It started innocently enough as a girls’ night out – a birthday dinner for a friend at The Cauldron, one of the trendiest nightclubs at King’s Cross. Maybe not quite so innocent – someone bought my friend a big black vibrator as a gag gift, and it spent a lot of time dancing in the centre of our dinner table. After dinner we moved on to Metropolis … a new, uber cool nightclub in North Sydney. It was so cool that I felt terribly out place, and spent most of the time sitting at the table with a drink trying not to be seen, until B came bopping along and asked me to dance. He was very persuasive and quite lovely …I relented. He was gorgeous, a lot of fun, a great dancer, intriguing, Yugoslavian, and he slipped an ecstasy tab on my tongue. Only an hour before my friend had been telling me how she had come to this very same place a week ago and tried her first eccie … and how fantastic it was. I was horrified … astounded my friend had done that. I was firmly anti-drugs … although I had smoked pot occasionally in the past. Yet here I was … allowing myself to be fed the very thing I had been appalled at one hour earlier.

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A few days back I mentioned Mnemosyne, a Titan Goddess who my friend Rena said she was researching.

Mnemosyne is best remembered as being the mother of the nine Muses in Greek mythology. Zeus, before he took Hera for a wife, spent nine consecutive nights sleeping with Mnemosyne, and as time passed she gave birth to nine daughters – the Muses. However she had a much more important place that just ‘mother’.

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Recently I’ve started a bit of a ritual.Whenever I’m feeling a bit uneasy, or need space to think, want to do any planning or goal setting, feeling restless, or just plain need space, I start feeling an urge to let the sea breeze and salt air blow blow the cobwebs in my brain away and replace the static with the calming, rhythmic sound of the surf. I like to have a good walk, then simply sit and write or just think.

When the urge takes me I simply get in the car and drive to the beach. I’m lucky enough to live in quite a beautiful valley with beaches, mountains and a major river all nearby (well – nearby by country standards )

Today I felt the urge so headed out. It was a beautiful mild and sunny afternoon – and I had the entire beach to myself!! Miles and miles of beach and I was the only person on it. And as luck would have it today I took my camera so after yesterdays very serious post, I want to share some calming photos of one of our beautiful local beaches.

Looking down the entrance ramp to the beach

I could have spent hours today just collecting pebbles. Such beautiful colours.

Looking south.

Looking north.

From atop my grassy knoll.

Looking back up the ‘ramp’ to the carpark.

The sound of the water
says what I think.
– Chuang Tzu

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Feeling rather contemplative tonight. Somebody on my friends list at myspace bulletined something today that at first I thought “wow I really like that”, but later started resonating with me in a rather large way.

George’s poetry is characterized by an aristocratic and remote ethos; his verse is formal in style, lyrical in tone, and often arcane in language, being influenced by Greek classical forms, in revolt against the realist trend in German literature at the time. Believing that the purpose of poetry was distance from the world – he was a strong advocate of art for art’s sake, and was influenced by Nietzsche— George’s writing had many ties with the French Symbolist movement. He was in contact with many of its representatives, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.Do not ponder too much
Meanings that cannot be found—
The symbol scenes that no man understands.

The wild swan that you shot, that you kept alive
In the yard for a while, with shattered wing—
He reminded you, you said, of a faraway creature:
Your kindred self that you had destroyed in him.
He languished with neither thanks for your care nor rancor,
But when his dying came,
His fading eye rebuked you for driving him now
Out of a known world into a new cycle of things.

~Stefan George

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Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond, that closes tightly in and sweetens,–
this entire world out to all the stars
is your fruit-flesh: we greet you.

Look, you feel how nothing any longer
clings to you; your husk is in infinity,
and there the strong juice stands and crowds.
And from outside a radiance assists it,

for high above, your suns in full splendor
have wheeled blazingly around.
Yet already there’s begun inside you
what lasts beyond the suns.

—Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow
from New Poems

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This is a legend from the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime about how the sun was made.  I’m assuming everyone knows what an emu is. A brolga is also a bird – a large crane. The Murrumbidgee is a river. A Goo-goor-gaga, for those who can’t work it out, is of course a kookaburra. These tales are always charming and beautiful. Enjoy!

How the Sun was Made

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Sigh. I guess, once the blogging community ‘finds’ you somehow, it’s inevitable that it will happen. Tagging – Bloggers must post these rules and provide eight random facts about themselves. In the post, the tagged blogger tags eight other bloggers and notify them that they have been tagged. Thanks to Danward for tagging me.

So rather than be a boring, persnickitty, grumpy old bag, like I’m tempted to be, I will do the right thing and participate. (And, um, I was kind of hard up in the inspiration department on what to blog lately.) So here goes (sigh again).

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