Channelling near-life experiences from the spirit of my dead mum
The new, expanded 2nd edition of "Darby, Love..." (Andrews McMeel) arrived from ignoring the fake human made reality, for months.
In the first second of waking, I don’t know who I am, where I am, or what’s going on.
And a second later, I’m carving order from the roaring chaos of night, excavating reality from the jaws of memory, and building a floor in the morning with my feet.
But in that first second, I feel pure bliss. I’m pure nothing and nobody.
And I feel an echo of this exquisite unburdening between Christmas and New Years. These lost few days are the 3am of the year. It’s the crow’s nest of life.
This space at the back end of the year is where I have no idea what day it is. So I’m not unconsciously forecasting my emotional weather to the usual days of the week. I’m not hitching my potential happiness to a Friday. Or anticipating the subtle dread of the week’s cliff edge of Sunday. At this time of the year, none of the weekdays exist or matter.
Unlike the regular week - where I antennae the tides of unseen crowds who are channelling the energy of Monday to Sunday as if they’re real - this lost week in the year lets me step off life’s ride. Here, I can unravel and choose to decide whether I’m happy or not.
But perhaps the reason why this week between Christmas and New Years is so peaceful, a near life experience? The whole world’s doing nothing at the same time.
Here, even the news seems to take a break. I can finally breathe. Because I noticed when politicians are on holidays between Christmas and New Years, the bad news seems to magically disappear. A cause and effect that they don’t want you to piece together. But, before of course, politicians return from holidays and get back to their day job of selling you aspirational ways to die.
I wanted to bottle the energy between Christmas and New Years
Late last year, 2024, between Christmas and New Years, revelling in this nothing and nobodiness, I sat on the couch watching old movies. I decided that modern tv shows, books and art - ‘content’ - human made asbestos, were the stuff that creates the tirade of ‘life’s ride’ that people so often joke about wanting to get off.
This art doesn’t ask questions, it’s just ‘message art’ that force-tells you answers. Most modern art is just ads - with answers that demand you buy into while implicitly telling you not to trust your intuition. Art that’s mostly a hollow reflection of the news. And the news: a dull, terrifying hall of mirrors born from the machinations of politicians. Endless wars on screens so you don’t have to deal with the war inside yourself.
Frustrated, I’d even found myself swearing loudly at ads, no matter how clever they were. “FUCK OFF”, I’d tell ads - I knew they were written by some child with a beard wearing a truckers cap in some ad agency. I was swearing at ads because they reminded me of the part of me that was dead inside.
I’d had enough. I didn’t want to care anymore. I’d put life on notice.
My grandpa said on his death bed, years ago: “The world and its worries aren’t my problem anymore.” I didn’t want to get to my deathbed to feel this same relief.
So, black and white movies on the couch it was.
I needed something from another time, another place, outside the suffocation of cultural norms and the fast fashion of morality. Outside of a culture that manufactures then pumps you with a deadly concoction of boredom and fear. It wasn’t a naieve impulse for ignorance - I wanted to feel the magic of nostalgia for the moment, resurrect my love for life by wasting it wonderously to the fullest.
That week’s peace showed me I could escape the world’s noise perhaps for good.
And I wondered if I could bottle the magical atmosphere, the near life experience of the week between Christmas and New Years?
So in late 2024, I decided to avoid the news and as much modern crap as I could for a whole year. Leap from the dizzying news cycle, its endless conveyor belt of worry and fake human made reality.
Climbing into the artist’s crow’s nest
It’s the artists job to step outside the times. Roll clear of the unconscious tides of a culture. We are all made of politics and magic. No one agrees on politics. But if you dig deep enough, everyone has the same definition of magic. It’s the artist’s job to ride the sparkling throughline of this unifying human spirit - through the walls of mind jails that separate generations. The humanist, incandescent throughline that connects the dead and the living - and the future dead.
“Darby, Love…” was born
Four months into 2025, feeling this unfamiliar calmness (early April), I was wandering through a crowded shopping centre and I uttered, “Darby, love…” aloud to myself, like a crazy person talking to no one in public.
