Memories: 8 September 2023

8 September 2023

Busy day. I stripped my bed, did washing, cleaned my fishpond filter. Then had a frantic call from Robyn asking me to check on Peter as he is not answering her calls.

So I go immediately but found him working on his computer, on his chassis model. He was perfectly fine although little Miss Koko was having anxiety attacks as she often does when she hears jets fly over or thunder.

I came home, remade my bed then sorta collapsed with exhaustion. I have had a weird pressure headache for two days. I’m not sick which is good but feel rather drained.

I plan on going dancing tonight so I will rest for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I need to pace myself!

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I had an awesome night, dancing first at 5 Rhythms Wake Up and Dance at West End then on to Brooklyn Standard for Alter Egos. No creeps or weirdos this time. Phew!

8 September 2022

I am very excited to announce that I will be at the Plant Lover’s Market (9-2 pm) on Sunday 11 September 2022 at Coorpooroo Square.

It’s been 30 years since I ventured to the markets as a seller. So I am nervous as hell. But I have been inspired to give it a go at long last.

I have been creating jewelry since January 2021 so it’s time I tried to sell a few pieces.

8 September 2020

11:11 am kadosh kadosh.. kadosh.. on your tippy toes Twinkle toes.

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So today’s project was I bought a random orbital sander and sanding discs. Only to discover after a few hours of more intrepid sanding (Psy sighs) that the remaining thin veneer still won’t budge.

So I googled what to do and found some comments that it can be removed with a razor. I had a few blunt razor blades so set to work this evening. It sorta kinda removes it but it takes forever and not much progress made.

I got excited though, about the possibility of removing the old coating and got to thinking about what I will use to seal the marble. (After I have scraped everything off!).

It appears I need a rather expensive sealant that was sold out on the website of a company I stumbled across. So I have asked them to email me when the product (from Italy!) comes in.

So this marble table top project is killing me ...financially and physically and psychologically.

I guess it will be worth all the effort in the end.

8 September 2019

11:11 am. Make a wish ;-)

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8 September 2018

11:11 am. Make a wish :-)

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Rainnnnn

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12:11 pm feeling loved and embodying joy and grace. Feeling grateful and content.

I adore all my friends (IRL and online). I feel blessed to have so many incredibly soul-nourishing people surrounding me and cheering each other on.

Life is good. Yeah, I have some significant difficulties in my life but by the gods, the good transmutes so much of the bad and the ancient moribund griefs are starting to dissolve. (They will bite back as life is cyclic like that, but right now, just wow! )

If I could bottle this bliss I’d have a billion dollars and that would only buy me subversive power and fake friends (fake news and fake dickhead presidents) so I think my wealth is more valuable and intrinsic, beautiful and edifying (although it would Kick me in the tochas when I struggle to pay next bill hahah).

The gods must be crazy but they really know what they are doing to/for me and I am at peace with that.

(Just for today...)

I had a beautiful heartfelt compliment from an old friend last night. She told me that a woman who had been so vicious to me over the course of several years was jealous of me because I am a good person.

A good person. That almost brought me to tears. I know I am not always good. In fact I can be a fiery stubborn irascible arsehole at times. (Haha “my bile is rising!” But the fact that my friend looks at me that way meant a great deal to me. Maybe because most of my life my family of origin made me out to be a useless shit.

So I will graciously accept that compliment as part of the core values of The Tanya and continue to thrive and jive and trust in my own innate goodness.

I surround myself with good authentic loving people (and my animals!) and I am happy and grateful for you all!

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Home from a great night out, dancing. I now have feet that feel like tiny angry wasps are drilling into them. But I had fun with Jenny, Adam, Tichsia, Tony, Luke and many others of the regulars there. A happy night, with music and laughter and silliness.

Now it’s time to sleep and rest my legs and feet and shut down my conscious mind for a while.

Laila Tov. Much love and blessings to all my friends (and tiny family).

8 September 2017

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This morning, not long after waking up, the words "Soul Retrieval" popped into my head. Then I saw a beautiful comment written by a woman mourning the very recent loss of her father in law. She spoke about his regaining large parts of his soul when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had spent 42 years with brain damage after a car accident.

