This Place

It's hot. Inescapably so, the type that leaves foot-prints of warm clammy skin across your body. The back drips, the legs wobble and chafe. You feel it imprinting it's impetuous sense of rightousness upon you as soon as you deliver yourself out of the comfort of your air-conditioned space and into the mid-day air.

It doesn't create fearful panic, like the cold can, but a slow and frustrating boiling alive, an inescapable truth – nature will always win.

No matter how many 'truths' you can discover in life this living thing remains strange and difficult sometimes. So many moments seem to bring clarity and strength, but they walk in-hand with the endless questioning of our ability to do the best for ourselves. What is it that we really want? What is it that we desire and what is it that will make us happy, truly happy? These days come on like a migraine tinted with fear; the fear of failure, the fear of pain, the fear of loosing things you will regret and can't get back. Ultimately, fearful of ourselves and letting ourselves down by not achieving greatness, not achieving basic elemental moments of truth, reality and health. I know we are all wanderers by our own measure in a vast and seemingly endless sea of possibilities, outcomes, decisions and consequences, each no more dramatic, real, or important then the last. So how do you do it? How do you find levity amidst the crashing waves? A simple dismissal? A greater quest? Sometimes it feels that even the deepest parts of what we think we know are still just passing fancy. On some level everything is negotiable, everything is up for debate and open to change.

Except that one damn thing that never leaves. That biting polyp that presses itself inside you. Inescapable is the desire for more, for every experience that is possible. Having an open heart is to see yourself simultaneously in multiple universes, each one calling you with its own special promises of happiness and fulfilment. Standing on that cliff, head hanging over, hands firmly grasped to either side, not wanting to fall over yet not wanting to stop fantasizing about your own fatalistic plunge into the swaying trees below. You can be anything and everything, but our human minds, our sense of selfhood asks us to be one at a time. The problem is that the freedom we seek cannot be harnessed between them, it has to run between all possibilities, all outcomes. It has to see you belong everywhere, while the heart goes on knowing it belongs nowhere except inside your chest, fuelling your next steps into the unknown. Another cliff to ponder, another road to walk, another life to lead, all as seemingly meaningless and magical as the last. Here in this simple place I may have found a soft repose, the release and forgiveness I needed so desperately, but I have also found the relentless side of an identity that questions everything and will, not, stop. Tear my heart out for the ones I could spend the rest of time with and leave them that piece of me they will always own. Leave these fallen tears and spilled blood on the sidewalks I've grown to love and maybe, one day, I'll follow it back home again; my morbid and broken Hansel and Gretel trail of lost memories and lives I've left behind. Or maybe the rains of time will fall and wash it all away, lost to the passage of years I can't spend, split in pieces.

All the inspiration in the world, all the hope for the future doesn't make it any easier to loose the things you love, so for now this love becomes the new string I tie to the few remaining spaces of emptiness I have left. This time becomes coloured and sprinkled with the glitter and gold of nostalgia, a longing for a time I still inhabit, but am no longer allowed to own.

From Other Side of the World

I know it' s been a while since I have posted anything. After leaving Europe in early September to head to the 'land down under' I wanted to give myself some time to relax and just live life in a more momentary way. This past year has been filled with challenges as well as some of the most rewarding moments of my life to date. For those of you who have been following along with me, thank you. Thank you for your support and for taking the time to see into and through some of my more abstract attempts at expressing the nature, colour and texture of reality as I perceive it.

New places, new things, on wards and upwards!

It's is hot and dry and expansive. It's sparse and magical. Isolated by archipelago shift everything that grows here is just a little bit different. It doesn't matter where you look, you will see something you have never seen before. Initially it seems familiar, but that is merely expectation. Everything that is common is exceptional. I am working in a pub in a small town in Queensland. It is a town of 1800 people, three bars, no cinema, no MacDonald's, no shopping mall and roaming kangaroos. Everyone is bound together here by the innate sympathy that comes from sharing a small expanse of space in the middle of nowhere.

This town carries people in and out like tidal waves. Fuelled by a booming mining industry, the blackened face, florescent clad night shift boys go roaming around in work trucks, trolling for something to descend into while they wait till the next shift. Clouds of effervescent boredom cover the faces sitting and drinking till dawn. Trying to find their place in this temporary world to which they don' t really belong. The smokers and the non-smokers, the livers and the drinkers, the cornucopia of differences are all made equal, by the uniforms of industry.

Here there is nothing to fear. No pretensions, no reasons to be anything in particular. I have never been so free of expectation, with references to Heidegger or Tolstoy getting you revolving slowly around the outer orbits of the fun nucleus. It's easy to to laugh away a joke, instead of deconstructing it. And if you really need to, you can launch a few over the crowd, and see where it lands.

