What does it for you?

I have concluded that the thing that does it for me when I am feeling ill or down - that leads me on, keeps me hanging on - is a sense of wonder. Whenever I slip down into a funk, what tends to start drawing me out again is something kind of ethereal, something God-reminiscent maybe, something that makes me sit back and go, "Wow!" A lot of the time it's nature. A lot of the time it's science-philosophy stuff. The nature of time. Quantum mechanics. It reminds me, as I need reminding a lot lately, that this crap boring thing we are stuck in, this dull as dishwater culture, is far less real than the reality of quantum mechanics. That's the sort of thing that keeps me hanging on, you know?

How about you? What things are there that are guaranteed to get you ever so slowly sitting up just a little bit straighter, feeling the stirrings in your heart again?

This afternoon I lay on the couch and watched a show about the rains that come to Lake Eyre, in central Australia, every five years or so and cover it salt bed with water. The life that flourishes in the drought is quite amazing. The land, it can look to untrained eyes like nothing may dwell there but it teems, even in the drought. The colours - oh, the colours make me ache. The red of the earth, the blue of the sky, the pale yellow and green of saltbush. When the rainy season hits, it's quite phenomenal. Masses of pelicans, thousands of them. A frog, which hibernates down under the earth - often for several years - survives in the dryness by encasing itself in a strange moisture sac. Until the rains come, dripping through the ground, onto the sleeping frog. It wakes. The sac becomes the first meal it's eaten since it's long snooze, and then its out onto the surface to dance and mate and eat and drink until the rains depart once more, and it's back underground again.



The thorny devil stands in the rain, soaking it in. In fact, it doesn't soak it in so much as it drains it in, the water running past its spikes, in rivulets directly into its mouth. Ingenious.

The wildflowers bloom in great swathes of colour across the desert, dazzling the senses. Bunches of wild budgerigars, shocking in their greenness, hang about on trees. Their mating style makes me laugh out loud. Big on bouncy exuberance, short on time.

It amazes me, the way eyes are adapted like sun visors to desert conditions, the way the red kangaroo can go for several months without drinking anything at all. The humour that is inherent in so many different things. The bird that does some kind of crazy mating dance to impress its wooee, a seed in its mouth like a flamenco dancer. The origins of how it all came about is irrelevant to me in some ways. I'm far too enamoured with looking at it, far too glad that I live in a time where I can watch the amazing camerawork of people labouring in love so that I can wonder, marvel, joy - and yes, even cry at the Personality that to my mind screams its joy through everything.

Image: Thorny Devil by Nokes