TONTS. - Rediscovering Ourselves with Holly Ringland Part Two

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Part Two of this beautiful conversation with author, storyteller and presenter Holly Ringland.For more from Holly you can find her here https://hollyringland.com/For more from Claire you can find her here https://www.clairetonti.com/Show credits:Editing – RAW Collings, Claire TontiMusic – Avocado Junkie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just before we start the episode, I wanted you to know that during this conversation, we do touch on some themes of trauma and male-based violence. If this brings anything up for you at all, please speak to someone you trust or contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or also 1 800 RESPECT, which is a 24-hour counselling service. Okay, on with the show. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging,

acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. Hello, this is Tantz, a podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Taunty, and I'm really glad you're here. Each week, I speak to writers, activists, experts, thinkers, and deeply feeling humans about their stories. And my goodness, is Holly Ringland a deeply feeling human? Now, I have to say, this is the second half of a really incredibly beautiful conversation. If you haven't listened to the first part, please don't keep listening. I mean, obviously, I want you to listen to it, but first go back and listen to the first half

that I shared last week back in your feed. It's really important because I think it then feeds into this content today and what Holly shares next. She is an incredibly beautiful writer. And just to remind you, both her books, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding are beautiful, sweeping novels. And I completely recommend that you go and check them out. Just to remind you, she's the author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and her new book that's out now, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, which is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin

and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy. Go and grab a copy of it as soon as you can. The cover art alone is just absolutely stunning. All right, onwards. Here she is for the second half of what is, I think, a really gift of a conversation, Holly Ringland. Let's talk about tattoos, right? Because that was one of the things I found when I've looked at your Instagram and I watched this video of you talking about when you'd published The Lost Flowers of Alice's Heart and it was wildly successful for those that haven't read it and it's now a TV series with Sigourney Weaver.

Oh, my God. Just. Yeah, 12-hour show on its own, that one. Oh, my God. You and me. Exactly. Oh, my God. You and me. Exactly. Oh, my God. I love Sigourney Weaver.

I love it. Me too. But let me ask you about tattoos and what that meant to you to get that first tattoo at, was it 34? Yes. Hang on, let me think. I was 30, I was 35. I got it.

It somehow felt, you know, maybe it's just loving round numbers, but it somehow felt really pertinent that I got it before I turned 36. There was something about 35, but it was less than the age and the actual number. It was more that I had been signed by my literary agency, Zeitgeist. So what that means is they had read Lost Flowers and said, we love it, we would like to represent you. And then what that means for anybody listening who don't know is that that means that then they go on and they handle all of the communication involved in submitting my novel to publishers. They're kind of the liaison person between that process and like little me sitting at my laptop or my refreshing my emails on my phone, like every

two seconds. And so we hadn't submitted The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart as a manuscript to publishers in Australia yet. It was June, 2016. So it was just before I turned 35. But I had finished the redrafted, re-edited version of The Cow Poop, which now felt like a shiny, beautiful, glistening cake, you know? And it, I mean, little did I know how many rounds of edits it was yet going to go through in the publication process. But for the time being, insofar as I had been able to do on my own with the help of my agents, we had a story that lived on paper about Alice Hart and me. My whole life is woven through that book, of course.

It's the fiction of Alice Hart's story is my entire emotional truth of everything that had been choking me up to here. And I had no idea if a publisher would like it. I had no idea whether or not it would be published or would it be something that my agents would send out and the responses would be we you know uh no or we love this but it's not market ready like it's this very confusing uh time where you've written something but you're not sure if it's something that will be published the thing that awestruck me though was that it was written. It was the power of the fact that at 35, 32 years later, I could remember that little three-year-old without a pit opening in my stomach and thinking writing is going to be the song I die with still

inside of me and I will never have sung it. And at 35, it didn't matter to me. Like I remember saying to somebody, a friend, I really, I've done the thing I thought I wasn't smart enough or good enough or capable enough to do. I've answered the call of baby Holly at three. I've done it. It exists on paper. And I, it feels so profound. It feels like I need some sort of ceremony to like, I, it feels like I need a wedding or something or a, or a, or something as, as cathartic as a funeral. Like I need a rite of passage for this experience because one-on-one with myself, I genuinely didn't think it would ever exist. I was terrified that life would pass me by and it would never exist. And I've said this a few times on Esther Wilding book tour, Claire, when I've been talking