This is Europe in it's negative print. It's my life of a year, in reverse, and it's splitting the images of what I am in two; this and that. Though I wouldn't say it's entirely dualistic, it's more of a deeper understanding of what we are all we are capable of. Of the endless possibilities of person-hood in the eyes of new lovers, friends and places. The fluidity of nature and existence is still present, as we remove once again the restrictions on what we think we. Allowing the cement to float up amongst the settled waters of contentment we rise, once again, the phoenix from the ashes. 

Endless Train

If it is not enough to remove the mental blocks standing in the way between you and that infinite it-ness then you have to go out looking for it. Incomputable, it is something in the essence, the in between of being and being alive. The short circuited shoulder of comfort  through art. There may not be anything inherently meaningful about a crushed pop can in a frame but there is still everything it can mean, under the right light.  It’s either in you or it’s not, to see that thing alive, to see it as a representation of deeper commentaries that push their way through the pit of your soul asking for expression. There may not be meaning in the thing itself, but art can speak, through artist and witness.

But does art really save, or does it merely isolate further? Does belief in the abstract give us enough to live our lives by or does it tear away the flesh from the bone, isolating us from humanity by way of partitioning it into segments of those for and those against? After all if you are trying to express something universal, some touchstone at the center of it all, do you not need the mind and eyes of all? Not just the ones who have the tools to see the multiple layers in the fabric you have created? If it becomes easy to write the world off, in yet you crave to carve in expression of it, then what exactly are you expressing?

Once again it seems we are faced with a choice, either you are going to do something or you’re not and if you already know the answer than there is nothing left to debate. Get on the train and ride it out of the station and damn the consequences, because they are just the consequences of the inevitable, of the choice you have already made before you took it up in guilt and conscience to be examined as some navigable doctrine. Most choices are already made, either by heart or head or belief. 

To get out and see the world was a choice completed in the silence of the first car ride I can remember. Feet up, head down I watched the crayons melt in the back window and the scenery go rushing past me; mountains and tall pines, blue waters of fresh lakes and the exhilarating wiz of other vehicles on their way to countless destinations. It was the first time I was made more complete in my first-hand knowledge of other things and had the realization that I had the misconception to think that all rocks were black. In fact they can be a myriad of colors, coral rose with flecks of sparking diamond white, limestone paste with blue azure checks. They can be flat or rolling, but more importantly they could exist outside of what I knew. It was the first time I saw things change in the passing weight of time and distance. Life can change this way, in the particulate of window sunshine, in the absorption of differentness, and in knowledge of how things are outside of one’s self. 

It was the first time I was gifted the calm passing reverie for change and solitude. My placid adolescent gaze was set afire with possibility, the possibility to see all the change I could and be enriched by it. The choice was made, in that moment in the back-seat, whether I knew it or not, it was made in the flickering light of a noon-day sun that I have been chasing that ever since. 

And now as my eyes waver and close over these stretching desert-like plains I know I have found it again, this strange yet familiar place where thinking is merely a matter of inhaling and exhaling and not conscious decisions. It isn’t 1.2” margins or APA citations or a reading list of irrelevant books. It is the things you pick up in breathing and sight. It is the size and distribution of volcanic ash over unfamiliar land masses, it’s knowing things, not academically, but internally, as one knows the feeling of lifting their own arms, or tasting their favorite food. It is knowledge of life and self through the direct experience of it, eating it up in chunks. Knowing that rocks can be pink or blue or purple not by photograph or imagination but in the rough cracked surface of those colors as you pass your hand along them. This place is strange, the language and customs stranger, but I roll on seeking out new nights and new days, not because it assuages loneliness or longing or home-sickness. Not because it makes you necessarily happy or comfortable, but because it speaks of being apart of something larger through the experience of it. And the decision to seek that particular sensation out, was made long before I could have a memory of it. It is the inherent predisposition of being human, to be on the train you can’t get off.

Continuing On

I have life beyond life. I have power beyond power. I have lived and breathed and died a million times more than I could ever write. I have existed with passion and without, through emptiness without thought of loneliness because I spoke fire, breathed soot and tasted the decay of my most precious metal -  my dreams. My thoughts my ideologies, my ambitions, they sputter forward like little ducks, following forth behind an untraceable, unimaginable goose. My mother hen, the subtly and essence of consciousness. The why, the agency, the qui and the quoi. 

Why I love is not the same as who I love. Who is just a passing metaphor, a glimpse at possibility, the what is the deciding factor, an aggregate sum of fate and inevitability. Why I am alive is not a question but an answer to the darkest questions I have ever feared to ask.  To live as an open gate, is to swing forth in the breeze and answer the call of all those winds that pass forth amongst the trees. To be human in the wind, to remain alive in the swaying factoids that push and pull you width wise and side wise, is to hold desperately to the rushing necessity that stems from cradling unborn dreams.  A dead weight is the eye that rests on its still born child. A mannequin of all possibilities. I shake and move and recreate the motions in an effort to spit forth this melonous weight, this heaviness in my belly that begs for life. It demands the sacrifices of a million fires. The heads of a thousand toads and the lonely empty stretching plane of that desolate highway towards selfhood. It’s not about staring into the abyss, it’s about eating the abyss of existential hopelessness for breakfast and asking for seconds. Seconds, seconds, seconds. Fuck you. I’m coming for more. And this time I’ll swallow you whole, because this time I know the score. No need to be an assimilated dot amongst the mist, to understand the process of evaporation. This time I stand as the mountain and let the water rain down. I let the pieces of the ripe tide pass my impenetrable surface and spit them forth a waterfall in the spectrum of light.

