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>

Waves

I can’t remember when the dreams of waves first began. I only recall that they started to emerge sometime during my primary school years. They all would start differently yet would end the same. Sometimes I was on a beach, a boat, or a cliffside, wherever it was I was somewhere I could see and sense the waves. Often it started in the presence of calm waters but out of nowhere you would feel it and then you would see it, a behemoth would lay before my eyes, stories and stories of water that blocked out the sun as it approached. My gut would drop as the wave crested over me, its form mimicking a mountain of liquid dread. Sometimes I’d try to run, but it would be of no use, slowly but surely the predestined terrors of Poseidon would always reach me. 

Gradually the wave grew and gradually the wave advanced.

And then Boom, it’d Hit. 

Sometimes I would claw to the earth as the waves washed over me, holding on with as much strength as I could. But it was all in vain as the swell would drag me back as it wasted the soil and dirt beneath my body. 

The ending of the dream would always be the same, you can’t escape fear and I could never escape the path of this oncoming deluge. 

I would have these dreams repeatedly throughout my youth. Over and over the wave would wake me up and leave me wide eyed in the middle of the cold dark night. Many good nights of sleep were sacrificed to this nightmare as I had to pause and collect myself in my adrenaline-fueled state before I could (if indeed I could) return to my slumber.

It would be years before I realized those waves were psychic manifestations of my own anxiety. These were the literal waves of dread and emotion that washed through my childhood and early adolescence. 

At an unclarified point these recurring dreams lessened.

From nightly happenings these dreams moved to weekly, then monthly, then seasonal occurrences. These dreams would never cease completely, still occurring as sporadic phenomena, but they now lacked the volume to dominate my life like they previously had. 

Once again, I had one of those dreams last night. It followed a similar pattern to others yet for the first time finished differently. In this dreamt illusion I found myself on an open barge in the middle of the ocean. Flanked to my left and the right were elevated platforms in which faceless members of the crew found themselves occupied. I however was in an open section and, like standing on the edge of the public swimming pool could feel the warm water lapping at my toes on the fringe of the platform. The sea at that moment was turquoise and tranquil, but as soon as I looked out I knew that the inevitable was yet to come. That's the thing about a recurring dream you can feel yourself being pulled towards it, and like swimming against a rip your attempt to fight it will only make you drown quicker. From the calm waters I saw the ocean grow angry and witnessed as the water welled up to tower before me. Slowly but surely the wave made its way towards the barge. The vessel creaked as the ship tilted back, my eyes a gaze at the giant that had terrorized my nights on so many occasions. 

And yet in this moment that I had found myself in so many times, something was different, something was different inside of me. And instead of filling with unceasing dread as I awaited my fate, I captured my resolve and ran forth and dived into the tidal beast. 

From the chaos of the surface above, I found myself sinking into pure tranquil blackness. The presence of my own body and soul provided the only illumination to be felt in these voided depths. With no noise and no movement, it seemed as though I had found myself in space, floating in a galaxy where every star had been painted over. 

There I floated and there I meditated, not concerned with the waves atop or the troubles in my soul but occupied instead with the quietness of the deep. 

A quietness projected not from the stormed reality above but projected from the dreamt solitude below. 

A solitude I can always find within me, only if I choose to leap towards it. 

Edited Journal extract- 

Originally written- 

4th of December 2023 - Madrid 

Video Cyprus- Filmed 10th of January 2024

nonsite-Iberian Peninsula

nonsite - Portugal 

"There’s a central focus point which is the non-site is the unfocused fringe where your mind loses its boundaries and a sense of the oceanic pervades, as it were. I like the idea of quiet catastrophes taking place…. The interesting thing about the site is that unlike the non-site, it throws you to the fringes. In other words, there is nothing to grasp onto except cinders, and there is no way of focusing on a particular place"

Reference Smithson, R, 1996, The Collected Writings, New York University Press, New York, USA

nonsite - Spain

Montserrat

I sit here, conscious to the elements,

Elements maintaining form and feel,

My eyes rest easy on the amber lit valley.

My lungs taste the air of olive tree forests

My feet hold firm placed on the trekked tracks of Catalan monks

My ears twist to the notes of crunching steps and whistling sparrows

All the while, my skin basques half in the coldness of a clouded east and half in the warmth of the setting sun of the west. 

It’s enriching to rest 

It’s fulfilling to be present 

I should get going soon,

Soon before night hugs this mountain with frost of December

But for now, let me have this moment 

Let my body rest sedate till my calves go numb, and my digits grow cold 

Let me have this time

For the moment,

But also for the memory. 

Transcription - Written on Montserrat, Barcelona, 

07-12-2023

Changes

Deposition of Christ 1587 Pieri Stefano

I think for a while I've tried to control my moods. I wrestled and grappled with my psyche to bend and contort it into submission. But I never mastered the art of Brain Jiu-Jitsu and no matter how hard I tried I could never choose to wake up in a good mood. On many occasions I have definitely awakened to a comfortable brain brimming with freshly topped up serotonin, but it was never something I could force. 

