the wood snake sheds its skin

On Monday I went with my friend Bene to the Nan Tien Temple to celebrate the Lunar New Year. We came to shed the old year of the Wood Snake, and to welcome the energy of the Fire Horse.

It’s just next door to the Illawarra Memorial gardens, where Michael requested his ashes be interred. He wanted a memorial here in Wollongong, where we built our life as a family, and where he and I can be together again when my own life comes to an end.

Purchasing my own resting place was a shopping experience like no other. 

After he died, I looked at the websites. I went to the office and collected a glossy pamphlet which I took home to contemplate the options on offer.

He could be put in a letter-box style slot in the wall. He could have a plaque on a rock edging a rose garden. We could choose to place him in the ‘Gardens of Serenity, Harmony and Tranquillity’ or ‘Everafter Garden Surround.’ The names reminded me of the satirical novel The Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh - I could just imagine his ironic eyebrow raise. But it’s hard to avoid excessive sentimentality and euphemisms, when faced with the stark reality of death. 

In the end we purchased a more prosaically named ‘Family Rose Bush.’ His rose is under a giant spreading gum tree - it has buds so dark they are almost black and it blooms a deep deep red.

There’s light industry over the road so in one direction we have a view of orange cranes and parked white trucks. In the other we can see the beautiful terracotta pagodas of Nan Tien Temple, silhouetted against the escarpment. Michael loved this juxtaposition of industry and nature - it's so Wollongong. Just like he loved the big rusty old wheat silos, out near his home town of Temora.

So before I met Bene, I popped in to say hi to Michael. I brought some fresh roses from our garden at home. I sat for a while. Told him all about our experiences over the weekend, moving Julia into college in Canberra. How quickly she hurried me out the door when it was time for me to leave, so we wouldn't cry. How well she is doing. How proud we all are. I took photos of his roses in bloom and sent them to the family.  Sat a bit longer.

Then I went next door to where the community was gathering at the temple for an evening of delicious food, vibrant colour and diverse cultural performances.

The evening light was soft. The people had gathered - wandering around the market stalls, munching on spiral potatoes, carefully skewering vegetarian dumplings. Kids were being pushed in prams, parents and grandparents in attendance. Women and girls wore beautiful Vietnamese Ao Dais, in every colour of the rainbow. There was a man in a red and gold costume of the Chinese god of fortune, complete with makeup and black beard, giving out lolly pops for good luck.  There was Mongolian throat singing, Egyptian belly dancing and Chinese love ballads.

Bene ran into a former student. I saw the daughter of a friend. Bene’s house guest, the son of an old friend, met us there. Igor is a 20 year old backpacker - a Belgian living in Switzerland and hoping to go surfing in Bali. He was friendly and engaging - perfectly happy to wander around the temples with two middle aged women.

The sun went down behind the escarpment and the temple was lit up with hundreds of red lanterns. I decided to purchase a wish. I chose a red fabric swatch with my wish in gold embroidery and threw it onto the wishing tree. It stayed up, first throw.

The 2025 Year of the Wood Snake, according to the God of Google, signifies a period of deep transformation and wisdom. Words and phrases jump out at me… ‘the snake’s intuitive, introspective nature,’ ‘adapting to change,’ ‘thoughtful, quiet, and profound inner work,’ ‘overcoming challenges through wisdom.’ (University of Sydney, 2025) 

Well I don’t know if I can claim any wisdom from the absolute shit show of the last 12 months, but I’m working on it.

Change? Yes. Challenges? Absolutely. Deep transformation? ... maybe there’s something to this astrology thing after all.

Last night I went to yoga. The theme for our class was the cobra - shedding the snake skin of the old year so we can welcome the new. We worked with the physical cobra pose, exploring ideas about what we were shedding. What did we need to let go of, in order to grow?

I thought about how we need to unclench our muscles in yoga sometimes. We need to let go, so we can relax into the pose. I thought about the Buddhist teachings that suffering comes from attachment - that all things are impermanent.

I will never let go of my love for Michael. I will never 'get over it.'

But I am trying to learn to accept the things I cannot change. To be kind to myself in my grief. To let go of the desire to ‘fix’ a loss that can never be fixed.

So what can we expect from the year of the Fire Horse? I go back online to consult the AI oracle once again.

I find the SBS news website and decide it’s more reliable than a bloody robot. ‘The symbol for horse will be meaning energy, vitality, speed and passion,’ Fan Shengyu, an associate professor at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language, said. ‘It's one very particular year in that 60-year cycle. It's very special.’

On Monday, the temple hummed with the energy of the crowd. It was peaceful, joyful, calm. There was vitality and laughter as people carried wooden horse puppets across the stage. They were decorated to symbolise various Chinese idioms, for the audience to guess. My favourite was a horse with a grey beard and wearing spectacles. On his side was painted a picture of a road. The answer was ‘An old horse knows the way’. This means that a person with experience knows what to do. With age, comes (hopefully, some) wisdom.

So I will keep on breathing in and breathing out. I will move my body every day, even if I can only manage a little bit. I will eat healthy food, go to bed on time, spend time with friends and family. I will keep on venturing out into the community to connect with others. After all, so many of us are living with pain and loss. We are not alone.

I went to visit Mum in the nursing home the other day. I took her some roses from our garden, too. Sometimes she can’t manage full sentences, when the dementia muddles up the words. They come unstuck - dart here and there down all sorts of memory lanes. But yesterday she was lucid.

At the end of our visit I gave her a kiss. Said, ‘I’ve got to go, Mum.’

‘Give my love to Michael,’ she said.

‘I will Mum.’ I will.