the sourcerer: Happiness.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Happiness.

I was very relieved to learn from Oprah that the first step to happiness is the place where you live. I've been feeling a little over-zealous about my new home. Toning down when I speak of it and so on, so as not to appear maniacal.

But the truth is that it has been life changing. I smile every time I walk through the door. Every time I go up the stairs to the loft. Every time I hear a cock crow on the farm.

Every time I look out of a window, I see the horizon. I spend many happy hours cloud-watching.

Last night I heard a girl in an apartment across the street singing along to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. At the top of her lungs. "Home". The reflections of clouds had me enraptured.

The end of hibernation has come. Hello World.

4 comments:

arcadia said...: Ek is so bly vir jou. My woonstel is een van die beste elemente in my lewe. Mens moet nooit die invloed van 'n woning onderskat nie.; August 24, 2011 at 12:06 PM
the sourcerer said...: dankie!
:-); August 24, 2011 at 12:15 PM
Marie said...: Jy't dit nie regtig by Oprah geleer nie! Say it ain't so.

But - happiness. Quite a word. En ek is baie bly.; August 25, 2011 at 4:52 AM
the sourcerer said...: ha ha!
wel, sy het ook gesê die tweede stap is (drumroll... ) seks.
who am I to argue. slim vrou, daai Oprah.

dankie Marie.; August 25, 2011 at 11:39 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.