Phosphorescence

by Julia Baird

Your parents, your friends, your work, your books, everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned, this is when you use that.’ And he was right. What is the point of all you have learned if you can’t employ it when you are floundering in a nadir? Haven’t all those lessons, and loves, been pooled in a reservoir you can draw on?

In Australia, the dawn is an arsonist who pours petrol along the horizon, throws a match on it and watches it burn.

In other words, when dwarfed by an experience, we are more likely to look to one another and care for one another and feel more connected.

Here’s an emotion that knocks out a really important part of our identity . . . I think the central idea of awe is to quiet self-interest for a moment and to fold us into the social collective.’

The greatest obsolete word, which I am eager to bring back into usage, is apricity, meaning ‘the warmth of the winter sun’. When you’ve plunged into icy seas and returned to shore with stiff red fingers and numb toes, there can be few delights as sweet as sitting in the sun’s light, soaking up the apricity, thawing down to the bone.

MOONBOWS EXIST TOO, AND serve as a reminder that occasionally we can be blinkered, or blind to the wonder in front of us.

Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures in 2018, I carefully

Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.’

You understand being small.

Even if what you have achieved seems to have vanished, seems intangible or is not recognised, you can recognise it yourself.

glacial pace of change

beauty is warmth, conversation, intelligence and a certain grace or magnetism, too, but it’s true.

more interested in what she thinks of you, than what you think of her.

And women who are not vain enjoy a freedom others don’t.