Eyes on the back

To feel the eyes on the back of our heads
To feel the presence of how others imagine us
To not stay in sight of a present moment
But to rift and sway under the tides of others
,not the pull of my own oceans
,my own celestial forces.


These eyes, eyes of others they press into the back of my skull
Impressions etched by the history of my past
A time filled with the forms I feared and forms I longed for
Don’t hurt me, Don’t hate me,
Miss me-
This pain,
This validation
What was it all good for?
Maybe it was I needed to get me through those years
Maybe those years have past
Maybe those etchings have disappeared

For there is only one pair of eyes that see

A gaze of my own

A vision unobscured by what was felt from all those years 

Outreaching into this world

Raw to the touch

Present to the moment

And present to myself.

These hills embrace me. 

And whilst the Kookaburras may laugh, there is no judgement here. 

For amongst the folded mushrooms and stretched views I see what these hills afford me. They are calm, they are wandering but most of all they are mine to get lost within. A labyrinth where each leaf of silver gum glows like amber. 

It's grand here, all the while being so quiet, maybe a flock of cockatoos will rush past to remind me what chaos is, but in the meantime, I will remain corroding into this forest-floor in which I sit.  

These deep divides and cascading paths are embedded to my bones. From the worms etched wood, to the hidden trickling streams, to the fly plagued splattering's of marbled blood, all these places, all these sights have clung to my psyche like moss to lichen. I love these ranges because these ranges are a part of me.

When Gaudi designed the Sagrada Família he drew up plans for the largest cathedral in the world. He spaced his twisted granite columns so that they appear like forests that stretched and overlapped the devotees underneath. And yet here in the lost corners of the Dandenong ranges, I find canopies ever grander and see visions ever more impactful, 

and the best part -

it didn’t even cost me twenty euros to get here.

Nature has its own unique beauty, for it does not know it, it simply bears it.  

Return to ritual.
For what else do I have but dry crumbs and spilt cups.
Follow the smell of burning incense and listen to the soft shuffle of cards in hand.
Select your questions and open up to the static hums of the universe.
You’ll have desires you wish to see and revelations you wish to ignore.
You’ll see visions of the moonlit valleys beneath you and the gullies of dread and lament above you.
But this is why you return.
For through this ritualised pattern you begin to map the archipelagos of yourself.
You will find your black rock cliffs and your white pebble beaches.
Many lost places need to be mapped.
Hidden by fog they are, hidden by our mystic selves.
In visions of lacerating swords and vessels of overflowing emotion we find something rarer than any diamond and deeper than any ocean.

We find answers to questions we’ve never asked.
We find something we didn’t know we were looking for.
We find maps of lost lands.

Place

I’ve travelled my realms within. They are expansive and wide, and together they construct the component parts of myself. 

My blood, my ether, my enlightened being. 

My realms are cocktails of disparate energies, mixtures of separate spaces of existing. 

I choose which realms matter to me most, for while I can choose to be anywhere, I must at any given time choose to be somewhere. 

I choose what wind soaked lands fuel my fire. 

I choose what sand hills I climb. 

I choose what snow covered mountains I embrace.

I have the sites of all being at my disposal, diseased and plentiful. 

I have kingdoms that burn with the acrid smell of black smoke, I have forests of limestone that grow with the gift of loving orchids. 

These are my pathways, my kingdoms, my unset courses, my trialing, divine choices.

I can choose amongst so many differing ideas and differing forms, and out of all of these options, I end up choosing myself. And therein remains my power.  

Edited Diary entry 

26/07/2024 Flight Ho Chi Minh - Sydney 

Being

Royal Palace, Bangkok

Cast into the warm fires of southeast Asia, I find moments to press up and lean against the presence of myself. I feel the vessel of my own body, a form of elongated tendons and broad shoulders. 

My soul, my being, who is this creature of muscle, of bones, of cryptic wet mass? 

Who is she and what does she desire? 

She yearns for it all.

She needs her palace to sink back into her lacquered wooden throne, where she orders her body be enveloped by royal gold. She requires a fine voice to stretch grand and reach outwards and calm lagoons to cool off and venture inwards. She needs rivers of silk to drag her into the monsoon swell, to soak into her being and quench her thirst. She demands glaciers of lychees and cherries carted to her each and every summer's night. She asks the moon to guide her, the sun to warm her. She may need the cosmos and all its grandeur but most of all she needs herself, for her own presence is her true currency. 

In her abbeys of individualism, she finds something worth more than all her gold, more than all her jewels, she finds a true inward sense of confidence. A realised self that stretches from her belly into her glowing surroundings. She can cast shadows to the moon and eclipses towards the sun but it is her inner sanctum that she returns for sustenance. For in her world, in her mind, but most of all in her gut she knows what is righteous. 

Queen of Swords - Rider Deck

French Island

It’s that time again.

The throbbing breaths of the living city have been grinding up against my temples. The car fumes bite at me like an adder that slithers through my sinuses. With each shriek of mechanised automation my heart is gripped and twisted into its own arrhythmia of anxiety. It’s when I feel the city becoming a bit too much that I know I need to return to the sanctuary of French Island. Since my return to Australia this place has been a unique oasis for me to inhabit. A refuge for me to swim amongst my own psyche.

