Running away with the circus...

While Lilly is literally away with the circus in Sydney and Tasmania, I feel like I have been swept under the big top again...all five years old and making mudpies at the skirt of the billowing tent. For several years the circus set up opposite my childhood home bringing with it the excitement and flurry of arrivals and the ache of caravan departures.  Now I sneak in under a new big top without a ticket and stare wide eyed at the enormity of the worlds and blogs of other magazines and organisations and mothers and artists and kids and  in-betweens.  And like I befriended the travelling kids of the circus for three weeks of wonder and play each year, I reach out to a veritable theatre of incredible people and places and projects, and shyly begin to invite them in. The research is Big to say the least and all the cyber travelling from one great link to the next, and the next, and the next, leaves me suddenly spinning in side show alley with too many bright lights and too little sleep...

So I retreat back to our own little BIG top and do things to forward the making of this magazine. A meeting is scheduled with AbaF to discuss partnerships and trading names and the development of business plans and structures. A grant application is prepared to DCA to help with the publishing costs of the launch issue. A conversation is had with a generous mutli-media artist who agrees to 'test his feathers' in response to our BIRD CALL. It is an overwhelming process, and I am held down only by the weight of my own children and the ongoing dance which helps to land the competing chaos in my body. This BIG thing is building, peg by peg. And as my arms get tired, I ride on the backs of the birds flying in and quietly mix up the mortar with the mud.