Clocking What age? What place? What power? Marching acquisitions of time, placing markers through bone, Counting the points. Herald softly the falling rain, Shower well the tired minds, Sound halos in broken crowns, Open daily the arching colours. Happenstance happens periodically, made predictable by observation. I saw the dance of puppeteers and balked, thinking my time was yet to come, But here it is, the snaking shadow line. Play serenely the tune of memory, Follow whimsically the tide of heroes, Swim lazily into shallow pools, Consider nothing of the tugging pause. I find it, sitting heavily in the pit of sorrowful gazing, Too many tomorrows to find the day when beginning ended. I hunt it as a switch through buzzing burrows, always behind, sometimes beside. You saw it and left me with it solitary. Now I too am past weary of its presence. Finding you to undo the doing of your flavour has been my object. Here I leave you, find yourself. © Sherri-Lee Lavender, 6 May 2019.

Where went the Aged Dragons? Elementals hibernating in buried caverns –  treasures since plundered by infant imposters. Shapeshifting through time, have they self-deluded –  their illusions of mortality taking rigid form? I wish for them to awaken, soften my aloneness  on roads built by human souls fabricated without magic. I long for my own Self to be on the wing again  – Wind and Fire my companions, Water my shield, Earth my catapult. There is no fun to be found in the unsophisticated rituals of abandoned children. Disappointment is my drinking bowl and I have insufficient glamour to proselytize  myself into hope-filled expectations.     Photo by  Jonathan Kemper