So I got to thinking about all the ways and emotions I had gone through to retrieve my Soul.

I suffered immense soul loss starting in early childhood from Child sexual abuse and my violent childhood. I simply never fit into normal human interaction. At school I was bullied daily then would sullenly trudge home to encounter more abuse.

I was fortunate that I lived by the sea and seeing the expanse of the horizon, the ever-changing hues of the sky and the water and experiencing first-hand the ocean's sweet calm and her most ferocious fury brought me into balance, if not always to peace and harmony.

The first thing I ever did as a child (by this time living in Melbourne Australia) was fall in love with an orthodox Jewish boy and with Judaism in particular. My soul screamed out for Love and acceptance and I saw this each day in the love of this boy with his mother.

How he proudly walked down the street with his arm around her, not shamed by the ordinary bogan boys hissing at him that he was a Sissie. I told my German mother that when I grew up I was going to be Jewish. She thought it was a sweet but absurd fantasy of a child.

I remember the day I sat before the Reform Beth Din at Temple Beth Israel. I passed my conversion exam (to such great relief!) My father in law to be was dying of stomach and bowel cancer so my conversion and my marriage were brought forward. Harry paid for me to fly to Melbourne for the exam.

He had fought my marrying his son for a long time. A year. But when he realised I wanted to convert for myself, and my deep love and connection to Judaism, he fully embraced me as his daughter in law.

He taught me Hebrew (in an old Ashkenazi accent, heavily accented with his Polish one). He loved me in a way I had never experienced in my childhood. (With 4 or 5 males constantly around me). He made me feel Safe. So there was some of my first soul retrieval right there.

The day I walked out of that shule (admonished by the rabbis to pick one dialect over the other for my Hebrew reading - I had managed to merge both Sephardi and Ashkenazi in my pronunciation of Hebrew and Aramaic prayers lol) I felt as though the Sky was an unlimited void above me.

My body felt light and even though it was a long walk to the tram to get myself back to the city I felt like I was walking on air. My head was a vast expanse of Light and a thing I had never experienced before at 19. Bliss! It was a natural High and a pleasure and a harmony that I have experienced only a few times in my life.

I remember I walked into Myers and could not work out how to use the public phones. So that brought me down off my Soul Retrieval High but no matter as I had arranged to meet a family friend, (Aunty) Beryl Lorimer (the former mistress of my stepfather Cees) and when she saw my radiant glowing happy face she was so thrilled for me. "You are going to have a good life now, Tanya". That was my hope, my prayer, my goal. A good life!

I flew home to NZ next day, in trouble for not calling home straight away. I was met by my fiancé. He tried to kiss me in front of everyone at the airport and suddenly I felt strange and uncomfortable. His words to me "Dad is dying. He might not make it. We get married on 20 May (lag b'omer). No other date an option. Wedding all arranged!"

So my newfound bliss turned to horror. My wedding was taken out of my hands. I had little input in it. It was both a day of some happiness. But also grief. Harry died 2 nights before.

The beautiful family I thought I was joining went scavenging for Harry's whiskey collection an hour after his death and I learned new depths of emotions that I had not quite come to terms with. Disgust, contempt, horror.

My beautiful father in law had lain suffering and dying, naked on his bed (I discreetly covered his nakedness with a sheet) while his daughter Shirley bemoaned the fact that he had not made her another mink coat, while my fiancé sat, disassociating somewhat, and I discovered that I had merely swapped one family from hell for another one.

Harry had loved me because I was strong. Because I had fought so hard for acceptance, because he knew I would need to be strong to survive my life and raise his grandchildren. And so it was.

As for soul retrievals. There was the time I screamed for hours in my unit complex. 2 or 3 hours. Freshly traumatised with nowhere safe to go and no future. But I had my children, so I held on. My screaming became an orgasmic purge of ancient griefs, not all my own. Finally I fell asleep with exhaustion. I woke up the next day, cleansed and purified, drained but resolute. I was going to live on.

In December 2004 I went home to Wellington. I stood on the beach, in front of my childhood home (the place where I sent so much of my soul out into the void) and I cried. Sobbed big heaving sobs. My half-sister and niece bewildered and ambivalent.

