Faith in You

I am hearing the same song in two completely different places. One, a cafe in Paris over a year ago, and now here in this small cafe in an Outback town, still drinking skinny cappuccinos and trying to write a book.

Still in love with my life?

Still passionate about travel?

It seems I can't stop asking the questions. I've already gone down into the impermeable fabric of my mind, changed my own reality, saw the world through divine eyes, sat in misery and glory. I've done it all on a whirlwind, by the seat of my pants, alone and inverse to everything I had ever experienced. I've touched lives and been touched. I've crawled, clawed, drank, danced, ran and cycled my way around the world - to this very moment here. The bottom of this cup, it's warm, bitter bubbles settling in my stomach and this hot Australian sun. The buzzing of new creatures in my ears rides along with the incessant doubt, the persistent unending questioning of self and self-hood, value and values, life itself, people and their fallibility.

Stumbling my way through a mid-dessert caravan park, Stand by Your Man echoing from inside the one of the nomadic tin-boxes, lost to the muggy darkness;

Is this art?

Or failure?

Am I after something deeper and bigger? Or running from the bigger things I can't face? Like the implied mediocrity in 'real life', expectations and potential, neither actualized nor obtained. Hidden in the underlying layers of all my academic failures and all my half completed projects was a sense that one day, one day I would come good. All these ideas, feelings of isolation and loneliness, this competitiveness, the ease in which I spin – am I not capable of more than just creating family? Am I not more then the weight of my sheets, tea towels, Sunday BBQ'S and band practice? Worth more then just a job? Colour coordinated file folders, only using pencil, call backs and out-of-office replies? Or are these just the pleas of an outcast kid, with not a lot of guidance, fighting against the wanting sense of normalcy?

I find it difficult to be alright with myself. I find it difficult to not want everyone to love and care about me. I find it difficult to let go, of people, of the past, of things that don't work. I find it difficult not to get depressed easily. I find it difficult to get up in the morning, to stay focused and passionate life; and when I lose that, I loose everything. Because what else do I have, besides my bare-foot road side gypsy dreams? This is me coming good, and I still have to drag my ass every step of the way.

Maybe that's just the way it is. Maybe I'm not alone in that. Maybe the magic of life really is in the reflection, wrapped up in nostalgia and comparison. The best you can do sometimes is to keep exploring, keep learning, approach the newness with compassion, and even when you loose faith in it, try not to loose the faith, the world has in you.

Rainy Reflections

That was the loudest crack of thunder I've ever heard.

There was a blink of heaviness where the energy shifted right before I heard it.

CRACK!

I thought the walls of this 100 year old Outback Pub would surely collapse under the weight of it. Now every sound has me on edge. Fight or flight, the adrenalin rush provided through our ancestry is never that far under the surface of our modern rationality.

I flip back, to the second loudest crack of thunder I have ever heard. Ten years old I was sitting in the front-porch of our house. We lived in a small town where the streets were dead long before the night closed in and the high-lights of your life were to be found either in the goings on of people, or the goings on of nature. I was fortunate, for a time, that the later was my preoccupation and my passion. Nature, weather, and I have always had, I felt, a unique bond, an understanding with each other. Fascinated by the magic and power of storms and the changing seasons, I used to believe that there was some consciousness behind it. It was in the way the rustling leaves spoke, or the wind pulled and twisted the snow into magnificent patterns, the changing colours, the white-cap peaked lakes tormented by invisible forces. These were gifts and signs to me, things for me to enjoy, and manifestations of states of mind I still can't express.

CRACK!

The second loudest crack of thunder I've ever heard broke the glass in the single pane window in our small front-porch. It was awe-inspiring as the thunder rolled on and on to what seemed at the time to be far and distant places, unreachable from my small childish universe. Then came the rain. A rain so heavy, so warm it's comparison is used for all rains that have come after it. I took to that that quiet street in the middle of the night and danced and splashed and welcomed the rain with outstretched arms, head up to the clouds, marvelling at the ubiquitous way it fell from the darkness. With no beginning and no end, it rushed down the street in rapids, flowing over my bare feet and into the storm drains, taking with it the debris, rubbish and heat of the day.

It's amazing and strange the moments that stay with you forever, the ones you think about again and again – or at least, every time it rains.