– Looking for the Down Slope. I have been living under a constant belling knoll of fright for years. The clamour of accumulated strikes from life’s demands set my mind-body-soul to reverberating with the everlasting overtones of calamity and I cannot shut it off. Disenfranchised from society – distressed by its sounds, smells, movements, requirements, questions, muffled dialogue, booming music, rapid pace – I find no sense in it. Completely disinterested in its false promises of reward for ambition, having expended all the tokens (of will and energy) I was allotted to be able to ride its sideshows of entertainment, I sit apart, yet not free of it. I am exhausted. Except in rare fleeting instants gone like stray smoke in strong wind, I can no longer feel rest in my body or brain. So much bullshit and crazy expectation has been my fare that I just – can’t. I can’t ‘life’. I wonder at the point to being here when my point appears to be to wait out the time until I am not here. The propaganda of human activity, that it will give me something in return if I engage with it, stopped convincing me of its sincerity more than a decade ago. Photo by Girl with red hat I feel like a broken wind-up toy. Regardless of how many times I turn the key, my body automaton will take only a few tottering steps and stop. Even on a downhill slope I hardly pick up the pace. Is it because I live in Sydney, with more than 4 million people and a constant drone of everything to do with human metro and overclocking of life just to make a few dollars? Before that it was Brisbane with 2 million people. I abhor it, just to be clear, so many people packed into small areas speeding about doing things I don’t understand the purpose of or need for, just to be alive, so they can be there, doing things. Meanwhile, here in my little space, my own piece of mind and conscious awareness, I feel like nothing much at all. A 34 year old man with mental health problems was shot dead by police last Saturday night ( a week ago today as I write this). He ran out in the street with a knife, apparently having issues over a passing car. And he ended up dead, after a life of struggling to be humanized enough to fit in and work and carve out a safe place for himself just to exist in without feeling overwhelmed by everything. How crazy is it to be alive in this century when the invisible machine of this civilisation is winding everyone’s springs tighter and tighter, just to squeeze a little more productivity out of everything. Our civilization is so highly productive, yet starving, homeless, malnourished, highly agitated, addicted, despairing, unable to plan for a future. Can’t you feel the tipsy slur of insanity all around you? I live in relative security, more so than many others, yet I cannot turn off the alarms in my cells. I detest feeling broken, reading it as a kind of failure to be human. I want to enjoy the small moments that I have, but living stripped away the confidence which once enabled me to believe that it would not reach out and f*ck me up at any moment it so chose by seemingly arbitrary rules which change more frequently than a pop idol between sets. I really do feel empty and suspect that I am hiding out so that the mechanism of this civilization I was born into can never find me again. I have enough usable coils within me to get the house work done, just, yet spent years exercising and dealing with nerve stuff so I could do that. And I just don’t get it. What is the objective of being here when here is just all about working hard to be functional enough to get your toilet cleaned and shower scrubbed whilst hiding from the grocery store and hoping to all the stars in the heavens that you never have to get behind the wheel of a car and drive again? All of my ‘inner work’, my striving to understand the workings of reality, and my place in it, to survive interaction with the meta of physical life, has prised off my moulded shell, scraped out my gears and cogs, and made of me a hollow shape which breaks inertia only in the presence of greater gravity. Is this it then? To make of myself so broken a toy I can no longer be played with by the toddler of the universe, be it an algorithm of mechanics or an aloof deity? There likely is purpose – for the higher soul, the visiting consciousness from that part of myself not local and overwatching the whole tormented ordeal of human life; yet for the human me, the small, the tired, the pain-squeezed – the purpose seems irrelevant to being here, or staying sane and well for the sojourn. I do not live in depression, but I do live in an oppressed body, seemingly allergic to civilization, a lone white blood cell in a petri dish of infection, overwhelmed by the resident information of a growth out of control which replicates for the sake of survival so it can replicate some more, whilst devouring all resources available to it. To facilitate my nervous system’s ability to maintain functionality, I keep downsizing my expectation of self. We (my body and I) do not seem able to handle much at all since more than a decade ago. I stick to the simple – handcrafts involving yarn. Knitting speaks to me of human ingenuity and is holistically satisfying. With it I can sense centuries of human genius, feel the hum of an inherited genetic memory, touch the loom on which human fates twine the cloth of creative potential. I can smell chimney smoke and feel the bite of iced breezes over misty fields, hear laughing melodies, admire the many long hours of experiment which turned thread into lace. Photo by Terri Bleeker Through this timeless art I can enter a type of communion with centuries of women, men and children spinning and weaving to be warm and hopefully fed through barter and sale of their wares. It reminds me that the difficulty I feel at being alive is a shared experience across millennia of human existence. Harsh sensations which rattle my body and mind are not an aberrant dysfunction, but an average response to the strange reality of being a creature persistently forced to live outside of a supporting habitat, unclothed by hair or fur, unfed except by long labour, unable to survive if left exposed to wild elements. Entirely unsuited to a symbiotic life on Earth yet pretending to be natural to the environment – we are eternal comedians. Previously published on Substack  - Aug 04, 2024.

