Today I am the person between < and >
What was my tattoo if not a prayer that “our paths shall cross”?
Our ways always intertwined even without our knowing

I had almost given up and then suddenly
“sorry" and "please" and "can we”
My skin sings

I too must throw an overdue rope out to another
Grasping the one I caught in my hand like an anchor
I am the person between two flung ropes
A boat


I write here before I even write to either of them, because it was something of a revelation for me. The same revelation I always have and that I always mention in this place so that I remember -yet I’m continually surprised by it in each repackaging- that life's always moving and me in it. That the red thread stretches, tangles and curls but is never cut.


****

We have been watching twin peaks. It’s a shame the way it outclasses every other tv show ever. So I can’t help but get over my ambivalence for David Lynch. Yeah I’m jumping on the damn bandwagon –alpha 60 dead laura palmer tee and all- almost 20 years too late.

Speaking of dead things, the store is having a chillingly quiet June, which my retail friends tell me is to be expected. Everyone is on sale harder and earlier but I’m not sure what is the right action to take for us. Have to remember that the business is a moving living thing- I have to keep things flowing in and out of it. Can we be self sufficient soon please universe? We’d really dig that.

Having holidays makes me realise how lonely I am and how bad I am of making use of freedom once I have it. I think I’m still in shock-recovery from the intensity of my usual semester hours. I don’t even have the drive or energy yet for all those things I wished I could do while I was doing this or that assignment: writing, oil painting, massive tidying and ordering of house. Playing catch-up with the shop has been enough for the moment.

We finally bought a Bokashi Bin! Not sure if I have the hang of it yet but there’s nothing like tackling the guilt of food waste and my garden’s need for fertilizer in one fell swoop. On the one-day pile is a proper compost bin for a big food garden but for now this is very handy.

We had our boy kitten desexed yesterday and I’m strangely sad about it. Stray cat’sare a huge environmental and animal welfare problem in urban Melbourne so I rationally understand the need and I’ve never had a problem with the idea before. Somehow this time, perhaps because he is under my very own guardianship and I paid, it felt like sending a creature I loved to be mutilated without its permission. He’s doing well, animals are little troopers, its affecting me more than him.

I have been thinking about the uses of bodies beyond their owners’. After watching a contenstant kill her first fish on Master Chef actually. Bodies are and are used organically, fluidly- changing with their uses is silent but material ways. Hardening, stretching, inflating, twitching, flexing. Then something external comes along –fashion, fetish, violence, a surgeon, a butcher, an autopsy, disease- and says “this part is for this now” and gives it another name and themselves permission to partake of a new use. “Ideally it will look this way” they say. They have skills and experience associated with this re-imagining of the body and these help them feel more entitled to it.

The other day I clawed some moss out of a crack in the cobbled street with my bare fingernails. I put it over the exposed roots of my Bansai. It’s still alive and moist. I am glad.