I always enjoy the unique experience of getting to French Island almost as much as I enjoy being there. In particular the custom three carriage V-line that takes you from Frankston station to Stony point fills me with a quiet kind of excitement each time I rest on its crusted purple seats. It might be something to do with the fact you can smell the Diesel burning from inside the coach as the train idles at the platform but I always get this kiddish joy like I'm waiting on the tarmac before the plane is about to take off. Once I arrive at Stony point I exit the hydrocarbon hotbox and breathe deeply as the sea air envelops me. It's a decent wait till the next ferry but there's always stuff to see at Stony Point, deluxe fishing-boats constantly come in and out of the water, Rays hang by the fish-gutting tables eager to steal a bite before the pelicans do. I sit back and treat myself with a plain English muffin, the ferry will be here soon and I will be where I want to be.

Stony Point to French Island passage

French Island is a sanctuary of space not a vista of peaks, nor valleys. Here the currency are quiet sands backdropped by a vast sky, not mountains that leap and compete with the stars of the night. As I walk the 5km from the Jetty to the campsite the hills roll with me through swamps and forests. Hamlets of novel sightings open up around each new corner, a softly pouring stream there, a hungry stoned Koala there. As you walk the hour hike you may be lucky enough to run into a lone car on the few roads that take you from south to north. There are only 120 residents and 60 permanent inhabitants of French island, a fact made all the more interesting that up until recently~1% of the population of the Island was made up of people called Kylie Minogue. This little factoid is a stray meander off the main path to truly understand the inhabitants of French island. French island is an off the grid community. A woven basket of artists, farmers and hippies makes up much of the demographic of the town. It’s a sea-salted township where if you spend enough time at the only place to hang out, the lone general store, you see how everyone knows everyone on a first name basis. It’s quiet here and you get the sense that that is why people stay here. 

French Island General store, A CFA and 

an often-closed community hall comprises the entire town centre

Fairhaven is the name of the campsite I return to each time. It is its own tambark retreat whose beach opens out west to a retreating sunset each night. A can of cold soup, an English muffin and a cherished bottle of cider are what accompany me as I watch the orange light fade to black. The star-like speckles appear slowly at first, wandering in and out of my visual plane. I speculate their origins as to whether they stem from the depths of the cosmos or are noise from within the jellied lenses of my eyes. The sun leaves, the cold returns, it’s now time to rug up. Two pairs of pants, double socks, I lower myself into my sleeping bag ready to not leave my nest till the morning. On low tides of the Full moon with your window zipped wide you can hear the soft white noise of millions of soldier crabs diligently combing this night’s sand for a day's meal. It sounds like pop rocks sprawled across the kilometres of wilderness that surrounds me. I sink deep into my readings, close to my thoughts and closer to the heat of my body. 

Fairhaven Sunset, - low tide

I always bring my diaries to the island for my torchlight sessions. I enjoy the path of embracing my own internal dialogue through cultivating private journal entries. Expressing my words underpins a large part of my own journey into the self, but as much as the act of expressing is so crucial to me, so too is reviewing these expressions. So on a cold night on my island of solitude I return to something familiar, my own words. The moon peers through the openings in my tent as my own patterns of thought are displayed before me. Mosaics of monologues and throughways of thoughts guide me as I weave between past and present perceptions of the self. Constant themes of gender of deep spiritual intuition rear their heads as I turn each page. Here isolated to the higher truths of the hermit I glow isolated in the soft hums of a glistening moon. 

Morning always calls itself in the first light. A sealed bottle of Iced-coffee has been left for this moment, I return to the beach-front and stare out onto the water as I deliberate whether they will be running the ferry across today. French Island truly is a place unto itself, there are no roads to the mainland here, only the timetable of a local ferry behest of the coming and going of storming tides is what can take you back to shore. You should always pack another can of soup for when the winds come in hard you may have to spend another night. 

There isn’t much to do on French Island but therein lies its charm. It’s a place to wander slowly, a place to bump into foraging echidnas or daze wide-eyed and transfixed by the ballets of migrating birds. In the reflected light of a distant moon I can reflect towards a distant sense of self. It’s a place off the beaten track, a place where each rock is saturated with circumspection and each shell overflows with revelation. 

It’s somewhere quiet to listen to the hushed tones that speak through my India inked pages. These faint words and outlooks don’t call on from the outer but emerge instead from within. These pages are my divine manuscript and French island is where I pay tribute to them. An island of isolated actualization and limitless potential. An island I will call home for the night or at least until the ferries start running. 

The Hermit - Rider deck

Creative Soul

First Pot thrown in a 10 months

12-05-2024

I am an artist, a silicate practitioner, a true clay-clad mud bandit. These are the titles I bestow to myself for the mechanisms that constantly tick from within. I know that the eternal act of creating is the energising structure that fuels me. I find in each of my expressions is a joyous celebration that provides sustenance to the flame within. This is the structure of my life, a structure that supports me like beams folded with the fires of my imagination. A cherished structure never to be torn down only to be reinforced.

I dance here in front of my castle courtyard surrounded by blossoms clinging to the edifices of my soul. I raise my bouquets of revelations to an overflowing sun. Today remains only so bright as for the vibrancy emitted from my burning heart, the heart of who I am, the heart of a practicing artist.

It’s easy to be untrue to ourselves so as to pour water on the flames in our bellies. It’s easy to forget even the most defining of our inner psychic elements. But it’s even easier to pick it up again. To slip under the warm sheets of a dedicated practice and embrace the cozy inner sanctums we craft for ourselves, this is what we always need to return to. I'm here to lick my tongue to the pavement of the earth and spit out the dust in Pollock splatter paintings. I’m here to turn the splinters under my fingernails into ornamental shrines that burn with the smell of frankincense. I'm here to observe and generate, to absorb and reflect, to digest and expel, to feel the world and then affect upon it.


