During her sadly very short life, beautiful Carol Jerrems documented Australia's seventies with a tender, yet strong and feminist eye.
Thank you, Carol.
xez
* all photographs copyright ©Carol Jerrems, click to enlarge.
One of Maurice Sendak’s best compliments
I absolutely adore this story by the late, great and lovely Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are:
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it.
I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over.
I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it.
I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.”
Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.”
That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received.
He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything.
He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
xez
Reef Shark photograph by Peter Smithson
Dogfish
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
- Mary Oliver
Prince Gyasi
Ghanaian photographer Prince Gyasi Nyantakyi, or ‘Prince Gyasi’ works solely with an Iphone.
He chooses his colours boldly and his muses tenderly.
Very impressive.
* all photographs copyright ©Prince Gyasi, click to enlarge.
Follow him on Instagram @princejyesi and visit his website at https://www.princegyasi.com/ to see more.
Don't you dare
Caitlin Moran is a very wise and extremely funny human being.
I had read the following words over and again in particular times of need, before I found out that they are actually part of a larger and touching Times article.
However, the fierce and loving hopefulness of this particular excerpt, still remain the core message to me:
"At 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”
In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing – not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.
Each baby, then, is a unique collision – a cocktail, a remix – of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.
When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes – we have never been before, and we will never be again.
Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences.
The honour of being alive.
They will never be able to make you again.
Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends.
Don’t you dare."
Picture by Carol Jerrems
Songs to start the day - 'Jump in the Line' by Harry Belafonte
Some songs just make it a whole lot easier to kickstart your working day- for me personally this is a great one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZR3ZfesIIw
Get to it!
xez