“Darby, love” were the two words mum said when addressing me, before telling me something. Saying “Darby, love…” to myself, aloud, was an incantation, an invocation. And the next sentence seemed to follow with ease. I could summon mum! I could summon life’s magic again. A guardian angel on call - an amalgam of me and mum. And that’s when I remembered the magic mum and I shared.
I posted a few of these personal ‘conversations’ I had with mum on social media, these moments of collaborative delight between the living and the dead. And they unexpectedly (and wildly) resonated.
In the following two weeks, after that first moment in the shopping centre, I’d had whole conversations with mum. This otherworldly collaboration! On walks, I talked aloud to the sky, murmuring, “Darby, love…”, and just let whole sentences fingerprintlessly follow and fly out. I wrote madly for a week, like some magical dictation from mum’s spirit. And nearly instantly, I had a collection of this wonderful insanity.
On social media, readers asked, “Where’s the book?”. And, “Call it, Darby, Love!”. So I did. I pieced together a small, self-published book of these uncanny conversations. And in 7 weeks, incredibly, sold 4400 copies. During this time, 4 publishers from the US, Australia and UK were interested in the book, including Penguin. Very recently, I signed a contract with Andrews Mcmeel for a 2nd edition of Darby, Love… A publisher I’d followed keenly for some time.
Readers loved the first edition of the book, and shared it outside of the bubble of social media. One reader shared that they’d gifted the book as a birthday present and the whole party fell in love with mum. Mum ended up in an article on Upworthy. People wanted to know more about mum. Who was this person? What books did she read? What did she sound like?
Growing up (and sideways) with mum
Mum sounded sort of like Alan Watts, the English philosopher, but the female version. Well spoken, very articulate and the same smokers chuckle.
When I was a kid, mum loved reading philosophy and mythology. She didn’t care where it came from: high brow, low brow. She knew what was worthy of her attention, she didn’t need to be told. She loved Yoda from Star Wars. She looooved mythologist Joseph Campbell whose work Star Wars was famously based on. Especially Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. She loved Jung of course, too. She even loved the film, The Matrix. But she especially loved local Melbourne artist, philosopher and cartoonist, Michael Leunig.
Mum shared many of Leunig’s whimsical and sideways observations while I was growing up in the 1980s. And like many thousands in Australia, who loved Leunig’s cartoons, she’d cut them out of the newspaper and stuck them on our fridge. With no internet, let alone social media, there’d be a new Leunig cartoon on the domestic ‘art gallery wall’ of our fridge once a week to delight in.
When I was about 10 and onward, Mum would often ask, “Darby, love, what do you think of this new Leunig cartoon?”. And very quickly, Leunig’s mesmerising, weekly cartoons felt more important than my schooling. I wasn’t learning much at school, other than the muddy human experience of cliques and power games (apart from friendships). Leunig’s cartoons held a beautiful ambiguity to them. They asked you to quietly make up your own mind. He left a space for you. This was before you could scroll beneath ‘content’ and ‘like’ someone’s pre-formed popular opinion.
A conversation with mum’s favourite artist
After mum died in 2019, I was lucky to swap a few emails with Michael Leunig, then in his late 70s (before he too died last year).
Michael was very generous with his responses.
I asked Michael how he found his voice so young (25 years old when he was published and embraced by millions), when many writers find their voice closer to 40 (after they’ve seen the cycles of life a few times). Michael wrote to me, “The true voice is found when it is heard, listened to, encouraged and appreciated … So you see, there’s all this business of finding your footing and making your own peculiar path - and the voice naturally and unconsciously emerges, even though we are not aware of its uniqueness … like you, I am an amalgam of my influences … maybe your voice comes mainly from ‘God’. I hope you can see this word as a poetic word.”
He emailed me of his wanderings in the Melbourne Carlton Cemetery where I’d been writing in an old garden since 1999, “Darby… I spent many good, rich hours in the Carlton cemetery when I was 19, 20 and 21. This was the time when I was fighting my conscription notice for Vietnam. Great lively years - drawing anti-war cartoons for underground magazines, in love with my first girlfriend and smoking Woodbine cigarettes!!!”.
Michael advised me to read Henry Miller’s book of essays, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird (I’d read years before, but reading it again with his recommendation felt different and I paid more attention).
