sticky note

It's important to have a long walk home now and then. This is a heaven-sent truth. I was on one such walk this morning, awhile before the sun announced Satur-Day. I suppose it was still Frinight. I wonder how Freya and Saturn feel about being placed so close to each other, when the Vikings and the Romans had such a difficult relationship? At Flipside Circus we learn how to separate those kids with difficult relationships.

Yes, it's true, I was walking afore the gloam. And I thought of you, Skye, and your idea for our show, or at any rate, the blurb you wrote, because so far that's mostly all we have. And I was walking and tromping on the heads of daemons all the way home, and a comforting rhyming couplet popped into my head.

You and I, we've come too far to worry over the Fact,
That all along we keep making shows whilst we never had a clue how to Act.

I have tried to write it so that the rhythm works. The phrase 'Ionic Pentameter' pops into my head, alas                I have no idea what it means. I feel like I should, so I hold this phrase awkwardly, as though I was posing for a photoshoot, holding an antique shakuhachi, intensely conscious of the fact that I'm not holding it correctly. I just have no idea.

Anyway, this rhyming couplet, if you can get the rhythm working, then you can say it out loud, in a joyous way, in an expressive way. In a passionate way. Because after all, that is all you need to do.

I didn't expect to see the 'convergence' last night on my walk home, but there it was. The girl with large dark eyes told us all that we should go for a walk at 5 in the morning, and look at the convergence, a number of nice-sounding planets are somehow aligned in relation to us, bickering hairless monkeys that we are.

Well I was walking. And there they were. Three stars, way too bright, way too low in the sky. I searched in the darkness for a distant building that they could be attached to, a skyscraper out in the backwaters of West Brisbane perhaps. There was none. I looked at it for a while, this blazing triangle. Half worried that it was our turn for a comet-apocalypse, the universe finally deciding to wash its hands of Bruce Willis. But they weren't getting closer or brighter, they were just hanging there, too low in the sky, too bright. I didn't even need to rub my eyes, though, absolutely real it was.

I've just been offered a flight to Nepal, accommodation and food to boot, in exchange for teaching circus to skilled Indian kids who were victim to the Indian circus-trafficking industry that until very recently I had no idea about. If all goes according to plan, I'll be flying to Nepal in a little over a month.

It would be easy to look at those bright lights in the sky, that divine non sequitir, and feel "Oh! That's why these dramatic life-changing events are happening now! That's why that poem just popped into my head! Those planets are aligned, and the wisdom is ancient, and we are very small, and the forces and movements of the universe must surely buffet and guide us somewhat."

It would be just as easy to feel, "Yes, those lights are very bright. Relative to you, and your solipsistic egotistical perspective. Are you sure you're not just one more person getting carried away with shiny things, as humans have always done? Perhaps you want so much to validate this divine feeling, to justify it, that you rush to attribute real events and feelings to it."

I could go on about this spiritualist-scientist argument. This argument goes on in my head at all times, like a tv channel that I can switch to, or a fishbowl that I can stare at.

The trick is to feel both things at once, and feel harmony between them. That's the kicker, isn't it? A nice quote that I read was "Do not mistake the map for the territory". We are very good at making maps, but we could never deign to know the terrain completely.

Maybe if we take away the need for cause-and-effect. The planets converged, life-changing events transpired. Did one cause the other? Probably not, impossible to know, and also irrelevant. The convergence is important in my life now because it acts as a sticky-note, or bookmark, for this moment when I got asked to go to Nepal.

So now it's most definitely Saturday, and I should be getting ready to teach the kids at Flipside. Instead I'm trying to round up this thought-spew, thought-stew, find just the right garnish to present it as a tasty lunch. No time, you'll just have to help yourself.


Looking over this post a few hours later. I was going to edit it, but I'd like to just leave that moment there. The ground has lurched, and that familiar sick feeling has returned. I've just been by the Nepal people not to contact the London office for a few days, as there are funding issues to sort out. This could be absolutely nothing to worry about, or, the worst kind of euphemism for "it's looking unlikely that we'll be able to bring you over, but we'll just string you along for a while just in case".