A young male tourist came up to me on the beach and told me how beautiful my birthplace was. He comforted and grounded me even as he looked at me with a certain degree of consternation. The kindness of strangers. Someone should bottle it. It is more precious than diamonds.

The last few years I retrieved my soul by fighting for myself (and advocating for other survivors of csa). By dancing in wildly dangerous places. Seedy toxic pubs with backstabbing dangerous revellers. But I found beauty, and a few rare treasured souls who loved me even in my torpid rage and Berserker stomping. I fell in love with myself and my capacity for hope and love which gave me a measure of peace after a long hard impoverished filthy treacherous life.

I fell in love with false traitorous men and I survived that huge vacant depth of emotion. In fact I was nourished by it. The false and the broken came to fuck me but they got something else instead. Their own abyss. Their own Jacob's ladder. So they spurned and rejected me and it hurt. It will always hurt.

My intentions were honourable. My love authentic. My passion intense. But I was not put on earth to rebuild them, nor to be a trifling piffling entertainment. (Get up, you curs. You have your own inner work to do!)

I had work to do, to rise and shine from dog-day afternoons and holistic Oblivion. To breathe new life into battle-worn flesh. To dance. To find a peace in my own Soul and a comfort that has ever been denied me.

To smile at the sea and sky and the earth beneath my feet and greet each day, a little more replete with bliss. To kiss my soul upon awakening consciousness, with that first breath and new vision of each new day and to be able to say "I made it". My life is now Good.

Thank you G-d for kind people. For the stars and the moon and the sun. For gifting me the tools to facilitate my own healing. For Love, eternal and true, for the laughter of triumphant childlike discovery. The world we have co-created is a beautiful safe harmonious Space where we are cherished and adored!

8 September 2016

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@ Lyn's. Sitting by her fire. Tenth attempt to burn out the huge tree stump. Slowly making progress. It is very soothing to be by the firelight.

8 September 2014

See below photo:

Now when I tell you I used to be a Zombie (non-brain eating kind, never did like offal!) you can see for yourself I am not joking or exaggerating.

I was so stoned off my natural brown mullet on Abilify or Zyprexa at the time as my nerves were so bad. I went without a bra for 2 years (it hurt to wear them!), I was grateful to have a bf who only wanted to see me twice a week and whom was stoned himself 24/7 for vastly different reasons.

My teeth were in dire need of fixing. (Lucky they got done!)

I had lost the will to live, I shuffled along like a mental patient in a hospital and had to be put on Cogentin for Parkinsonian spasms.

By the end of that year I had had major surgery and eventually 7 years later, I have clawed myself back from the brink. Even if I do still tend to teeter over the abyss, scrambling for solid ground or at least a branch to hang onto.

I told my ex end of 2009 that my true personality was coming back and he would be getting to know a woman he had never met before who is totally awesome but completely wild and he might need to adjust to this as I hadn't seen my true self since I was a child, so I would also need to become proud of and comfortable with the real Me.

Needless to say, with my mother's death in March 2010, and my near-dying experience on December 25 2009, and my struggling to make sense of my life thereafter, he left me.

Awww. No regrets. The only way he could cope with me, was by me being significantly disabled and defunct and I served no purpose other than to be fucked, and supply a car (and chauffeur!) Admittedly he was great about fixing it and even lent an ancient Merc to my daughter...so not a total bastard, just not in love with me.

Oh and he did love my Dog!

So yes! When I rock out like I am 15 years old at my very first concert, moshing and writhing like a Whirling Dervish but letting my body command its own meditations, when I seem dangerously Mad (perhaps I am!) when I disassociate to the energy and tempo and bass of the music and I get that odd look on my face…I am enjoying myself, my freedom, my life or what is left of it.

I am sending my spirit into little orbits in dreamtime and I am physically channelling years of pain as well as triumphs of survival. I am here but not here and being a PSTD survivor, hyper-vigilantly everywhere and awake and aware as when I sleep, I sleep the sleep of those who should not be here but are, and as I age I no longer sleep 16- 20 hours a day but I still sleep a lot. It has healed me up to a point. It is where I do my best "work" in dreams and astral plane.