about tattoos tattoos like just framing for everyone again I grew up on the Gold Coast like I went through night clubbing in the 90s when I was like 18 and the early 2000s I I made it to 35 clean skinned without the lower back dolphin tattoo or the butterfly hip tattoo at some 3am drunken night with a kebab in my hand in surface paradise like i made it without that happening to me and that's not to cast any judgment on anybody who has those tattoos tattoos are personal empowerment but but it felt astonishing to me that that that had never happened, particularly how much I've loved butterflies all my life.

But I think the deepest thing was that I never, nothing ever felt meaningful enough for me to mark my skin with. There was no connection where I thought, oh, yeah, because I'm such a meaning-driven person. Like the joke in our household is that when family or friends come to have a cuppa, like my, one of my cousins always makes me laugh because she'll help herself to make a cuppa in the kitchen, but she'll open the cupboard with the teacups and be like, Oh honey, I can't go through this. Tell me which cup has the least meaning

because I can't handle the pressure of what happens if I drink from the cup that I, and I'll smash it. And yet you've had it since you were six and you got it the day that like this happened. She's like, just give me the bland cup, you know, like the meaningfulness, everything had meaning. Yeah. Yeah. So 35, I've written the book and I, it was, it was really like waking up one morning, like going to bed one night, tattoos were on my mind, waking up one morning and it was like a fire of yearning in my skin. It was like, I want a tattoo. I want Alice Hart on my body. And I think in reflection, I think there was a lot going on. feels like it's possible I mean the subconscious what a wild place but it feels like it's possible that through the act of writing that story

and reflecting on what I needed to look at in my own life to write it and how much that story lived so physically in my body and how much my body has experienced and held for me, both in surviving violence and also carrying the emotions and the stresses and how harmful that level of stress is on any physical body. I think there was something huge going on in my subconscious about the body, my body, my skin, and my sense of embodiment. You know, there is such a common experience for people who have experienced any kind of physical, sexual, psychological violence where dissociation happens because your brain is trying to keep you safe from what it can't process. And for me, and I've read and talked to many others, it feels like your brain leaves your body. So you're outside of

your body and can spend so much time there, so much time feeling disconnected from your physical self. So upon reflection, this fire in my skin for a tattoo, I think it was all of these things coming full circle for me, coming to a desire and a place where I thought I want this story on my skin. I want to wear Alice and myself on my skin on the outside. And then the deeper level to that was I want to self-decorate. I want to put life and beauty onto my skin that I wear as a joyous choice of something I do with my body because it belongs to me. And this is not a scar of something that somebody else has inflicted upon me through corrosive, harmful power dynamics. So it very much was about my choice the choice to mark myself from joy and connection with self and embodiment rather than the gaze of anybody looking at me and seeing

the tattoo so I went and got my first tattoo on all my tattoos are only on my right arm so far, so far. And I'm right-handed, so that's my righting hand. And my first tattoo is on the inside of my forearm. And it goes from – who's Holly Ringland, everyone? Well, on her first tattoo, she went and got a tattoo from her wrist to her elbow that took nine hours oh my god that is so bold i was assuming it was like a moth or a butterfly just a nice small you know on the wrist maybe just like delicate my mom was like there she is

school of hard knocks there's my girl and it was the most extraordinary thing about getting it done was it felt like it felt like the story of the tattoo was being revealed rather than being put into my skin and the profundity of that experience of marking my own body through joy and beauty and self-connection was so intense and that was impacted by then to my disbelief readers reaching out to me and sending me photos of their tattoos that they got of flowers or verses from The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. And all of that combined, I just thought, I have to write about this.

So that was one of the early things that I knew about Esther Wilding's stories were that Esther's world and the women in her world and her stories would very much involve tattoos, women's tattoos, as forms of non-verbal storytelling and as sacred acts and rituals to honour, you know, the self, the body. It's so beautiful. I'll just read out the description of the novel for those who haven't read it yet. On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.

