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Walking The Elephant




For my birthday, Girl bought tickets. My birthday is in January, but the show I favoured wasn’t till now. And I was quite certain I would not write about it, for mostly I prefer to take something ordinary and paint it up in the glitter of my proficient vision. To start with the extraordinary seemed like cheating, like a lazy exercise. But sometimes an imaginary elephant turns up and fills you with such wonderment! I have been to the circus, ladies and gentlemen; a circus unseated, where you wander, with the crazy performers, and they swing over your head and stewards in leather kilts are busy keeping the balance between thrill and law suit. What the troupe present is inspired by the journey of a wedding gift elephant. Walking from Lisbon to Vienna, thrilling and alarming, it represents the bewildering, discomforting delight of the unfamiliar, the push to believe that things can be different, the very extraordinary wonderment that transforms what was previously regarded as mundane. Proximity makes the magic powerful. I feel unlocked. I feel like I’ve mastered the trapeze myself. I feel like taking my elephant for a long walk.



Comments

The Cranky said…
It sounds both thrilling and magical! Sometimes divesting ourselves of the usual, the habitual ways of seeing things, not only relieves us of a half-realised burden, it becomes a spell-binding path into the numinous.

Oh, and happy (very) belated birthday.

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