Raspberries in Water [12]

You’ve seen it before, haven’t you? Floating around on the ether.

Tell me you’ve seen it?

A startle of light.

That’s the only way it can be described.

It tells the secrets of the universe.

Or at least this galaxy.

The earth spins around in space, you see. The stars are distant suns.

And when you think about the earth, do you think it’s a spaceship, that we are hurtling through the black vacuum of space?

Or is it an ecosystem of itself?

The Sahara desert is a graveyard of ancient plankton. It used to be a sea that dried up, and the sand is the old seabed.

Five thousand years old, it is said. Every day at noon, the winds lift the sand particles, really the ancient plankton particles, into the air.

And carries the particles over the globe we call earth to the Amazon rainforest, where they melt into the millions of raindrops that saturate the earth in that part of the world. The ancient plankton particles contain iron and essential minerals for life, for fertilisation, for the rapid growth of the thick undergrowth in the Amazon.

A whole entire world, yet all of its parts conspire to create one heaving, breathing being.

Do you think the earth breathes?

Ethereal [10]

I don’t know how to pay attention.

To the moon, to the stars, to the earth spinning in the galaxy.

I don’t know how to slow down and hear the leaves fall.

I sometimes stand still when it is dark, but light. I can hear the call of the humming system that is life. I can hear it in the way the trees rustle together.

I can see it when the clouds, dark and purple, scud themselves over the beaming moon.

I can hear it when humanity is tucked away for the night. In the stillness.

It roars loudly when the machinery shuts off for the night.

It roars and it calls me, you see.

But I am always in a rush, I don’t heed its call.

What would happen if I stopped, and listened? If I turned my eyes upwards. If I let them focus, till the blur became a sharp knife to slice through reality as I know it.

What would I hear? What would I see?

Image Credit

Human Graffiti

I have twenty eight years on this God-given earth.

I think every single human being is made to put their mark on earth, in any which way. Little dots graffitiing out way through the blip that is our lifetime, before others replace us.

And others come across our art, for it is art, really, and what do they see? What do they learn? Do they continue our mark, adding paint and fine-tuning our brush strokes? Do they add details that we never saw, burgeoning our art into something else?

A beast, maybe. Clawing its way through solid walls and leaving a trail of rubble and wreckage in its wake. Sharp, sabre toothed, bad temper, a reek you can smell through seventeen mattresses.

Or a home, silent and still. Lampshades dangling cobwebs and dust. Do they come in and brush the dust gently away, painting warm glowing light in the corners, adding colour to the drab sepia, laughter of children drifting down hallways, carpets laid fresh like green grass. Strong, strong roots. Calm, loving, old arthritic hands knitting cardigans for everybody’s babies. And then years later, when you walk down a hospital corridor with your own babies and pass a rack full of hand-knitted cardigans a warmth floods your being. You wish she was there to knit cardigans for your own babies. My Nani. My Len. My first baby, she said, always, even though I was the first daughter of her first baby.

What do you see when you stand on the old old spot where millenniums stood before you? New homes on old grounds. New parks where old schools used to be. Do you think of the ghosts of yore, or do you dream of your own future ghosts to be?

Are you caught up in this race that everybody seems to be on?

Are you clouded by other people’s emotions and expectations?

Sadness and joy.

Have to fix all pains.

Not realising that sometimes, pain has to run its course.

What is your art?

New art? Continuation of somebody else’s art?

What pictures do you draw, my friend.

Weight

I am challenging myself to write a post every single day in May, to kickstart my writing again. I will be following some prompt words that I ‘stole’ from somebody on instagram. Here is my sixth post.

 

Well well well, I see you have found the scales.

Go on then. Stand on it, do. Won’t do you no harm. Sure, a number will pop up, but that should only show you how much mass you have accumulated on your years here on earth.

Would be very different on the moon. You’d weigh less there – but perhaps if humans inhibited the moon there would still be a stigma, just on a different range of weights.

When you were a baby your mother anticipated each weighing you had. They stripped you and sometimes you cried, your little naked chubby body going blotchy because there was a draft. They laid you gently on the hard plastic of the scale and your mother – well she squealed in excitement when she disovered you’d almost doubled in weight since the day you were born. She sure does remember your exact weight and treasures it in her heart for some odd reason.

