0106: Ask your friends how to be great.

Recorded: Monday, 19th of May, 2025

Location: Abbotsford, Victoria, Australia

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Poem:

Spin yourself around in circles – the faster you move, the lighter you’ll feel. If not in the body, you’ll soon feel it in your head. Dizzy, even a little effervescent. Feelings, like air bubbles, rushing to the surface.
I’m puzzled. The world seems to be spinning faster, but it doesn’t feel any lighter. Is the gravity of Earth pulling down heavier? Is this what centripetal force from high school physics really feels like, or are my shoes just weighted? The world is dizzy. I’m sure we’re meant to be dancing, fox-trotting, salsa-stepping, but I think we’re pirouetting, on the same damn dime and spinning ourselves giddy till we run out of time.

I look at the things around me that are meant to move slowly, like magazines, curtains, and the butterfly wings on the latte next to me… but instead, they’re turned over left-right-left-right, pulled up before the sun and down after the moon, rung in on a bell, capped with a lid, and sent off for a photo to be sipped on through a screen.

I think the world is seeing stars. Not rockstars, pop-stars, or even shooting stars. Perhaps, if you don’t take a deep breath. Quick. Box-breathe, 4,3,2,1 - you might see them too.

We became bored with being bored because it wasn’t efficient enough. Now, I’m a little worried if boredom has become extinct. Will it be something we talk about, like the Tasmanian Tiger? - “Oh boredom, it went extinct in 2017.”

I look at how we run ourselves in circles in conversations, communities, and countries. Of course, we’re going to bump heads and fall. Look up, see the stars. Close your eyes a bit, look carefully.

You saw what I saw?

A star goes wild in the places beyond air — a dark star born of coldness and invisible. It hits the upper edges of our atmosphere and look! It is seen! It flames and arcs and dazzles. It goes out in ash and memory. But its after-image remains in our eyes to be looked at again and again.

Stewart tells me.

So I know there are stars, something true and real, but I found they don’t look like galaxies, and the suns retired 3 billion years ago.
They look like poems, and soft, narrow tracks below ancient trees. They look like a heavy head on a Sunday afternoon at 2 pm with a tea in hand. They look like adventures, and long dinners, and I’m sure they are dusty, like the book that’s been staring at you for the last 17 months.

So, I’ve found there are two ways to see the stars. You can spin yourself into orbit, or you can pull the handbrake and stop on the side of the road, letting the traffic pass you by.

There’s a space for you that sits beside noise.

Stars still exist.