The last time Esther Wilding's beloved older sister, Aura, was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura's disappearance, Esther's family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister's disappearance, Esther's family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister's death, Esther reluctantly travels from La Truita, Tasmania, to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind. Seven fairy tales about selkies, swans, and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body. The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart

on your skin, I'm going to cry, and the ways life can transform you when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy. And I couldn't write anything better than what was already there on your side. Oh, my God, Claire, can you just read out everything about anything that anyone's ever written? Like, oh, my God. I don't want to come to the light out this for both of those stories but um I have to say as well

that so much of this resonates so deeply because there's a truth in your storytelling about the experience that I think is particularly unique to women often too. I just, and I know non-binary people as well may feel this too, but I just felt like you made real things that I had been hiding in my head as too woo-woo or too out there. Does that make any sense to you? It makes total sense. Yeah. It makes total sense.

It's all the messaging around the feminine, isn't it? It's that anything feminine, mythologies around the feminine, powers of the feminine, which is not necessarily gendered either, right? Like all of it is the ways that we express that energy, our feminine energy, regardless of gender. You know, the patriarchal response, the toxic masculinity response, is that it's woo-woo and too sensitive and too emotional when the exact opposite is true. It is the power of our lives. It's how we connect with each other and we connect with ourselves. And it's how we, I think, can find the resources and the resilience inside of ourselves to face the things that are

too hard to face like shame like grief like love the i think feminine energy is encoded with power because it enables softness and tenderness and those are how we reach out to ourselves and each other so even though when we meet Esther she is a red hot mess and she's grieving and constantly making the same bad decisions that are constantly blowing up her life because at least bad decisions are familiar rather than running the risk of feeling vulnerability, which is terrifying and uncomfortable. Side note, deeply autobiographical from my 20s, Claire. Like I feel like I need to do Esther the service of saying, yes,

Holly Ringland was also a red hot mess in her 20s. It's all right, Esther, you're not alone. I feel like so many of us were, right, and that time of our lives is so full of that, the mess and the heartbreak, all of it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Particularly because I think that that time in life is where we are definitely no longer children. But if we haven't gone through

some sort of initiation or rite of passage to meet ourselves, to learn or gain language or ways to frame or speak or express what's inside of us, we don't know who we are. And we don't know how to find who we are either. And I was, yeah, I was really drawn to that. Again, I didn't love uh writing from that place like the first in the first draft of Esther Wilding my amazing you know inimitable publisher Catherine Milne who just has story I swear to god it makes up if someone read Catherine's DNA it would be like oh here's the storytelling you know chemical um she read the first draft with me and you know when i wrote it i was thinking because the in in the opening scenes and the opening few chapters of the novel esther is as you read out so beautifully in the blurb she um it's a year after her beloved

older sister aura has disappeared last seen walking towards the sea. And we meet Esther when she's coming home from the west coast of La Truita, Tasmania, where she has sort of self-exiled and is, you know, working in hospitality there. And she's coming home to the east coast because her parents are holding a memorial finally for Aura's life. Esther doesn't want to be coming home, but she is because she would do anything for her older sister. And, you know, part of that messiness when I wrote it the first time around is I kind of, I didn't gloss over it, but I think that so much of my heart was bleeding

for Esther and also not wanting to actually deeply access how awful the constant bad choices cycle was from my own 20s that I kind of like just dipped in and out of the things that Esther was going through and Catherine read the first draft and she was like we talked about you know a lot of the rest of the novel and there was a lot of squawking and honking and it was amazing. But with the beginning, Catherine was like, you need to put her through pain. And I was like, what's wrong with you? I was like, what's wrong with you? She's gone through enough.

Catherine has this ability to like stare you out with this twinkle of knowing in her eye. And she was like, you need to show us, you need to show us what she's going through. You need to show us what, how the bad decisions are showing up in her life and what they mean to her. And I'm like, no, I don't. Like she just, and then, then she said to me, do you remember what it was like to be 27? And I was like what's

wrong with you and and and so it was all of these things that we're talking about coming up against each other the feminine the power of the feminine rejecting it being a mess not knowing or having any scaffolding for how to safely feel or to communicate or to even be soft with and like yourself, to even know that you don't abandon yourself no matter what kind of mess you are, that abandoning yourself doesn't make the mess less messy. It's actually the detonator. Self-abandonment is the bomb that goes off, that will manifest in every sort of part of your life. What a biographical. Oh, gosh.