Yes he weighed 3.45kg when he was born and now he weighs 5.9kg, isn’t he growing fabulously!?

Such pride and happiness in her voice. She longs for you to grow and yet laments your tiny self from a month ago.

So weight is important. If you weren’t increasing in weight they would worry. If you increased too much they would also worry.

It’s just when you reach a certain age. An age where weight seems to become evil and high numbers on a scale are devastating. People begin to become fixated on these numbers, and eat green things in favour of beige things in the hopes that the scales will read them a lower value.

Some barely eat at all.

But no.

Those scales you are standing on are just an inanimate object. Revel in your mass. Revel in your form. It takes up just the right amount of space here on earth, and presses down on our planet along with billions of other masses – the comforting humdrum thump thump of earthlings weighed down by gravity.

All it is is gravity. Your weight. Here on earth.

Stars

I am challenging myself to write a post every single day in May, to kickstart my writing again. I will be following some prompt words that I ‘stole’ from somebody on instagram. Here is my second post.

There were three stars, in a straight line. And they followed her wherever she went. Up North, down South. In the Eastern hemisphere, where the world was tropical and the heat and humidity battered her body until she oozed from every orifice. In the Western hemisphere where the days were icy and short and then terribly, terribly long. Every night, three stars in a row.

If she looked up at the sky her eyes searched and searched for three in a row, just like that.

She didn’t know what they were called, or if they were part of some larger constellation. Scrap that, who cares for the constellations.

As long as there were three stars just like that. Just that, as long as there were those stars. She didn’t know what came after that. Just that she had to see them.

When she learned about space it was always with awe. A deep expanse of blackness and nothing and airless floating, containing worlds of light and gas. Black holes bending time and space, folds of dimensions expanding and contracting. Complex and unnerving, terrifying and beautiful.

But when she looked up, all she could see were the stars. Her three stars, amid a myriad of others. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on where she was.

Dependable. From her safe haven on earth.

Love Letters #46

To the night.

As the day wanes, and the sky gives way to the ever-lurking darkness, the sounds of life retire.

Alive.

But not quite so.

Under a darkening sky, the stars begin to wink. Off and on, in and out, and the purple tendrils of space creep in between them.

And the earth begins to hum, a strange hum that nobody notices by day.

In the silence of the night, they say.

But the night is never silent.

A small face, from the third floor window, upturned towards the sky. It stretches beyond, forever. Stars upon stars, and when you look away, more stars appear, only to be wiped out when you focus on them. And the more you look, the more she looked, layers of stars appeared, until the sky was alight with them, hundreds of thousands, how had she never seen that many before.

And through the years, when life takes her up in its arms, harassing and tugging and screeching like an unstoppable machine, the night still hums with the sound of the earth. Not heard as often, when sleep embraces her warmly, when she snatches at what little she can, she forgets that the earth hums. Hums with the sound of millions, droning through the dark. And the wide silence of space, above.

The night has sounds, you see. Far away freight trains, spilling their hoarse roars into the atmosphere. A dog barking, yowling over the distance, like a banshee over the hills, distorted by the long shadows of trees and the loud silence of night. A car driving by, the engine obscenely loud. And lights in houses, everybody tucked away, except those who dare venture out in the echoing dead of it all. Breathing, as a whole. Breathing, as one.

Dead, but alive.

Alive, but not living.

And the stars, the same, but different. Through older, wiser eyes. Twinkling that same old story, through thousands of years.

And the sound of the earth humming its hum, uninterrupted by machine life.

The sound of the earth, humming, louder and louder, as the inky blackness of the sky spreads its fingers down to earth.

And the stars wink brighter, one by one.

This, this is the night.

And she is at peace, in the thundering hoarseness of earth, the trains in the distance, the snippets of humanity, the wind rustling through blades of grass, the insects, teeming at her feet. She is at peace, as the world sleeps around her, and the earth keeps on humming.

She is at peace. For now.

Image credit.

Over Earth

 

Over the storm,

Under the canopy over the earth,

That they call the ‘atmosphere’.

Surrounded,

Held up.

Riding an invisible track,

Air currents,

Under,

Over,

Racing alongside.

Heart thudding.

