The House of Love

Community is delicate, deep and coloured. It moves in currents – wild and tidal. It grows, like so many living things, to the degree that it is tended.   When I first relocated to Melbourne four years ago, I had one friend. Blindly, I followed him into a beautiful, messy circle of people with whom I slowly began to show myself. I found a tiny two-bedroom apartment tucked at the back of a block of apartments, nestled above the trees. My writing desk looked over the mountains, and the bookshelf was half-full.   The home grew as my community did. At first, I […]

The Secret Garden

When I think of my heart’s journey over the past few years, I remember the time I watched my friend Laurine tenderise a chicken breast. She hit it with her kitchen mallet until it succumbed – limp.   I would rather you thought me valiant, in love. Independent, but entirely adorable. Definitely too devoted to make mistakes around men or marriage. Totally wifeable, but too holy to worry about it.   That is not the case.   The romantic paths I’ve taken over the past four years have twisted and turned and led me to both extraordinary wonder, and to […]

Feathers, Part Two: Hollywood

No matter your belief paradigm, Los Angeles is a furnace. This month it has had this eery sheen. Smudgy bronzer lines the gutters of Hollywood Boulevard. We have red carpet covering that corner where the homeless man was killed by police. Is that a woman putting a price on her body? Darling, no. That’s a nominee. The Oscars are the ultimate reflection of a hope deferred. They are the television show masquerading as an institution, the marketplace pretending to be a temple. The top of the ladder, the dream of every kid waiting tables in WeHo. Judgment day. We see the […]

Feathers

The Sad Days start the same way all seasons do. The wild plants on the side of the road on which you are travelling, start to change, ever so slightly. They might have been sporting little yellow flowers – bright indications of warmth, health, abundance… But almost without you noticing, they somewhat wilt, and then shed. The plants become bare. It’s subtle at first, only a few dead leaves here or there. But as you travel on, you notice them more. Suddenly, there are no flowers at all, and you know you’re in the thick of a new season.   […]

The Beautiful Men

  ‘Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power, and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and goes in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy is itself undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever-changing, […]

We Get It

Last night, I went and saw a play called ‘We Get It’. It was part of MTC Neon, and created by ‘The Elbow Room’ – written by Marcel Dorney and Rachel Perks, and co-directed by Marcel Dorney and Emily Tomlins. This isn’t a review. This is my response. I don’t want this play to open, and then close, and have the long-awaited conversation stop. In saying this, I am responding to the aspect of the show that I could directly understand from experience. There were profoundly moving elements I can’t address, and so I leave them out – but not […]

Home

Every plane trip, my randomly selected neighbour strikes up the same conversation. “Are you going home?” “Yeah. I guess.” And somehow, I always figure that I am. My body has, for a month, crawled out of the brief cocoon of America – the corn syrup, yes – the dust, of course – but the safety, too. I have had to sweat out the stalled pain of the things I have had to leave behind, their memory preserved, hardly seeming real. Some days, jet-lagged or genuinely in transit, I feel like I have conditioned myself for loss. As if a relationship isn’t […]

Antinome

Not too many months ago, some friends and I drove along Mulholland Drive at night. We watched the little lights collect together, and the larger lights of mansions hiding coyly behind hedges. I remember seeing one house, positioned like a castle on a cliff. It held the prime real estate of the city – looking out over the entirety of Los Angeles. There were people pouring in to a party. The building glowed – lit like Marilyn Monroe, with soft shadows and curves. It was very simple from the outside. Highly mysterious. It even had a carpark, for fifty or so cars. […]

God is Alive: A Prayer

(For Sunday) Here is a call Open and voiced From this gut Grated along the back Of this throat Come back My God As rock is smoothed By generations Of precipitation Of this pull Deeper Down To the animal Crouched In the crater Of this earth As the deer pants for Water So my soul longs for You I have these strange visions, sensations Under my eyes, along my skin I have an entire universe Lifted off my shoulders As if I have carried you while You Have waited To carry me I Have waited For the empty suitors For […]