Seeds from the suitcase
I was raised on a farm.
902 acres of green rolling hillsides, bushland, cows, wildflowers, adventure, and the old fallen down homestead that my father had grown up in.
It was the perfect place for an imaginative, introverted child to grow up.
It was a the best playground ever…..well, you now, apart from the asbestos, rusty nails, broken glass, decaying medicines, paranormal experiences and stuff. Sometimes I wonder exactly how we survived our childhood intact!
My brother and I would jump off the hay stack and roof of the house and land with a commando roll because we needed skills to be the international spies we were training to become. Never once had a broken bone. Bizarre! Growing up on the farm gave me a never ending supply of escapist fuel that my brain could make stories from. What I remember the most is all the little things that got left behind in my dads homestead, as my dad would prefer to not have the past haunt him and wouldn’t let us collect anything from ‘the old place’, as interesting as it was to us at the time.
My Aunty Ethel, my dad’s eldest sister, liked to keep things, and many of those things were kept in a suitcase under her bed. I don’t know why this stuck out to me as a bit different, but I remember her and also my grandma, kept memories in suitcases. Perhaps it is what you did, back in the day. Utilise spaces and things the best you could. I have Aunty Ethels wooden scrabble game, filled with newspaper clippings about wildflowers. To me as a child this seemed an odd thing to keep treasure in suitcases, because after all, suitcases were for travelling and for collecting memories, not really for storing them in. After my Aunty Ethel passed away, I opened her suitcase, filled with newspaper clippings, old letters from the war, and all sorts of bits and pieces and it made me wonder if she would just take that old suitcase out and ponder through everything every now and then or did she just shove it under her bed and forget about it all?
Like little seeds that would never see the light again.
So I figured that when I built this whole website, what I wanted was to bring the seeds I have within me that have been lying there in the darkness, and I would nurture them and see what weird and wonderful new species of plant I could grow :). Would it be an inedible puffy fly trap that would shoot out farts, or would it be something really colourful and bold and eclectically wonderous? So despite what urban dictionary would tell you what a suitcase is….I know you’re going to look that up now and I have totally ruined how magical this all sounded but in my head it still sounds magical and so I am going to keep it anyway……..
…… loses train of thought………
*elevator music*
…….
So despite what urban dictionary would tell you what a suitcase is, this is the perfect title for my newsletter. It is all those things I have wished I could grow in the world, from the core of my being, to reach you and then hopefully share a little inspiration to find your seed that you hopefully plant in the world until there is a whole forest of weird unidentified species of effervescent brilliance.
That’s how a forest grows.
It just throws out as many seeds as it can and sometimes birds eat them and they get pooped out and sometimes they find their way on the water, on the wind. Sometimes you just have to throw the seeds out there and let them land where they may. Into a sculpture, a podcast, a letter to a stranger left on the park bench, or the ping pong brain seeds thrown into an oddly formed blog.
One of those seeds is exactly what you have just been reading :)