hitting the high notes
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
The lists have been drawn up, the worldly goods stashed or relinquished, the packing visualised, the return ticket seriously contemplated if still not purchased, the farewells and !buen viajes! by and large celebrated, and my daily twelve-second panic attacks about traveling have dissipated into a high sustained tone of near-breathless excitement. This must be the high note I'm leaving on.
Which makes me ponder about the power of travel to wind us up - to shift our pitch. If poetic resonance is at the core of our connection with each other - our senses of humour and conversational sense-making - does this higher pitch resonate differently? I feel funnier (in both senses) and more insightful. I am probably more obnoxious than usual.
It's been a crazy couple of months. Feels like about a year since I came back to Alice in a towtruck, trailing smoke, exhausted and (despite the circumstances) faintly triumphant. Part of that time lapse thing is going away and the growth it spurs. The letting go involved. I have such a wonderful community of bold geniuses around me here in Alice, and it makes it a hard place to leave. There are other places I feel like I have this and I wish I could be in lots of them at once. Sometimes I fantasise about collecting all the bold geniuses on an island. But instead I want to infect everyone on this planet with an awareness of their own abilities.
Damn, I really must write that self-help book.
The letting go, the leap of trust you make when you throw yourself halfway across the planet in a tin-toy bird, makes me high in almost the same way that writing makes me high. Poetic risk is the antidote to boredom and despair. Not that I have been anywhere near either of those states for a while - but it's good to write these things down for future reference.
And another part of it *is* work, the things I've been figuring out which now seem so obvious: that I am on this planet to help people use their imaginations, and that this is healing work. That imagination is the cure for memory.
So yeah, leaps of faith and states of Grace. I get my copy edit back next week by which time I'll be in Sydney. Looking forward to family time there with some of my biological and secular relatives. I'll take my manuscript up in the air with me, work on it on the plane and on Waikiki beach. I love that the structural edit was done in transit between Alice and Darwin. Actually between Brisbane and Alice and Darwin if you take meetings into account. And the next phase will happen in another kind of transit. Serendipitous, for a book about love and distance.
Yes, I am cynically collecting anecdotes for future launches.
I have 'I wanna be sedated' stuck in my head, so some things never change. twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go-oh-oh... here we go again!
Which makes me ponder about the power of travel to wind us up - to shift our pitch. If poetic resonance is at the core of our connection with each other - our senses of humour and conversational sense-making - does this higher pitch resonate differently? I feel funnier (in both senses) and more insightful. I am probably more obnoxious than usual.
It's been a crazy couple of months. Feels like about a year since I came back to Alice in a towtruck, trailing smoke, exhausted and (despite the circumstances) faintly triumphant. Part of that time lapse thing is going away and the growth it spurs. The letting go involved. I have such a wonderful community of bold geniuses around me here in Alice, and it makes it a hard place to leave. There are other places I feel like I have this and I wish I could be in lots of them at once. Sometimes I fantasise about collecting all the bold geniuses on an island. But instead I want to infect everyone on this planet with an awareness of their own abilities.
Damn, I really must write that self-help book.
The letting go, the leap of trust you make when you throw yourself halfway across the planet in a tin-toy bird, makes me high in almost the same way that writing makes me high. Poetic risk is the antidote to boredom and despair. Not that I have been anywhere near either of those states for a while - but it's good to write these things down for future reference.
And another part of it *is* work, the things I've been figuring out which now seem so obvious: that I am on this planet to help people use their imaginations, and that this is healing work. That imagination is the cure for memory.
So yeah, leaps of faith and states of Grace. I get my copy edit back next week by which time I'll be in Sydney. Looking forward to family time there with some of my biological and secular relatives. I'll take my manuscript up in the air with me, work on it on the plane and on Waikiki beach. I love that the structural edit was done in transit between Alice and Darwin. Actually between Brisbane and Alice and Darwin if you take meetings into account. And the next phase will happen in another kind of transit. Serendipitous, for a book about love and distance.
Yes, I am cynically collecting anecdotes for future launches.
I have 'I wanna be sedated' stuck in my head, so some things never change. twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go-oh-oh... here we go again!
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