It’s Valentine’s Day this week, but I have never seen much point to it other than having an excuse to eat more chocolate until this year. I’ve had number of long time dreams coming into alignment in my life at last and I found myself full of grateful love for the many people who have …
Sidewalks and Roads and How We Walk
Follow the Road and Who Knows Where is Goes My favourite quotes in life usually involve streets, crossroads, some sort of long straight or winding road. My favourite songs often involve roads literally or figuratively to, The Highwayman by Loreena McKennit (also a poem), Carry on my Wayward Son by Kansas, Carry on by .fun, …
Visit London: Learning London City With Lists and Food
Learning London City Day One Breakfast, tentative, tiptoing into a corner of the chatting room. I toasted bread, find peanut butter and quirk a first smile. I will spend the next two years oscillating between amusement and exasperation that the British understanding of peanut butter is full of sugar and very little of peanuts. But …
Visit London: Transform Dreams into Lived Stories
Visit London: An Introduction I lived in London for two years and I have endless stories from the experience. I’m in the process of organising years of descriptive emails into a series of travel memoirs. Before all that gets settled, I’d like to let you all into some of my experiences as I continue my …
The Value of Visiting Museums
Museums… Make your jaw drop the first time. Give you sensory overload. Contain room after room, like the Never-ending Story. And sometimes they begin to look all the same. For example… The Enlightenment Room at the British Museum is an endless hall of collectors bits. I figured this out after a month and a half …
Have a Good Life, They Said: A Drabble
Life, They Said, Only Has Colour if You Paint it
I grew up with practical parents, supportive, wonderful parents who did everything they could financially and physically manage for me and my siblings but they were practical.
That meant, work hard, work harder and aim for reliable jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse. They supported my love of photography, giving my the camera I still own and use, fifteen years later to do all the photography on this site but running off and being a freelancer, being a travel blogger, an artist, starving even after the rice, bean and broccoli dues of university, any of that, unthinkable. Not practical. Terribly uncertain and unsustaining.
Their view of a good life did not match mine.
Then again, go ask anyone what a good life is. You’ll get as many answers as people, possibly more, if some of those people have multiple ideas.
“Have a good life,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? What is a good life?
“Have a successful career,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? Well, it’s true I haven’t started. I’m twenty-seven and have only just kicked my butt out the door toward using my creative insanity for something more than road trip entertainment while I traveled Europe for two years. And I wanted to be like you.
All the best started at least when they were a minimum of four and a maximum of eighteen. Or so society has taught me.
They had rough lives. Uphill both ways and sideways too. In sinking sand. To built character of course. They went like lawn-mowers toward their fantasies, not content to just dream them up in stories. They were bulls through the red silk sheets, roaring against the dying of the light.
They probably fought, disagreed and moaned at or about parents, partners, prime ministers and that panda they talked to at the zo once, just because they could. And it shocked the adults.
Or they might have had parents who were as obsessive as they, who supposed, bashed and pushed until the child lived the parental dream of superstardoom.
Whatever that ambiguous alphabet soup is.
Or they might have had parents who ignored them to pursue their own dreams and the children occupied themselves with their own imagination and brilliance anyway.
They were the sort who laughed in the face of offence and giggled in sending it back because the world needs less defenders and more offenders. You can’t win a footie match without them.
This is the match for life.
Even if they were awkward, easily embarassed, introverted or mad hatters, they had more than enough shine to not bother with or about other people’s suns anyway. Then someone loud would find them and helicopters would descend. Lights bouncing and beaming in the treasure trove of brilliance. Personality doesn’t matter so much then. Usually. Sometimes. Probably.
“Have a good life,” she said.
How are you supposed to have a good life if you don’t live said life with vigour, passion and enthusiasm?
Shouting from every roof-top, screaming from every cliff-edge.
Clawing, fighting, biting and bashing against the dying of the sunlight.
They won’t wait for the day a man speaks on a bus, to say, “nine-hundred and nintey-nine stars. The sun is burning.”
No. They will kick down the padlock. Crash the door. Poke their head through and bring on the foretelling by being the prophet of their own future.
Facades: A Drabble of Self-Perception
The Mask of Facades upon Old Architecture
Mask, an object worn over the face to hide identity beneath.
I wore a mask for years. Who knows how many, I have forgotten. Right now I wear one, even still.
Then it started to peel. Paint does that. Even the most chemical which leaks into your insides behind labels of “for sensitive skin.”
These chemicals only made me more sensitive. Formed not out of nature but out of a lab.
My eyes leaked from the windows, crying sunlight, when I just wanted rain to dance in.
Whispers flickered shapes across my skin, leaving the impression of wolves about to blow me down.
Soon I kept only straw on the inside. Outside I towered into the sky with walls of brick, and then, the earthquake hit. I rattled and shock, cracked and crumbled. When the clouds rose back into the heavens and the grey danced off upon the wind, I remained, a memory of masks built of material and changing mood.
Today I begin peeling the paint. With hand and hoe. Rock and roll. Faerie dust and book musk.
Have you ever sat on a sidewalk and watched a house, watch you?
It will drain stories out the pipe vents.
What is your mask?
ARR.