This is a short fiction I wrote more than 20 years ago. I was labouring through a writing course (which I never finished – hmm I see a life pattern), and ‘Old Tom’ was an assignment. I would so love to write a novel. I keep putting it out there, but nothing emerges from the depths of my expansive inner landscape which begs to be written and told. It may yet arrive. For now, I refresh this old story and enjoy the moments it creates for me. Whilst searching for document files of old writing I realised that somewhere in the transferring of data to newer, larger hard-drives, I have misplaced things. Perhaps they didn’t make it from that old corrupted drive before it died completely. I also like to think that I am organised with where I put my writing, but in practice it appears to be spread across drives, devices, and online storage in a way I would never have knowingly agreed to – surely. The largest piece I ever wrote is gone. I am not upset, more resigned to the nature of living which sees things born of intense labour disappear when you aren’t looking.      “Take a look at that will you, Tom. Going out dressed like Sunday dinner. Should be a law against it.” Lucy let the lace curtain fall back before anyone spotted her.      Not that they would, she thought sourly. All too wrapped up in their own busy lives to notice one old woman.      “Always coming in and going out, doors banging, children yellin’ and screamin’. Not right, is it Tom?”     With a final ‘harrumph’, Lucy moved from the spotless window, pushing her neighbours’ goings on firmly out of mind. She shuffled into the kitchen to get dinner on. Tom liked his dinner on the table by six o’clock, so he could catch the 6:30 news. Lamb chops and three veg, one white, one yellow, one green, and a little bit of mint sauce. Tom liked mint sauce.     Dinner was quiet. Tom never was one to talk much during meals. Said it was bad for the digestion. “I’ve had a hard day, Luce. Not much in the mood for chatter. A man’s entitled to a little peace and quiet in his own home.”     The television went on at 6:30pm precisely. Tom set every clock in the house according to the man on the phone every Sunday evening. Lucy sighed, there were dishes to do and the shopping list to finish for the morning.     “It’s the first of the month, we’ll be needing paper towel and toothpaste won’t we dear?”     The house remained silent. Not that Lucy expected a response, but it would have been nice.     The neighbours at 24 Maple Street provided a constant source of distraction to Lucy and her routine suffered. On Saturday, so incensed was she by raucous squeals and head splitting screams from a dozen ten or eleven year olds tearing around 24’s backyard all morning, that she clean forgot to rotate the drapes. It was Tom’s opinion that the sun blazed hotter on the eastern side of the house, he insisted that they rotate the living and dining room curtains every two months “so that they bleached even” he said. First time she had forgotten in 23 years, since Tom had first taken an interest in such things, not long after his retirement.     Lying awake late into the night, Lucy tossed and turned, unable to stop fretting. Finally, she slipped quietly out of bed and spent the next hour and a half teetering shakily atop their three-step ladder. Tom never helped. “Not my job,” he had once said.     She slept late next morning, starting awake in a panic at 8 o’clock to have breakfast ready at half past. Seven-thirty breakfast Monday to Friday, eight-thirty on weekends. Sinking heavily into her chair, she eyed her scrambled egg wearily. Lucy had never much cared for scrambled egg, she preferred poached, and she disliked orange marmalade, that was Tom’s favourite not hers. Pushing the plate aside, she sipped at her tea and listened to the silence.     Ever present, deafening, the stillness pressed in around her, a thick woolly blanket, suffocating. She caught herself listening for the trill of childish laughter that often floated through from Number 24. Three children they had. The eldest one, a boy, went to the primary school on Gatton Street, she knew from the uniform. The other two were girls, a toddler with a shock of curly red hair, and the six year old. Lucy searched for a name, Heather - Heather with the large dark blue eyes and soft brown curls. Lucy knew Heather’s name because the child had told it to her herself, and she remembered her eyes were the colour of rain-burdened storm clouds, because they had looked up at her large and moist with tears the day she had come to Lucy’s front door. She had sobbed out an apology for tossing the ball that had gutted Lucy’s nodding violet. The girl’s mother insisted that she make amends.     Lucy found the replacement violet by the back steps where she had deposited it, in a sorry state.     “A bit of water is what you need,” she told the plant firmly. “A little bit of TLC wouldn’t hurt either.”      We could all use a bit of that,  she thought glumly.     She was just scrubbing the soil from her fingernails, admiring the violet in its new pot, when the jingle of her door bell made her jump. Visitors? Who would be calling, and on a Sunday? She froze, waiting for another buzz, surely she had misheard.     The bell shrilled again, joined by a frantic pounding.     “Hello?” a boy’s voice called.  “Mrs Brittol?  Hello!  Anyone home?” Thump, thump, thump.     Scowling, Lucy hurried stiffly to answer. Such rude pounding! Snatching back the lace at her front window she recognised the boy from No. 24, hopping about on her front landing. She ought to ignore him, she wasn’t in the habit of opening her front door to impatient, loud youths. But something in his face sent her fingers to the ring of keys beside the door.     Relief relaxed his face momentarily when she drew back the door enough to glare at him. “What is it?” she demanded.     “Please, it’s Mum. I need an ambulance. She fell. She won’t wake up.”     “Ay? What? Then why haven’t you rung for one?”     “We don’t have the phone on.”     Several tense seconds ticked by. Lucy stared hard at the boy, fingered the cool metal of the keys. Tom didn’t hold with dramatics, wasn’t keen on her getting herself all in a state over things. She had weak nerves, he said, went all to pieces in a crisis. Tom was always right, he said so. He would hit the roof.     “Right,” Lucy said firmly, pushing back the door. “In you go, phone’s on the hall stand,” she indicated with a shake of her head. “Call triple zero and get them here quick like. I’ll go see what’s happened.”     She was out the door and down the three steps to the pavement with more speed and vigor than she had mustered in over a decade. With the crochet rug from her lounge over one arm, Lucy marched down the path of No. 24 and straight through the front door. The small voice in the back of her head that had started to keep her company in recent years screeched with shock and dismay. What would old Tom say!  What indeed .     A little over one breathless hour later, Lucy stood in her kitchen, arranging cups and fresh baked honey-snap biscuits, the ones Tom liked, on a polished wood tray. Placing the pansy-painted tray on the kitchen table, she tried a small smile for the three dishevelled children wriggling and fidgeting on her teak chairs.     “Dad doesn’t live here now,” Heather offered matter-of-factly, pulling a honey-snap slowly toward her with a pointer finger Lucy felt was a little too thin for a six year old. When Heather broke the biscuit into uneven halves, Lucy watched the fragments fall silently onto her fresh-pressed tablecloth. The girl passed a soon-to-be-sticky portion to her sister's eager hands. “He said his co-worker understood him better than Mum, so he lives with her instead.”     Lucy snorted. Old Tom would never do such a thing. Old Tom would never do a lot of things. Early afternoon light danced with leaf shadow through the tall wide window that Tom hated for its insulation faults. This was her favourite spot in the house. With a deep breath and tired but resolute exhale, Lucy limped to the bureau sat against the wall of her small kitchen. She moved the Bohemia crystal vase of fat chrysanthemums from its place beside a grey marble urn and positioned it carefully in front.     She liked crinkly seersucker tablecloths and cozy piles of fruit, soft jam drop biscuits - and crumbs, soggy crumbs falling from the mouth of a giggling toddler sitting on her brother's lap. Photo by Maurice DT

