The Shadowy Marches of the Country of Idleness

Far greater peril runs rampant in a land of not so far kin to the realm of faerie, one where the sun neither dims nor shines, or admits of night announcing its incestuous presence. There is a stream of consciousness alive in the place it is true, without rhyme of reason, signposts or destination. It feeds and births dreams, neither of the waking consciousness nor the sleeping subconscious. We are creative therein, it is so. But no craft takes shape in our hands for we have none therein, but are only disembodied ecstasies and streaming yearnings. We are alive and well, but the blood does not run in our veins as it ought, and we bleed grey syrap when wakefullness pricks us.

This is the land of the grey mist, the faint light not of the sun. It is the land immortal, unchanging, whose time is like a vacuum for our own. Youth is to be gotten there, it is so, but not without sacrifice. Not without life. Not without peril.

A Comedy of Contacts

The most recent post on my sister's blog, appropriately (rather cleverly I thought) entitled 'Networking', is what provided the impetus for this train of thought. I won't spend time, however, clearing up the story, although that was my original idea, because as I considered with immense amusement the prospect of taking different sources and putting them together I realized something. Essentially, this was that the story didn't so much as show up the value of itself on face alone, as both my sister and I presumed, because not everyone saw the value in it as we did. And that taking the extra effort to piece together the story would either baffle most of the people involved or strike them as a ludicrously trivial waste of time.

That said some offering of the occurence from my point of view will serve as useful. I was sitting with a friend in a restaurant when she got a call from another friend of mine, one who she knows only artificially. The event essentially circles around my sister losing her phone, and although most of it seemed to have been managed by my other friend, who phoned the friend I was sitting with, the 'network' of people who were roped in to facilitate its return to its owner was amazing to us. Most of these people had only the barest connection to each other, and yet for a single afternoon they were drawn into the accomplishment of a single goal. They ranged from the secretary in the University department where I work as a tutor, to a boy in Jo'burg whose connection to my sister through my other friend was itself obscure. It involved another tutor in the English department who had studied with my other friend and who used to work as a tutor in the department where I was now working. It criss-crossed from my school best-friend's little sister to Jo'burg, to another girl who had studied with my other friend, who was also a friend of the friend sitting across from me, and who also worked as a tutor in the same department.

It is striking to me that so many people in the department where I work on campus got drawn into the task of helping my sister's phone get back to her, since she has nothing whatsoever to do with any of them, and not very much to do even with me. It is striking that it drew into contact a boy my sister was studying with (who found the phone) with a boy she was friends with in Jo'burg, striking that my friend sitting with me in a restaurant in Menlyn had cause to say my best friend's little sister's name, via a childhood nickname given to my best friend, who she will probably never meet in this lifetime.

It is striking not because of how far we have come with technology, or because the world can be so amazingly small. It is striking because my sister and I have a peculiar way of being moved by every single person that touches us in our lives, whether it reaches her only through her connection to me or vice versa. We are amazed every day that there are so many, that those people are so different, and that we all cherish them on some level in a truly personal way because, even the most random mundane incidents show how they are in some way part of us.