To the fence & back

When I was a child, very young, maybe four or five, I remember a group of us playing truth or dare games.I can’t quite remember where it was. I can only see it through the flapping curtains of a stormy dream. But I remember the dare as dusk set in and the grown-ups were laughing and boozing, while us kids were sugared up and crazed in the heat of a dying Queensland day.

Run and touch the fence and back.

A seemingly innocuous challenge, but it was getting dark. And to imaginative children, such as we were, in an environment where the trees and bushes took on a slightly more ominous presence, and the insects and frogs and toads seemed to watch you with one foreboding pair of eyes, it was a challenge.

Once the fence was touched, the sprint back was supercharged by imaginings of monsters grabbing at your ankles and pulling you back into the deepening shadows.

Many years later as a teenager I dared myself to undertake the same challenge again. I made it to the fence but my art was probably the difference between my returning or not.

It is the infinite apartment I own on an island just off the coast of Blahlah land which allows me to unquestion. To uncontrol. To find beauty and meaning. To find the profound in the unprofound.

To unlearn.

…Damo