Conversation to the online Mind - I am here. That is the crux of it, the sum total of what I can say about any day – ‘I am here’. What else can I possibly add to the bloom of consciousness hustling upon this misshapen sphere of minerals, metals and sediment? It is not that I have not tried. I see, and contemplate, what others write and say, attempt to share a thought with them, yet drop back to the stillness of inertia – knowing that outlays of word or voice bring only microscopic movements in others towards my own sphere of coalesced consciousness. In layman’s terms, I am made aware through experience that you desire to know what you have to think and say more than you wish to engage with my output. You are invested in your thoughts, your perceptions, your opinions; mainly interested in mine when they cause a swelling wave of rippling effervescence in yours. I do not have the capacity to excite you, so you will not move towards me nor give me words to entice me to provide you with more stimulus, because you cannot figure out how to use what I have. After years of this game I stopped manufacturing the things you need; things I learned of through observation of your state, your emotions, your statements of preference, your descriptions of yourself and your beliefs. I grew increasingly unwieldy, uninteresting, uncaptivating; not nurturing of the programs and viruses running your thought processes. With me you find no nutrition to fuel that insatiable tax levied by your heart’s passion or mind’s imagination – the machines which drive you to chose a pathway of experience and call it your life. Equally, I am not entranced by your repeating episodes. I have not the energy to spare to maintain the substance of your stories and sub-plots which continue with minimal variance to their repetitions. If Life wishes for me to follow along, the time is well past for it to provide a different book for me to read. Changing conditions and circumstance of the physical way in which my life plays out is not appearing as an option in the chapter list. My daily grind focuses on managing, investigating and altering the mental and emotional conditions that I have available on my interior landscape. Most days I feel ‘trapped’ inside a screen of repeating scenery, not even given variance by new characters. Ahhh, sigh, what I am working so hard here to tell myself? What is it that I need to know? How am I continuing to miss the communication from my life to myself experiencing the life? I will keep splashing words onto off-white digital pages until the next illuminating moment arrives. Published on: The Nothing in Between Date: 18/01/2025 Feature photo by Brad Bang

