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.