I love to think in vibrant motion, in terms of colour and rhythm and creation. To see the force behind the seed’s sprouting, the relationship between the eye’s retina and the spectrum of colour offered by a storm’s tinted sky, the intensity of emotion that you know is a response to a deep-rooted and selfless love for another. To take the reigns of something so wild, yet being certain of its place within you. To seek the essence of truth in all things. To be saturated in and guided on by that force. To live dynamically and poetically.
I say these things and fear that my words will translate as a romanticised gushing. That’s not where I intend to go. I am not a romantic in any sense of the idealised form. I believe that this life-filled thinking and living is something for all. Not that it should take on the shape of what I am learning to know as my own. No, your dance on the edge of the precipice will most probably model attributes foreign to my understanding. Your costume, your landscape, the places where your feet start and stop. This is your dance.
But do dance, even if it means learning one step at a time. Be bold. Share your unique strength and brilliance with others as they dance alongside you. Take time to dwell on what your story is and how you will relay this. Learn to wonder anew.
Tonight I’m just going to write a very simple post that sums up what is the highlight of my thoughts right at this very moment in time, 11.49pm, Friday night, after a stretched and tedious shift at work…
Long awaited and hoped-for change can occur within your self.
This will probably come as no surprise to you. I however had allowed myself to believe that certain things were ingrained within my fibre and consequently beyond any realm of change. I thought I had to carry them. Things learnt over the last few months have been the harbinger of a new chapter in this life of mine. I am deeply humbled. I feel as though I’m becoming more me. Yeah, hope renewed.
Filed under: contemplation
I had to run for the train this morning. I usually do. Fortunately the ticket officer had my ticket ready to go and as I handed my money over he dropped the ready-processed ticket into my hand. I popped it into the validator and scrapped through the doors of the closest carriage only to sit there for about 3 minutes before motion commenced.
I must say I do enjoy my train trips into old Melbourne town. I feed off the colours of the graff art that lies beneath the high concrete walls guiding our path. I like seeing so many faces, each revealing glimpses of untold tales. I look back at my little mountain and see the morning sun intensifying over its soft rise and fall. I take time to think and breathe and pray. I feel so lucky.
I was going to write about the guy who sat next to me this morning listening to some exceptionally distasteful late ‘90s pop techno beats way too loud. I was going to express my lack of understanding. But instead, I’ll put up with the crass record label generated trash. One does become desensitised to the foul odours, and I can pretend the old man whose dandruff is flaking off onto my jacket is my own old grandpa. I’m sorry for harping on time and time again. I really have so much.
I make myself a pot of bittersweet coffee. I sit down under a cocoon of doona to read my school papers. I pause to hear the wailing fire sirens echo across the valley. The screeching ambulance calls follow. I briefly wonder whose humdrum reality has just been crashed and burned. The sun continues to shine. I continue to sip at my coffee.
The art of listening is a funny thing. I believe we learn to use our voice and body to demand a response from our environment before we learn to listen to our surroundings and other individuals. I don’t spend a huge amount of time around baby humans, but it almost seems as though listening is something they have to adjust to. It is instinctual to cry when their immediate needs are not being met, but when do they come to know familiar voices and the meanings of specific tones?
I was speaking to a fella the other night at work who genuinely appeared interested in talking to me. It was at the end of the night and he and his mates were the only customers left at the bar. We had discovered we had a couple of shared passions and he continued to ask questions long after I had poured him his beer. The funny thing was that he really didn’t seem to be listening to me. He would ask a question, I would offer my response, then he’d reply with something somewhat irrelevant, as though he’d been having a conversation with himself. A few minutes after he’d returned to his mates sitting at their table he actually called out and asked me what we’d been talking about! Maybe the guy was tired, perhaps he’d had a bad day, I don’t know. But it just struck me as strange behaviour. Anyway, his question surprised me so much that I couldn’t elicit a response and just laughed at him out loud.
I appreciate a good listener. I love it when someone is able to truly hear what you are saying – even if things are not being captured by one’s words. I would even suggest that eyes are more useful than the ear when it comes to that sort of hearing.