Unbleached veil of autumn sunlight Muslin pinafore of faded pansies, Superior robes to my own drab garments Is your raiment of late blooming chrysanthemums. Published on: Threads @Between.speak, The Nothing in Between Date: 08/05/2024, 17/01/2025 Photo by Daria Glakteeva

Hope How far out of reach are you? The tantalizing breath of a promised sojourn in sheltered valleys With peony-scented laughter in the unhurried gaze of playing children, Do you trick me to imagine or weave to blind me with a gauze of illusion? Are you the ass’s carrot or the bullocks whip? Will I catch up to the vision glimpsed in your soothsayer’s glass Or do I indefinitely stumble behind in the inhalations of this dusty Djinn bottle, an indentured spirit? You arrive so naturally, imperturbable and unwavering But I have lost the enchantment of your encouragements, Watching you as the crone watches crows in fields swept by a carousel of seasons. Will you bring corvid magic or be the stone-eyed messenger of lofty fae who believe the world a dance of enjoyment? Your fiddle has long since failed to move my feet, Rather would I laugh at your graceful swirls in the mists of yet-arriving moments And pretend we have an appointment which you yearn to keep. Published on: Threads @between.speak, The Nothing in Between Date: 11/05/2024, 13/05/2024 Image by Erik-Jan Leusink

I have sung an ode to Bacchus, Pressed the first and second fruits into warm wine, Poured out libations to a master of Joy, Yet not acquired a taste for this sweet and heady liquid, So it trickles on to other tongues which know the skill of lingering on high notes. Fermentation to unfold inside kept blossoms, Unfruited and holding seed as potential, Has become my ageing cultivation. Bacchus watches me, eyes a full bouquet of spiced meaning. Urging me to keep the best bottling to myself he winks and raises his goblet to my endeavours. ------- Published on: Threads @between.speak , The Nothing in Between , Here for the Journey Date: 03/04/2024, 12/05/2024, 09/07/2024 Feature Photo by Kevin Andre

Dear Melancholy, I forgot you are a shared experience, A stately dance through unkempt woods, With heavy shade and intoxicating perfumes from hidden blooms. I forgot your ardent suitors, Who saw your worth in golden compass arcs and unaffected nightingales, Their longings heard by fae glades of mesmerizing sunlight through wind-rushed leaves. I forgot your patient temperament, An erstwhile companion to hand-pushed plough and chimney smoke on mauve-greyed skies, When distant children sang songs in flower garland’d circles and fell in faux decease. I forgot the honeyed succour of your welcoming embrace, Which carried me in crisis tempests like ocean currents sweep debris to foreign islands, So I shall lay a while on the gentle crests and valleys of your familiar melody. Published on: Instagram/Threads @between.speak , The Nothing in Between , Here for the Journey , Date: 22/04/2024, 12/05/2024, 11/07/2024 Image by Johannes Plenio

You thought that knot of tattered minds would care for you, That it might pay to trample paths of penitence to the resident god, And lay your attention in halls of pretended heavens. Yet you remain invisible, not even a sound which irritates their ears, And they make signs you deem unintelligible. Why do you fight the silence when it gives you faux fur to pass through these beastly glades of angelic predators? Your home is not here. You do not have to belong. You do not have to love these nightshades, nor to have the flavour of them on your lips. They will pass into the soil, the essence of them pulled into other planes, Where they make more stories for minds to feast on. So glide quietly. Settle into unpopulated valleys and watch the passing seasons from a distance. You have learned your lessons and no dominion can make you take on another’s. Published on: Instagram @between.speak , The Nothing in Between Date: 20/04/2024, 11/05/2024

