Bee happy and stay connected
You just never know how big and deep the web is until you can see all the connections.
For instance, I spoke to a fellow this week who seems like a practical, no-nonsense sort of bloke who spends a lot of time in meetings with people in suits.
But he also occasionally enters a meditative state when he paints and creates exquisite carvings. This was a revelation to me because up until then, I had just looked at the surface of this bloke and it wasn’t the whole story.
Then this week I heard of a longlost letter by Albert Einstein in which he discusses the possibility that birds and bees have hidden talents that could open up a whole new world of discovery — particularly about navigation, quantum physics and magnetism.
Albert was a connector — someone who looked outside the established box to make connections that on the surface seemed absurd, until we discovered television, radar and GPS.
Then, adding to this vibrating web of connection, I read that bees are now being trained to detect the presence of coronavirus.
As Louis Armstrong said, what a wonderful world.
Which naturally brings me to the launch of this year’s Shepparton Festival guide.
The guide is jammed with 50 ways to connect to your fellow citizens from weaving a wire mesh fence at a basketball court to watching people you know perform and create, and listening to the stories and music of all the different cultures we live with.
Festival committee members have turned a bad thing into a good thing.
Out of the ashes of last year’s COVID-smashed program, they have looked outside the box and delivered an exciting and inspiring series of events to make the most of winter.
After more than two decades of dreaming up ways of bringing people together, nobody would have blamed the committee if it just ran out of steam under the hammer of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the festival has gathered steam, and it looks set to continue well into the future.
Who would have thought that a collection of food stalls, actors and musos in the Maude St Mall 25 years ago would set in motion a train that’s still running?
A lot of other events in other places have fallen by the wayside, either through lack of energy or money or both. But the Shepparton Festival is the little festival that could, and still does.
It does this because Shepparton has always been about making connections. It’s the right size, in the right place and runs on a longlife battery of future ideas.
We are not measured by history, or historic failures. There is an energy here that runs through the arteries of disparate groups that creates a big bouncing, rolling ball that everyone plays a part in.
So the sparkie lights up the theatre play, the businessman sponsors the charity bike ride, the mural painter brightens up the fencing supplier, the lawyer writes the dance troupe funding application, the footy player knows the muso who can play at a mate’s wedding, and so on it goes.
Each one makes a connection outside his or her own box to discover something new, something surprising.
Over the years, we have found the Shepparton Festival to be a powerful platform to make these connections possible.
All we need now is a box of Einstein’s bees to keep the world safe, connected and sweet.