In Transit
August 2015
In between countries and across turbulent waters lies the flight path. Transit affords the luxury of being suspended between time zones, nations, languages, commitments and expectations on the ground. Phones are switched to flight mode. Strangers are squashed together in neat little rows, facing forwards. Between the earth and the sun there is the flight. Humming, we travel. Something about the quotidian suspended appeals to the adventurer in me. I like being between spaces where I have no control on outcomes and feel weightless. For those hours in the air, I am moving towards something; I have left something behind. I am coming back from being gone.
While I’m in the air, I like to watch films: to indulge in light-hearted movies, uninterrupted. I discover something in every story. At the end of ‘Insurgent’ I’m reminded it’s generally better to be divergent. Characters in ‘Tomorrowland’ tell a story of two wolves fighting. One wolf is called Darkness & Despair; the other is called Light & Hope. The question asked is ‘which wolf wins?’ The answer given is ‘the one you feed’. I think about that for a while; then watch the ‘The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’. In this, I‘m reminded it’s an admirable thing to be planting trees under whose shade you will never sit, and that there are no endings: only the point at which you leave the story. While watching ‘Hot Pursuit’ I laugh aloud and smother silly giggles, thinking how pleasure is a much neglected pursuit in serious art practices, at times.
Then I find myself looking forward to being home. Home is my husband and children, and my spot by the river, and our dog chasing galahs. Home is the dry heat by the cold blue of the ocean and the vast Australian sky. It is the river endlessly sucking salty seas into the dolphin waves. It is also my place to create and dream; to travel inwards and trust outwards. Home is within the hereof now; a reflection of there – inexplicably recovered in the ballads of the spaces between.
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Behind the idea
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Photography of Waikikki Beach, Hawaii by Lucinda Coleman, 2015, reprinted with permission