With Bon Iver. Unexpectedly at yoga.
That’s the place to end the day too.
Do you know the way you feel sometimes when you come over the top of a big hill, not that exact moment of coming over the top, that exhilarating bravery of launch, but that other feeling, when you are part way down a hill which is bigger than you thought at first and you are all the way back over the saddle? That feeling, when you just kind of know you could totally get the speed wobbles and die? But it feels sort of okay. Actually pretty damn good. You think about getting back centred on the saddle and opening up your arms to meet the wind. That would be okay. You would be flying.
But you worry it feels okay in a Meg Ryan City of Angels kind of way? Like you’d open up your arms to welcome the sky over your wheels and your hands off the bars and then. Well, we all know what happens then.
Well, Mirerva, our next sponsor on this road to football fame and fortune, she knows what happens then. She has gone up and over more hills than most and still she flies.
Mirerva is also an honorary Radelaidean. Where the magic happens. Handorf. Recommended for those not in perpetual states of game preparedness in the 2011 AFL Women’s National Championship player handbook. Yeah right. Tourism and sport. Why not? There were no carbohydrates harmed in the making of this meal. I nearly had a coronary afterwards but.
Mirerva took a step away from human inspiration recently and learnt to paddle her own canoe. And found joy in inanimate objects. This is how she put it:
Much like the unfailing companionship of a dog or cat, inspiration from an object like a canoe or a bag of skittles or indeed a bike, means that its solid and that admiration of its beauty could never shift from it being just that.
Like the love of a pet, the constant reminder of the beauty of something anchors me to faith that the world is indeed beautiful. And I never saw a bag of skittles fighting each other.
(My previous inspiration was one day seen collapsing drunk on a footpath and I found that to damage the oil painting I had in my head for so long).
I am inspired every single day by my early morning commute to work and watching the sun rise as I trudge up the last Rathdowne Street hill.
The light it throws and the different colours every day reminds me that life goes on and the sun will always rise much after the moon has sunk – and will do that every day.
I am inspired knowing that the sun sets in such brilliant colours in Sri Lanka and in Paris, to the rich and to the poor.
I am inspired by colour and its vitality and the ability to find it in a rusty drain hole or the red hair of my work colleague. The blue of the offset print of the Age or the yellow of home made gnocchi drowning in butter.
Even in the middle of a Melbourne Winter, the sunset and its colour is brightest at the darkening hour.
Now, I’d like to redo this shot, but it’s very late and I’m very having eaten too many of my picture. Which is not really a graph. Nor is it a chart. But Mirerva is off the chart anyway. And that little piece of paper says “captures of the here and now” and was the insert to a mix tape that someone gave me almost a decade ago when they were someone special. And that’s a heart in the middle. A beautiful origami heart. That someone gave me not very long ago. And there’s a bell. And two little clogs from Em. And worry dolls from Sabra. And ten packets of freaking skittles. Mirerva is beautiful memories.
My soul is riding hard.
Speaking of colours, Blues or Maroons? Who won?
And frankly, Adelaide, you better get yourselves ready. Because it’s the next 5 minutes that matters.
Mirerva takes the big waves.
eleanor j jackson 