An update then, is it you want?
Well - here it is Friday morning. The day I had set aside to catch up on oh, say, about six months worth of school work..
Not going to happen.
You see, I got back from Central Australia late on Wednesday night. I may well have spent those ten days with 27 teenagers but it does not dampen the effect that the area has upon me.
I first went up through S.A. and the NT two years ago - September 2004. It was a trip that I was very much looking forward to - it was a chance for renewal and change for me and a beacon in the distance to look to when times were hard. I had broken apart from my partner of some 4-5 years in April of 2004 and I really really needed to be free and away. (Teenagers aside, I have a strong imagination and therefore I could block them out when I needed to!)
Central Australia just got me. And I got it. I had always thought that I was a bush and sea kind of girl, I had never expected the way in which the trip was to assault my senses. I took in everything. I photographed away some 600 shots, I filled my ramshackle homemade sketch book from cover to cover and I came home enlivened and a little more aware.
You can understand that in preparing for this year's sojourn, I had been a little apprehensive - will it be as good? Will I still love it? Will I feel the same?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Even though it was different this time - for whatever reasons - it still got me.
And I still got it.
How can I possibly think about the petty wants of unconscious teens and their barely literate musings of 200 words on the form and function of a bmx bike when I have photos to sort and have developed, sketches to finish, websites detailing the requirements of working as a home tutor on a homestead and at the School of the Air to peruse, and staring - thinking and breathing and staring - to do?
Not a chance.
So I will fall further behind and I will fret and worry and freak out for another three weeks but I will be happy internally if only for a little while as I prevent the warmth of the sun, the colour of the land, the spirituality of the space and the noise of the nothing from leaving my heart and mind.