Gut clenching.

Opened can of coke, untouched.

Riding on trust and faith,

Please don’t let us fall down.

And the stunning beauty of the earth from the sky

Overshadowing fear.

 

What is Life

The world is a beautiful place. So stunning and ethereal and vast and ancient. And humans are also ancient, though perhaps not as ancient as the mountains or the seas or the many many animals and plants we don’t know anything about.

The hearts of people are mysterious things. The hearts of people quite often are what determine how we look out on to this world. And how we treat it, and often influences how others perceive it too. Oh, everything is part of the something massive we call life, so everything is too complex and complicated to understand.

For example, who can we blame for all the death and corruption in the world? The truth is, we cannot blame anybody. Because everybody who is a part of it all, are all part of a massive and ancient machine. And we can serve justice all we want, but it won’t mend it and it certainly will not make it better in the future, because there will only be more evil hearted people and more sadness and destruction.

Oh, I don’t know how to put this thought. I feel really bitter and upset sometimes, and I feel it in my heart even though I know my brain is doing all the thinking, and it makes the world look so bleak and grey. Even when the sun is out. Even when the sky is bright blue. Even when the flowers are nodding away brightly. And I try to say, well, it is not real. Stop thinking horrid thoughts. But they carry on coming and manifest themselves into very real self made problems.

And we have been around for so so so so long. And so many before have felt this way and so many after will also. But it fixes. And it breaks. And it fixes again. And it will never change.

The heart is so strange, folks. So odd. I am constantly at war with mine.

Well, there is that lovely lyric – ‘Don’t worry, be happy, don’t worry be happy now!’

So, I guess I won’t worry. I will be happy. HAPPY. GLAD. Fun fun fun.

 

On Politics and Human Life

A terrorist is somebody who kills and terrorises others fueled by extreme political or religious ideology.

If a man who claims to be Muslim and kills innocent people because they are of a different ideology is a terrorist, then so is a white man who murders an MP because her actions do not fit his extreme right wing political ideology. He is a murdering terrorist.

Right?

Of course not, folks. The media reckons he is a mentally ill loner.

The Orlando shooter? Muslim? Bipolar disorder? Closeted gay? Mentally ill loner? No. Terrorist.

This world is cruel and harsh and unjust. Innocent people die for no reason, buffoons campaign to run the most powerful country on earth, idiots are allowed to buy guns, hate and fear is spread everywhere.

I guess what we can do is spread our love. Treat our neighbours right. Help those in need, even if they are strangers. One kind action can change a mindset. You never know.

As long as there is love in this world, and good people, they can’t say life wasn’t worth it. It is.

Blue Water

Rain is pleasing, when you are warm and snuggly and it is pattering gently on the skylight window, like a thousand imps running amok. Rain is pleasing when it is accompanied by what you just know is bitter wind, because you can hear it, and because the temperature has suddenly dropped so low this week, but you have a nice hot cuppa tea and the kitchen is sparkling clean because you have scrubbed it down and your parents are having their coffee and it’s all comfy.

Rain is pleasing when the grass is thick and green, and the smells of life and earth are wafting in through your window on a summer’s afternoon. Rain is pleasing when you can hear it tapping on leaves, drip dropping, trick trickling. Rain is pleasing as you watch it smattering down, accompanied by low rumbles of gruff, yet friendly thunder, while your thoughts take you to far off lands, and your mind is void of deadlines.

What isn’t pleasing is water dripping over the edge of your boots, sodden socks and puddles that are growing larger and larger. It’s no fun when your clothes are soggy and your feet are cold and damp, and the wetness seems to have seeped through the very walls of your house, making it smell funny.

Rain is lovely, but not for those who have roof leakage, or are homeless. Rain is tough when the water levels rise and flood your home, ruining your comfort zone. Rain is harsh when it flies in through your broken windows and stings your face, and makes your children cry. Rain is cruel, when it soaks you to the bone, and makes you have to leave your destroyed home to seek somewhere safe and dry.

Rain is water, water is life, therefore rain is life, happiness, growth.

It is also death and misery.

Here is an interesting quote relating to rain:

“Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows. ” – Carol Gilligan

What do you think about rain?

 

Artist credit: Igor Mudrov