I’m here to create, whether vile or incredible I’m simply here to create.

 

diary entry - 12/05/2024
Inspired by 4 of Wands- Rider Deck 

Forest Black

Naples , November 2023

“Lifes a whole trip isn't it”. 

That's what Forest said to me as we relaxed into our Naples hostel surroundings. The aged leather sofas would have seen so many conversations over the decades, many of the conversations flowing through the same route, what's your name? What's your hometown and how long is your trip for? Forest answered the first question easy enough, yet the 2nd and 3rd drew him in to reflect, these questions almost felt as though I was probing deep within. He explained that he was originally from Phoenix, Arizona, but I could tell by the way he gritted each time that an American asked “So which state are you from!” he had left Arizona to see the world but also to escape. And while I couldn’t understand why there was pain in that place, I could sense it nonetheless. 

Forest had found himself on the open paths of life for most of his life, he told me how much he enjoyed the isolation of an Alaskan town populated by only five people, he told me how cold yet quiet the winters could be. He had spent his covid years hiking and road tripping in New Zealand and now found himself driving a motorcycle between Spain and Italy.

You could tell that he enjoyed the quiet he could draw from within himself. And yet here we found ourselves on the 6th floor of a social hostel in a city whose scooter chaos felt closer to Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh. Luckily for us (particularly for him), the cacophony from the streets below made itself into a white noise by the time it reached the couched area. Forest hated Naples, he didn’t need to say it, the language of someone whose discomfort could be seen in the way his body became rigid and locked up when he described the city. He was only staying in a hostel and talking to me because he had no where to camp on his way to the Amalfi coast. 

I myself loved Naples, its an atmosphere that flows with good food and chaos in a warm embrace. A warm embrace that I personally feel happy to slip under, but I can imagine for Forest, a man looking to eventually move and live off the grid at peace with nature, how Naples could bite at his senses. He expressed how society is eating the planet and itself alive, as I looked over the smog covered gulf of Naples it was hard to not agree. He told me how he wished for a farm and a family, in which he could carve out his existence in the same way he could carve out his plot of land. 

He had done a lot of impressive things for someone who was only 24. He really was someone you knew could find peace in solitude. And while there were things you could see that his brain struggled as he had to adjust to, the buzz of a big city, the social aspect of a small hostel, there were many aspects of Forest that I admired. You could see that he was tough and respected his inner strength in a way that few can tap into. His self-pride was not shown through the boasts but through a soft smile that would creep in while he explained his travels. You could see that he saw developing his own psyche as a constant challenge to sign up for. 

Forest was a unique character, one whose passing presence illustrated the potential one can achieve if they work towards a challenged existence. Motorcycling around Europe wasn’t easy but you got the sense that that was the point for Forest. Whether it was having to pitch his tent as the rains of Campania punished him or having to deal with Alaskan Moose eating his crops as he read his books, I'm sure it was the challenges that made him fulfilled. You knew Forest was different, for a question I’d ask hundreds of times in hostels, he was the only one to answer it differently. 

“When will your trip end?” I said as we first met. 

“Lifes a whole trip isn't it… It never really stops, does it” he responded as a soft smile returned to his face. 

Pendulum

 

The pulses of a seismic body,
A body that beats in extracted sugars and bitter sweetness.
It writhes in the rhythms of its own natural orders.
Where chemicals and synapses squeeze against each other like worms in a bucket.
Inside this cathedral of wet proteins and fatty acids lies my perceptions, my feelings, my very being.

The body is a vessel drawn towards equilibrium.
A beast ravenous to return to the centre balance of being.
You see it in our wants and our cravings.
It's the impulse to overeat after being underfed,
The desire to swim in iced water under summer’s sun,
The thirst to socialise following solitude.
Maybe monks of meditation may always find their presence in the equalised centre.
But this isn’t the trajectory for most of us.
For most of us we swing up and down through rhythms of pleasure and pain,
Like a needle on a seismograph.
Up and down,
We weave through the centre balance only for a brief moment,
only to immediately escape for fields of thorns or meadows of grass.
Life is about feeling it all, for that is what the body demands.
Comfort and distress, hot and cold, hungry and full,
Balance comes with how smoothly we sweep up and down between states of bliss and states of unease.
It’s not about the position of the moment but the grace in which the overarching curves of life flow.
For in these grooves where our paths weave we feel the shifting tectonics within.
We feel a body eternally in friction to the movements of the universe.
A body always attempting to return to centre.






Inspired by paper 

Leknes, S,Tracey I, 2010,  "Pain and pleasure: masters of mankind." Pleasures of the brain: 320-335, oxford university press, New York City, USA

Readings

Exposing myself to the buzzing static of the universe and seeing what sticks, this is a philosophy for my own thoughts as much as it is a practice I have incorporated within my daily life. 

I’ve been reading my Tarot over and over since I’ve gotten back to Melbourne. Fresh in the face of a familiar setting but with an unfamiliar protagonist (myself) these cards have been a resourceful way for me to stir my psyche and push new journal entries. I’ve always said when it comes to my own tarot deck, the order itself is random but there is nothing random about the 78 cards I shuffle between my shifting fingers. 

For centuries these cards have been expanded and informed by the reader and the querent (individual seeking knowledge) who partake in this established ritual. These cards have never been idly static, instead they have shifted in design from deck to deck and by interpretation from reader to reader. These cards have been selected and informed by the deepest pools of our collective psyches. These decks run with archetypes that Carl Jung simply drooled over for the expressive ways they communicated our collective inner consciousnesses. 

