End of tour, why I have the best friends, and new horizons

Don’t come to Australia. Australia will make you lose your tongue, exterminate your vocabulary, long for the days when you could call something “beautiful” and it would be enough. I’ve over-used magnificent, enthralling, verdant, spectacular, breathtaking, wonderful, gorgeous, thrilling, heartwrenching, etc, and I must come up with something new, some new language to describe the utter perfection of the world around me. I feel utterly inadequate in my ability to describe this continent, yet i continue to strive to do so, grasping futilely at wisps of language to capture the life in front of me. Australia is terribly, achingly, painfully beautiful, in a way that wrenches out my heart and leaves nothing but aspirations to perfection, to the idea that there is nothing wrong inside or outside me. I don’t understand how such excruciating beauty can be met with anything but peace and love and the idea that everything is as it should be.  Don’t come to Australia.  I want it all to myself.

Tasmania was inspiring.  We went on a canopy walk through woods owned by Forestry Tasmania… 45 meters up and there were still trees taller than us!  While parts were decidedly overgrown and were in obvious need of a controlled burn to stop a worse fire in the future, as a whole the experience and place felt slightly magical.  The river that ran through the woods was a deep red from the tannins that run into it from the peat in the area, and so the river looked bloody, and from a distance above the trees, like some scaled, pulsating sea creature was slowly undulating upstream.  There were ferns that were larger than Robert Wadlow’s armspan towering above us, and I fully expected a brontosaurus to poke its head around a frond and watch us travel through its territory.  Everything felt slightly surreal.

The next day, we went out on the Hume river, to try our hand at fishing and to see Tasmania from a different perspective.  It was a sparkling sunny day, and I took this video:

just to give you a feeling of what I was looking at.  That movie doesn’t capture the seals we saw enjoying themselves, swimming around with their flippers out of the water, watching us idly as we sailed by.  We fished, and once again, I was able to assert myself as hunter, although I wouldn’t have been able to support a family, as my two fish were rather small.  No salmon for us that night!

Leaving Tasmania the next day wasn’t something I wanted to do… We stayed the night in a Hostel, exploring the local flavor (my god, the Germans are EVERYWHERE!) wandered a bit around Hobart, and wound up at the Botanical Gardens, which were wonderfully peaceful and well labeled.

But enough about Paradise.  Melbourne was great, we had two nearly sold out shows, and then it was back home to Gosford!  I was rather excited about coming back, getting ready for a new term of drumming, getting my body and mind back into developing my technique (much better to practice than perform at this point, as I’m still learning so much!), and getting back into my routine.  A day after we got back, I turned 24.  For my birthday, I was told to show up in the middle of Sydney and wear something pretty.  I did, and my friends showed up and blindfolded me, then walked me down the street as I teetered around on my stilettos, laughing as they forgot to tell me when we were going downhill or uphill, and generally making mayhem.  I’m sure other people thought we were freaks, or that I was being kidnapped, but I was having a great time of trusting that everything was going to be brilliant and that they wouldn’t let me fall on my face.  After a while, we entered a building (I could hear the sounds change), and then suddenly, I hear an announcement about getting seated because the show was about to start, they whip off the blindfold, and… They’d taken me to see Warriors of Brazil, a Capoeria/Samba Spectacle!  We were actually sitting in the producer seats, best in the house, because the theatre had sold out of everything else, and it was a crazy wonderful performance, full of dance and movement and CAPOEIRA and music and drumming and story and song.  What a great surprise!  It was a thoroughly enjoyable night, even moreso because I could appreciate the effort that goes into a performing tour a bit more having just come off of one.  Following dinner, we had a discussion about future directions for the Rhythm Hunters to take, and whether or not we would want to do a similar style of performance (The decision was no, it was far too sexy for us).

Now I am looking forward to visiting my parents in NZ in less than 2 weeks!  I can only imagine what words will escape me there… we plan on hiking for most of the 3 weeks I’m spending there, which means I’ll mostly be out in the bush.  Expect tons of photos when I get back.

Your moment of Zen:

You can look to the stars in search of the answers
Look for God and life on distant planets
Have your faith in the ever after
While each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
And heaven’s here on earth

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