24 Hours in Rome

It glows.

In the setting sun I move amongst architecture and ground hallowed and historic. I am full of the basic necessities of life after eating my fresh grilled panini and cold beer overlooking the Colosseum. The streets here are cobbled and cluttered with the sounds of  impatient drivers and scurrying pedestrians. I remove my shoes to feel the shadows cast my feet onto these ancient rocks. In a glance Rome is the smell of dust and tomatoes, bugs, cars, buses, tourists with sore feet, blankets laid over in trinkets and souvenirs, costumed Roman Gladiators and the upside down triangle of fingers brandished in constant emphasis.  The past, the present, the old the new, things that are built for now and things that are built for all time, they grow and decay in a garden of din and beauty, wavering with the horizon, buzzing under the pressure. This, as all things, victims of the same fatal disease tearing the holes through these ruins.

Just ten hours ago I was home. Now, on my own again my eyes are open and the heart leads on, past eroding edifices and into winding unlit passages that spin me face first into this living history book. I'm back. One with my intuition. Making proper turns without a map, stumbling into everything I need to see. I can be so many things out here, covered in the tapestries of these historic worlds. I can feel tradition pass through the walls that are falling down around me; it stretches and grows the skin covering the insatiable girl residing within it. And through my placid gaze I realize how much better that skin feels now in the triumph of all these memories, under that warm ichor sun that is falling slowly, this July evening in Rome.

It isn't lost on me now, how fortunate I am to be here. To live life filled with adventure and reward. To know that the world is a place made infinitely smaller and simpler through the experience of it. At every turn we can wake up to the joy that is the inevitability of this; we are given what we need, if we allow ourselves to be shown just what that is. To live, to breath, to see, to exist in all our imperfection, surrounded by the intangible, is the essence of living that which is greater than ourselves.

Before I went home I pined and longed for the sound of poplar trees. Longed for the fulfilled promise that we could swim this flood of newness and isolation for that familiar harbor. But what was missed drifting for that ephemeral shore was that home was always apart of the rising seas around us.  We carry a piece of all the souls who crash into us in that particular way that causes us to call them friends, lovers, and family. Their blessings are in the breeze and finally, finally, I can feel it here. The pride and thanksgiving accrued in 24 years. For me continuing on, being alive in this way, chasing these ideas around the world is more than given in any embrace. To show up again to challenge old trauma and all preconceptions. To deliver on our potential. That is the connecting solidarity between me, the ones I love, and the experiences I long for. I see more. I do more. I live more, for all of us. Because the world needs it. Because we need it;

to be lifted up,

in expectation, 

purpose,

and joy.

Fossil

There is a war within me. Two opposing forces that are playing out an epic life long battle of wills. It is a war of sentiment, on one hand good enough, on the other - never. They are reactionary but they are also inherent.

I have come home to a place where familiarly is only implied, no longer expressed in the essence of things that have waited in animate apathy for my return.

I have lived a year of restless solitude, inhabiting a dark-like space and filling it with glory, mercy and grace through great moments. The beautiful sunrises, the mountain landscapes, the warmth between new friends, challenges faced and surmounted. It has been a year of tremendous change and tremendous struggle and now, face to face with the context provided by home it seems impossible to hold on to the revelations, impossible to transfer the feeling of being so in charge yet so out of control it nearly kills you. But of course, it doesn’t. It creates texture and color and music in the deepest parts of you. It isn’t always joyous, but it is a melody of allegory and change, sometimes somber, sometimes rapturous, but always ringing out within. To say that I know myself now would be disingenuous. It would presumptuous to think that there is some type of constructed personality, or internal character that you can know this way; as one would uncover an old dinosaur bone in the layers of hardened sediment.

The creation of the fossil is the discovery of it.

Each experience is hot magma, compression and the scattering of carcasses. Each day that I woke up with challenge in my heart and the newness on my tongue I pressed these things together and saw that they were mine. That is how the self becomes myself, you claim it, one bone at a time.

So I wandered Europe, collecting bones and looking for new light to see them in. Looking for the meaning that would truly set straight the confliction between wanting to fit in and tear the whole thing apart. Tear apart all conceptions of reality so there were no more lines to draw, no more crosses to bear, no more have to’s. I wanted there to be only me and the open seeable universe to sink my feet into.