"It also seems as if pictures in the tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation...The symbolic process is an experience in images and of images."

Page 38 

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung 1969

I love both the clarity and space present within a tarot reading. There are enough links to shared archetypes for anyone to reach into, as there also is enough wiggle room for us to paint ourselves in the blank space left on the canvas. This is why Tarot is such a valuable tool for myself. Finding the story and the path between disparate and sometimes contradictory cards has allowed me to reflect into disparate and contradictory parts of my own self. The ways in which different readers and differing decks can have such rapidly different explanations reflects how we all interpret the world through our own lenses. Our trajectories are all initially laid out from within our own psyche, our own selves. We all walk through the vibrant light of paths that we have carved out. Walkways of thought and progression that are cast both as much by the lights of others as the shadows of ourselves. Never must we overlook the power of self-interpretation even when we are reflecting on shared cultural paradigms. 

So this is where I’ve carved out my own Camino to explore my psyche, relentless Tarot reading. Over and over, with different spreads and different rules, I stretch towards the questions and answers these Arcana cards can bring me. 

Interestingly enough when I find a spread of cards disconnected to myself on initial observation this is most often where I’ve found the most bejewelled of insights. Because in the end, we are such layered and context driven creatures that with enough reflection we will always be able to find part of ourselves that can relate to the divinatory meanings of these 78 images. 

We all experience subjective experiences and thus we can always find our own subjective narrative built of shared archetypes. Shared archetypes that can call us to seismic action like the three of wands or images like the six of swords that recall us to remember that through life comes hardship and through hardship will eventually come release. In these cards that I have in my hands I can spread them out to prompt questions that I didn’t know were within myself. By hovering and dwelling on these archetypal cards I can construct new narratives and thus see the potential routes to be taken in life. Through this reflection the mental and physical structures of my mind are forever altered.

Cards are read and reflected, neural pathways are shaped and woven. 

And if having the literal matter in your brain shifted by a spread of selected cards cannot be called magical, I don’t know what can.

Embrace your own magic, embrace your own devine stories, throw some cosmic spaghetti to your own wall and see what sticks. For with only a couple cards in hand you may expand a couple more things within your own mind. 

Pollack R, 2012, The New Tarot Handbook,Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, USA

Jung C, 1969,The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA

Topologies of the mind

Incomplete topology outlined by Dutch explorers- 1663

What does it mean to know ourselves?
Or better yet, how do we imagine ourselves?

I mean sure we all have ideas, ideas of people, ideas of community, ideas of me and ideas of you. How we imagine these ideas are often just as powerful as the thoughts themselves. I had previously imagined getting to know myself as though I was mining deep below to find the crystalized ideas of my own self present within my psyche, when in actuality thoughts and feelings don’t exist as limited objects you can hold in your hand, but instead exist like boundaries we crudely draw out on maps. These boundaries shift and alter over time as the inertia of life takes its toll. These lands that we demarcate are never isolated archipelagos but great expanses that extend onto other ecosystems, alternating ecosystems that we never realized could border eachother. Our brain is a series of biomes that are interconnected and mish-mashed with the ecology present within our heads. As we delve into our mind we form a rough map of topologies and sections of our psyche, a map revealed to be interwoven and constantly changing. 

Me and you exist, we exist in physical space pulsating with the energy and rhythms that have driven us for our entire lives. And while our bones appear solid and our teeth set, even the firmest sections of our being are slowly replaced by living cells within our body, on average most cells in the human body are replaced every 7-10 years. This is the nature of being, a constant flux that appears to us closer to the weathered landscapes that surround us as opposed to diamonds and gems locked in museum vaults. We are filled with fluxing bodies of flowing sand, not callused gems that do not change or extend. These laws of our physical nature link squarely to the mental rhythms within our own head. For our brain is a physical beast and no physical entity can escape the universal laws of inertia. The universe and landscape change and so do we.

Kohala mountain range runs next to a dry valley with little precipitation /plant life occurring

“In the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala are extensively interconnected and work in concert to tune the expression of emotions, such as fear and anxiety”

Excerpt from
Prefrontal entrainment of amygdala activity signals safety in learned fear and innate anxiety -2014

If we can acknowledge how the landscapes around us are constantly in flux, we can also acknowledge that they are complex and interwoven with bordering topologies. Mountains and deserts may seem so different yet if they are placed next to each other we may realize that one influences the other, so too with sections within our brains.

There are multiple realms of the brain, each part offers unique specializations for our minds to process. In regard to mediation and mindfulness it’s the literal link between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that I find inspiring. The amygdala provides a central role in emotion processing and regulation, while the medial prefrontal cortex is a key location for experiencing “self-awareness”.

Many spiritual practices like Yoga and Tai Chi have repeatedly called out the importance of self-awareness. Think of the way in which a yoga teacher reminds you to pay attention to your breath or notice if you find yourself holding tension in your tongue, these are all questions which reach into us and help activate the mPFC. This activation of the medial prefrontal cortex inturn literally connects to emotion centers of our own selves. Deserts often border mountain ranges because the mountains push the clouds high enough to start raining so much so that a desert is left on the opposing side. Much like how mountains often coincide with dry valleys, meditative spiritual practices often coincide with bringing focus to self-awareness. As our conscious self-awareness center of the brain has a direct in-road to our emotional centre a change in one can correspond to a change in the other. It's no coincidence that a practice like yoga that asks you to feel your body also can help subdue the bubbling sensations of anxiety that may be present in your bloodstream.