And that opening a vein and being like, right, I'm just going to bleed all over the page and having to dredge up all of that pain, mate, that must have been a huge thing to navigate. What did you do in your life to kind of combat that while you're writing? What helps when you're having to access such incredibly painful parts of your memory? It's, you know, what really. You know what really helps? Mentally what really helps is that the framing it and using it in fiction, using it to write fiction, it's tapping into the age-old wisdom in the well of turn pain into beauty or the wound is the way, you know, it's the thing

that really helped mentally was being able to take the memory experience and the physical memory reflections. Like when we remember things so often, we feel it in our bodies and it you know we have physical sensations in response to the memories and something that that really helped me meet remembering what because even if I'm not even if I'm not at all writing like when I joke about it being autobiographical what I'm saying is that it is an emotional truth that's deeply uncomfortable to remember. Because even though Esther Wilding's story is not played out and it is not what happened to me and it's not my story from my 20s, the emotional experience of everything like self-sabotage, rejection, low self-esteem, no self-compassion, fear of expressing emotion, fear of vulnerability, walking on eggshells in any social circle, not having any boundaries

with, you know, anyone that you fancy, constantly choosing to be with the same kind of person over and over again and wondering why it hurts so much. All of those things are things that I have experienced. And so writing the emotional truth of that requires deep memory access and remembering. but the joy that I get because at the heart of everything that we're talking about with writing is that when I sit down to write, the place I start from is a conversation with myself to say, you love this. You have loved this. You have loved story since you can remember remembering. Write because you love it and write what you love. So when I come from that place of remembering why I'm doing this thing of going back into parts of my own lived experience to draw out pain, to turn it into beauty, to access emotional truths so that Esther lives

on the page. Something that really, really helps is the joy of remembering that I'm doing it to make story. And that becomes the fuel that feeds me so that even when the emotional truth and the memory access is happening, it's contextualised. It has meaning and purpose. It's sort of this safe way to reflect rather than to relive. And I didn't do a great job of that with Lost Flowers. That's definitely a lesson that writing Lost Flowers has taught me and taught me with Esther. And the other things that I do are like a lot of slow time outside in nature, going on a really slow hike where I notice things like slow looking,

taking things in so that my central nervous system will calm down and talking about all of the hornet's nest of the story with Sam we'd go on long walks and I would talk about Esther until he came to know her so well and her life so well that I had this I had this person this beautiful brain outside of my own brain that I had a shorthand with to talk about the story with. So it was like talking about, well, she was very real, talking about a real person. And then running. Running, I'm not by any means an athlete, but I'm a runner.

And regularly running moves stuff through my brain and body and it moves story as well. So it was those sort of things and really basic stuff like trying to get enough sleep, not drinking too much, not eating shit and watching fluffy stuff before bed. Yes, none of these murder shows. My God, that was a profound thing for me. I've, listening to you talk, it's huge. I

had COVID in January and since then have kind of suffered from long COVID, I think. I also had a baby during the lockdowns. Oh, thank you. And just a lot of things in my life. I've got two kids and we run a company together and I have been running so much, think from the idea that I could be an artist from probably my whole life and since I was probably three I've sung like I came out singing I've got a hugely loud voice I've always loved to sing before I could talk I was singing and I sing around like just commute that's how I communicate and over time through things that had happened in my life and then through birth trauma and a lot of things you know that happened to me I kind of squashed that

further and further and further down in the running of the business of life and work and then the trauma of that I experienced of motherhood and becoming a mother and squashed it so far down that in the end, physically, I was really unwell. And then I had COVID and that stripped me of everything because I had such deep fatigue that I couldn't get out of bed. And that was sort of after January and I would just have bouts where I was so low. And from there in that place I started singing again. I remember I was sitting in my bedroom and I've always written poetry in my books and always been writing songs in my head. I thought everyone when they got drunk hid in the toilet

and played songs on their iPhone. I really wish you and I were in the toilet stall next to each other. I'm typing out like a story idea at 3 o'clock in the morning at Shooters in Service Paradise and you're typing out like a song in the toilet stall. Perfect, perfect. I just always thought everyone did that and everyone had this burning desire to sing wherever they could, however they could.

