How many blog posts do you think one person can write and save to their drafts before they finally get frustrated enough with themselves and post one out into the world? Maybe squarespace should have a feature where they give you a gentle nudge and some encouraging words when your draft posts reach a certain amount. Over the past few weeks I have put together so many posts. I have constructed stories, I have uploaded photos, I have at times bared my soul, and yet when it came to publish, I just couldn’t commit.

A few days after I posted my last blog about Jazzy moving to Melbourne and the granny hottie I crocheted for her while riding my emotional roller-coaster, it occurred to me that you might have wondered what Bren was up to at that same time. Well, he was designing and building her a guitar stand. While yarn and a hook and little stitches became my love language, his was all recycled scraps of timber, drills, clamps, saws, screws, sanding discs and a tape measure.

A couple of months ago our Jazzy moved to Melbourne. With a car and trailer filled with her belongings we drove down the highway listening to a playlist I’d originally made years ago to comfort myself when our Indi went overseas. As the car was filled with acoustic guitars and vocals I felt overcome with emotion. It was the end of an era in the story of our family, and at the same time it was the start of the rest of her life.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of ours, Petrus, popped in for a cup of tea and a catch up. We first met Petrus about 19 or 20 years ago, sitting by the edge of the local school’s swimming pool watching the kids have their annual month of lessons. We warmed to each other, relishing those long warm hours of observation and conversation.

Oh wow, I didn’t actually mean to take such a long break from blogging.

There was this moment during the week when we were sitting on the ground in the tractor shed paddock, trying to make friends with our four newest sheep. We were sitting as still as we could while they ate their oats just in front of us, building trust and friendship, and attempting not to scare them away. New sheep can be terribly flighty you see.

I did actually write a blog called Foxs Lake on Friday with lots of pictures and words showing and describing all the water that was flowing through the bottom of our property. Most non drought Septembers, water spills out of the creek and over our driveway and into parts of the windmill paddock once. This September and October I’ve lost count of how many times it’s happened, but it’s probably close to 12 times. So far. At one stage on Friday I was standing in our driveway and it was almost up to the top of my knee high gum boots.

I’ve been sitting here for close to an hour adding photos and then deleting them, writing words and then deleting them, playing around with the design, looking through my archives, and getting distracted constantly. Sometimes blogging comes so easily it feels like it pours out of me with no effort at all. Most of the time I have to make the space, block out the world and urge the post to come forth. But then there are days like today when no matter what I do, it just feels sticky and difficult. After all this time I still can’t work out what this post is going to be about and how to get it there.

Welcome back to the land of the daffodils. They certainly are putting on quite the show for us this year. And by some miracle, the cockatoos aren’t snapping too many of them off, and the kangaroos aren’t trampling all over them. For that I am definitely grateful.

Can you see Popcorn in the photo above? How she looks is exactly how I feel at the moment. I’m inside feeling cozy and dry looking out on yet another grey day of pouring rain and arctic temperatures. I’m so sick of this weather. I have a bit of a period headache, I have a hot water bottle on my lower back which is making me feel sleepy, I’m missing sunshine and light, I can’t be bothered doing anything, but I also can’t wait to be outside doing everything.

I feel content but a bit flat.

Greetings from daffodil land!

It’s a bit wild and unpredictable here. One minute the sky is brilliant blue, full of glorious sunshine and we’re wearing tee-shirts, and the very next it’s dark, wild and windy, and the rain pounding down on the roof is deafening. Dress in layers, pack a spare pair of socks, and don’t forget to wear sunscreen.

Gosh it has been a massive week on the path to reclaim my creative life. I think I’ve managed to spend time with the clay every single day. As was to be expected, on some days the hour for creativity presented itself obviously, as if it were meant to be. But then on other days, I had to rearrange things, or let something go, or give myself a talking to to remind myself of the importance of what I was doing. On one particular day there was almost an argument between me and another family member before I stopped, took a few deep breathes, and realised that I was just feeling guilty for prioritising myself. No one was trying to stop me, but me.

Gosh I’ve been thinking so much about creativity this past week. I’ve been consumed with wondering about texture, about story, about shape and about opportunities for self expression . And I’ve been obsessed with trying to work out how creativity fits into the life I’m living at the moment, and where I can fit in more, and what that more would actually look like.

Despite my relatively easy homecoming from this trip, I woke up on Wednesday feeling a bit grumpy with everything. I had struggled through a night filled with vivid terrifying dreams (which is so unusual for me these days), it had rained non stop for weeks and was in fact still pouring, we’d stopped drinking coffee three days before, and I couldn’t even be bothered getting dressed in my same old boring winter work clothes again.

I have memories of crash landing into real life after trips overseas in the past and feeling almost bereft by real life. By the same-old everyday routines, the weather and the chores. This time we tried really hard to cushion our homecoming with some new short term rituals that we invented just for these first few tricky weeks back.

What a crazy world we live in, hey. Just last Friday afternoon we were sitting in our apartment over looking the old city of Jaffa in the Middle East. It was crazy hot outside. Earlier we’d had a big lunch out at a vegan restaurant around the corner and now Jazzy and her boyfriend Noam, Indi and Pepper were downstairs watching the remake of Footloose, while we were upstairs alternating between reading and dreaming up ways that we could spend more of our days chasing sunshine, adventures and exploring ancient cities.

I’ve thought about blogging so many times over the past week. I thought of hundreds of things along the way that I’d love to share with you. So many descriptions, and stories, and thoughts, and questions. Travel life is so rich in experience and emotion. These ancient cities we’ve been staying in are so full of history, and language, and culture, and architecture. As well as politics and religion. It’s difficult to know where to begin; my head feels overwhelmed, my heart feels full, and my body is tired.

I’m actually on the other side of the world from last time I wrote. It’s so weird how we can do that; one minute we’re picking Brussel sprouts in the depths of winter on our little farm at the bottom of mainland Australia, and then after one night in a hotel room at Melbourne airport and 23 hours in two planes later, here we are in HOT summer in Israel in the Middle East.

Which just reminded me of a time back when Pepper was about eight and I cut her hair for the very first time. She went from having waist long hair, to hair a few inches shorter. It was so much more manageable for me, but also a bit emotional. Anyway I wrote about to on my blog and got a furious email from a reader berating me for taking Pepper’s power and changing her entire look. It shocked me to think that someone who had never met Pepper before could be so invested in her appearance. We ended up emailing back and forth and eventually she apologised, but I think from memory that exchange really shook me up and changed the way I posted for a while.

How are you? How has your week been? Has it really been a week? Gosh, even though we are in the depths of the deep, dark, winter, the days seem to be flying by.