“Many described the cultivation of self-awareness that they practiced as part of their tai chi exercises. Participants described awareness of the breath, of their own bodily sensations, body signals, and symptoms, and how this allowed the forming of a new connection to themselves. “

Excerpt from

The Impact of Tai Chi Exercise on Self-Efficacy - 2014

Other sections of the frontal lobe like the Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dPFC) have no direct connections to the emotional hormone releasing structures (amygdala) of the brain. The dPFC is a section of the brain responsible for where we develop plans of action. It’s interesting then to reflect how in moments of absolute state and shock how it’s not been my planning side of the brain that got me back into sync but my introspective mind frame that has. Questions on my breathing and sensations have always calmed me way more than organizing a plan of action in the moment. 

In imagining my own topography of my mind, I became aware of myself and in doing so I relaxed the emotional centers of my brain, which in turn allowed me to get a closer look to the terrain of my mind.

To create this map of self has been a wild experience. It's lead me to altered states of mind that I didn't know existed. It’s as if I’ve been trying to write in a loud bar for my entire life only to find that down the road is a lovely quiet library where my internal monologue can have space to expand and spread. In this space of quietness, I actually found out what I am driven towards, what experiences matter and who I am and who I can be. Like the sailors during the age of exploration I find myself with a crudely drawn map that shows the loose fluxing boundaries and extents of the reality I preside in. My mind is a shifting topography and an interwoven ecology. I'll avoid saying tapestries as tapestries don’t unweave and reknit themselves like our minds can. Of course, this is my life and my brain, everyone's life is different and so is the physical structure of the neurons in their head. Even with that said, I find that there are beautiful commonalities between all of us, between the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the ways we feel, commonalities between the practices of Yoga and contemporary PTSD treatment. We may all craft our own maps of ourselves, yet we all share the same world, a world in which we can voyage into the deepest expanses of our mind.

BBC, What cells in the human body live the longest?, Online page, BBC Science Focus, accessed on 12 march 2023, <https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/what-cells-in-the-human-body-live-the-longest>

Kolk , B 2014, The Body Keeps Score, Penguin Books, London UK

Likhtik, E., Stujenske, J. M., Topiwala, M. A., Harris, A. Z. & Gordon, J. A.  2014, Prefrontal entrainment of amygdala activity signals safety in learned fear and innate anxiety. Nat. Neurosci. 17, 106–113 (2014)., accessed on 11th March 2023, <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15920-7#:~:text=In%20the%20brain%2C%20the%20medial,%2C2%2C3%2C4.>, 

Yeh, G. Y., Chan, C. W., Wayne, P. M., & Conboy, L. (2016). The Impact of Tai Chi Exercise on Self-Efficacy, Social Support, and Empowerment in Heart Failure: Insights from a Qualitative Sub-Study from a Randomized Controlled Trial. PloS one, 11(5), e0154678. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154678

National Geographic, Rain Shadow , Online article, National Geographic Education, Shadow, accessed on 12th March 2023, <https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/rain-shadow/>

Thevenot, M. 1663, Hollandia Nova detecta 1644 ; Terre Australe decouuerte l'an 1644 De l'imprimerie de Iaqves Langlois, [Paris viewed 12 March 2024 http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-230670124

Home: And other places

 

8 minutes 21 seconds - Video work 

It’s weird coming back, back to the same place but now with a different lens of mind. Old rows of houses appear as new developments , the sky breathes in unfamiliar rhythms, the place I had come to know as my home feels different, because I am different. I feel the segments of my mind are pieced together like fragments of a collage. With each segment giving rise to a separate mish-mashed location. Footscray, Barcelona, my childhood, my adolescence, all coordinates for where neural pathways were established within me. Some paths have been extended while others have been circumnavigated. 

This is the beauty and trauma of life and of our minds, we find thoughts and places not perceived through linear narrative but cobbled together like loose pages that fall to the floor. Within each of us is more than one combination of being for we are crafted of experiences of more than one origin. 

Many psyches - Many origins- Many lives left to live. 

Seclusive Sensations

Sitting in solitude at Cape Cornwall as storm Isha makes landfall. 
Gusts up to 142km/h were recorded in Cornwall that day. 

I saw Granny Tessa today. It’s been 5 months since we last rendezvoused. A lot has happened between now and then, a few health checks, a couple birthdays, and a Christmas, but thankfully now we are in the same part of the world and an offer for a cup of tea by my Cornish Grandmother is something one does not simply turn down. 

I had brought a photo album under my arm. It was an assortment of treks, galleries and drunken escapades captured in fleeting snapshots of my recent trip. I opened up the pages to flick through my months of European travels, eventually resting on the pages of hikes I had carried out throughout my time in Cornwall. It was a strange feeling this place had afforded me. I hadn’t visited the west coast of England since I was a toddler, but the environment and the place had an eerie feeling like I had known this land. I felt this place as I trudged through farms and ocean passes. I felt it as mud sucked down on my boots as I plucked them out, like plugging a wine cork out of grey mud. I felt it as tides pulled back and forth to a narrow beachline daring me to run across before the waves swallowed my shins. I felt it as I marched across fog covered cliffs with no one insight, the sea permeating the fog as it settled in my lungs. And after I had walked 140,000 steps in four days, boy oh boy, did I feel tired. I felt tired yet I also felt different, as though the strange familiar land had left some of its mystical powers within my own being.

I never expressed this to my grandmother as we flicked through the pics, I told her the funny stories instead, how I got lost in Eindhoven and how sneaky seabirds had performed successful hit and runs on the pasties in my hands. I explained how much I had walked but had never explained how deep of a spiritual experience it had been to have that experience in isolation. 

