Salty memories of lighthouses

I don’t like fish or fishermen, but I like their company from afar. I have to admit I don’t see what’s relaxing about fishing, but it relaxes me to watch them busy about their hobby, diligently becoming smelly and salty, enjoying the pretension that they are catching their own food, hunting for their keep, or perhaps just escaping their families. They form part of the scenery, the backdrop in my mind. Their fishing rods merge with the birds and boats. Two kayakers soldier on out into the wind and swell, two white specs disappearing into the grey horizon before me. If I stand here long enough I’m sure I’ll acquire the weather-beaten, rustic look of an old fisherman’s bucket, spotted with fish scales and blood.

It’s the salt air that reminds me how once, sitting on an ocean rock wall on a dark and starless night, I told someone I felt like a lighthouse. That I was a distant flickering light that no one ever really approaches, built on a rocky outcrop, standing strong alone in the cold, crazy world, but not altogether sad. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that perhaps this was information I shouldn’t share, a secret that contained something so vital to my fragile inner existence that when I butchered it, I was left with nothing. Except for the seaweedy taste in my mouth that you get when you give away too much of yourself to someone who doesn’t really want it anyway.

My headphones are like earmuffs but even still, they don’t block out the whistling of the wind in the yacht masts or the rumble of planes overhead. Today I feel neither sad or happy, not exceptionally high or particularly low, I just am. I stand stoically on my rocky outcrop, a quiet lighthouse, seagull crowning my shoulder, salt encrusting my face. A face blanker than Mona’s with a gentle lost look which only the feral rock wall cats notice hiding in its eyes. Tiny birds dart about me. From point to point the coast stretches out either side of me and I can just make out the distant two legged figures pushing on through the sands of the beach, or clinging to their knives and forks in their windowed, sprawling homes, so see-through and yet tall and guarded. Already my leg has begun to cramp up, my jeans slowly being worn away by that steady wind, how long before they are reduced to threads? How long would I have to wait on my rock before I became a statue, or as silent and unseen as a ghost? How long before my heart starts to beat in tune to the tides and the light in my eyes to flicker?

When I turn to leave, to hop across the big rocks that try to keep the waves out and the boats in, I carry with me in my hair, my eyes and my notebook the salt and the clouds, the wind and seagull cries and a tinge of regret that I can’t stand there forever, a lighthouse.

Some random thoughts sewn together while the flowers sleep

I have no idea what I want to say.

There is a story in my heart with a beginning, middle and an end
but it has no characters and the scene is hazy,
the plot eludes me and the words evade me,
all I know is it starts, gets complicated and then ends happily ever after,
several thousand times.

What on earth is goin’ on in my heart?

Has it turned as cold as stone?

Seems these days I don’t feel anythin’

‘Less it cuts me right down to the bone

David Gray

I’ve been a powerhouse of focused reading, a tour de force of note taking. I have submerged myself in a void, and filled it with distraction. But now I’ve lost my mojo, my way and my light. I woke up, or I’ve fallen back asleep. I just want to drink tea and nap, read novels and philosophise. I’ve been day dreaming about hiking mountain ranges and sailing on calm bays of empty thought. It’s all variations of nothing in particular, something so familiar all over again.

There’s a person inside me I want to be, I can see them, but I don’t know whether they are me, or an imaginary being. I’m staring and waving my arms but for some reason I can’t get their attention.

So I bought a shrub. Her name is Boronia and she will be my offering to this world. In this graveyard garden, amongst the remnants of tennis balls, where mangled bones lie on upturned dirt she’s going to flower in the winter and spring, absorb sunshine and carbon and make people smile... if I don’t kill it.

So come along, it wont be long

'Til we return happy

Shut your eyes, there are no lies

In this world we call sleep

Let's desert this day of hurt

Tomorrow we'll be free

Sia

It’s September, did you know? I don’t think I got the memo. Part of my head is still tangled in August’s heartache and July’s nausea while the other, regrettably, is wearing Sunday’s pants in Monday’s world. Apparently there’s no room for slippers in the daily grind, which is where we begin to disagree, the world and me. Spring afternoons are short and sweet like Perth winters and soon forgotten by long summer days. And I am addicted to cloud watching like my contemporaries are to debt and energy highs. I don’t think I dance alone but its where I find myself, day and night, in my slippers, dancing upon pages and words, words upon pages, pages upon words. But just before I drown in the unabated flood of information I arrive at the life raft of knowledge that it’s tea time. This is an ode to the time spent in escape, except that it is no ode at all. And I know before long September will give way to October like sadness gives way to surreal calm or calm gives way to disarray and eventually I’ll have to learn to stop writing in paragraphs that are lost from top to bottom.

Yellowbetty was looking at me with a conspiring grin and a wink that said lets go and not return, for the hour at least. Let’s take this spring day and roll on by, past picnics and car crashes and screaming toddlers alike, let’s dream this fine Sunday alive. So I’ve been working hard at my daydreams. I have etched out a fantasy in which, there are no castles in the sky, but every hard road is a grassy path where there hides an abundance of tea and sugar in tiny yellow cups and people speak not of peace, for they have known no war and gentle waves crash on sandy shores, sandy shores greet grassy plains and there where the blades dance, my heart beats again.

...perhaps my kindred souls

ride on trains late at night on tuesdays

till they wake again

with wednesdays music in their ears...