Parsley novels rosemary and thyme

Posted on July 10, 2024 by heathwilder

Tonight I am sitting down on a cold winter’s night to a meal of mashed potato and peas, Toulouse sausage – an inspiration of from Craig my local butcher, as he’s getting festive for the Paris Olympics. The fresh parsley, lemon thyme, spring onion, and rosemary are out of my balcony garden.

I’ve taken 2 days off work in recovery as I’ve kept blacking out. My local GP thinks it’s probably exhaustion, and she’s probably right. I went for a mental health care assessment to help with the government subsidy which is kind of a new Australian tradition prior to psychology. It’s a little inane as you have to spend $150 at the GP for an allowance copayment of about the same for psychology and typical bureaucracy nevertheless. Nevertheless I have found a good GP which can be is rare as finding a good mechanic. Being off work

Being off work meant that I got to catch up on, you guessed it, more work. My Data Analyst wrote a fantastic service level agreement SLA, and in the interest of mental health, and controlling the chaos, I need to write a introduction to onboard the company to this practise. It’s not that their resistant, more that it’s new. This is especially true in the arts where none of us, or most of us, are doing work very tangential to what we have studied. Lots of people have expressed interest in our use of Jira to manage the incoming, and the new SLA for clarity on deliverables. That’s a lot of business words but don’t get me wrong this is purely for protection and sanity. I’ll save you the spiel about saving the arts through project management for another time.

Parallel to that work is the Advocacy Group for Arts workers that I manage with my friend Shelly. Some of the mental health advocacy I’ve posted here has been born directly in the work in that space. This started as another bit of mental health safety around providing support to neurodivergent and autistic individuals in arts administration, but quickly became one of the central pillars of my life.

Over the last 12 months Shelly and I have expanded our little group to include activities like a book club, movie watch party, and other mental health activities like weekly meditation. This month for book club we’ve decided on the fiction book tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin. Extraordinarily this book is a non-romantic love story between two autistic young adults, and by young I mean a flashback to teenage years but it’s predominantly set in college and beyond. I am 10% into the book already and have a sometimes overwhelming love-hate relationship with it already. Like watching your favourite sports team lose at the grand final the early trials of the protagonists have me in outrage damming the characters foiling their lives to hell. I hate this book, and as love and hate are close parallels I’m reticent to say the truth that I am hooked.

So that’s where I am at present. Walking a fine line but enjoying that moment.

Lemon Thyme

Small but kind

Aside

We’ve had a few nests of paper wasps at our house over the past 5+ years. Over the years they’ve started a few nests, small ones off a few cells that they’d sometimes abandon for unknown reasons and sometimes they come back to them. They are small clustered tubes of grey, looking like loose bunches of Sunday newspapers bought from some tiny delivery kid on their weekend paper route around the garden, and turned into a paper mache bouquet.

They meant even more to my partner, spending days in the garden they’d often watch her work as much as she watched them. Once a spider built an elaborate web overnight surrounding their nest, and they watched with patient faces as she deconstructed the web and moved the spider on.

Over seasons their family grew with the size of the nest. Some summers, tubes were capped with wax as little wasplings grew inside to emerge weeks later. Of a night they sometimes shelter on the flat top of the nest, or crawl in a tube for shelter from wind.

Recently we had huge storms across the coast. Rain and flooding were intense and the winds were worse. Coming home one morning we noticed that their nest had blown down onto the path in front of our door. A few wasps were at the roof where the best used to be, and a couple more were at the grounded nest. It was easy to read the tragedy with human experience, in their frantic but futile action. We hit a small still from the house and some super glue and easy enough put it back in the position that it fell from. The wasps watched us from the roof or hovered about, but never tried to sing us even as we handled their home for over a minute, with them clinging onto it. It stayed attached and they immediately got back to work replacing wax and trending to anything in the sealed tubes; making repairs to their long-lived home and staring at us, as they sometimes do, while we work near them.

Then on Friday, in a brief moment, we were out, that all changed

Human neighbours must have had some internal pest control done, and one of them crept over our fence and sprayed the nest with some poison. Then they took off. Years and generations of our considerate neighbours were destroyed by human xenophobia and an inbuilt need for destruction.

It’s difficult not to think that humanity is the earth’s story case scenario. Too short-sighted and greedy to do anything more than squeeze the last drop of personal gain off their environment in their short lives and too arrogant to stop graffitiing the landscape with boasting of their own greatness.

Sometimes I get weary of hoping that humanity will change. They perform horrors on one another without learning from the past, led by greedy men, or unable to challenge their own ego and empathise with another, praising the genius of the wealthy as if there was a linear relationship between abundant wealth and the ethics of accumulating and hoarding it.

There will never be a day when we are free from the tyranny of ourselves; but I do hope that a collective consciousness, an ethical understanding, is reached whereby we can continue as something greater than ourselves. Less destructive and more considerate of our place in time.

There are people that I’d want that for. There are still people that connect me to the species of my birth.