Liana Joy Christensen, Writer
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On Being Seen

18/9/2021

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​Many years ago, I created a gig as a Café Poet, offering to write short poems upon request. The very first request was from a dear friend’s 90 plus year old mother, who wanted a poem on the theme of Old Age. Being recently admitted to the very junior ranks of eldership, I dashed off a tongue-in-cheek little ditty called “Invisibility has its Consolations”.
 
It is now several years later, and I am learning the delights of being seen. It has by no means been a straightforward path to this place. My relationship with mirrors, for example, is fraught with primal trauma. Being seen originally was a terrifying exposure. I resist quantum entanglements with this particular memory by chanting to myself lyrics from a Joe Camilleri song: Hold it up to the mirror/ Won't you tell me what you see/Something might look familiar/
But it's a bad likeness of me.


As a dancer,  mirrors are a constant in my life. I’ve learned to make my peace with them. They are a tool of the trade, a guide to learning and nothing more.  But the desire to be invisible is still strong . . . 

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Writing this post was kicked off by a most extraordinary artwork I received this week. This gift needs a context. Let me begin with Merlin (appropriately enough, as I seem to be living backwards towards a state of innocent and fearless delight). This  was a treasured gift from another dear friend, a writer with multiple talents in other artistic forms. Having learned a love of Arthurian myths from my mother, this ceramic has been a longstanding joy in my life. Recently, my grand nephew has become the Wizard-Elect of the family (deep into Tolkein, Star Wars, drama and dance) and the time was right to  pass on what has now become a family heirloom.

I wasn't always a writer (I was always a writer)

​There was a time I sought help for the damage, the central symptom of which was a complete lack of faith in my own creativity.  I timidly shared my desire to write.  It took years but eventually (resisting the compelling temptation to bolt back to the safe invisibility of my log)  my numbat persona found its way into the open. I published an article called "Stars with Stripes" in Australasian GEO.  This was a significant milestone, of course.  And one that was made infinitely more precious by a gift from two sister seekers who had witnessed the courage it took me to emerge into the open. I remember their excitement the night they gave it to me. And my infinite astonishment. They had commissioned a potter to make this numbat for me. It was my first inkling that being visible did not have to be excruciating, that it could, in fact, be exquisite.
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Deadly Beautiful

"Stars with Stripes" was just the beginning, and I have gone on to publish poetry and prose, including a non-fiction book on dangerous animals of the world, Deadly Beautiful.  And that brings me to the gift I received this week. Another commissioned artwork, from one of the amazing women who originally gave me the numbat. I shake my head at my good fortune at receiving works made by artists, especially for me.  Meet "Deadly Beautiful", my ceramic avatar, sculpted by Albany artist ​Nicci Romanovsky Daniele  https://www.facebook.com/niccidaniele/
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​Each lovingly crafted detail is a response to the brief from my friend, which included a picture of me in a blue wig (see Ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery) and a copy of my book. 

The intertwined snakes, the tiny butterfly, the warrior woman breastplate marked with a peace sign, the native flowers, the shark fin . . .  
Now she lives atop the Cabinet of Devotion with other talismans of my writing life.
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It feels like my soul made manifest. 
​It is an experience like no other
to be so seen . . .
​ and so loved.
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Fathers' Day

4/9/2021

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Like everyone in Australia born in the first week of September, once every seven years my birthday coincides with Fathers' Day. I always loved it when I shared my "special day" with Dad. Now it is 2021, twenty-eight years since he died, and the two celebrations once again coincide. I've been thinking what an extraordinary birthday gift I received simply by being born to such a man.

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Fathers' Day 1993: I was moving house. It was my birthday. My Dad only had a couple of months left. Yet, there he was, at my new cottage, pruning the grape vines. And my Uncle Les was there, too. Driving trailer load after trailer load between Beckenham and Hilton, moving some furniture and an implausible number of plants. 

​He worked all day. It wasn't till he went home in the late afternoon to be with his own family that I found out that not only had he spent Fathers' day with me,

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​it was also his own birthday.  He was ill, too, with the asbestosis that killed my father.  He died only six weeks after him.


Many years ago I was in a psychotherapeutic group and we were asked to pair up at random and sit back to back with another group member. My partner happened to be a tall, solid man. Sitting back to back with him I became aware at a visceral level that the senior males in my life have always "had my back".  In our toxic, patriarchal culture, this is a rare and fortunate thing. You can see in both these photos, the beauty of nurture, the gentleness with animals that was the measure of both my father and my uncle.

Happy Fathers' Day, Dad. Happy Fathers' Day, Beloved Uncles. Happy Fathers' Day, to all the good fathers out there. Know that your work is immeasurably important.

My priceless birthday gift will last me through my entire life. I am profoundly grateful.
Here is a prose poem about that cottage, that time, those men . . .

​Idiom
 
My husband gutted our bathroom this week.  I removed myself to the back garden while he removed the debris of decades.  Later he showed me the shell.  The dark wood of the weatherboards, the patched hole where the chip heater used to be, the inevitable white ant damage.  I registered the stamped logo on one wall: Hardi Flex.  That’s the new stuff isn’t it?  I knew the other wall between house and lean-to was blue.  ‘Stabilised,’ my husband cracked hardy.  He was thirteen when he first handled sheets of asbestos.  My brothers’ sleepout was lined with it, a weekend’s project by dad and my uncle.  I live a couple of streets away from that uncle’s old house, a carbon copy of my own in this garden suburb where every wind bears filaments.  He was an old school Aussie, the sort who’d say ‘Bewdy’ without irony and ‘Your blood’s worth bottling’ and his was.  He was the first person I’d heard use the expression ‘cracking hardy’.  He was advising me not to when I’d come home after a fall. I had no idea what he meant.  But I learned.  I watched for months while he held back rage and terror at my father’s deathbed.  He never lost his bottle.  Dad was Olympic class at the job himself.  Their lungs were full of fibre, too.  My dad died.  My uncle died six weeks later.  And I’d give a lot to crack hardy, myself.
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    Author

    I am a writer, speaker and creative mentor.
    I publish poetry,  short stories and creative non-fiction. 
    I'm passionate about creativity, animals, people, social justice, the planet. 

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