And I have seen it this way; sitting on a cliff overlooking a blackened midnight ocean being eaten by the reflecting stars. It’s in the knowledge of inevitability, how fate and fortitude walk hand in hand when you finally put all those chips on the table. When you look the future in the eye and say ‘this is what I’ve got, I’m either going to make it or not’.

And you do.

And you do.

But like any migrating creature the time comes to return to home. Here back in the snow globe of old hang-ups, old anguish, old fears are so many unanswered questions. Maybe we’ve been inside this glass dome all along? Thinking we were traversing great distances but really we were just spinning in concentric circles around the same thing everyone is; the gravity of pleasure, to please and be pleased.

The Great Finale

Europe in all your manicured glory look what you've done. Teetering from your 6 inch stilettos putting a spike through this. On one side; the pouring emptiness, black like clouds, rolling around in soot and ash. The other; crystalline swordfish, beauty in magnitudes of 100 degrees. Whipping about your unlit passages. Juggling your cluttered groves. Stone angles and demons, rebels in new wave mullets. And even though beneath it all is everything I may still never know, this much I do know is true - these streets are as muddy with my footprints as I am with you. This is Europe. I have spent nine months staring at people staring at things. Taking picture of people taking pictures of things. Big things, small things, old things, new things. Concrete and gravy. People rocking back and forth without realizing it as they sit out for tapas. Licking their tiny bowls and dancing their greedy eyes on each other. Europe you clever devil. How did you manage to pack that much bullshit into one sales pitch? Sure America has it too, telling you what you want and when you need it. But you, you polish it chrome make it half the size and charge twice as much. Selling dreams. Selling quality of life. I don't trust anyone anymore with a moleskin notebook. Don't get me wrong. I am not resistant the charm. There are so many things that are just better here. But even as I dare to criticize this idyllic paradise I know concern, its exposure will be met with serious resistance from those who need to keep the dream alive. I treasure the things I have seen. The developing further a serious love for contemporary art. Culture continues to intrigue me. But to study this, is to study a travel brochure. All of this is dependent on telling ourselves what is good and what is bad until it encroaches in on itself; an artistically decorated box. Here is what I see. Intermittent with vacillating exasperate joy is the desire to continue to push back. Push this thing on its head and tell it to stand for me. It's the desire to shake people from their perfect hateful conceptions of themselves. It's pictures of manicured, pedicured, over-cured meat. Its money. Old money and old men. Little china dolls, overdressed children. Its people living lives yes, struggling, destitute, hopeless lives. It's chasms and schisms and rocks. Its youth and it's age, together at last, looking for the same thing, but staying at different hotels. I have spent nine months in Europe watching people on vacation. Watching family dinners by candlelight.  Watching lovers roll around themselves in midnight embraces.  It's the feeling that despite travel being my life's ambition, despite it being all I can think to do with myself, despite it being the one thing that was to save my soul, despite all of this - they need it more than I do. This casual jazz music on terrace patios over-looking history. They need it to be good. Better than what they know. They need the romanticism to capitulate them towards better pictures of themselves. Mirror plates over sewer grates. Its ok too you know, that it exist like this. Marginally more real than Disney World. Its the nature of things. Of cities, of people, of the Western world. Times progress speaks through it. Its decades, centuries of money and growth and progress widdled down and chained between past and future. Between standing tradition and the influence of the new West. Its my cultures elders and with that comes a certain amount of knowledge of how to do things. Unfortunately its what they cannot teach us that continues to haunt me. Happy enough to find beautiful ways of balancing among the ripples, the disturbances source remains lost in time and tailored clothes. Lost in its own perfect cobble stone roads. Perfect intersecting rows, left ,right, left, right right. It's just a pattern too. A pattern about bringnig about the flavor in olive oil, the complexities in wine, but not the essence of this. Why need this in the first place. The coddling love of crafted lives. Money still owns you here. Maybe more than anywhere. This is a refined system of human government. Of casual perfected complacency. Of knowing where you stand and caring less and less in the distracting spittle of an 18th century fountain.

Simplicity More or Less

Two little girls.

one piece of chalk.

disobedience

like an excited ferret,

in their grasp.

one act.

the joy of being,

mischievous.

side long glances

with trepidation streaked brows

as they scurry off,

into the dusk.

--------------------------------------

time keeps me

god know I cant keep it

prisoner,

executioner.

there is a will in it

more ancient

and deadly

then original sin,

it holds me

in its cold embrace

and reluctantly,

unskillfully,

I follow.