Between her sips of tea, English breakfast -milk no sugar, she opened up about her own views…

“When you go the places by yourself, they leave you with a feeling and that feeling will never leave” She said. 

The value of seclusion in nature and in life can be tremendous. It creates a feeling that will always stick to you like a piece of gum travelling on the soles of your shoes. For by tying our own experiences to the vibrancy of the universe, the universe sits within us. Solitude is magnitude, to keep one's own company is to open the door to what the cosmos can offer to your soul. 

Tessa told me saw her younger self in me. She told me how when she was with her horses, one leading while two followed tied by ropes, how the galloping of hooves faded into the background, how the hills widened, how her soul outreached to the quietness and majesty of her surroundings. She told me what powers those mystical cliffs of Cornwall had left within her. 

If a tree falls in the forest and we are the only ones to experience it, it falls for us. For when we are alone we become the only source that can create meaning, we become the world, the universe, the audience and the narrator. When we are struck by the quietness of our surroundings, when the leaves brush so lightly they sizzle like carbonated water, or when the wind blows through carved rock so it sings in ghostly glares, there and then we find our own voice. A voice whose timbre is impregnated by the flavour of the surroundings that we subconsciously consume. 

Leave yourself alone and you will find where you are. In the company of ourselves the landscapes that envelop us become digested and fused to us. And when we depart our surroundings, they will never leave us. For while gullies may be washed out by floods and forests carved down to firewood, as long as memory remains those settings remain too. 

Buried deep within us- our surroundings made our own, but only because we could afford ourselves a moment of solitude to appreciate it. 

Edited transcript from Diary entry

27- February 2024

Surface Tension

Hand details - Portrait of Andries de Graeff I

Marble, 1885, Rijksmuseum

In our lives, our existence is preserved and maintained by our own bodies. That idea is clear and obvious, but a juicier, more subjective rhythm of thought ought to be explored. We can all sense a location where the phenomenon of our own vitality does seem to exist. From the folds of your heart to the lining of your frontal lobe we each feel a position where the sense of ourselves sits, somewhere that just feels right. The query for us to sink our teeth into is this, where do our souls rest within ourselves?

For the longest of times, I protected my soul by leaving it in the bones of my body. With the most important part of myself locked away to the marrow of my calcified shell, my being sat preserved. Although my internal being lay secured it was not enriched to the buzz of the outside world.

As I’ve grown into life my coordinates of my soul have relocated. As of now I hold my own sense of being right below skin. Closest to where I can feel the heat of the sun is where my soul thrives.

To let your soul sit below the surface requires you to develop your own thick skin. You will grow through friction as you let life form its own calluses around you. Yes, when your soul flows through the capillaries, it's easy to feel the pain from life, but it also makes the pleasure oh so much grander. The sensation of energy becomes something more than just a feeling; it forms into tangible objects that lean up against you with their presence. Objects you can envelop in your being, objects whose ambiguous meaning provide raw overwhelming sensation. That’s what occurs when my soul settles to the most external of internal locations, you feel more. And while I understand why people develop their cocoons, their shells to grow into, that living is no longer for me. I’ll live in the danger of opening my soul to elements of life. I’ll let the energised static of existence flow in and out of my being. I will rely on my own strength to preserve myself against the harsh conditions that exist in bitter corners of the world, but I will also allow myself to be overwhelmed by the raw vitality of living.

The Final Frontier

Sahara's sand dunes sprawl and wash over Algerian rockfaces and sandstone plateaus, 

Photographed from a height of 259 miles, 2022.

The soul is the final frontier. 

That's what Haruki Murakami says in his final chapter of “Novelist as a Vocation”. A book I’d recommend if you got some time to kill on a beach in Cyprus.  Cyprus was where I crunched through this piece of writing, perhaps it's the warm nights or the white noise of a soft ocean, but there was something about Cyprus that allowed me to chew through this novel. I would finish dinner, an oversized feed paid for about ~8 euros- always cash, wander back through the ancient laneways of stone and meandering gangs of cats till eventually I would reach the waterfront. It would be night but luckily there was always a free bench next to yellowed hued street light, there I would perch myself to do two simple things, read my book or reflect. This little alcove became my monastery of dedication and meditation, not much of a view lay before me, simply a black void, but in that black void was an opportunity, an opportunity to look so deep into the abyss that eventually I came to see myself. 

Maybe that’s why when I read this statement in his closing remarks it stirred in my head so god darn much. For indeed the soul truly is our final frontier. Exploring the frontiers of the mind is a lot like mapping the dunes of the Sahara. It’s a probing task that will only produce ephemeral results. While these results presented are never long lasting, the task in itself is never a fruitless errand. For by mapping the valley and shoals of sands in the Sahara we can see its changes, its movements, we see what time has brought to this land. 

With expeditions into my psyche I see what is the landscape I have fashioned within my mind. If reflecting acts as my scout party then journaling constitutes my field notes. Field notes that require me to return to the same location as a later date to see how I’ve changed. I say require because certain landscapes require repeated expeditions to see where the bedrock is. There's solid rock that sits below the sands of the Sahara and there’s mountains that live under the glacial walls of Antarctica. Some of these will wither back to sand one day while others will stay firm and set. We can separate the transient, from the semi-stable, to the permanent layers because we have studied these areas for decades if not centuries. And while I can’t analyse my brain for centuries I can occupy what decades I have left to that final frontier. An expanse where I can feel my soul shift through the act of my observation. A landscape where the erosion of self growth can wear down even the toughest of stones. A place I will forever call home even in different surroundings. 

