…ail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself. Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans are constituted of love….
…ever produced. I burst into tears with relief. But later I looked over his website. It was all, the greatest this, the most highly qualified that. It was a minefield of pyramids. I don’t live in that field & it doesn’t seem real to me. That’s not how life works. I live in the jungle where every tree has its flower in the elbow, every bird has its arrow-glistening feather. Where there are a multitude of voices. Somehow they make a kind of complex h…
…ry living thing is beyond what any mother could hope to be. You ground and comfort me by simply being. Nick Rose I love the way you think, Cathoel! Laura Taylor I see you as amazing and brave and unapologetic and wild and powerful and beautiful. I know that standing in who you are often comes with a price but on this day you are my inspiration. Travel well wild woman and thank you. Elizabeth Bartram Strikingly, powerfully beautiful. You radiate wo…
…“To truly understand something is to be liberated from it.” This fascinating film held me riveted. It’s completely reinvigorated my view of the everyday life I lead and its purpose. I’m so glad I stumbled on it. Hooray, humanity, I love you and I will serve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU…
…is the assault on our planet’s liveability, sidelined by these posturings of hatred. Read widely. Think deeply. Speak out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt7CxXh5nQw…
…t is colder and you can die of it. But the sun won’t kill you. And the bureaucracy in the government departments relies on the administration of a thousand ill-paid hands. I remember the waitress aghast in a bar where I simply left my late, lukewarm, unappetising coffee and walked out. She followed me into the street and came up to me where I was unlocking my bike. She said, “We simply don’t do that!” Das machen wir einfach nicht!…
…I have twisted this über-German phrase into Das machen wir einfach so: we simply do it so, that is simply the way we do it. Last weekend tramping a thirty kilometre round between two scenic villages I lost sight of the trail of intermittent blue dots painted every now and then onto a tree trunk to guide walkers. Just as we reached the fork and needed our blue dot there it was. How come this trail was so well marked and others have been ill-signed…
…t was recorded in New York, Melbourne, and at home, by a collective of twenty-eight jazz, folk, and funk musicians. 50s impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford on first hearing Hey, Big Splendour said, ‘In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.’ Even fresher new work can be found at houseoflovers.com.” 25 WORDS (woot!): “Cathoel writes poetry and jazz. Robert Adamson says, ‘a born poet.’ Overland journal call her ‘a f…
…, making tiny and crucial decisions about a word that was too many here, a comma there which intruded. Resurfacing to field calls from printers’ sales reps I negotiated by comparing one quote against the other. I was awesome: I’m not normally awesome in that way. Scrabbling back and forth through my forty pages of closely-written notes and scrolling from one tab to another on the screen I brought the price down by nine hundred dollars. Camaraderie…
…ld her, you have to get rid of some, or cull. She’d put a notice up in the papers saying, free purebred kittens. I went out to her farm and there were four large sheds brimming with yowls. In the middle one a concrete floor writhed with kittens. I sat down to watch and find the cutest one, the prettiest. I liked the golden baby with caramel points. I liked the dark brown. I looked down and a skinny, ugly, funny-looking teenage cat with a smudge on…
…can do, you have a few months, set your affairs in order. Until the first tests come back there is no way of knowing how much cancer is in my body at this stage nor how far it may have spread. The call from this doctor’s receptionist came as I walked out of the hospital from seeing Mum. That morning, Thursday four days back, I woke to texts from Mum at 4.30am saying hello I am very very sick and then from my brother at dawn, we are at the hospita…
…cs either. In this workshop we had to sit in partners and explain to each other something using a made-up language, or any sounds: “the last film you saw,” decided the convenor, 70. My mind flooded with The Great Beauty. I described it to my companion in a torrent of what doesn’t exist. Now, it does. The room was filled with people’s sounds and the great flooding windows stood open. Afterwards she said to me her dark eyes glittering with tears “I…
…lk that upheld it having rusted through to nix. And then the gears started complaining. It took us several goes to get up a medium-gradient hill – we creaked up slowly until a handy side street appeared, backed into that to get another run-up and take another bite at it. Traffic accumulated at my tail like well-wishers to a visiting dignitary, only lack in all dignity and free from well-wishing. Finally I took the thing groaning and spluttering du…
…down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up to pay I realized I had left my bank card lying on the desk at home. I could see it: scarlet, round-sided, shiny. The guy serving had made me the richest hot chocolate of my entire winter and didn’t look as though he wanted to call the police. We spread all my coins on the counter and sifted them. Australian cents with band…
…lled yourself a racist. You hate his race. That’s what racism is. It’s not complicated.” But the outrage that broke following that statement did not still over the next three or four days. We drove home at the end of the visit still carrying it and I never felt comfortable in that family again. Because mine was the real insult. It also fascinates me that people who feel entitled to preface “this or that racist assumption” with the words “I’m not r…
…eah, I wish I were cool enough to qualify as hip but sadly, I lack the raw materials… I come off sounding like I wanna be *too* cool ~ hip enough to not even care about not being hip. Like my neighbours, I like a quiet street which is not too crowded with popularness. Yet I want the cafes to be good enough to draw such a crowd: Great coffee. Decent service. Music that doesn’t depress me. Essentially I am wishing failure & suffering on the business…
…riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit to my fitness and wellbeing. There were incidents in both sessions which made me uncomfortable and Chris’s response has just been ‘good luck finding a new group.’ He hasn’t offered to tackle the issue and when I replied with a summary of what had made me so acutely uncomfortable I actually left early, he didn’t bother to respond at all. I wasn’t the only one feeling…