we can be heroes

15/06/26

‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’ is the newsletter of signed artist and traveller Catrin Vincent, formerly the front-woman of the band Another Sky. Subscribe for news about my first solo record, touring dates and reflections on life in a van and a boat.

Writing club at Iiris’s.

Someone spoke about music existing because it’s devotional, about grief having a colour. Wanting to win in a way no one loses. Iiris spoke about a WWF fighter not liking the ‘way he was winning’, so he changed tactic and lost.

I thought about how to memorialise everything we’ve ever loved in riddles, metaphors or fiction. Abstraction, allegories and mystery.

A saltwater fish saw an eagle, one day. The eagle was from another world, and the open air had always looked inviting. The eagle circled like a kite in the sky. But the saltwater fish, as much as it tried, couldn’t fly.

Oh, it tried to learn. Why not? Life is all about adventure. It strapped bits of seaweed to its fins, made fake wings. If it pushed itself upwards, it could fly for a second. Soar out of the water. And it was beautiful. To soar.

But the fish couldn’t reach the eagle.

The eagle had always wanted to live underwater. It looked so peaceful, compared to the world above it. The eagle tried to dip into the water, and this worked for a while. It could spend longer than a second underwater. But the lower it travelled, the more it gasped for air. It wasn’t close enough to the surface to take a breath.

So it skimmed the top of water, then dipped its body in, watching the fish submerge from the darkness below. They could meet in the shallow water. The shallow water was their hiding place, a liminal space, one only they could occupy. And the eagle and the fish danced like this, for a while.

It started to hurt, though, that neither could go deeper into each others’ worlds. So one day, the fish didn’t come. The eagle waited. The next day, the fish didn’t come. The eagle tried to remember how they’d said goodbye. If it had known it was going to be the last time, the eagle would have said more.

And in that breaking lied an opening. The fish realised how the river is its home, and how water can feel like flying, too. How water, while slower, and lower, and darker, can feel just as free and weightless and translucent as air.

The eagle returned to the air, flying solo. The deep water remained an untouched world, better to think of as a fantasy place, with castles and kingdoms and mermaids and magic. No longer the reality of a black abyss, where the eagle would simply drown.

Every heartbreak cracks us open a little more, helps us understand ourselves in a way that wouldn’t happen had we marched on in denial. None of us are heroes.

But the beauty of this is that it means none of us are ever truly villains.

Blue Bucket Finds:

This Substack is named after Sufjan Steven’s ‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’, a song about the Blue Bucket myth. Kids wandered off from a mining camp in Oregon and came back with their blue bucket filled with gold, but nobody could figure out where they had found the gold, or find it again. So let me indulge you in some things from my blue bucket.

Reading:

My diary lol

Listening:

I asked for hip hop reccs on insta, and someone sent me this album, which I’ve become absolutely obsessed with: