Today, my hair, the pages of Rilke’s poetry collection, and Treasury garden’s fallen leaves were all fighting against the spontaneous lashings of the brutal wind. One minute the air is silent, cool, and the next you lose your fruit juice to its swiftness, and find your coat decorated with crunchy bits of crimson leaves. 

The sun, on the other hand, appeared more committed to its purpose. It was unsparing, enduring in its assertion of light, so much so that I couldn’t tell if my eyes were lubricated from trying to avoid its glare or if I was simply tearing at how nature’s naked flames have so precisely warmed up Rilke’s ruthless words. 

Some years ago, when I was a kid and the word ‘ambition’ was still obsessively uttered, I believe there were already telling signs that madness was gnawing away my sensibilities. Yes, even as a kid. I loved drama and theatre but hated my peers, I was rude to some of my teachers but expected them to read and give me honest feedback on little stories that I wrote outside of class, and I thought that losing my way home made me feel like Robinson Crusoe, meaning I enjoyed it. 

So I guess there really isn’t anyone to blame for the ideals that I now have, which have been forged almost entirely out of stubborn imagination. Even at my most ambitious, my ivory tower is just to give of something that makes people feel; to put the human back in people. Simply put, to offer every pathetic sod I meet some slushy hot chocolate that puts the life back in them, and makes them go out and have outrageous sex.

It could be that this place has run out of manna, but I haven’t been very excited about the things around lately.  I blame it on the blinding sun and the fact that it’s simply too hot to be drinking hot chocolate.

But well a friend came to town for a visit recently, and the energy she brought with her, along with the promise of being able to soak our minds in music and literature in a cold, beautiful place…well that one made me sit up.

There wasn’t even a need to make up my beast of a mind. I’m excited to fly out to a place where I can be swathed in cool wind, hear my bones begging to be back in the heat, and be warmed by songs and words. And hopefully, if I’m lucky, I’ll bring something back.

‘Let us look for secret things

somewhere in the world,

on the blue shore of silence

or where the storm has passed,

rampaging like a train.

There the faint signs are left,

coins of time and water,

debris, celestial ash

and the irreplaceable rapture

of sharing in the labour

of solitude and the sand.’

Forget About Me - Pablo Neruda 

At the columbarium today, I was trying hard not to look in. I just couldn’t embrace what I was doing and was afraid somewhere along the way I’d lose the nerve to brave through the day.

The place was belching; with people, heat, scented and pungent fumes, heaves of smoke ashes. And then in comes more people. And the momentum that people bring  to a place where momentum is buried. Every single one of us, confronting our mortalities in little tightly packed cubicles lined with rows of little square boxes. I was trying hard not to look in.

Until my uncle said, ‘At least Ah Ma gets to watch the sunrise every day.’

I guess it’s true, she does have a decent spot in the larger scheme of things. She does. I wonder how many quiet sunrises she must have seen, how many of those we’d already missed out on, and how I absolutely must rise earlier and catch some sunrises with her. 

Something set me wondering how that imploding hunger to have someone - to have your body pressed firmly against theirs and yet have the stammering nakedness of their skin feel so tender as it grazes and moulds into the nakedness of your own -  how this senseless, urgent bodily hunger, an explosion in the moment, can just as easily be subsumed into the night, weary naked bodies now unnatural in the glare of morning light. 

Now that the mist of arrogance and self-indulgence has glazed over, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to come to terms with the fact that I’m so blessed, so blatantly blessed to be surrounded by beautiful people, sincere and pure of heart, open of mind, big brazen souls.

All my friends, I’m undeserving of all your goodness but from your big hearts I draw soft beauty.

Vamos.