Michael’s emails had the flavour of Rainer Maria Rilke’s, Letters To A Young Poet, (although I was no longer so young). But his emailed voice was resonant. Still the same clear signal that spoke to a nation’s inner-life for decades. To have that small window (over a couple of years) to swap a few emails with Michael after mum died, felt like I was able to honour some part of mum. And some part of my early ‘education’ from him, through mum. He was very generous.
And while Michael Leunig’s books were/are mostly published through Penguin, the CEO of publisher, Andrews McMeel (a fellow Australian), shared with me her love of Leunig. It thrilled me when she showed me, via Zoom, a cartoon of his on her wall, from the Andrew McMeel office in Kansas, when we talked about a 2nd edition of Darby, Love.
These little signs. This perculiar path that emerges…
Mum’s darkness and incredible lightness
One of my all-time favorite works of art is The Sopranos. David Chase, its creator, famously drew inspiration for the show from his own mother, who he has described as both "nuts" and "very funny." Her counterpart in the series became a dark and unsettling presence. My mum was very similar - but instead of exploring that darkness, as The Sopranos did, I wanted to show a different side to my mum. Something between the magic and cynicism of The Little Prince and Catcher In The Rye.
When mum was alive, her magic existed in the quiet eye of her storm. Mum was consumed by a lot of darkness. But over the years, I learned to lure her from the body of now an old woman, into the shy, playful little girl she had always been. Some people remain a certain age for their entire life, no matter their official time spent on earth. Mum was always 12.
I lured her from her decades long regrets and freewheeling bitterness, firstly by seeing her less of a mother, and more as a sister. And secondly through play. And for a moment, we shared this incredible light and magic - two children in adult bodies playing in a world full of self-important adults, outside the world’s craziness.
Play is a rebellious act against endless human invented ‘important trouble’. And I’m almost certain mum’s lightness wouldn’t have been as brilliant without this swirling energetic dark storm that mostly surrounded her.
At some point in her life, mum was a Barrister/Attorney - a profession that precisely and algebraically deals with words with a merciless adhesion to ‘reality’. This was strangely at odds with her true spirit. But this profession that had less to do with truth and justice and more to do with word games, was also an essential part of mum being able to find loopholes in the formal adult reality. And leap incredible distances from it into her own universe, into something vast, very true and real.
Mum and I shared magic in the quiet eye of her tornado full of confetti
In my early 20’s, when I finally discovered what was “normal” to me was insane to everyone else, I had an inkling I’d be forced to become a writer. I had a head start on this, being raised by mum. Early on, I discovered, like mum, I too was from a different planet.
Writing mum’s book, Darby, Love… may be the only unforced “feel good” book I’ll ever write. I honestly can’t stand forced optimism (unless it comes from a true and real place). It’s like drinking poison otherwise. And I never thought I could write a positive or happy book, because once when I was meditating and content with life for a few months, all I could write during that time was “I like life”. Writing optimism that’s more than “I like life” is hard. Cyncism is easy.
I wouldn’t have been able to write the book without initially stepping away from the darkness of the world - and my own - late last year, into the calm embrace of the space between Christmas and New Years. And then to let a breeze blow through the inner wind-chimes of the old heart. Hear my own music again, and mums… I wouldn’t have been able to write it without coming home from these storms, coming home from the deep cynicism of the world mum and I also shared.
I remember going for a walk at night with mum around the block, and as we approached my home, she saw the glow of amber light from my front window. “Gee, Love!”, she said, “It’s nice to go for a walk in the darkness to come home to that warm light through your front window!”
Cynicism and its jail cell of bitterness can be reverse-engineered to create a directly proportionate amount of magic. At the risk of sounding holy, true light is born as a rebellious act in the face of darkness, otherwise it’s a false light. A reader can always smell it.
A small act of life in the face of death is powerful.
2nd expanded edition, Darby, Love… (alive things mum said to me before she died)
Hardback, with 38 new quotes, 128 pages. Available to preorder.
Published by Andrews Mcmeel.
Find at: Barnes & Noble, Readings, Amazon, Walmart, Bookshop.org etc
How neat to have made that connection with Leunig, Darby 🧡 There are no coincidences as they say.
Loved reading about the making of this delightful, irreverently wise book. Thank you.