And I did classical training while I was studying teaching because that's what my family wanted and that's who I thought I should be. And I really didn't enjoy it. It didn't sit in my heart and my head. And even when I was giving birth, quite ironically, the midwife, one of the trauma things was that this sound came out of me as I was in labour and she told me, stop that, be quiet, that's not helpful, you need to immediately stop. And I was 29 and young and didn't know.

So I did and then I ended up in all kinds of trouble and a lot of trauma and it was for lots of reasons. But it was almost like this real you don't have a voice. Don't say things. Don't express how you feel. Don't let that out. And anyway, when I finally stopped, this song came out of me called This Mother Thing and oh, I'm going to cry. But I

sung it to this beautiful group of women called Kindred Women. We have women's circles once a month. My friend Erin runs them and they're so grounded. And I was so terrified because I hadn't sung for so long in front of anyone. And I sung it and I could, I felt like a change in the room does that make sense and of course and because it's it's a song about how we want them to stay with us but I also want them to go because I want to create and being a mother has meant I haven't just got the space for it yeah you know and it's this constant struggle of also I'm raising kids to eventually leave me, which is just so tricky. And I think part of the reason I'm singing and writing now is also because my daughter, I see her, myself in her,

and she's just a ray of sunshine and got this hugely loud voice and sings Let It Go to like anyone who will listen. You know, you just can't stop. And she's like a bubble of joy. And I can tell I was raised in a beautiful home but a very Catholic home, a lot of shame and guilt, a lot of quiet around a lot of quiet people. And so I was taught as a three-year-old that that was bad, that it was bad that I was allowed, that I can sing but only in strict, conformed kind of perfect ways

and that's not me. And so I then ended up, I've written this album of music that kind of almost fell out of me because it was like there was someone waiting for me and when I got quiet, they turned around and were like, I've been here the whole time. What have you been doing? I'm 37, you know. Mate, I've been here the whole time.

Why have you ignored me? Drumming my fingers on the tabletop. Yeah, exactly. When I got drunk or something, it would come out a bit more and it would be like, I'm here. But you have to, like you were saying, you have to quiet all of that. And so, yeah, I have this music now that's kind of, I've created this thing and I'm in that space where I don't, I don't know if anyone will love it or not love it or where it will go, whether it

will just reach a few people. And I kind of at the, at this point don't care because I'm so in awe that it exists. Yes. You know? And when you said your three-year-old self, when I was driving home after I'd laid down the last lyric, like the last vocal track, this visceral feeling of this three-year-old saying, I did it, just kind of exploded out of me and I was sobbing, driving down like the Eastern Freeway, just like crying and crying because I could feel myself it's the only sensible response

yeah just sobbing down the eastern freeway with that absolute it's the full circle release yeah and self-actualization happening all at once yeah yeah and I yes Holly will you will you sing for me oh no like now yeah oh god that's a huge you can edit this out oh yeah you can edit this out but if you felt like you wanted to leave it in and I'm leaving lots of space on either side of everything I'm saying so you can edit it out if you want to. Yeah. But if you feel like you could or want or if you feel, not could, if you feel like you want to, do you think you could sing something for me and everyone?

Yeah, I could. I'll give it a go. I could sing this mother thing but I feel like maybe yeah I could sing a song I've written called self yeah and don't and I mean sing a sing a verse sing a I'll just sing a fragment of it and see what you think I haven't warmed up reading so anyway there we go three-year-old Claire it'll be fine there's There's the, I know, we're going to put all the disclaimers aside and now, everybody, three-year-old Claire. Yeah.

Here she is. Hi. Woman at the start, broken open now, thinking that she'll fail. You can hold your own damn self. Your self can still prevail. I remember being told it won't hurt. Milk will come. Push through that pain. But I'm bleeding, just try harder, you should be better at it all.

Yeah, take, take all the shame. Woman on the edge of something. Thinking that she'll fail. You can hold your own damn self. Your self can still prevail. Through the war. through the wood there's a lot that can be taken watch yourself carefully or you might find the kernel of you stolen. You are the wolf red hooded one. There's so much more to be done.

