine.
Surviving trauma is more than not dying of it....its not changing because of it.

Shopping Centre Poetry 1

I am the breath of a cooling breeze on a hot day.
I am the touch of a flame on a cold evening.
I am the swoop of a wave against sand-burnt toes.
The flash of a wing against a clear blue sky.
The call of an owl in midnight's lonely darkness.
I inhabit the glorious colours of Autumn's leaves,
fallen upon damp soil.
I am All.
I dwell in empty places and in those that are replete.
I live here. I am Here.
I must remember my magnificence.


-DEDICATED TO MYSELF-
...and to all women who have forgotten...

Child/Crone

Why can't you see me???????
I have the wide open eyes of a child...open to the wonder of the world...open to the mysteries that dwell in the liminal spaces, the corners and the cracks. I see it all. I hunger for those breaks in the 'normal'. I would wander the world in search of them.
I have the open heart of a child....innocent of malice, ready to receive, and always ready to give,give,give. I have the easy sensuality of a goddess, and the earthy nature of a creature of the forest. I am raw and powerful. Gentle and filled with wonder. Hot and dark and ravenous.
But,here, in the 'real world', I am doomed to grow older and am expected to become less than the truth of what I really am. And everyone I know is DETERMINED to make this happen. Except me.
My years as a woman have only just begun....but to the world in which I dwell I am already a crone. Time to put myself away and let the remainder of my years on Earth dwindle away. NO! I cannot allow this. I am glorious. I can feel this glory and it must be allowed its free rein or I will surely die of its burning.