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From here.

The other day I was sitting out on the deck drinking tea. Z was at school, PJ was in Sydney and our dog Zero was asleep beside me in the sun. The tea was hot. I blew on it. A cloud of steam drifted up into the sunshine.

I forgot what steam was made of. As I sat there, quietly blowing, sipping and sunning myself, I was reminded. And just as I saw that steam is made up of tiny droplets of water, I remembered that everything is made up of so many parts, different, the same, interconnected.

Happy Mothers' Day to all maternal sentient beings, including my own.

In our wanting to be better humans we sing your praises every day. You raised us, you held us, you guided us.

For everything else we say thank you today. The small things may be small, but just like the placement of an apostrophe, they are never inconsequential.

High 5-ing the World

Resolution? Promise? Goal? I don't know what you'd call it, but a year ago we made one.

In a conversation about where we'd like to be as a family, we quickly realised that the future we were planning didn't include a car.

Three years ago we gave up shopping at supermarkets, a year ago we gave up air travel, two months ago we gave up eating out of season and we're slowly transitioning towards giving up our mobile phones. But giving up our car feels like the biggest decision we have made so far.

It took us a year of preparation. We started a log book so we could see all the reasons we were justifying using the car. We biked, walked, carpooled and used public transport as much as we could, and after surviving the winter, knew that we were ready.

The town we call home has limited public transport options—no trams and no trains—so we knew we'd have to be a bit more organised whenever we wanted to leave. But on the plus side, we live in town, so it's a five minute bike ride up to the post office or library.

A week ago, we drove our car to Melbourne and delivered it to its new owner. The second he drove away it started to pour, and it dawned on me for the first time, the reality of our decision.

The next day, PJ started converting our carport into a bike/tool/potting shed.

After researching and test riding several cargo bikes, we finally made our decision. Yesterday PJ and I bussed and trained to Melbourne where we picked up our Kona Utes. Our first ride was a two-hour stint from the nearest train station, home.

My legs feel strong today, though my arms are a little sunburnt. Not from waving down passing cars to give us a lift, but from feeling so overwhelmed with freedom, I couldn't help high 5-ing the world.

We Rode

I thought we'd get a crowd of 20 people, I had hoped we'd get 30, but 40 turned up, which is about 1.3% of our small town's population.

We rode bikes and scooters. We rang our bells and we blew our whistles. We waved to people we know and those we didn't, standing on the footpath. We slowed the traffic to the pace of our cheers and wheels.

We reclaimed public roads as public space.

Then we all sat around with our celebratory ales, toasting the mighty and the free.

If you're this way inclined, please feel free to join the Daylesford Critical Mass Facebook page.

Or if you're that way inclined, please feel free to tune into ABC Ballarat this coming Monday at 6.40am (yikes!) to hear me talking about the event.

I look forward to riding with you in a month!

Thanks for the photos, Kate.

En Masse

We made it! The weather here is still chilly and un-springlike, but the coldest wintry days feel like they're behind us.

We have walked and ridden our bikes on 90% of the journeys we made this winter past, and I am happy to report I haven't had a single cold. PJ takes a raw garlic clove at the first hint of a sniffle, but I swear by my daily intake of spirulina. And lots of time spent outdoors.

The advent of the warmer weather is bringing with it more people on bikes in this little town of ours, but not necessarily more bike awareness, so we thought we'd change that with our very own Critical Mass.

If you live anywhere near the Central Highlands, we're meeting at the zebra crossing outside Daylesford Primary School at 5pm on the last Friday of each month, which means our inaugural ride is tomorrow.

If you're going to come along, please do come say hello. For those of you I've never met, here's what I look like:

And yes! That is a puppy in my basket. Introducing Zero, the newest addition to The Artist as Family. He's a 9 week old Jack Russell and he'll be coming along tomorrow too.

Hope to see you there!

(Thank you, Kate for the photos.)

Starry Starry Nose

We have been watching with much delight, each weekly episode of the series Life, narrated by David Attenborough. We have been mesmerised by insects, enthralled by reptiles, and last night we were spellbound by an assortment of animals hunting and hiding.

Featured in the most recent episode is the star-nosed mole. I had never heard of it before, and I definitely hadn't seen one — it's not an animal one is likely to forget.

Isn't it remarkable? Aren't we lucky to be alive at the same time?