Glass

The click-clack of heels down a midnight street
as the waves come rolling in
on an empty beach
while the board walk walks
with lovers
friends
and me

gazing skywards the luminous orange shift of street light
ascends in the sea fog
beaming towards the clouds
caressing their undersides
turning them into
burning orange embers in the sky

salt water cool humidity
and perfume
on a womens breast
passing by spilling radiance
picked up in the wind

passing conversations
a cluck clack of tongues
raining down on the sound of waves
as run away bags
chase run away dogs
in the cool heat
of a seaside night

to be a passing spectator
on a lovers night

is to have golden eyes
in inky darkness

to be loved by the wind
and the years gone by
layers of old photographs
seen through my modern lens
trying to pick them out
despite the blur

to honour the moments of beauty
of solitude
sadness
and grace
that are passing by
all around us

this man and his half empty glass
of Chardonnay
spilling dust clouds from his mouth
white smoke against a night sky

vindicated here in the half dark
the windows of palaces wink at me
from the other side

glass
glass
glass

people and courtyards and cemeteries
made of glass


see right through
from the other side

all this space and all this time

is glass

Dawn

Twelve early mornings in my life I've sat sleepless inside a dream, watching the early mornings rise.

In my life there are moments such as this that are remembered forever. There are moments that linger on; in memory and sound, in light and shadow. And in all these mornings I remember the same caress of cool wind, the same smell of early  morning foods.

And me. Neither hungry nor tired but wide awake at the fantasy of shuffling rays rippling up in the air. Cliffs abandoning their shadows. Night warriors on their last patrol.

I am neither because I am all. All I see in the dawn.

I know many parts of me in this time. I know the sounds of solitude . Brilliant crystalline solitude. While every occupied space still lies in wait for momentum to inspire them towards daylight, I am already here. I am always here. Waiting. Willing. Wanting. The fruits of the mania. The grace in the perfection that is the assuredness of the existence of today. As it always has been. As it always will be. Though the sun may burn itself through. Though the earth may cease its rotation. The dawn I share, this dawn in me, continues on; never to be set down in entropy.


I am a walking cloud. Too light to rain I write my droplets on to the page. Splashes of sun creating rainbows in the mist.


What do I see?


The wings of a bird set in dew. The sliver like beams of light and shadow across building tops. The arching raven, coal black wings. The sky, pink-blue sky, a perfect shade of metaphor. Before corruption wakes and sets in. Before the markets hum and the bells chime. Before the beggars kneel and the cars whirl and promenade. Before this, before all of this, there is me. Me and the dawn and the silence.


Dawn, my dawn! My rippling clothes-line laundry sprinkled dew. My morning with no night. My day with no end. My perpetual weakness;


to be here when nothing stirs,

but you

and me.

Post-Tramatic Rest

No matter how far I've come, I feel that there is is still further to go. Go back, go forward, go down. 

I scroll back: where is the beginning of my memories? Are they apart of this? Or merely a favourable sequence of colours that go streaming through my sub-conscious? Do they pull from pasts before me, or are they created in the moment out of cognisant possibility? What is possible? I can never be certain, I am not still chasing a mirage, a place of caged apathy that helps me control the lack of control we have - over everything.

If desire is truly the root of suffering how can one continue tin ideal passiveness despite the crushing certainty of being asked to be partial again?

I feel so deeply.

Stories cut me, others cuts through me. I can feel the tepid waters of idleness that hug those around me while I wonder what I am doing here. Wonder, perpetually, if I am not a point making machine in a temporal world of absurdity. So desperate to find a cause for this disgusting display of cranky tears that fall, at the opening of every refrigerator door, that I would give the sun and moon and stars eyes and arms and call them friends. Or worse yet, dare to call them a metaphor for this.

I feel a joke coming on and I am laughing at my own expense.

I have been inundated with detail for too long. I have lost the ability to remember where I stand, or where I am to go again. I am lost, awash in things I have seen again and again and again, moments upon moments, place after place. Awash in lethargy, a more comfortable request is to rest indoors, then to spend the energy needed to grate this brain against the grain of everything. Judgeless judgment is what I have mastered. See them, hate them, love them, it matters still and it matters not. I will continue in gulps. I will continue to reach out, but more slowly now, as my restlessness begins to rest; flaccid cool-aid acid test.

Still so much time and so little. A pick me up here and there,  while still wondering what am I seeing? Visions of similarity? Or just my own reflection? A perpetual narcissist maybe it's just seeing my own ideals, in the eyes of everyone. Do I need to feel less alone so badly that I would add God to coincidence? Meaning to randomness? I can't sing or play guitar, but I still feel like a genius every time a mediocre song comes bursting through my lips; only to be crushed in the light of day that is repetition. I know I am small, but I feel so big in these little pants, pulling at rolls of fat which marshmallow around my bones. What right do my indulgences have to hang on, exposing me, my weakness; undercontrol.

All the days now begin to blend, who will remember them all when they fade from view? When my spirit leaves the mind and memories it has entered? When it runs off the streets in a midnight street sweeping, reflective yellow and green jackets, coming down hard with their machines, to wash it all away. What will Europe be without me? Me without it? What infinite thread can I tie my heart to hard enough, that it will pull it out and carry it on, across the universe? I don't need to beat anymore, if the beat goes on.

