The most asked question right now to the MyPOWER team has to be how do you feel about getting home? I honestly didn’t have a decent response to that for the last couple of weeks. Every time I was asked I said “I don’t know, it’s kinda weird that the tour is wrapping up”. So I decided to do some soul searching and come up with something to truly represent how I feel right now. That will have to wait for now I have a journal entry to write.
Today I woke up at Dale and Ron’s place next to some old vinyl records. I flicked through them and couldn’t help but notice that the graphics on the front of these old record covers are amazing. Something has been lost in the translation of vinyls to CDs. And I think that it is a good representation of how life has changed over the last few years. Something has been lost in translation as we have sleepwalked into this more technologically advanced lifestyle. I can’t put my finger on what we have lost, but I think it might be our touch with reality, the real world. Most people don’t know how to grow fruit and veg anymore. Some people even think that polluting our soils, water and air is ok to make a cheap dollar! Fair enough this has always been occurring but it seems a little more endemic nowadays.
I think maybe this has happened to me and the boys over the last year, except in the exact opposite fashion. We have been living in the tech advanced world our whole lives, displaced from the force of Mother Nature. It’s never hot, because we have air conditioning. It’s never cold because we have a heater. It’s never wet because we don’t have to go outside. We are all happy living in our little box of modern conveniences.
This tour has taken us out of this “shelter” world. It has placed us under the mercy of the seasons, of the winds of the Barkley tablelands, the rain of the “wet” and the bushfires of the “dry”. It has opened our eyes to that connection with the outdoors that we seem to have lost. Maybe we have only noticed this “shelter” world because of what we have been through in the last year. But we are definitely better off for it and already I find myself appreciating small luxuries like being able to speak with family and friends on a mobile phone. I think Tom has been indulging in this luxury a little as well.
So I’ve been thinking and haven’t been able to come up with an answer yet to how I feel about the MyPOWER tour wrapping up. I have an answer though, it came without any thought as I wrote an email to a friend about how the tour has been progressing lately. Here is an excerpt of the email, explaining how I feel about coming home.
“Everything is going really really well. We are in crescent head at the moment which is about 450 kms from home. We are two weeks out and have organised a festival and everything for when we get back! Pretty excited but at the same time can't believe we are nearly finished.
It kinda feels like I have been lost in a maze for a year and all I have to look forward to is the next turn and the next turn after that. But right now I feel like of a sudden I have realised how the maze works and I know that after a couple of corners I will be out and I'm kinda scared about that and don't know what to expect when I finally get back to the normal world.
I guess I will have to figure it out when it happens and let you know.”
So that is how best I can describe how I feel right now. I have just figured out how this maze works. Slowly around these few corners and I might you on the outside!
Quote of the day:
“Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.”
- Thaddeus Golas