Campbell Street at 9.06pm

Last night I was walking home and I stopped to look a few white roses growing behind an old white picket fence. I love breathing in the sweet smell of roses, taking a step out of the world around you, and letting the petals tickle the end of your nose just as if you are five years old. When I stepped away and continued walking a beautiful thing happened... the couple walking behind me paused, and stopped to smell the roses too.

a little beauty from a weekend away

inspiration. there are no words to describe this.

i flew to auckland on thursday afternoon to go to this. there were many wonderful moments. at the end of the first day everyone in the audience made a paper plane and sent them flying all at once.

i found the rustling of two thousand pieces of colour paper being folded so beautiful.

a little joy in the familiar

i recognized your voice by the sound of your laugh.

i could listen to this a hundred million times.

i'll take care of you, take care of you, that's true...


from take care by Beach House

page one hundred and twenty seven

'So you do love me, little thing?' he murmured.

from A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

good morning

I opened my mouth and the room filled with birds.

Elliott Smith

found

i found this sign outside the bats theatre when i was walking home last night. there is something very beautiful about its sadness.

a bookshelf

i love this. it's so erratic and hoarderish (a new word?) and a little bit wonderfully organised all at the same time.

Photo by Melchior Tersen via Andrew Harlow.

sunshine at Makara beach and only one teeny cloud in the sky

snow day!

happiness.

sharing

i would like to share one of my favorite short stories with you. i love short stories. and this one... i've read over and over again. the story is mournful, lonely, and an illustration of overwhelming sadness. and i find it moving, hopeful and beautiful.

This Is How Good the Coffee  by Denise Sammons

It's a grey day, raining and cold, yet I'm sitting, under shelter, outside. Happy. I am loving the  feeling of the clambering stopping. Then a tram full of American tourists pulls up outside the cafe and empties its cargo onto the footpath. A woman dressed in pink is telling another - who looks like a baseball on legs, all round and striped - about her problem. 'Oh,' her friend says, 'there's a product on the market for that.'

     I sit in the noise and feel a kindness, a warmth, maybe even some kind of love for these loud people. This is how good the coffee is.

     I am thinking of the French doors at home and how they will be leaking now (don't tell the real estate agent). Or do tell the real estate agent and maybe our house will never sell. Yes. I am imagining the soft plop, plop of the drops on the inside of the glass. I know you are at home with the open-mouthed boxes that are waiting to swallow our life together. You will be sitting with the cats, reassuring the ones you are taking and saying goodbye to the ones staying with me. In this moment I can almost see how it could all work out for the best. This is how good the coffee is.

     Sparrows ring the table where I am sitting. They skid towards my plate, aiming for the muffin, but then they get frightened and slide back to the edge of the table. They have no staying power. Their claws have no traction. Up close their bland commonness is transformed into beauty. The striking marking on their wings making a pleasing contrast to the soft, downy bodies. I want to hold one in my hand so some of that softness could seep into me, into my heart. I know that's impossible. I think of her. I do not smile. No coffee is that good.

from This Is How Good the Coffee Is by Denise Sammons. i found it a book given to me by my Nana. One hundred New Zealand short short stories, edited by Stephen Stratford, 2000.

by train

over the christmas holiday i travelled by train to christchurch. and later home again to wellington.

i think there is something beautiful about taking the train. it's quiet and noisey all at once. sometimes i slept as the train rattled along. i read, daydreamed and listened to the rain. i like to be alone and still surrounded by people and the landscape.

He walked across the length of every carriage looking for the most secluded seat. A disruptive minority of humankind regarded journeys, even short ones, as the occasion for pleasant encounters. There were people ready to inflict intimacies on strangers. Such travellers were to be avoided if you belonged to the majority for whom a journey was the occasion for silence, reflection, daydream. The requirements were simple: an unobstructed view of a changing landscape, however dull, and freedom from the breath of other passengers, their body warmth, sandwiches and limbs.


from The child in time by Ian McEwan

humming

They exchanged glances, trying to recognise the emotions of the day before. For a moment each seemed unreal to the other - then the slow warm hum of love began again.

from Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

bones

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

from And our faces, my heart, brief as photos by John Berger

waiting

I will tell her...she sighs and stirs, sweeps her unbrushed hair clear of her watery eyes, goes to rise but remains sitting, cups her hands around a jug - a junk shop present to herself. In her eyes the window makes small bright squares, under her eyes cusps of blue twin-moon her white face. She pushes her hair clear, sighs and stirs.

from In between the sheets by Ian McEwan