Drifting Notes

Some mornings in Brisbane feel like the space is tuning itself, the river sighs, coconut sunscreen drifts across the air, strangers gather like loose notes in a half-written song. On one of those mornings, I found myself at the ferry terminal with a backpack slung over one shoulder, the city still clinging to me and the island calling me like it always does … slowly, insistently, with the promise of pelicans and dolphins and colours that run deeper than reason.

People arrived in little constellations, all of us waiting for the same boat and carrying our own weather systems. There were the loud ones and the quiet ones and the ones pretending not to care. And then there was one person I couldn’t stop watching for reasons I’ll tell you later.

There’s something magic about the minutes before a journey starts, that pocket of time when the we all have not yet decided what the day will become. This episode lives there, in that small bright place between city and sea, belonging and almost-belonging, arrival and everything that comes next.

Slip your headphones on, this one starts before the ferry even moves. Thanks for drifting with me.

What’s something you noticed in the minutes before a journey that stayed with you long after it ended?

If we stood side-by-side at a ferry terminal, what tiny human moment do you think I’d catch you noticing?

ps. Some of you ask how I write my Drifting Notes, I note down my ideas in a random way… then I make bullet points for a story and read it out as I ‘feel’ it.

The ocean is in a good mood this morning … calm, kind, and I’ve got a coffee in hand. A (thankfully) grey November sky hangs above Miami Beach, the waves lined up in rows of promise, and the air carries that first brave sound of children running toward water.

They’re called Nippers here, the ‘learner’ surf lifesavers. Every Sunday morning they gather in bright-pink rash vests, learning how to read the sea before the sea decides to test them. They run, swim, paddle, rescue. They fall, laugh, and get back up. It’s a training ground for courage, disguised as play.

We drift through one of those mornings, the smell of sunscreen and barbecued onions, the whistles, the laughter, the parents pretending not to pray. It’s a love letter to the small rituals that teach us how to reach for each other long before we understand why it matters.

Out in the surf, a girl mistimes a wave and disappears for a breath. Another child, half her size, same size fear, reaches out and steadies her. It lasts only a heartbeat, but it holds the whole meaning of the day for me.

If you’ve ever stood on the edge of something bigger than you, or watched someone you love find their footing, this will feel familiar. It’s about salty, repeating moments that turn instinct into care, the muscle memory of kindness.

Bit of info about nippers…

* Miami Beach Surf Life Saving Club (QLD) — where mornings like this begin.

* Surf Life Saving Australia — the national movement training generations to read the sea.

Thanks for drifting with me.

Ps. I’m practising with sound depths, to try to layer wind, surf, laughter, and light into these stories. I am practicing a new way to tell them, a way for you to feel more what i am trying to share with you. I’m learning and am super open to feedback.

Every morning I ride across the Gold Coast bridges and end up laughing at the same ridiculous miracle… enormous birds landing on thin tree branches. Pelicans, cormorants, herons, all bulk and grace, touching down like drunk acrobats, wobbling, correcting, pretending it was intentional all along. To me, it’s like slapstick meets poetry.

There’s something about watching a bird the size of a toddler balance on a twig that makes you question everything you thought you knew about physics, faith, and being human. Because they don’t hesitate. They just land. No calculations, no backup plan. Total commitment to the branch.

I have laughter and awe, about trust, balance, and how sometimes the universe gives me a chubby bird with serious faith in landings.

What are you trusting to hold your weight, even when it sways?

Ever landed somewhere fragile and found it held you anyway?

Thanks for drifting with me, Lyss x

(ps Welcome to a new season! Queenie is ok, in palliative care still, and I choose to start a new season of stories, called Hands in motion)

This week I’ve been thinking about how time behaves beside someone who’s fading. It slows, slips, folds back on itself. Some mornings stretch forever, while it feels like others vanish before my coffee even cools.

I’ve come to land to be with my Queenie. Each day I hold her hand, listen to the sea outside the window, and notice how my own rhythm changes with hers. The sea keeps time for both of us now. This Drifting Note is about that time bend, and the way care rearranges a life, and how presence can feel like movement.

Maybe it will make you think of someone whose pace you’ve learned without meaning to….Have you ever noticed how time changes shape beside someone you love?

How a minute can stretch until it blurs, and a week can fold into a single breath?