That’s the thing with a bad mood when you wake up to it. You wake up feeling shit, you're tired, you're hungry, your brain is in a chemically altered state. You can’t command your mood any more than you can command the tides of the ocean. 

I can’t control the tides, but I can understand my mindset. I can dive into my mental thoughts and mental rhythms. By swimming amongst the pools of my emotion states I can look and see the negative thoughts flowing within my grey matter. I see their location and why these ideas reside in me. 

I breathe slowly through my own consciousness,

In,         and,         out,         with deep breaths,  

clarity in my mind appears, clarity in my thoughts releases itself.

I can now find strength from my mind instead of labouring from beneath it. 

And through my own mindful presence and intention setting, I’ll get a good night's sleep and maybe, just maybe I’ll wake up fresh to a good mood. 

Trails

Surround me hills.

For that's why I am here.

To be swallowed whole,

By rocks that are dormant,

And fog that is flowing.

Smother me in a sunset hidden sky,

And coat my skin with Padua's mountain valleys.

For on this glim lit path,

Where step precedes step,

I may not find home, 

But I may find myself. 

Rainbow-Washed Revenance

Dilemmas and demands for the Doctrine of the Faith

How much should we expect from the Catholic Church? What reforms should we be thankful for and what progress should we be impatient for? These are all questions that have stirred through my mind as I’ve spent the last weeks walking and reading my way through the structures of the Papacy. 

Gold Cross - Cathedral di San Pietro (Bologna)

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is a 500 year old foundation that is cemented within the Vatican. Initiated in 1542 by Pope John III, this organisation has since shared and officiated church doctrine. If cardinals or priests have a question the Dicastery is the one who writes back. Letters to the consecrated editor if you will. 

It’s not often that the Dicastery has been part of news headlines, but on the 3rd of November they published the succinctly titled “ Answers to Several Questions from His Excellency, the Most Reverend José Negri, Bishop of Santo Amaro, Brazil, Regarding Participation in the Sacraments of Baptism and Matrimony by Transgender Persons and Homosexual Persons”. 

The voice of the Vatican clarified that people who were transgender could be baptized and them along with them homosexuals could potentially act as godparents. 

From this came a media storm, great changes were reported to be happening within the church, dare I even say could the Catholic church begin to be considered progressive?  While this step is an important one and does reflect some sort of doctrinal alteration within the institution, we must not get too excited for as always, the devil is in the detail. 

Two main points are worth considering, one- the Catholic Church still treats members of the LBGTQ+ community as people who participate in an immoral lifestyle, and two- the church leaves prudence within the hands of the clergy, a group of men who has been told repeatedly that queers who act on their urges represent “an intrinsic moral evil”. 

On to the first point of living as a sinful being. In the 2023 response to the Brazilian Bishop the Dicastry makes repeated mention of the Baptismal reflections of St. Thomas Aquinas taught and St. Augustine of Hippo. These two Saints who both wrote repeatedly on how Baptism itself can lead the sinner to a life of righteousness. 

“even if a man falls into sin, Christ does not destroy the character 

received by him in Baptism and seeks (quaerit) the sinner, in whom this character is 

imprinted that identifies him as his property”

Answers to Several Questions from His Excellency, the Most Reverend José Negri, Bishop of Santo Amaro, Brazil, Regarding Participation in the Sacraments of Baptism and Matrimony by Transgender Persons and Homosexual Persons- 2023

Saint Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne, 1650

So, what the Church is saying through its own mouthpiece is yes, we don’t support your actions, you are still an abomination but why not join us? Join us and maybe the Catholic guilt will free your soul to an everlasting liberation. Don’t find salvation in yourself, they say, because within the pride of one-self is only sin, find salvation instead in the sacrosanct of Jesus.™, join us for Sundays and pay your tithe. Look how progressive the Church is, they would even consider letting some queers in through the front door!

I say consider, because “considering” leads us to point two; the latitude given to ministers to exercise their sacred rites. Let us dive back into the letter and pour through the details of how these ceremonies are considered.

“However, since such a task does not constitute a right, pastoral prudence demands that it should not be allowed if there is a danger of scandal, undue legitimization or disorientation in the educational sphere of the church community… due pastoral prudence demands that every situation be wisely weighed, in order to safeguard the sacrament of baptism”

Answers to Several Questions from His Excellency, the Most Reverend José Negri, Bishop of Santo Amaro, Brazil, Regarding Participation in the Sacraments of Baptism and Matrimony by Transgender Persons and Homosexual Persons -2023

Jurisdiction of who is let into the church is left to the hands of the local priesthood. They are the frontline soldiers of the churches, soldiers who have been and still are told that a queer lifestyle is a sinful lifestyle. In 2021 the Dicastery released a declaration stating that blessings could not be applied to same-sex relations as...

