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.

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.