In these limbs.
Don't lose sight of delight.
Here is me reading this post should you need or fancy it, my loves.
This morning an old fortune cookie fortune fell onto the floor,
Happiness will always follow
you.
An apt reminder for us all right now, I started thinking about all of happiness that’s been following me these last few months…
I thought about when…
…the man with a whole world in his eyes and magic in his fingertips, handed me a pressed four leaf clover that he’d found and kept especially for me.
…he tells me there's no gravity under water so her mermaid boobs need to be brilliant. I like the detail in this thought, and that her perfect rack now sits emblazed on my skin forever. A reminder to dance in the clouds with my feet on the ground. To accept the reality, and acknowledge the fantasy, and let both co-exist.
…she gifted me a drawing of the inverse of a mermaid, a fish with tall fish netted pins and heels. She’d danced words across the back of the page that made me tear up.
…unprompted we all placed our knives and forks down and sing at the top of our lungs, like it was planned. Like we all knew that at that precise moment this is exactly what we were meant to do, which of course we were. Eighty something people on the top of a mountain, swaying to the music in their seats, singing about love with an abandon so bold it fizzed my core, and the laughter that escaped bent me in half. Bodies are meant to bend in half like this. With joy like this. Not the other ways we’ve carelessly watching on our screens for a whole year, a whole life time, now.
…my friends go to one of the most dangerous places in the world to honour our friend on his wedding day. They dance in the streets for hours. The entire town shows up to feast and celebrate. A bomb killed fifty people the day before. But on this day they celebrate the joy, the joining of families, the music in their limbs.
How sad that we forget that we get to have music in your limbs. That there’s meant to be music in our limbs.
Let there always be music in our limbs.
…the Aunties tell him the ancestors are speaking to him, and the koalas are the sign. The koalas at his doorstep. Every night. The aunties tell him this wisdom, and he tells me. One day soon I'll get to see the koalas too. What a privilege.
…she has a premonition that the dog she needs to rescue is ready for her. She knows where she's from, and she’s right, like she so often is. Her new love arrives with the ease of the prophecy. This giant dog has love in her eyes that looks like past loves. It feels meant to be.
…years ago a tiny psychic told me that Disney would feature in this future vision, so when he utters the words, "When I worked at Disney..." I gulped hard and shouted, "YOU WORKED AT DISNEY?!" I didn't tell him why and allowed myself to seem ever so strange, but he can handle my strange. How lovely when even your strangest bits are seen and held.
If you fancy you can subscribe to this sparkle punk glittering ever evolving space as a divine way of staying in touch and supporting me and my work.
…I learn by my loves learning that love isn't in fact all you need. That what you need is love AND timing and reciprocity and alignment and work and commitment. You need love AND co-regulation and interdependence. You need love AND to commit to yourself and what you know is true and real. You need love AND to stand in the ache of vulnerability and speak aloud only the true things. You need love AND to make agreements and hold your hurt and learn and practice and tweak the way you communicate. That is how you love. Falling in love is easy. Being in love takes work. I marvel at the love in action I get to witness. The models that don't exist that have to be made so whole new ways of loving become possible for the rest of us.
I don't want a grin and bear it kind of love. I don't want a love where longevity is the only marker of success. I want a love that is emboldened by my commitment to myself. That is alive and active and conscious.
…she insists we go to the dog park so I follow her lead, we meet another black pug named Paddy. They are the only two dogs at the dog park and Paddy's dad tells me that pug hearts are tiny, he holds his two fingers together in a circle like he's gesturing good effort. I look at her, there's a good effort of love in her tiny heart. It's all there is. Unconditionally. How lucky I am to receive all of it.
I think of my own heart that still feels tender with a self-stitching laceration, while at the same time glittering with new longing. How resilient she is.
…there was glitter in my dress as I watched the dancers limbs glitter with their hearts in their fingertips, their politic in their toes as they take up all of the space and glitter falls from the ceiling and we all get up and dance too. There aren’t enough moments where we dance together.
Let there always be music in our limbs.
…I giggled under the flower garland fairy lights and marvel at my friends and the simple delights of board games and queer joy…which isn’t simple at all when you think about all of the hard fought for ancestral liberatory action required for us to experience this simple joy. Both and…multiple truths at once.
…I got to delight in the bar raising revelation of no longer accepting things past versions of you would, like being with a partner who isn't excited to spend time with you. I celebrate this learning with her as though it were my own.
…the universe shows us she is an expert comedienne with impeccable timing. I sit in the dark with my students watching an actor be exceptional on the screen, the tension thick, with both the magic of the art and the unspoken communal experience of watching a sex scene together, when precisely in its beginning throes the “Low Battery please plug in,” warning sign covers the screen and the discomfort bubble is popped.
…my car stops working on a busy roundabout and two people help me get to a safe spot. May car dies. I think about fifteen years of adventures and dreams and joys and tears and moments and relationships that have begun and ended in all that time. All the music and dancing that happened, and didn’t happen, in all that time. I'd called her Constance. Constance by name and constant by nature.
The universe continues the twenty-twenty-four theme of letting go of everything not of service.
Dandelions dance across the sky in perfect moments reminding me I'm exactly where I'm meant to be. I once went on a date with a soul love and only realised after he had dandelions all over his shirt.
Don't lose sight of delight.
The tiny delights that wick away the brazen horrors.
Let the joys be the fuel.
Pleasure is the calling card of the resistance.
Resisting hopelessness.
Resisting obedience.
Resisting acceptance that things can't be brighter and better and different for ourselves, and for each other.
The delights remind me of the truest nature in these cells. The cellular bits that remember that bird song is poetry. And our intuition knows. And community is kindness. That peace is self-made in the saying and doing and living of the truest things. Because peace is possible even amidst the abominable, especially then, because there is delight. And there is always delight to be felt in these limbs. Always.
Love.
Claire.
Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.
Thanks! Needed this!