Lovely Things of Late

Well, friends and family, lots of lovely things have been going on in Australia. There are about a bajillion million festivals going on, the weather is changing with nice cool breezes, Footy season has started, we finally heard some quality live music (blues!) AND the Professor and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary with homemade lasagna and chocolate cake and then Rushmore at a rooftop cinema! And can I just tell you all a TMI story about our anniversary because I think it might make you laugh? (It also might gross you out.) Okay, well, on the morning of our first wedding anniversary, Jason called me into the bathroom to, "see something awesome!" The something awesome was a GIGANTIC, rainbowed glistening snot bubble which Jason had just shot out of his nose into the sink. I looked at it, looked at him, shook my head and walked out of the room as Jason proudly proclaimed, "Happy Anniversary!" I pretended I was annoyed because I figured that's what a good wife should do in that situation, but secretly, I thought it was awesome. I just thought you might want a glimpse into our glamorous lives. We didn't give each other gifts because that's not our style, but we did put lit tea lights in our eyes to commemorate our first year of marriage because that is our style.

Also lovely of late was an AWESOME! FREE! exhibition at the Arts Centre called Experimenta Utopia. We got to scan ourselves, see what we'll look like when we are older, communicate with singing plants, play in a virtual forest and much more. The future of art is looking pretty awesome. Future Tracy? Not so awesome.

Even more loveliness? Yep, and this part is the most lovely of the loveliness if you ask me. I took advantage of a really neat program sponsored by the Melbourne City Library called Living Books, part of Cultural Diversity Week, in which citizens could book 30 minute one-on one chats with extraordinary people from different countries who ended up in Melbourne with interesting stories to tell. I got to meet one of the coolest and bravest people on the planet, a man from Southern Sudan named Akoc Manhiem. His story begins with war and hunger and lions and murder, but it does not end there. Akoc is a much too positive person to let it end there. His story is ongoing, and while in many ways it is still a story of struggle, it is also one of hope and triumph. Since escaping Africa and landing in Australia, Akoc has helped to establish and direct the Lost Boys Association of Australia, received the City of Yarra's Citizen of the Year award, and will soon graduate from university. He also returned to Africa recently to move his family to safety in Nairobi. He believes that Love can bring peace. And he definitely believes in laughter, which is one of the things I learned from him that I held closest to my memory and heart as I walked away from our meeting. He laughs with the best of them. He laughed as he talked about seeing a river for the first time and running from it. And he laughed again when he talked about seeing the ocean for the first time, how he turned away and covered his eyes, saying in disbelief, "What is this?!" He laughed about how when he returned to Africa with a video camera the children, completely in awe said, "You must be connected to God!!" It's funny, too, because as I walked away from him, shaking my head in disbelief at meeting such a man with such a life lived and such a life yet to live, I was thinking to myself, he must be connected to God.

Another lovely thing of late (actually I'm pretty sure it's been there for a long dong time, but it's new to me) is the State Library of Victoria. It's only one of the most amazing places I've ever been, and hopefully I will happily spend many hours there, reading and wandering and people watching. I'm just wondering why it took me so dang long to go there in the first place. I went today and took the pictures you see below, and after I did that, I sat at a table in a large reading room and just listened to the silence, interrupted only by creaking wooden chairs, footsteps, an occasional cough, a book slammed, a page turned. I wrote two things in my journal: "My soul was meant for quiet places." and "Surrounded by words, there is so little I want to say." And I thought of Borges saying, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" and nodded yes, Borges, me, too!