A bullet (point) for every delight.

Delights, and peace and farming truffles.

I’ve been keeping a bullet journal this year. I write one delightful thing, or one thing I’m grateful for, every single day, and I give the day an arbitrary score out of five. In a truly uncharacteristic non-ADHD-start-with-the-best-intentions-but-forget move I’ve maintained the routine all year so far, and now I’ve got almost four months full of this delicious data. Tiny coloured squares and evening scratches of the bits that would usually pass me by.

At the end of the month I read through my daily morsels and I reflect on some key take-aways to be integrated and create some ponderings to action for the month ahead.

Here's what I’ve discovered…

The delights and the gratitude’s are often small. They’re often about nature, or connections, or speak to satisfaction or feeling seen. They’re really about the small stuff.

I saw a dragonfly.

I made scones.

There was a text.

A nice thing was said.

The white petals look like snow as they fall.

The sun was on my face.

The heralding of the simple makes my life feel so beautifully full. Which it is, of course.

I think I felt so compelled to do something like this because such a big chunk of last year was so unbelievably shit. And whilst there were so many gorgeous things, if you ask me about 2024 all I can think about are the significant shitty things. And that feels like it doesn’t paint a true picture.

There is beauty and mess, chaos and calm, joy and heartache, connection and loneliness, fury and pleasure all at the same time co-existing to make a life. It takes it all.

It takes feeling it all.

It takes acknowledging it all.

It takes speaking the true things about it all.

There is no arrival place, no mountain top, no golden formula. There is no thing, or size, or relationship, or goal, or purchase that’s going to be THE thing. There is no singular thing. There is all of the feelings, and all of the glorious things, and all of the hard things and there’s us in the middle of it all.

What I’m recognising is that the inherent craving we feel, that capitalism has turned into purpose and purchase, is actually about peace.

Peace in the discomfort of a life well lived.

Peace in the terror of self trust.

Peace in the curiosity.

Peace in the fundamental need to disappoint everyone over and over again if it means not disappointing yourself.

I heard this recently that the word disappoint when you really think about it is at it’s core about the need to stop appointing someone else with power over yourself. To take your power back. To reappoint yourself with the power you have over your own peace.

The grandest peace I’ve ever known in my life has come from the moments where I’ve really honoured my own knowing and acted accordingly. When I’ve appointed my self as the keeper and ruler of my very own Queendom.

So simple, and at the same time so impossible.

I want to acknowledge the trying…if you’re out here and you’re trying then you deserve a blue first place ribbon, and a Student of The Week certificate, and a trophy and rosette.

I see you effort. I see you. Good on you for trying. Celebrate that. Celebrate that every day in the tiniest of delicious ways.

Delicious Things I want to tell you:

• I’ve started playing Stardew Valley and maintaining my little beachside farm is giving me so much joy it’s silly. I’m in year five. I’ve married Emily. We have adopted one child, and another is on the way. I make a lot money making wine, aging cheese, preserving my greenhouse crops and I’m grateful for my pigs hunting all the truffles.

• The other day I shared that I deeply responded to these two podcasts on We Can Do Hard Things with Terri Cole about High Functioning Co-Dependency. I’ve been learning and unlearning and recovering from having deeply co-dependent tendencies since I first learned about Melody Beattie’s work about four and a half years ago. I shared some ponderings in my stories the other day and SO MANY of you reached out to tell me that you identified with this description:

  

If you missed that post then maybe listening to these episodes will help you. Maybe all of us recovering high functioning co-dependents can hang out together?!

• In writing news I’ve finished another draft of It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake the stage play, and I’ve been working on the Young Adult novel that I’m hoping to have edited for mid-year.

• And, maybe the greatest, most surprising joy of them all of late that I’ve discovered, is that Midge, my ten year old, anxious, allergic to the world black pug fucking loves the beach. Like, new lease on life, thriving as an off leash, beach adventure dog. THE JOY I’VE EXPERIENCED IN THE WITNESSING OF THIS. Babes, we can change and do and be all manner of things. We are not fixed. We just need to try and see what happens because when we do we might end up looking like this.

  

  

  The goal, my dears, is to feel as often as we can as relaxed as she is here.

I adore you. Take care.

Love Claire.

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If you wanna support me and my writing come hang out in The Grit Guild where I’m writing monthly chapters (sometimes more) of a smutty story about a woman names Lulu Dare learning to be more daring. We’ve just met her future love interest Owen and they are a dream boat. Readers in The Grit Guild are answering questions and in a choose-your-own-adventure fashion are leading me and Lulu in new and delicious directions. Basically The Grit Guild are horny, bold babes who want total pleasure and deep satisfaction with a dose of drama and I am here for it.

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Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.