Because sometimes beauty and poetry mix. Fern seems a beautiful poet, musician, anthropologist and I believe person. She has one of those goodness shines out of you kind of auras*. She also has a helmet. I actually have a playlist on my computer titled – Things for Fern. Which are now redundant. For a whole range of reasons, which I will explain in my other life. So I seem to have less reason to send her the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks Song in the Front Yard. She might one day want to be a bad woman too though, so perhaps I’ll send it anyway.
But her humble (borrowed) helmet, seemed so very fitting, kind of a mossy green – set against the wet, swaying bamboo of Bulimba’s Riverbend Books (thanks to Emma – I was able to actually find Bulimba!) it just seemed perfect to me. I don’t wear a skate helmet any more, because it was just too hot, but there is something simple and honest about them, and the greater surface area means you can always make it your own. I have about a hundred Knog stickers, which could go on my helmet if I was so inclined. But I’m not right now.
Sometimes, I try very hard to keep these lives separate. Sometimes a lot I do. For a while there, I was very worried that I needed to keep all the separate parts of me separate so that I could make sense of them. Now I am not sure if that is wise. Although I beginning to wonder if you want to spend all your time with someone who shares your exact ratio of interest between bikes, books, baked goods, poetry, pestilence, poverty and soave – you’re pretty much going out with yourself.
What all this (Fern, her great mossy green lid, my failed playlist, and stickers) reminds me of, is that you must always do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Or do what you want to do when you want to do it. Or something similar.
Seizing. Moment. Day. Ready. Go. Life. Live.
Someone I know may have just lost all their photos (years of digital photos that is); this can only be described as a tragedy. Having once lost all my photos (years of physical photos – which they have also lost, lots of loss here), I have to reassure you that when things like this are lost you indeed lose something. Actually, you should remind yourself occasionally when you are griping about what you have lost, of just how much was lost that other time when you lost all your photographs so that you can put things into perspective.
More pertinently, you should also consider your safety when you are riding (oooh – I had a really, really considered email question come in the other week and I just remembered that I FORGOT TO ANSWER, I will come back to this, I promise). Because what if you lose more than your photos?
Hmm. It is getting late. I am getting strange. Let’s hold back.
I just mean that life feels precious.
What if this is the moment when it starts?
My friend John wants to know – all the way from England – what this Rollers thing is. I shall illuminate him! How wonderful to have readers from so very far away… who care so very much about such strangely small things.
*I cannot actually see auras. Promise.
eleanor j jackson 