Protect your cake from the mean one. They'll take them all for fun. And leave you alone and undone you're the wolf red hooded and one woman on the edge of something thinking that she'll fail. You can hold your own damn self. Your self can still prevail. Let me tell you that shame isn't yours to hold. Your body born this way Let it sit, let it sink in

Your beautiful and wonderfully made Your beautiful and wonderful And wonderfully made. I'm sorry. Like, look at this. I'm trying to shake. Usually it's a bit peachy and I've got a bit nervous. Dear Claire's inner critic, you're totally safe.

I am covered. I am covered in painful goosebumps from head to toe i've got emotion sweat i don't even know like there's parts i can't even see out of this eye my god Claire thank you those lyrics and your voice I feel sick in like the best way like when you see like a scene in a film you just want to rewind ten times and your stomach

turns into like a washing machine of emotion I don't even really know what's just happened to my body my god thank you of emotion. I don't even really know what's just happened to my body. Oh, my God. Thank you. Oh, I am. Those lyrics and your voice, I think I've got a bit of a joy headache. Oh.

Oh. Oh, thank you, Holly. I'm really, I'm still shaking because I haven't sung that song to anyone live really yet. So I, and I wrote it because of the trauma that I'd been through, the birth trauma and that woman who was just broken, totally broken. And I think so many women, so many reasons become broken. For me, it's the system that's medicalized around birth that has a blind spot

to the spiritual nature that women need to give birth safely. And there's wonderful people who are trying their best, but I know a lot of midwives I speak to will say the same, that I hadn't realized birth was spiritual and I had entered into the medical system wanting to feel safe and instead I felt let down and criticized and traumatized. And then after that, my body didn't do what it was supposed to. I couldn't feed my son the way I was supposed to. And everywhere I turned, the message was, don't sleep, feed him more, just try harder, you should be better, you should have figured this out when actually I'd missed so much feminine wisdom and knowledge. Even though my mum is really beautiful, I feel like she tried her best too but

the system itself I was stuck in was different from the one when she was growing up and much less supportive. So I just, I want, I just want something different for my daughter, you know, and I think that in so many different ways our patriarchal structures let women down and it takes until you're 37 to feel strong enough. And I wonder sometimes, I don't know if you resonate with this, what I would have been like and who I would have been if I, as I can see in my daughter, if she'd just been allowed or I'd just been allowed to grow into myself without all of that trauma. But then maybe you can't create art. I think I actually honestly think about that every day. I spoke about it with a friend two days ago. What would it be like to be allowed to just grow into

being who we are without carrying so much messaging and narratives about how and who we should be. And part of me wonders, who would I have been and what might life have been when I was younger if I wasn't carrying around a second world, a second invisible world on my shoulders like Atlas, which is what carrying trauma is for any of us. I'm so sorry that happened to you. What a beautiful, beautiful thing to make out of something so horrific and what incredible things you've set in motion already by putting words to it and your voice to it. There's movement already that wasn't there for 29-year-old you. Oh, I could say exactly the same thing for you you I'm so sorry for what you have been through um oh thank you sometimes sometimes it brings me a bit of peace to reflect on the fact that

I think it was someone random like I think it might have been Richard Gere I love Richard Gere i just i know i think i think it's someone random like richard gear who said something like i think he might have been paraphrasing like a philosopher but he said something like none of us make it out of here alive i and i'm pretty sure i will rely on the internet to prove me wrong. And my brain just seems to remember that Richard Gere, okay, here is the safe comment. Richard Gere said something like once, once upon a time, he said something like none of us get through life alive

or something to that effect. Yeah, yeah. And the reason why that concept replays on me is because it gives me the comfort not that it's at all comforting but it gives me the comfort of not feeling like i am some freak who is alone or that i am like the one bad thing, the one bad person in the world that this has happened to. And all of these thoughts are not like conscious front brain personality thoughts. They're like, they're sort of deep brain childlike thoughts. Because what I take from a statement like none of us get through this alive, or none of us come out of this alive is no one lives without suffering.