Edited diary entry written in Larnaca Cyprus, 12 January 2024

NASA, 2022, A portion of the Sahara Desert in Algeria, Nasa online archives, Accessed on 15/02/2024, <https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/portion-of-sahara-desert-algeria-2/>

 

Re(turning)

Returning to a reiterated declaration.

The familiar familial hometown,

A city of muddy creeks and industrial lots, 

The warm night breeze wraps me dry as I walk through its enclaves.

The creeping itch of childhood's memories fail to leave me alone.

Layers of learnt behaviour swarm the brain in the humm of this night. 

I must pay attention to the now,

So as to not lose the future to a misremembered past,

I return to the places that I feel acquainted,

And realign and adjust myself so the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, 

The comfortable, becomes the trial.

This city becomes the place not where a child was raised but an adult was born.

I sit in that house of friction that scrapes like sandpaper,

And embrace my fate like a molten pillar of gold.

It’s never easy to carve out figures of yourself in the place you grew up,

But easy and fulfilled are two different things,

And I am more than just two different people.

I am more than my past, 

equal to the present,

and infinite to my future. 

I am someone returning to the same spot, 

Only to paint it anew in colours of my own.

Colours I’d prefer to see.

Laterz

And damn baby we're done! That's 137 days out of the way and added to the pile of life. What a wild journey. I took my sweet time walking over 2.6 million steps. I swept past nine countries and nineteen cites maxing out my 90 day visa in the schengen zone. I marched through the cities of northern Europe only to meditate in the mountains of the South. We had thunderstorms in Cypress that quenched my soul and dogs that chased me down the road in Italy. I partied hard in Barcelona and swept into my cosmic resonance in Cornwall. I don’t think I should say Europe changed me, I think it’s more appropriate to say that I changed in Europe. Yes, the passions of the people of Spain fueled my fire, while the warmth of the Portuguese blushed my skin with tenderness, I thank everyone who’s paths we crossed once and surely many we will cross again.  But I also have to recognise my own soul, because recognising my own soul is indeed what's happened here. I had a rule if a walk was under 2 hours I did it and while my butt has never looked so good the real benefactor was my own mind, because in these hundreds of hours of non-stop movement I have found the faint outlines of where I can find my own inner-sanctum. Through manic, feverish pacing on this foreign land I ended up finding the beats and rhythms of my own psyche, what I think and how I think. I learned how my brain pulses with its ugly habits and its own beautiful mosaics. With this rough layout of myself in hand I have something I haven’t felt for a long time, presence. True presence, belly breathing, focus relaxing, mind easing presence, and honey I can’t wait to return to extend that state of mind to the land I know to be my home, 

the place from down under, 

Australia.

Cya soon cuties x

Leach Pottery Studio

St Ives 2024

Warm Blooded

Allegory of Charity

Ca. 1655. Oil on canvas.

Zurbarán, Francisco deFuente de Cantos, Badajoz (Spain), 1598 - Madrid (Spain), 1664

We are warm blooded creatures. Unlike fish and reptiles, we can produce our own heat and warmth. We don’t need to rely on the fevered exterior of the world to bring us our own strength, we can produce our strength from within. And while the warmth of a heater or the radiation of the sun may please our soul, the flame in our hearts nourishes us like no outside force can. I would always prefer to have a full belly in cold surroundings, then be hungry while in a warm climate. Because with that full belly in me I can find my own love and my own admiration that hugs me closer than any soul could. My own vitality pulses in the heated convection of my own blood. The orange tones of life's passions start as sugars stirred in the essence of myself. To create your own energy is to be warm blooded, to be enriched, to be alive with the force of life itself.

Maintaining your own fire may take more effort, but it's always worth it. For the flame that comes from within will always feel more enriching than the flame that comes from foreign origins. To love yourself is to stoke that fire, love yourself from the inside-out, that's what I say. It’s all within our capabilities, maybe some easier than others, nonetheless in all of us is a pilot light waiting to be fueled, waiting not for someone to say they love us, but for us to say we love ourselves. 

Prado Museum, Allegory of Charity, Prado Museum archives, accessed on 29th January 2023, <https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/allegory-of-charity/95d3d5cc-4af1-4c0d-b03c-a9e1c1e6481f>

Avaritia

Avaritia; Greed

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 1558

Engraving

Greed builds greed, money chases money, dopamine chases dopamine. I met the man tonight I’ve talked about for a long time, the posited drug-addicted rich boy child of a legacy family. I'm lucky to have booked this hostel because tonight I saw what it looks like to have unceasing desire. He had just fled his previous country. He fled with 700K in corporate debt whilst running away from drug habits and running towards the imagined dream of a family. He said there was no luck that he was born to a rich family and to be fair this was the only thing we agreed on. He was privileged to be brought up amongst wealth but not lucky I felt. He lacked fortune to be born to his gilded surroundings, surroundings that on his own accord praise three great virtues: God, Glory and The Family Legacy. Here I found this Family Legacy drunk on his hostel bunk, coming down from a cocaine binged Wednesday night of paid dopamine and paid sex.

He was a man of God he told me, just not a practicing one. He was upper class British in accent and American Christian Free Marketeer in nature. He told me as he’d gotten closer to God, he had found happiness. Yet he never espoused the moral ethics of humbleness, humbleness he told me was what poor people told themselves to stay happy being poor, he said sipping his corona. 

