…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…
…“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…
…the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled…
…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…
…acist assumption” with the words “I’m not racist but” will invariably feel compelled to also say, if female, “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [ya know, I just sorta have this feeling maybe women are people too?”] As a society we have learned to feel ashamed of our racism but not yet to uproot and rout it. As a society we have not yet learned to feel ashamed of our hatred of women. There were those few halcyon years in which people started to s…
…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…
…he shouted, gleefully, raising up his arms like wings. “Yes!” I said. “And come up on the tips of your toes and feel the wind take you!” We wobbled gleefully at each other for a minute then I left him balancing there, amateur bird, laughing in the wind. We took refuge with our new Queensland number plates in an underground coffee shop with sweet, chirping songs playing softly and the hum of a rather old fridge. “How’s your day been?” asked the bar…
…intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses a…
…d him out with a teaspoon. Flung him out into the sunny breeze and he flew free, a kite trail of honey sprinkling the grass. Moments later my companion nudged me: Butterfly! Indeed, as if out of thin blue sky, her brown wings velvety light and tremoring she supped the round drops of honey. She laid her wings open in an ecstasy. I scooped a little more out and flung it wide, see if I could make her dance. She did. A police car pulled up under the t…
…sked. “Australia.” “Ah,” he said. “When somebody come in… who is friendly… open-minded, like you: open heart: they are always Australia. Or… Irish.” I smiled at my hands. He said, shrugging, “To us… you look English.” In a flurry of Spanish he turned to the older man sitting at the bar, refilling his glass of some creamy liqueur. “Something, something, Australian,” he said and I tried hard to eavesdrop. The one or two words one gleans in a spume o…
…to a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness,…
…ntil she had worked out what she wants to do with her career, having qualified in law in Brazil and her qualifications not considered applicable in Australia. This insight, which was merry and nourishing, arose through the free and open discourse in which strangers respected and made room for each other; if we had submitted without protest to the domineering man, we would have had a less pleasant afternoon and she might not have gained it….
…ou’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames…
…e poisonous dishwasher gleam from my cup, and make tea. I look all the big questions in the eye and tell them, I’m not afraid of my fear of you, I know you, I know you are there. But today the worst thing is the tiniest thing: my resentment at the pollution of my own daily dreams and the way I try to plan my day, by the wailing of the world’s biggest questions in context of history’s biggest mess. The siren interruption of alarm, that is the call…
…ackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am I subsidizing it?” The hundreds of times I have been asked, “So: do you make a living from it?” the question has never once been accompanied by, “Ah! Is your writing for sale? Where can I buy some?” But I answer the spoken and the unspoken questions either to myself or, if asked rudely enough, out loud: 1: No. 2: Yes. 3: No, so you’re not…
…’ 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 first-rate artist at work.’”…
…ag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at m…
…s devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth. In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.” “I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-heigh…
…g boy I lay on my back, with my ankles crossed, in Kinderparadies, my eyes open and all the trees leading me up into the dark glinting complexities and simplicities of night. “Who’s that,” the mother asked her husband quietly, “in the tipi with Thomas?” “It’s me,” I said. “Ah…” And I lay there close to sleep myself, not just his but my own, until at length I heard people standing up and getting wakeful and we gathered all our things and took our b…
…my hand round him in bed he yelped my name. The two of us were strong and open and free together. Don’t you want to be loved, I have asked him: don’t you want love and affection in your life. My love and affection. Don’t you even want to be curious about what might still be possible? Why would you move across the world to be with someone, that someone being me, and then… refuse to have the painful or uncomfortable conversations, including with yo…