Nobody does life without suffering. And, you know, more profound sort of religious texts even go as far as saying life is suffering. To be alive is to suffer, which is what makes any form of joy, whether it's the quiet joy of, you know, Ross Gay, the poet, talks about joy in adulthood. He calls it grown joy. And it can be the act of connecting our sorrows. So the word joy is not always this effervescent adolescent kind of experience where everything for a moment is perfect, even though it is that, and that's so wonderful. But the joy even of quiet human connection and suffering

is the counterbalance that meets the suffering. It's where resilience is being cultivated all the time. So when I reflect on wondering what would have been of my life had so many years not been occupied and influenced and directed by unspoken trauma, there's a balance that I need to find for my own mental health where I don't go too far down that path because it feels like it will only lead me into further sorrow. It will only lead me into sort of playing with the past, which all of the great wisdom teaches us there's not really much point to doing because it's done and we can't do anything about it. But what we can do is try and accept,

try and accept it. And so the way that I do that and the counterbalance, so I don't go into this dark, helpless wood of spending too much time, like it's constantly a balance, isn't it? And spending too much time trying to relive an alternative parallel life, which is a beautiful thing in the imagination, but not actually anything as far as we know that I can do. It's to counterbalance it with just remembering that, remembering what I'm grateful for, what I do have, and that to be alive is to feel and to suffer and to also love and feel joy, but suffering is part of it. That just helps release that vice on this fear or this idea

that I am the one bad person in the world and that is why trauma happened to me because I'm bad or, you know, that sort of weird, deep 3am childlike thinking. That's how I sort of counterbalance it and focus on where joy and resilience is to be found because they go hand in hand. Completely. I totally agree. I feel like when you go through deep trauma or deep pain in some ways, and when I've experienced deep grief too, the world becomes technicolor for me. In some strange way, you see colors differently. I experience food differently. And there's this sort of thinner layer over how fragile everything is, which in itself is kind of beautiful.

Yeah, it's a joy to have that awareness. Completely. Gosh, I could talk to you forever and I don't want this conversation to finish. Me too. I've just loved it so much and I am so grateful for it and for the universe and all the things that sometimes happen right when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and open up to listening I wanted to ask you you said this beautiful thing I think it connects so well into what you just said

what if we took joy and wonder as seriously as sleep diet and exercise. And I just, I loved, I sort of wanted to finish with that, leaving people with that question, because I think in a way you've already answered it. That's, it is vital, right? It's as vital as the exercise and good food and the sleep is the finding joy and wonder. So what are you finding joy and wonder in right now? Really paying attention to the things that make the pounding anxiety in my head calm down. And it can be the anxiety of having a new creative offering in the world, being the seven skins of Esther Wilding, or it can be you know I've I am so lucky I just finished a four-week book tour around Australia what an incredible what an incredible thing to to have happen after the last few years in particular but but even at all to have the support and backing

to have a tour but also a four-week tour around the country is really tiring. So teetering on burnout too is like, okay, I'm anxious about whether or not I want tea or coffee in the morning because I'm too tired to know what the right answer is. You know, like everything is just so sort of micro at the moment. You know, and then the general distress of awareness of suffering of people around us in the world. There's a lot of noise all the time. And finding joy and wonder are how I keep my brain, I think, from collapsing in on itself and from falling into a pit of despair I can't climb out of. And I find that in really, I can find it in big loud things like having a blowout and going out dancing, you know. But mostly at the moment, what's bringing me joy and wonder are hanging out with my dogs in the sunshine, taking my first cup

of coffee in the morning and putting like my flip-flop thongs on and walking around mum's garden because I'm living with my parents at the moment because of the pandemic sort of going on three years now Sam and I are living with my folks and they are on three acres of Yugambeh land in the Gold Coast hinterland so I take my first cup of coffee each morning as a as a deal with myself and I start my day without my phone. And I walk around mum's garden, waking up with coffee in hand and the dogs quietly sort of padding after me or beside me. And I look at, I look really slowly at the grevillea that are coming into bloom. And I notice where they change from green to pink and I go into mum's

green fernery, her fern house, and I look at the tiny curls of the ferns that are waiting to unfurl and it gives my brain awe and joy and wonder as a framing, a quiet framework to start the day before I open my inbox or look at overnight text messages or social media in particular. And I take, I guess I'm trying to do everything slowly. That's where joy and wonder is happening for me at the moment. Even making dinner or choosing what I'm watching on telly or what books I'm reading and making sure that I get time in nature and and then you know going to see the like latest Wakanda movie you know like oh gosh yeah just just listening to just listening to our bodies because they're always telling us you know if I'm idle or bored not turning to social media to distract myself

or numb out but you know could I read could I read something that like amazing that about nature that I didn't know before you know just looking for those tiny moments of uplift that nurture through joy and wonder rather than numb that's that's kind of where I am at the moment. That is such a beautiful answer. Go slowly, I think. Yeah. And self-compassion, which I think is something that is so difficult. I find that so hard.

