After spending a couple of days in Sydney,  I’ve needed a couple of days to get over my stay in that beautiful city I spent many years living in, and now my daughter wants to do the same.

In my youth I found Sydney an invigorating city.  Full of beauty and life.  A rich tapestry of cultures, food and entertainment.

With each visit to Sydney, I experience an inner recognition of ‘home.’   I spent my youth and young adulthood there.  But now in middlescence, I’m torn between that recognition and its sense of reconnecting to what is almost a lost comfort, a part of my youth I guess, and a yearning  for something deeper, something quieter, more peaceful as maturity stakes its claim.  At 52 I find Sydney beautiful, loud and far too busy.   Even the ocean crashed loudly upon the shore, taking me back to a point in my childhood where the history of years of tidal wave dreams began.

Standing on those rocks as the ocean swelled, I felt the movement of the ebb and flow, I felt the sound, I felt the ocean’s overwhelming vastness and power.  I once read in a dream analysis book, that tidal wave dreams mean emotional overwhelm, and I wondered what it was  all those years ago in my childhood, that triggered those dreams.  Perhaps it was the journey on the ship from Germany to Australia.  Perhaps it was my father ‘whooshing’ me through the waves….

While in Sydney, a girlfriend and I stayed in a house designed by Walter Burley Griffin, the architect who designed Australia’s capital city Canberra.  The owner of the house was overseas and suggested we stay while we were in Sydney.

We arrived at the house after an active and long day at around 11.30 pm.  In unfamiliar territory we used our mobile phones as torches to locate the hidden front door key and the key hole in the door, then to find internal light switches;  non of which worked!

Back outside again with our mobile phones as torches, we found the fuse box, that revealed a blown fuse, two fuses, and one socket.  All too much for tired mere females.

So my head hit my pillow in a bedroom, seen only through the light of my mobile phone, in a house totally unfamiliar.

As I drifted to sleep I heard the gentle tingling of wind chimes somewhere close by and thought “how lovely,” until I was woken  every time a breeze blew, lunging for my mobile phone, then realizing the sound wasn’t my phone, but the wind chimes.

I tossed and turned through the night with thoughts about tidal waves, city life, country life.  Could I ever live in Sydney again?   Sydney’s mild winter compared to the Highland’s.  How much I loved the warmth.   My beautiful daughter.  How much I loved her, yet how annoying she could be.  Love in all its forms;  unconditional love, love of mother and child, romantic love, and love of nature.

The morning revealed a cosy comfortable home, with skylights and windows allowing the the outdoors in.  The garden was lush with plants I missed in the Southern Highlands.  Frangipanis beginning to shoot new growth.  Magnolias almost ready to blossom, and of course the beautiful Jacarandas.

My restless night was not only rewarded by the morning’s daylight revelation, but by thoughts still lingering, still clear, about issues that begged for attention while I yearned for sleep in a foreign place.

A visit to somewhere outside of my comfort zone, has created a new vision, a stamina.  I yearn for springtime warmth, for it’s colours and scents.  for its freshness of life, and I will seek out the sun and bask in its warmth, knowing that not too far from home spring is already asserting its imminence.