So No, I am a long way from Wellness, from success, from Love, and life still knocks me down and I still get up brutalized but not Beaten and I will be doing this dance until I die. It's not the Zombie shuffle any more. It's wilder, angrier, more passionate, at times lonelier but it's mine, my Art, my Muse, my Essence and my Coup de Grace amidst the feral and graceless.

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I am incandescent with rage. I told the boarder creature to buy birdseed for her budgie over a week and half ago. Today I checked on the bird and all he has are damp husks. I texted her to buy food for him and she needs to move out by Wednesday evening. I got a mouthful of cheek in return.

Meanwhile the bird is not the only issue. She comes home very late each night. Child was pale and exhausted-looking last night and with her asthma, coughed all night. I gave her one of my Ventolin inhalers the first night they moved in as that user parasite woman didn't have ventolin for her child. She needs to see a Doctor!

This is neglect! The child and the bird. Outrageous! Never makes her lunches and hasn't cooked a meal in almost 3 weeks of being here. Only heated up one lasagne. So she must be feeding the child with junk food every night, for lunches and breakfast as well!

8 September 2013

Tonight I visited Gail, and Lucy and baby Rider were there. They put the smiling cherub of baby boy in my arms and he immediately grinned at me, and clutched my breast and settled for a snooze and a lovely cuddle. I told him the story of the 3 bears, and sang him some little ditties in German and French.

I decided he's been here before as his own great-grandfather Bernhard, who survived his naval ship being sunk in WW2 and floated in the Black sea for 2 days in flotsam, jetsam and oil slick. I mentioned this to baby Rider (a complete innocent) and he squished his eyes closed in actual disgust and horror, so I laughed then told him, don't worry Kid, we will just concentrate on one lifetime at a time, and make sure THIS one is gonna be awesome!

He gave me a rather relieved but happy grin. Adorable infant, whether he is actually Bernhard or not! Still the facial expressions were Priceless.

Gail was very amused by how much Rider enjoyed my morbid little German Ditty that my mother used to sing to me. It's almost as if he really thought it was Yiddish. I keep telling Lucy her boy is Jewish even though she named him for his father's Welsh antecedents. She had to laugh at that.

Update 8 September 2020: I am no longer friends with that family.. but the memory is a lovely one regardless. I hope Rider is growing up safely and happy.

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On Saturday night I met some NZ Navy sailors. The three of them threw me up in the air. I was laughing so hard. Pretty awesome. I "entertained" one of them. He was cool but slept most of the day, as apparently it's very noisy on board ship for 2 months.

I drove him back to his ship. It was a long drive to the Port of Brisbane, and the silly man didn't know for sure if his ship was berthed there as they moved it in the early hours of the morning.

I was quite relieved to find a warship berthed where the Port officials said it would be when I rang them. lol. I got a bit worried he might end up AWOL and think he could be a sleeping partner indefinitely.

I met another lovely man on Saturday night, a jeweller from Dubbo, he was mad keen until I found out he was married so had to throw him back to the cesspool of recycling schmucks of the over-50's. He looked rather dismayed when the sailors took up with me and my friends, and were tossing me in the air.

Enjoying living through rather awesome but weird times. Still missing my Bella though. No man can ever come close to loving me like my doggess goddess.

8 September 2011

I had a lovely day today. I got up early for Lyn who had to cancel on me, so rang Gail who took me to get a tick collar for Miss Bella and then took me out to lunch. Noodles...delicious.

Then we were both so exhausted (I'd been sorting my back room until 4 am and was up by 10 for Lyn) that we went back to my place for a nap. Then Gail went to pick up Taly, and I pottered around doing washing, cleaned out the Bettas' Bowls and just chilling and feeling moderately happy.

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Woohoo! Margaret has booked tickets for Miss Bella and I to come to Sydney and to stay with her in the Blue Mountains. I'm so excited! This will be my first holiday in years and I've never been to the Blue Mountains, or Sydney for that matter. (I was there when I was 8 but barely remember it). I'm so lucky and so happy!

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8 September 2008

is tired but happy after cleaning the house

Copyright Tanya Désirée Arons