He could stay in a penthouse suite in a hotel, yet he stayed at the hostels as they helped to stay grounded between his binges. When I asked if his hunger fueled his appetite even more, he told me yes it did. He told how he envied his friend who was satisfied sailing alone on his boat, his friend who didn’t crave money and instead managed to find himself simply content. 

He credited himself for the livelihoods of his employees saying his actions provided them with over 200 salaries, while never stating the fact that 200 working employees also provided him with a salary. A salary that would pay for his lawyers, his fast cars and even his helicopter rides when his licence was revoked for speeding 100 km over the limit. 

We talked capitalism, we talked socialism and somewhere we got into the weeds of what an economy should indeed look like. He asked me was it fair that he’d put in all his hard work, after he’d received the McClaren, the Penthouse sweet, the fixed wing-aircraft , he asked me if it was fair that he’d lost relationships, he’d lost his company, he’d had to stare the barrel of a gun, was this all fair? 

Fair is a funny word isn’t it. It doesn’t have the same legal bravado that justice has, or the same inalienable quality as prescribed rights, fair is a unique one. In this case the way he was using the word “fair” was to ask what should've happened? I can’t say if what he was describing indeed should have happened, but indeed it did happen, he chased his lust till it pushed him back to the other side of Earth. He consumed everything till his gluttony overwhelmed him and he found himself stewing in his own self-pity. 

When I asked him if money made him feel happy?

“define happy?” he asked, “fulfilled” I said, 

“define fulfilled” he replied, “feeling satisfied” I answered, 

“No one can ever feel truly satisfied,” he concluded. 

He told me he couldn’t meditate. For him the 30 minutes a day made no sense if the other 23 and a half are wild and frenetic. This is a thought that had on his own accord only for it to be confirmed and reiterated in one of his favourite podcasts. Meditating was both unachievable and unneeded in his life. Yet it’s often the things you feel like you don’t need that you often require the most. 

He is a child of his own privileged trauma, a human who can and will pursue their own financial success through non-stop self-sacrifice. Moving to Monaco was his next stop, a location picked for their low taxes and safe neighborhoods. His new God driven direction in life was to provide financially for the family to sow the seeds for future generations, preserving his and families name and legacy. He was yet to find his partner or yet to have his children, yet sure enough in the end the family name will pass on and his own legacy will be extended. 

When I dream of a family that brings me fulfilment I don’t dream of legacies, I dream instead of leaning back to the large wooden table that presides in front of me, relaxing quietly while I appreciate the people I love surrounding and showing love for each other. You will never live to see your legacy, but you can live to see and enjoy the immediate moment, only if you pause and breathe for it. I'd recommend 30 minutes a day. 

Image :

Greed, British Museum, New Hollstein (Dutch & Flemish) / The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts 1450-1700 (24.I), Accessed on 26th January 2023, <https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1880-0710-642>

Ship of Theseus

1909 Illustration by John F.Campbell

I experienced multiple selves in my dream last night. It's as Paul, a companion in my Cypriot hostel said, "in dreams you can see behind yourself”. In dreams you can stretch your legs, pace around to observe yourself. You see your profile, your hands, your feet, even the weird ridges on the back of your head. It is when you walk around yourself that you realize that at all times there are multiple versions of you. Multiple representations of yourself that spontaneously emerge each time an observation is made from a different angle. This is the liquid nature of the human condition, the never-ending flow of lived and dreamt experiences. A perspective that is defined as much by what is being perceived as to who is perceiving. In all evaluations of perspective, we must interrogate the observer strenuously, even if that observer happens to be our own selves. 

When one does not pause and dive into their own psyche, they end up living blind, blind to the present and obscured to the feelings of the past. For while we can all stop to imagine our own selves, we only imagine ourselves through the context of the here and now. So, when we ignore the here and now, we reflect through opaque lenses that lack clarity. Perceiving the present self within conscious thought is possible but far from easy. It's like checking the oil yet we can’t slow down the car, we must continue to drive while the hood is popped up and we lean forward as the highway winds blow in our face. We are the observer, the test subject, the hypothesiser, the control group and the out-of-control group all wrapped into one. We must cut into and dissect the sinews of thought yet not flinch too hard in case we ruin the anatomical investigation. 

Leonid Rogozov acting as surgeon to himself 

and removing his own appendix as he the only trained medical profession during a 1961 Soviet Antarctic expedition  

This is our lived reality, the unceasing conditions of existence. For all our awake lives we are forced to swap out sections of our hull while the waves come crashing down on us. The open ocean of life is swimming with challenges and rewards that require us to do day to day repairs. This daily maintenance is imperative if we are to not take on too much water. The easiest way to repair a vessel though is to return it to the safety and quietness of a harbour. The drydock of REM sleep is perhaps the best suited location to discern and make alterations to our vessel. 

It is a unique opportunity for while the brain is cataloguing its archives in deep sleep, we can sit and take a read. Perhaps that is part of the reason we feel so relaxed after a dreamy night of sleep, for it is one of the few moments we can simultaneously reflect and rest. We sit portside while we look at our galley, we see the barnacles being stripped back, the decks scrubbed properly, the sales fashioned anew, and while we sit there, out feet perched up high, we ask two most important questions.

Why do we choose to set sail back to the high seas?

And what course shall we plot for our maiden voyage?  

Barham, M 2021, Counter Arts online article, 6th September, accessed on 16th January 2024 , <https://medium.com/counterarts/the-ship-of-theseus-time-identity-and-memory-f6a6e2e815b2>

Lentati, S 2015, The man who cut out his own appendix, BBC online article, 5th May, accessed on 16th January 2024, <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442>