Actually, all of it. Going slowly and self-compassion seem to be counter to a lot of the messages that we receive from our culture. They're absolute practices. They're absolute practices ongoing. And, you know, a couple of days ago I sat out on the veranda and I was thinking about there was this tiny segment in the Deep River episode of Back to Nature where the episode opens with me making ephemeral art on Dear Rubbin or the

Hawkesbury River and I was thinking about that and it's such it's a thing we all do maybe when we're kids is if we're at the beach or if we're in a park or if we're anywhere and we gather sticks and lichen and stones and pebbles and leaves and we just idly start making shapes or we arrange them and it's instinctual as a kid. And I was thinking about it the other day in that episode of Back to Nature where we did it and I sat out on the veranda with these treasures from the sea, like broken bits of pink scallop shell and a black pippi shell and sea glass

and a black feather that I found in mum's garden. And I got a piece of raffia, no, not raffia, hessian. Sorry, I got a piece of like that neutral coloured hessian with the great tactile touch. And I just sat as the sun started to go down with a cup of tea and I just moved all of these pieces of treasure from the sea. I had a bit of ammonite, I had an ammonite fossil and all of a sudden an hour had passed and all I had done was drink my tea and listen to the magpies and the wind in the trees while I moved shells around on this piece of hessian. And it just felt like the most

meaningful hour that I remember clearer than anything else that I did that day. Because my brain was slow and I was present and I was filled with this sort of zoomed in awe and wonder of the ridges in the shells, where you could see where the calcium had grown with the being who had once used the shell as a home and it was just bringing my brain to that present level where we're outside of that constant information absorption that we live in now and i more had this hour with a cup of tea and pieces of shells and sea glass. And afterwards I was like, oh, my God, that's profound. Does anyone know how much of a sage I am?

I'm a wise woman. I've figured it out. I've got the secret to the universe. I've figured it out. And I'd really just slowed down for an hour. That was, and the contentment and the joy that flooded in, even with the factory of anxious thoughts and intrusive thoughts constantly whirling, you know, but that practicing that slowness and that self-compassion,

that act of treating ourselves like we treat anybody that we love, they are such ongoing and really important practices. Thank you so much, Holly. Gosh, well, we've come to the end of our conversation and I just implore everyone to please go and get Holly's new book, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding and also The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart while you're there. And just thank you. Thank you for what you make and bring to the world

and thank you for the gift of this conversation. I need to go and have a lie down. I know. I'm going to make a stiff cup of tea and stare at some grevillea. I'm going to make a stiff cup of tea. I actually think I'm going to go take the dog for a walk. I live near the bush. I think I'm just going to go and be a woman and stare at the ocean,

the water, no, the river. Yes, go and be a woman. Yeah, go and be a woman with your dogs and the river. And I will go and stare at a grevillea at a macro level and just try and integrate the beauty of this conversation and what's just happened. Yeah, it's going to take a while. It's going to take a while.

All right, well, thank you so much, Holly. Thank you so much. You've been listening to a podcast with Holly Ringland and me, Claire Tonti. For more from Holly, as I said, head on over to her website, hollyringland.com or head over to her Instagram account. For more from me, head to Claire Tonti on Instagram, which is where I like to tell stories or claire tonte.com where i've got all my writing and things over there and as always thank you to raw collings

for editing this week's episode if you would like to contact the show just send an email to tontespot at gmail.com i would love to hear from you as well, I also do another podcast with my husband, man, James Clement, where we bring each other things that we've been watching, reading and listening to and sometimes argue and sometimes make fun of each other and sometimes commiserate and celebrate the highs and lows of parenting. So that's over at Suggestible Pod and comes out every Thursday. Thank you so much to Maisie for running our social media and go gently with yourself. We talk about some really deep themes in these two episodes. So

yeah, just self-compassion, connection and slowness as much as we can. Love to you.