Is there energy in torn shoes on a desolate highway? Bulgaria, Romania, Hungry, Croatia. These exotic words fumble around in my mouth like superheated marbles, looking for a drink to cool the burn. I want to know how they taste on each part of my tongue; bitter, sweet, sour. I can sit for days on a bus or train. I can believe in fate and hold out a thumb. I can know every road as I know myself. I can. I can. But do you promise, can you promise me that the time will come, when the road rises up to greet me and brings with it - the direction home?

Clickity clack. The beat goes on. Yadda yadda yadda ya, the beat goes on.

Three steps ahead of myself to jump out of this open window. Lets head for the dessert. Feel its breeze. These tired legs can't hold me here much longer. We will have to go again and differently again.

Sigh...

Ah modesty.

Ah moderation.

What do you look like? All I see is you fading, a discolored balloon in the distance on the road of all the way.  All the way. It's painted in my eyes. It is all I know. All I breath and it reminds me, it's never enough. I know I am more than even my greatest fantasy. My greatest whim or desire. I know it is about residing in nothingness and beingness. . .

I'm working on it

Either way thank you for today. For these words that bring instant pride. For letting me get through another dangerous teetering cliff of depression and misanthropy. I see you little forgiver. I see your sly castle. Even if I don't want to believe in you I see you and the grace in your wisdom. I will let this mess rest, and wait for it to continue to pull me through.

Thank you for today.

Double Dog Dare You

 
I swing wildly from longing to peace, excitement to self doubt. Though to be truthful most days are sprinkled with a pleasurable surety, a willingness and a desire to continue, even a sense of not having enough time.  After all, I can't see everything,  can't do everything. All that we can do is hope, hope  that the things we do now are important, are giving back the lessons, thoughts and experience to say what will need to be said.  Where is god in the everyday? What does freedom look like? Feel like? What is it that unites us?

God is hope. I can even see it here now, God in the concreate. The hope that builds art galleries, underground community centers filled with graffiti, free music and solar cookers, boiling up nourishment for everyone. Identities shaped in hope. Created in belief. Of faith in change. The hope of a nation is that it's people rise of the belief in creation.

I see the city now is more of a living thing. It's energy is friction. It's buildings, roads and bridges are perfect cellular constructions. Arteries, veins, organs, valves, pulse and serge. It's windows, girters and steel are created in symmetrical unity - an evolutionary phenomenon - human perfection.

This is not  a discussion about what it lacks.

Like humans, for a city to be great it needs to be forgiven and simultaneously called to progress.

I call thee. Rise Up!

Take back knowledge from the culture of expert.
Take back expectation from advertising.
Take back God from religion.
Take back joy from comfort.
Take back the night from the lights.
Take back freedom from self doubt.

Dare to be passionate.
To forgive.
To feel.
I dare you to see the world in this way - culture less, boarderless, filled with complexity, unhinged, chaotic.
I dare you to suffer the damnation incurred in the erosion of everything you think you know.
I dare you to give up. Give in. I dare you to fail.

Get up. The revolution is dead. But the one in your head is just beginning.

We are more than this.  We are more than this.   We are more than this.
We are more than this.  We are more than this.   We are more than this.
We are more than this.  We are more than this.   We are more than this.
We are more than this.  We are more than this.   We are more than this.

Is this Numbness? Or Mindfulness?

This damn blank page. It blinks it’s cursor at me like a demanding child. Who needs who?

I am in Granada, Spain. It is a mid-sized city nestled somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Home to the Alahambra, countless Cathedrals and endless Arabic-chique bazaars selling skin greening jewelry and Indo-Hippie clothes made in Taiwan. German. That seems to be the language you hear most often. Though occasionally Spanish as it wafts over you in the streets, bombasts from the street side tapas bars and convelesses and prays in endless Catholic ceremonies -  over coifed and costumed in all there sensual cosmetic glory.

Maybe it’s the rain.

Two weeks straight of it.

Maybe it’s the sickness.

Four straight days of vomiting and diarrhea.

Maybe it’s not knowing where I am going next. Questioning why I am still here, spending money to be dirty and homeless. Spending money to let my mind rest, as soggy as a vegetable, surrounded by too much peace and quiet, too much respite. I made room for God and lost it again. Skeptic and aware that when you’re alone, it’s too easy to make things up. Too easy to read into all this; a falling leaf, a passing wind, a message in the breeze written just for this girl, just like every other 23 year-old girl, following a herd of goats, searching in the mountains for something  that makes this make sense. Something that defines, confines and replaces the ceaseless uncertainty. 

The sound of a piano ties this all together. For twenty years I have heard these notes and wanted to play them, to know them, feel them with the skill and precision that would make them dance off the walls, make them sing into hearts the sense of cacophonous foggy ease that it brings into mine. These things, all these things, bind me together, pages of a book that run years long now. They smell and perforate and smudge end over end as I continue to flip through, looking for the omnipotent narrator to tell me where this is all heading. To provide me with insight to the dramatic irony I am certain is occurring. What is it this character is failing to see? Judy Blume never made it so complicated, to get to the point of it all.

