12. three things i find very beautiful

one of my favourite people who has ever existed, magical magda, started a blog! it is called hearts and pinwheels but you and i will have to wait a little longer until we find out more about it.

in honour of this, today i thought i would tell you about a couple of things i find extremely beautiful and inspiring, and that thrill me perhaps a little more than they thrill most people.

1. wind farms

this is a strange little fascination of mine and i'm not sure where i came from. when i was very small and went on road trips with my parents i remember staring and staring at wind farms when we passed them, but i'm not sure if i actually harboured any specific feelings for them other than interest.

now, though, when i pass a wind farm i get a strange feeling in my stomach. it's a queasy sort of love, i feel like those people who are afraid of heights because they can't trust themselves not to jump off the edge of whatever precipice they're on. they are so huge and stoic and simple and useful. i don't think people realise how huge they are.

one thing i would really like to do is see a wind turbine up close. i think there is one in albany that you can look at pretty closely. i'll probably go there one day.

2. iceland

when i was an antisocial highschool-aged critter i discovered a wonderful album called agaetis byrjun by a band called sigur ros, and i grew quite obsessed with it. i had never heard anything so expansive and wonderful in my life, it seemed somehow to be an echo of the walls of my rather melancholy and isolated teenaged soul. they were a band from iceland and that was exactly what their music sounded like to me. when i listened to the album it would put a picture in my head: a string quartet in the centre of sheets and sheets of ice, and an all-encompassing dome of a sky, everything white and silvery blue, except the tiny musicians, their heads bowed, floating notes with empty centres into the freezing air.

i stayed up late one night to watch a film called 101 reyjkavik on sbs. i thought perhaps i would live there one day, at least for a year or so. now i suspect that i never will: i like sunshine, i like driving to the beach with bare feet and janis joplin shades, i like flopping on a couch eating twinpoles with a fan blowing into my face. but some days i still wish i was in iceland, brewing big black pots tea early in the morning and walking along the beach of a reedy, swampish lake, recording songs in a makeshift home studio, or rugging up and going out drinking at night with surly cerebral types.

i think i still have a notebook at my family home which contains the following sentence:

when i think of iceland i think: ice

3. dance lessons

i love attending dance lessons, but i love watching them just as much. i don't mind what genre it is. i've been taking swing (lindy hop) classes lately, but i've taken the odd class in jazz and a few sporadic partnered dances over the years. i love the floorboards and mirrors and barres. i love the shoes and hairstyles and outfits. i like watching people stretch in the corner, i like watching the gifted ones show off and the shy people stare at them. i love warm-up routines. i love watching a whole roomful of talented people pick up a difficult move very rapidly, injecting it almost immediately with their own style; i love watching a roomful of uncoordinated people fall over themselves laughing.

i'm not sure why they thrill me so much. i took ballet classes when i was very young, and they were probably my first exposure to anything creative. perhaps this is why.

love love love
lion