Just after the British colonised Australia, a platypus was taken from these shores to the Empire where people couldn't believe their eyes. They thought the animal was a hoax; that the sailors who had brought the specimen might have been playing some kind of joke on them. What would they have thought of the star-nosed mole??

If you're interested in finding out more, here's a great four minute vid:

Leave Them Kids Alone

The other day, when PJ and I had our heads buried in books, Z found an old chair in the shed.

The less we parent, the better for everyone — a sentiment PJ and I often talk about, and now that Z is growing up, a practice more easily fulfilled.

The book I had my head buried in was Tom Hodgkinson's, The Idle Parent, a book that expounds do-nothing parenting, just as Fukuoka posited do-nothing farming.

Hodgkinson writes:

We need low-impact parenting, do-nothing parenting, no-work parenting. Harness natural processes and nature will do the work for you. In the case of gardening, this may involve a lot of simply wandering about. Just sitting in your garden or strolling around it will produce umpteen ideas for low-effort improvement and refinement. So it is with children. Just sit near them with a book and watch them play and chatter.

...And incite new life into old things. And old parents like us.

Vaginal Corona

When I was 18 I went out with a guy named Ben. It was our first year out of high school, we were overseas together and we were in love. One warm night we were so in love we decided to bequeath our virginities to one another.

Afterwards Ben said he was surprised that I hadn't bled. I mumbled something about horse riding, tampons and masturbation, then I fell asleep.

Fast forward 18 years to a few days ago when I web surfed my way to a pdf booklet put out by RFSU (the Swedish organisation for sexual enlightenment), which starts like this:

Known by the established term "hymen," the vaginal corona is the subject of many myths and misunderstandings. The most important of these is the notion that a woman’s vaginal opening is covered by a membrane that ruptures on penetration. This is incorrect. There is no such membrane. RFSU wishes to dispel the myths and promote knowledge of the true facts. In this booklet, we aim to give you a more accurate idea of what you will find just inside the vaginal opening of every woman.

Holy popped cherries, batgirl! My entire life I thought I had a hymen, and that somewhere along the line between being born and meeting Ben, this precious proof of purity was disturbed.

Between clitoris and labia in my Cambridge Illustrated Thesaurus of Biology is the listing for hymen:

Thin membrane partially closing the vagina in a virgin woman. It is ruptured when coitus first occurs.

Ha! One more myth of the patriarchy debunked. I wonder if there's a word for the membrane that seals a closed mind.

Sugru

Thank you Rachael for my care parcel!

I don't know which I was more excited by, the packaging or the contents.

The contents: Sugru.

Sugru feels like modelling clay, or Blu-Tack. It fixes in 30 minutes into whatever shape you mold it, and is ready to be used after 24 hours. It fixes soft because it's made from silicone. It sticks to metal, plastic, glass and ceramic. It's waterproof, dishwasher-safe, heat resistant, cold resistant, electrically and thermally insulating.

I don't write this to advertise, merely to explain.

Or if you're more image inclined:

After I fixed the ring and knife handle I was walking around the house like a woman possessed, trying to find broken things, considering what I could chip or bust or smash, just so I could mend it. I gave myself a high 5 I was so excited, when I remembered the missing bit at the bottom of the food processor.

I must admit I had hesitations at first, thinking of all the energy that goes into creating Sugru, but then I thought that anything that promotes the Repair Manifesto, over buying new gear, is definitely a good thing by me.

Overheard

The train leaves the platform. After sitting silently for a while, a woman looks up from her newspaper and says to her friend, "It says here that 90% of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century because of industrial fishing."

Her friend looks up in dismay.

The woman continues. "Only 10% of the whole world's tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skates and flounder are left. In the whole world! That's it—I'm never eating tuna again."

"Are you serious?" Her friend says. "I'm going to eat as much as I can before it's all gone."

Overlooked

Just over a year ago I was deeply moved as I took part in Deborah Kelly's tribute to one man's stance against the tyranny of his government.

So when PJ and I received an email about Ms Kelly's latest project, Muffled Protest, we jumped at the chance to be involved.

Here are some photos from yesterday's action in Melbourne, that aimed to highlight the overwhelming injustice of incarcerating asylum seekers and their children in detention camps—how blind we have become to the suffering of others.