Life is a trillion piece puzzle that you have no picture to build with.  I smashed two or three together over the past two months, I think it’s ocean.  Either way it feels good to mush my fingers through the pieces, feel their cardboard sides spinning and catching on themselves as they build-up and slip from my hands, under my feet. I wake up with them stuck to my face, appearing in a dream that tells me I have to go back; back to school, back to work, back to busy. But it is the ones under my eyelids, that impore my dedication, the ones that cut my view into empty jig-sawed holes. Travelling is walking in and out of the blankness. What is it that goes in here? My journey brings me from one rabbit hole to the next, all seemingly interconnected, but how?

These dark crevasses are shifting too, not so much holes anymore I see bubbles of psychological manifestation. Inundate, coagulate and coddle the wantant mind with light, sound, sight, smell. It is all it needs to believe anything. The Truman Show comes true; we do believe that stimulus is reality. In this particular bubble a fire burns in a deep forest lodge of a river-side Spanish commune that spills dirty worn Arabic carpets from its hearth; hand drums, guitar, flute, didgeridoo, it’s encircling companions. 

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, sometimes tensions rise as desperate growing souls continue to struggle with the everyday. I see them mostly as children here in this Never-Never Land. Time has stopped, but here there is no Hook, no enemies, no crocodile. No fear but regret and themselves to move the plot along.  I step into the sleeping tee-pee, nothing more than a half dozen dirty blankets and worn out mattresses resting under a canvas-cone. Orange peels, broken glass and plastic bags our warming central fire. This feels like failure, resting half a step above skid-row. It may not be heroin or speed, may not be money, but it is here all the same; how much nothingness one can consume is consumption too. A non-material aspiration. They would all be happy to fade away, some part of the cycle of the waning moon.  Martyr for the cause of ecological servitude. This is far from criticism. I chose to be here, part of my own disappearing act. I took each step and wanted to see everything.  I wanted to see where one can go when you stop believing in everything. I found a place where you stop caring enough to believe in anything. A place to fade away, part wood nymph, part smoky fire, while the rest of you carries on unshaven, unkempt and falling apart at the seams. An old burlap sack, a discarded Birkenstock, all of held under by the heavy lid of Babalon. 

I look at my gummed-up ocean colored puzzle pieces, close my eyes and look again. Breathe.  These questions weigh me down. I am looking deep within everything for the truth, the answers that push energy into this thing, this thing into me. I look at my pieces:

I have found love; ancient, celestial and terrestrial.

I have found a difference pace, which has made all the chaos seem funny, unnecessary and invigorating again.

I have found home and learnt there is no place like home.

I have learned to love without fear.

Pain is personal.

Being strong is not about being alone.

The struggle is not who gets to the end first, but who enjoys doing it.

I have remembered that I care deeply for everyone, even strangers. It is caring like this which sets me free from fearing them.

Happiness is not something that can be found or attained. Absolutely nothing, not even time will deliver it. Happiness is a tool. You have to learn it. First step - open your mind. 

Simplicity Continues

She oiled the dough,

He piled the wood

And rubbed his sunburnt leg,

After all day in the field,

Planting potatoes.

Everytime I spoke

I wondered who was speaking

Like a case of alien personalities

On the vocal chords.

We Until Vaporate

Like a record skipping we are forced to find the song within the nonsense.

And at the end of it all?

Maybe it is really nothing.

Either way, we made a promise too see this through.

All the way.

Until we boil and burst.

Until we evaporate.

Until we make it home again.

I've capsized and been marooned in a busy metropolis. I smell like the sea so no one notices me as I make my way, star struck, through these narrow streets.

On my way, amnesia sets in. Who am I? What is my name? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Nostalgia without memory these things reminisce about something, I can't quite. . .

Thinking more about the art of doing nothing.

The perfect moment is found slumbering away inside you, unawares, until it is awoken in the knowledge it is no long needed. It looks out and, groggy as it is, it recognizes it is no longer inside but in front of you and fades into the vaporation of actualized being-ness.

I am no writer, I am simply a girl with a pen.

Into some dark corners the boundless mind roams. Uninhibited, unshackled and free to feel – so much - on occasion it ends up in the hands of desperation, emotional deviance and flattery without love.

It can't be helped.

Desculpa.

But we still have time, to erase the needles from the past, in the lubricating oils of the present. Ahh, the present. Can't mistake it for anything else, here it rides, tied up with words, I can't quite,

Locked up in the every second, to pull it out would surly be to kill it.

Maybe one day we can safely talk about it in the past - pull it out, taxidermied and under glass, a museum piece - but for now; the perfection and everythingness, the serendipity, the closeness, the magnificence, oh the sheer phosphorescent beauty of every ticking second!

The present doesn't lie, it stands, for everything I've fought to be destined to become.

The present doesn't lie.