I love the messages you send, here, on WhatsApp or by email. Thank you for drifting with us, Queenie and me, through this season. I read to her all of your responses <3

Eight weeks into palliative care with my Queenie, I realise I’ve been arriving like a project manager, with my plans, checklists, bright ideas on how to ‘make her life better.’ Feed her. Move her. Sing with her. Save her, a little.

But love, it turns out, is less about doing and more about staying. Sooooooo, this episode drifts through that quiet surrender, from the restless urge to help, to the gentler work of holding. It’s my story about mercy disguised as ordinary touch. And how the smallest gesture, one beautiful hug, can become its own kind of miracle.

If you’ve sat beside someone in these in-between hours. hospice, hospital, home, you’ll know the strange grace of doing nothing well too…. let me know here if you feel like it.

It’s Queenie’s eighty-fourth birthday. Buuuut, no trumpets this year, no cake collapsing under too many candles. It’s more gentle. Just a soft room, sunlight on her blanket, and my ukulele.

We used to celebrate and roar like the world was ending, hats, laughter, three cakes for good measure. Now the party’s smaller, but maybe closer to the truth. We sang Down Under again and again until the words turned into home. Two Australians, two women, the first and the next, finding each other in a song that still glows, even at the edge of things.

The older I get, the more I think birthdays aren’t about time passing, I wonder if they’re about light returning?

When the people you love can’t meet the world in the way they once did, how do you bring the world to them? What does celebration look like when the confetti has to be invisible?

At the point where the Brisbane River divides, the water seems to hesitate, one arm drawn toward the port’s restless industry, the other curling inland, slow and green. From the mangrove-lined banks, the split looks like a question the river keeps asking itself.

This reflection drifts through that moment of division, between motion and stillness, boardrooms and harbours, the fast and the quiet versions of a life. It’s a meditation on coherence and how to stay whole while moving in more than one direction.

In this episode, the river becomes my teacher. It shows me belonging doesn’t always mean choosing, sometimes it’s about trusting the currents to hold their own logic. Annnndddddd about letting attention, not urgency, set the rhythm.

When life pulls you in two directions, between speed and stillness, duty and desire, what helps you stay whole in the middle of it?

At first light in Nerang, the mountain bike trails are empty, there are just the gum trees, the squiggle of roots, and two old friends. Lisa runs in front, knowing every turn and fork. I follow, arms out like a child on a roller coaster, yelling “weeee” into the forest.

This episode drifts through the joy of letting someone else lead, and the trust that comes from twenty-five years of friendship, the odd freedom of surrendering decisions, and the reminder that sometimes the most adult thing you can do is yell like a kid in the trees.

Recorded as part of Drifting Notes, a series of short stories for walks, commutes, and late-night listening.

When was the last time you let someone else lead the way? or let yourself shout with abandon? I’d love to hear your story. Share it in the comments, or pass this episode on to the friend you’d most trust to choose the path

Four bracelets in a cloth pouch - > blue, pink, green, grey.Passed from wrist to wrist, carrying a mother’s touch, a family’s pulse.

In this episode, I share a small ritual my family and I have created with Queenie, as she moves through palliative care. The beads remind us how fragile and how strong a circle can be, stretching, holding, always one tug from breaking.

This is my little story about connection, and the way simple objects can hold whole lives inside them. And the one on my wrist today.

These beads are ours, but maybe you have your own version, a photograph taped to the fridge, a mug no one else is allowed to use, a story that’s told again and again?? What’s the thing that circles through your family, keeping you together?

This drifting note begins with a piece of hot pink cardboard. The kind meant for school science projects. Ours is taped to the wall of a hospice room, and it’s filling up with post-it notes, crooked, bright, and full of life.

At my mamma’s bedside, we could spend hours looking back her years in Europe, tennis courts, work events, songs, ski slopes, marrying into a Papua New Guinean family. A film reel of a dazzling life. But here, now, in these days that feel so final, I wanted to catch the present before it slipped through.

So we opened champagne, and wrote down our first note > bubbles in bed, Saturday night. Since then, the board has grown, a rock star wardrobe change in a new pink shirt, contraband chocolate, jazz turning the hospice walls into a Paris café, my husband dialing in with a cappuccino raised to the camera.

This episode is about that board. About catching the fragile, fizzing moments that still arrive, even at the end of life. It’s about how memory isn’t only the past embalmed, but the present scribbled just in time.

Pull up a chair. Pour a glass. Love Lyss x

What contraband joy have you smuggled into a difficult season?