I am struck by how I have appeared to abandon the Time Woven blog. After clicking through a fact finding mission to see what I had published and where, it became obvious that I have published anywhere but here. The small storage size available for this website and how any photo added to a blog post takes a bite out of that palm-sized allotment played a significant roll in my letting the blog lay fallow; and I think that ideas I held about what this website is for also contributed. That and the perceived lack of traffic. Wix blogs do not get roaming reader traffic, it's more a thing linked to from other social media for those already interested or curious in content elsewhere. By comparison, Wordpress has a community reachable by tags, so wanderers, who frequent the Wordpress Reader, happening by are that much more likely. I don't write for others, but I also do. When I am self-contained and hiding away from the world - I don't; when I am influenced by the drive given to humanity to want to be seen - I do. As passing years accumulate, I find my mind increasingly filled with Nothing. Not Nothing as in empty, more like as in having No-thing I could be committed to have an opinion on or engage overly much with. I suspect that this stems from an unspoken desire, a quiet compulsion, to have sparse ties with the human social complex. My connection with those NHI (non-human intelligences) has convinced me that the fewer anchors there are to the human social complex, the better - for those engaged in the work of actively receiving and bussing data from those Other planes and frequencies. Human society is a heavy anchor of broken ideas. In terms of the Bigger Picture for consciousness in this region, I do not know the details. I think we are on a long road of disentangling damaged and low functioning conscious intelligence from a closed system which became a prison of sorts, especially at its lower levels. It was a slow spiralling well pulling all motes of passing individualised consciousness into its gravity. I follow the information on UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) whenever a video or article catches my eye. In general, though, I don’t outlay much energy to pursue or research anything. Conservation of energy to keep powering myself through this region of the galaxy seems a more productive choice. My Connections/People express gladness at the conglomerate progress and I take that as enough, knitting socks and slowly reading through a book of someone else’s observations of the activity and behaviour of consciousness and its possible purposes, or poetry. I may read only a page a day, sometimes a few words, most days nothing, and spend much longer pondering what the person is actually saying. I do not know what mechanism of my mind switched on to make it so much more elaborate a process to get a visual understanding of what people are saying. The sensation is of receiving all information from books like a bucket of letters I have to pass through a sorting sieve and rearrange so my mind can detect the conceptual devices being expressed. Otherwise they are isolated words of no particular pathway taking a confusing route to the main bundle of ideas being described. I could say that I have lost access to the bank of shared precepts which humans, of the cultures to which I have access, use to communicate ideas to each other. Maybe I never had that access, hence the lifelong feeling of not being connected to the human experience. Always it feels as though there is a secret to the act of living as human which is kept behind bars and out of reach. I acknowledge that living is all much simpler than that and the complications are the effects of propaganda pushing individuals to move, to dream, to produce, to do, to comply, to rebel; to expend energy like batteries; to fulfill stories. How much of our thinking is genuinely our own. I recognize how much I repeat a theme when I write. Making my observations and thoughts make sense to myself is the likely reason. And those thoughts have not changed much at all in the past 5 years, which flew by like birds in high winds. I don't know what to do with life. I am hiding quietly, keeping Life company like an aging Aunt who comes to knit and drink tea whilst Life complains. What now and what next? Well I have a week of posts lined up for Time Woven, doing some catch-up. After that is close to another week's worth of posts to schedule. And then I'll see. I may be teasing out some poetry. I do feel less burdened by being here breathing when I publish words. Writing must be a valve release for me. Take care all, hope your days have kindness in them, Sherri-Lee Photo by Natalya Letunova

Spectre I am sitting in a bizarre vigil beneath sun-struck skies You do not want me here but I came anyway I watch your melancholy flow like heavy smoke across a table You have no words, I have plenty But you hear none, neither do you see them Nor feel We are together yet apart You look outward, I look at you I fascinate upon your pain as you scrape scabs from your scars You believe you are a mountain of woes I remember you will mould planets from dust This watching of your funerary precession is lonely And if I could I would return to the void and to sleep But I am your spectre, tied to your travail We have no forward path but the one you cannot see And I am here to take you on a journey. Published on: Instagram @Between.speak , The Nothing in Between Date: 20/04/2024,11/05/2024