Reveling the reality and fallibility of person hood means finding a nodule of sadness even amidst this infinite glee.

Seeing the dedication of a fathers love and weep, for the all encompassing patriarchal atonement that will never come.

And maybe that's just it. Freedom in the silence? Yes. Love? To be sure. But an answer for this? No. That is just time my friend, time and a re-dedication to the knowledge of immortality. The past is the past. What's done is done.

Moonlight lights my finest hour.

This way.

Whoosh...

That way.

Whoosh....

This is nothing less than going all the way.

Now I know, what the laughter of the Gods sounds like.

It sounds like the beach in the moonlight. It sounds like a midnight motorboat and it looks like the heavens fell on me.

It's what remains that counts, you and your fly paper heart, ready to bite again.

I love someone I can't even pronounce their name. It's so hard to believe it feels fake.

Obrigada.

Today is completed in the setting sun, both arduous and lazing, its sits well in the stomach, I am feeling bit by bit less and more.

Chasing summer around the word, moving west to fight the night. Travel on. Travel on.

I am barefoot in the desert. Like walking on hot coals, the best strategy is to breath, and transcend.

This is how we overcome, we don't become over-came.

I am trying to see this as it really is; a long road, a late day, a heartfelt salute, the waning light, this plastic and this camp concrete. It should not sustain. It should wobble and bend and shift under the weight of my reality, be pulled in by my gravity, it should be lost in it's own truthlessness. . .

Maybe in time. For now it is me that wobbles.

Nostalgia for a current time, this is the greatest feeling.

Milky black the night settles in again, settles onto the skin, of everything. It is rich, this night, rich and tepid and it masks the dawn that will truly come, eventually - inevitably. This is apart of a repeating phrase.

Like a record skipping we are forced to find the song within the nonsense.

After the Wake

Today I made my way from Setubal to Lagoa de Santo Andre, 60km on the bike for the first time.  Two hours in I rounded a corner, eyes wide, brakes off, careening down a hill I had just surmounted when suddenly;  the palms and the sun and the road and trees and the wind and the smells and the birds and sea rose out of the fermented ashes of my memory and into my throat.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

I yelled it as long and loudly as I felt it. Farmers may have woken from their labor meditations, birds may have flocked from their trees, but I don’t care. I don’t care. This day is my day. Today is mine, I made it, and I own it. All the love, perishable and imperishable in the universe builds and grows and flows within it. Today I created my own reality. Today, I am my own God.

This is the house that Jack built. 

And this is the day of suffering endured. 

This is travelling. 

This is infinite freedom.

Here there is time to exist. Time to think in the light and effervescence. Time to grow and move, with fear in your heart and peace in your shoes. Finding family everywhere you turn. Never alone, surrounded by the constantness of change. With every step that which was lost is gained, the wisdom that lives in everything. Its hearing the silence again, an unbroken melody since the dawn of time, too toxic for skin, you have to quit to begin. 

Everything is something to be known out here. Felt in the breeze, under a gentle hand, a twist of an open door. I am only as good as that which surrounds me and though I cannot fix its holes or mend its tears I can chose to see it completely, open and unmarred;  a reflection of the same light burning within me, an immense brilliance that glows now that we’ve finally made it - out here. 

Though I move in slow spurts, I now move only as I wish towards my destination, be it tomorrow or all time. My only conditions are the ones which keep me safe, the rules of nature and perseverance.  I have only to look to the future and the progress of growth to understand I have all I can possibly care to create. 

My Life. 

My Matrix.

And the rooting anchor that grows? It’s knowing that all will be forgiven. So off I swing, madly, truly, violently, from the heavy proof of absolution. 

Is this careless? Or simply unimaginable?

It seems messy but it is also clean, pure and untouched. This is a re-virgining of spirit as life comes back to me, as it once did, as a child. 

For all that was lost.

In the wake and furry of adolescence.

For all that was never gained . . .

I plunge, head long and head first, dead weight. I am a vision- shepparding my own flock, living in the hills of my infinite subconscious.  I am rebel - arousing suspicions in some, dreams in others. 

I am a creature.  

I walk this earth with you. Though sometimes alone, sometimes through folly and unforeseen circumstances, as queen and ghost, but still the way we all do, absorbed and lock-step, caught between idleness and forward momentum. Even at a standstill we spin, 100,000,000,000/mph.  Our earthly cavern is our anchor; and it anchors all. 

So remind me if I forget to smile. Remind me if I lose my way. Remind me of this - looking up- of all of this. And don’t forget to ask me, if you don’t walk too. 

And I will do the same, journeying to remind us all, we have a choice. 

My friends, my comrades, my peers, my loves, my family: 

 Life Lives! 

You can be one with the mercy of your dreams, high in the clutches of your own majesty! You can sign your own cheques and all it costs is everything that doesn’t matter. 

Walk with me, I’m on the other side and I am waiting to see, 

 

just what your mind can be.