In the midst of a bustling city

I don't know about you, but the city for all it's glamour, glitz and parties, for all it's culture and couture, can seem a starkly empty and hollow place to me; tall, high-rise buildings towering above people rushing from one place to another, in the struggle to stay afloat and keep up in a rat race that relentlessly gets faster and faster

But right in the midst of the all the meaningless striving, there's a place that's different; a place hidden deep in the recesses of a dingy laneway. Perhaps apt, as I've always contended that Melbourne's true treasures are found down laneways (or at the end of two)

For the last two days of my self-imposed sabbatical of sorts, I've been @ Urban Seed helping out with some IT stuff. I'm still a little puzzled at how a place can still feel so much like home, even after four months removed and so much movement in my own life since

I found myself walking down the laneway, pressing buzzers and walking stairs so familiarly; but surely it was more than the stones and improperly-attached-to-the-wall elevator doors that beckoned once again




I don't think it's normal to leave somewhere for that long, and to be included again so seamlessly and effortlessly; conversations picking up right in the middle, without the hint of the 4 months of blank space between

Not a slick, well-oiled machine producing off-handed polite remarks, but rather the gathering of unlikely and seemingly divergent people...

There was Mark, continuing to helm such a bizar grouping using nothing but awful pastoral jokes (wonderfully awful :D), completely black attire and a quiet manner that never belies the heart of a creative worship guru

Brent, with his yacht-club playboy demeanor, Kate who seems to always be dressed for funerals (darkly; but yes, always hot), Sue that almost-seems-scattered-in-a-brilliant-way, thought-she-was-scary-but-is-actually-funky gin & jihad jeff, i-have-a-wife-and-three-kids socialist marcus, almost-out-of-control-i-have-that-much-spunk mel, keyser sorze luke, my cynically-beautiful (or beautifully-cynical?) banterer Sammy and the most precious hobbit Toms... how could I even describe the personality pot that is that space?! I can't

Perhaps it's because so much of me is still there, is there in the '06 resies that still call central-house home, the huge part of my heart that will belong always to christop-'nomes-ray (and bio-diesel ali), always

A newspaper once used the term for the open-lunches of "soul food" (would that be what edith sprigg eats?); I left today, until who knows again, walked out of the heart-place of the laneway into the comparatively desolate city, but restored incredibly in soul and resolve