I’m forever a summer dress girl. There’s something delicious about feeling the soft fabric of a long flowing dress flapping about your legs that intoxicates the soul and makes me feel akin to a bird sailing through the open sky, wings outstretched, meandering lazily through the world up above, serene and graceful. I love slipping into a summer dress despite the informality of any occasion. For me, it is what I’ve felt most comfortable wearing ever since I was a little girl.
‘You deserve the best-dressed prize!’ a mother comments as she scrutinises my ensemble from her picnic chair.
‘Oh! Thanks,’ I comment. I honestly don’t give it a thought anymore. ‘I have three summer dresses, and they’re my go-to. Simple,’ I smile. Life is already so complicated, I’d rather leave my wardrobe to tried-and-true and let it be.
We’re at a children’s party, and I’m meeting up with friends from my daughter’s old playgroup. We’re at a park in a heatwave. The kids are running around with water guns until their faces are piping hot and they wilt, seeking the shade of the shelter, bleary-eyed from sweat and moaning from the thirty-eight degree heat. My own two daughters are dropping sadly, groaning and clinging to me for dear life. I tell them to go and get some ice water, and they walk off reluctantly, and I let out a sigh.
It has been a big week. Their last week of school holidays, and now, finally, their return to school. I took them with me into the city mid-week to collect my clarinet. They watched with enthusiasm as I played it anew, freshly oiled and repaired, and the repairer struggled to contain her nerves as their interest waned and they began messing around in her studio.
Attention spans of fleas.
I got them back in the car and took them to my old house in Coburg and pointed it out, a cream and brick duplex near the train-line just off Sydney Road. I remember walking around the street here, more than a decade ago, my legs strong and lean, my head full of dreams. I wonder if they will ever feel the same way I did when they are in their twenties, and I half wish it, and half fear it.
We go scavenge in the op-shops and I get the girls lunch in a trendy cafe that serves vegan mayonnaise and fair-trade coffee, and then we pop next door into a quiet secondhand bookshop filled with wonders haphazardly piled to the ceiling and toppling from tabletops. I trail my finger along the spines of Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, David Gutterson, and my daughters open the pages of old books and breathe deeply. I watch them approvingly as they let the stillness of the books press in upon their animated forms and they begin to slow down, the heaviness of the books beginning to contain them. I smile and exhale. It is in these precious moments into which I lean, telling myself that in these moments, they are forming a small part of themselves that they’re not even conscious of yet. A small fragment of their energy existing now in this sacred space of books and words and knowledge and storytelling.
And so by today, Sunday, I am well worn from the busy-ness of the week and ready to step into my summer dress and all I really want is to do is to be walking in nature. To breathe deeply in the way that I caught my daughter breathing, deeply inhaling the smell of old books. I often find myself inhaling the smell of eucalyptus leaves unknowingly, having caught them in my hand and pulled them from an obliging branch. But more importantly, I find myself craving solitude.
Some people spurn solitude. They fear it or feel it means something unsavoury about who they are as people. But I crave it. I seek it out. In fact, I go out of my way to find solitude, turning off main roads into small winding dirt tracks and stepping away from the crowd. I am forever exploring quiet spaces away from people.
In a world of noise and words, I seek solitude like an antiseptic balm against the burn of the scorching heat of the world’s noise and hustle. I find it fortifying and absolutely necessary for my own inner wellness and peace of mind. It is in my own sweet solitude that my eyes are able to hungrily devour the shimmering waves and pulses of a lake and the magical flickering movements of sheer butterflies and buzzing insects against the amber hues of the setting sky. I stand in dry grass and the wind blows my long dress and I hear it grazing the grass, scratching it in a way that soothes my soul. I long to touch the leaves of trees, to inhale the smell of eucalyptus and sink my hands into dirt and clay. I ache to create and become part of this earth, a creature that builds and makes and shapes and doesn’t once think. I long to breathe and see and nothing more. Life is complicated enough, I want to make it simpler. To pare it back to its essence. To my being, which should always be enough. Which is of course, enough.
The sun has almost disappeared from the sky as I turn the key in the ignition and drive to the lake, and on a bench seat, I let myself become one once more with the stillness of the world around me. Time softens, and my heart expands. I feel beauty inside me, and see beauty shimmering around me everywhere. There is nothing more glorious than spending time in my own company, to sit with myself, and let myself feel the comforting sighs and exhalations of Sunday. I pause on the bench seat and my thoughts ruminate over the week’s happenings, and I let them empty out into the evening sky, and I am so absorbed in the stillness that I don’t even notice the ants climbing up my legs and over my long linen dress. I watch them before me, scurrying hastily in a straight line as cockatoos and birds screech and cry aloud, and I wonder if rain is coming, and if they’re busy settling down for the night, each small soul finding their place on this one sacred earth.
I breathe one last exaltation and for the first time in what feels like forever, I feel once more humbled and full of painful compassion and closer to myself than I’ve been in what feels like years, and in this closeness with my essence, I feel a burgeoning sense of self love, of self knowing and self approval. These tiny moments of stillness and softness etch themselves deeply into the human soul, in the way each letter of text is imprinted in the tired and worn pages of musty old books. These are sacred moments, and like my summer dresses, I crave just slipping into them, and letting life once more just be uncomplicated and simple. Of letting my inner child fly, serene and graceful, in the skies of grace and imagination, and letting her be who she was always meant to be: a daydreamer, a forest-child, a solitude-seeking poet. A woman, now, who is filled with renewed presence to preserve the sanctity and sacredness of these simple moments.
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