Escerpt from Journal...

"I made these low fired, earthen ware cups from clay I dug up in the forest twenty five minutes out of town, and one of them worked. It holds water. 

Over the weekend, I drank three bottles of wine from it, and today I tried making a hot ginger tea in it. I noticed some seepage on the outside. It had been washed a few times with hot water to get the wine smell out, and maybe the detergent has worn away the seal made by the milk glaze. I gave it two new coats of milk and baked it in the oven again. We will see if it's water tight again.

Over the time I've spent with this cup, I've grown very fond of it, despite its imperfection and failure as a cup. I turn it over in my hand all the time, even as I drink poison from it. Looking at it.

At the end of 2004 I left a Christian cult and began a slow descent into complete breakdown. For a year afterwards, I continued to follow the strict rules that had been imposed on me for the previous three years. Every Saturday morning I would do all the domestic cleaning,  rising early and following a strict regimen just as had been the rule in the house I shared with other cult members.

Thanks for agreeing to meet me. I wanna tell you a couple of things. But first, would you say he was a good father? In your opinion? You knew him well? I mean, you baptized him into the faith, right? Yeah. I know. You helped him  get clean. It was a miracle.

Okay so one day I was sitting in my room with my school friend, I was...eighteen. I'd already left home twice and had gone back to school. I was okay at English lit. Probs my best subject really...

I walked away from our meeting

down  a long, carpeted corridor

Carried by a human current 

towards the exit like a single cell

Curved monuments stood out even against the night

like a poetess institutionalized by fire 

and you said that I seemed happy.

Keeping the question caged in tumult

I didn't ask.

Why?

entombed in glass.

When words that

dive into horror can give so much?

Just place a stone in the centre.

Listen to its weight as it rests in space

Offering you nothing.

My Mother made a small quilt almost a decade ago. After being locked up in a Psych ward, placed on community treatment orders and subjected to the indignity of Centrelink compliance in her sixties, the last of her Church friends who had anything to do with her invited her to be part of a quilting group, which I'm sure she found very therapeutic. She made the quilt while part of that group. A small metre square blue blanket with a diamond triangle design.

My Therapist tells me I'm trying to be heard.

Walking around the mountain day after day in the mists and rain and cold (four degrees at 4pm) speaking out loud to my abusers. Telling the truth about what happened. Imagining their response. Going cold at the thought they might be right. I'm the problem.

Imagine yourself as a teenager. Imagine being  beaten up by your step father in front of your school friend. Their eyes widening with horror as you take blows to the head.

The ring of a metal spoon being tapped on the edge of an enamel cup. Warble of Magpie. Words on a page become sentences about the sacredness of walking. Sun edges across a large, grassy cricket oval clearing. Brutalist dam walls dry no water flow to be seen. I hear water though. Flowing down through these mist topped mountains on my right that cradle the Birrurung Marr.

I guess there's no point in saying it,

That all my colleagues have swallowed lies. As our bodies slowly give way or give out and the Behemoth just rolls right over the top of us and keeps going under the misapprehension that we are worth something to the system. That its a caring industry.

The sun is out there's a gentle breeze and its a little cool. The river is bathed in sunlight and there's rolling hills on the other side. Corella's in flocks flying low along the rivers course, just a foot or two above the water.

My insides feel tinder dry. Its like a desert in there and I really dont know if it will be flooded i ever again. When I traveled with T_ we only ever had one fight. I realize now we were only good because of who she was.

I was eleven when I first met the pastors wife. She picked my mother and I up from Spencer St train station and we got into her car and she drove us back through the streets of Mellbourne, which captivated me with all the bluestone and Victorian architecture, so very different to the flat urban savannah of Adelaide that was familiar, to the Church where she and her husband lived in Ascot Vale. We stayed with them for two weeks.  It was my very first encounter with the Christian religion.
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I'm an artist/cartoonist from Melbourne, Australia. nommric@gmail.com
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