“there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”

-Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex- 2021

The Catholic Church's power stems from a moral authority built on a long standing catalogue of theological texts and declarations. It’s not just the bible, but also the words of Saints and previous proclamations the Church has made to build up this catalogue. The Authority of the papacy drips from their ability to cling to the past.The Church considers themselves harbingers of the eternal word of God and when you consider your words as eternal it only makes sense that your reforms end up moving at a snail's pace. It afterall took the Church 359 years to apologise for threatening to burn Galileo alive for surmounting proposing the foundational fact that indeed the Earth really does revolve around the sun. 

The Church is by all accounts a conservative, not a reformative organisation and this reflects on their relationship with the queer community. They have said that no one should have the door of the Lord closed to them, and yet the church hands the key not the people but to their foot soldiers to carry out the orders. For decades these priests and members of the ministry have diligently listened to the Church’s words and teachings. They listened when they called homosexuals sinful and they listened when Pope Francis likened gender theory to nuclear weapons, and it’s to these people that the Dicastery entrusted them to allow a more “open” space within the Church. 

Yes Pope Francis is the most palatable Pope us queers have seen in a very long time. Yes, his Jesuit robes and teachings may be the teaspoon of sugar to the bitter elixir that is the Vatican but boy is it a big, powerful Church, and it's going to take a lot more than 4 grams of sweetener to hide its taste of something so pungent. 

“It’s not a crime. Yes, but it’s a sin,” 

Pope Francis on homosexuality, January 2023

It’s important for me to reflect on the role of The Dicastery, for in that I find my own role for myself as an artist. The Church is spending effort, money and time to release edicts to change the world in the direction they see fit. They preserve their power and their own authority by recalling the past. 

It’s not good enough for the Pope to sit down and break bread with people in the Trans community or let selected gay couples into their converted rituals. I will not be lectured that I'm a sinful creature, I simply expect more from a moral authority that speaks to 1.3 billion individuals. I’m not looking for change from within because it will never reach the pace I desire. The power structures of the Church rely on the slow moving of social tides not the wash and crash of a reformative storm. Well us queers are that storm, we are that destabilising factor that will come in like Noah's flood and wash these pontificated men out on their behinds.

This is my Dicastery, these are my edicts to inflict my agency onto the world, an agency that is truly filled with an undying love for my fellow human beings and sacrosanct of the self that any Abrahamic God wishes they could come near. My edicts are ones that indulge in the pleasures in humanity, from sucking cock to denying the shame of Catholic guilt. My soul nor my pride will never be held to ransom by the white robes of the ordained, I simply respect my soul too much. 

Keep rocking that boat, never accept that enough is enough till the Pontificate is on their knees begging us for forgiveness. x

Pope Pius VIII kneeling, St Peter's Bassillica, Monument by Pietro Tenerani, 1866

CBS San Francisco 2015 ,Pope Francis Compares Transgender People To Nuclear Weapons In New Book, CBS online news article, Feb 20th, accessed on 19th november 2023,< https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/pope-francis-compares-transgender-people-to-nuclear-weapons-in-new-book/ >

Columbia College, N/A, Saint Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne, 1650, Core Curriculum Catalogue, Accessed on 26th November 2023, <Saint Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne, 1650. | The Core Curriculum (columbia.edu)>

Dallas K, 2023, The pope’s latest comments on same-sex marriage, explained, Desert News Article, October 3rd, Viewed on 25th November 2023, <https://www.deseret.com/faith/2023/10/3/23901388/pope-comments-on-same-sex-marriage>

Dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, 1995, SOME CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING THE RESPONSE TO LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS ON THE NON-DISCRIMINATION OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS* ,<https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19920724_homosexual-persons_en.html  >, accessed on 19th November 2023

Dicastery for the document of the faith, Translated by Lewis M, 2023 ,English Translation of the DDF’s Dubia Response to H.E. Msgr. Jose Negri (Oct. 31, 2023), 

,<https://reasonandtheology.com/2023/11/08/english-translation-answers-to-several-questions-from-h-e-bishop-jose-negri-of-santo-amaro-regarding-participation-in-the-sacraments-of-baptism-and-marriage-by-transgender-individuals-and-people-i/ >, accessed on 19th November 2023

Fastenburg D 2010, The Galileo Case, Time Magazine online article, 17th June,  Viewed 26th November 2023, <https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1997272_1997273_1997285,00.html> 

Luis F, 2021 ,Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex, Dicastery for the doctrine of the faith , accessed on 19th November 2023

,<https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20210222_responsum-dubium-unioni_en.html  >

Winfield N, 2023, Pope suggests blessings for same-sex unions possible in response to 5 conservative cardinals, Associated Press online article, October 2nd, Accessed on 25th november 2023,<https://apnews.com/article/vatican-conservatives-synod-lgbtq-5c6e33d4d45aea1b0b5553d3acc799e1> 

Winfield N, Thomas T 2023, For this group of trans women, the pope and his message of inclusivity are a welcome change, Associated Press online article, 19th November 2023, Viewed 26th November 2023,<https://apnews.com/article/vatican-transgender-lgbtq-b3d67868504ba701cce09da9ecc94de0>

Vactican, DICASTERY FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Vatican official website, Viewed at 23rd November 2023, <https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_pro_14071997_en.html>