I watched a really insightful doco last night. It illustrated the plight of three young people in Teheran struggling to express themselves via channels barred and illegal according to Iran’s authorities. A painter, a death-metal musician and a skier; each striving to share the life and hopes springing forth from within. Born into a world of inflexible codes of practice, each shared his and her desire for change and frustration regarding the things impeding this.
I was amazed at how the three continued to live out their hopes and dreams despite risking imprisonment – even capital punishment by means of stoning. Each was determined to carry out his or her own little revolution as they raged against their country’s power systems.
The artist broke my heart. His creative drive belonged to another world. One of mystic. One of the manifestation of human experience. His genius was apparent as the cameras followed his working hands. Huge canvas creations telling the stories of hope of a fresh new day. This man’s house was raided and he ended up incarcerated as a “corrupt individual”.
Freedom is the ability to make choices. It’s having options and the liberty to express these without restriction. What really gets me is that I am seeing this restriction of freedom paralleled in my own, thoroughly Western, land. Although young people in Oz have a plethora of choices at their fingertips, they are encouraged (might I even be so bold as to suggest coerced) by the many unwritten codes of society to abide by everything money can provide. Slaves by choice to a big fat money god. They don’t need death threats to conform. Choosing to be bound and maimed by the necessity to uphold ‘happiness’ and avoid boredom at the expense of anything else is the tragedy of my generation and culture.
What I saw in these three very brave people was the hope and determination to see change occur in their rigid culture. Sadly I think this is something lacking in most walks of human existence and I dream of the day when we can all be free of such foolishness.
What’s the going price of beauty these days? What does one have to submit in order to attain the best?
This morning on my city-bound train I sat across from a woman looking to be in her late 40s. She was clothed in the tell-tale crisp lines and fabrics of some pricey designer label. Her hair and make-up suggested strict and thorough application and her eyes were fixed before her in an intent, perhaps surreal, stare.
Usually such a woman would not capture my attention. Sure, it appeared as though she’d made quite some effort on her looks, but that’s not unusual – especially in rush hour. What did shock me was that this woman, who seemed to be struggling to stay awake on the commuter’s journey, could not close her eyelids properly. The soft skin that usually surrounds the vital seeing organs had been folded and sliced and sewn back up in order to remove unsightly wrinkles. As she drifted within her haze of doze and her lids became heavy, one eye was distinctly left partially unveiled.
We have opted for a beauty that can be cloned and bottled and muted, but does not captivate or intrigue or overwhelm. This beauty has been tamed in order to make it a purchasable thing. Something that can be packaged and regulated. A beauty that can be reigned in by the surgeon’s knife.
The graceful wild beauty that flows from a generous and open soul is not a product that can be reproduced and bought according to demand. Each of us has been born with the alluring beauty of irreplaceable differences and oddities. Yet we have allowed society to promote a dumbed-down, tamed version of beauty that can be rendered according to the depth of one’s pockets. How sad we’ve sold out.
Filed under: contemplation
My time has suddenly become sparse and, although I’m finding my mind wondering to many a concept, space and image, I have very little opportunity to place these threads of thought down in written form.
One thing however that has been plaguing me over the past week or so has been that of what constitutes goods news for you as an individual. Of course, such a topic is going to be very subjective in nature. The astute businesswoman at the top of her concrete tower and the bohemian artist living by the sea will perhaps have polar opinions on such things, but what do you see as being essential to the flourishing of life? Maybe the flourishing of life isn’t even important to you…
What really lifts my spirit is seeing change within an individual for the better. Seeing one previously defeated and deflated empowered and growing in this new strength, seeing addictions that ruin and rule being broken for the long-haul, seeing a face shift from anger to inner peace. You get my drift. That’s good news for me.
I write this because I see a variety of people in my day and I wonder whether good news is generally a shared thing between humans or whether it changes according to one’s culture or whether it’s a personal vision. What do you think?
What forms the essence of a person? The inner nature that determines whether we choose to offer what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within a situation. For there certainly are negative ways (what we often refer to as evil) that tend to bring us back down to our knees, the things that hurt us and others, the actions, both planned and accidental, which lend themselves to destruction. This can be as small and biting as teenage girls boycotting the birthday of a peer, or can be as devastating on humanity as the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. The attitude of both is one of scorn.
I write this with certain people in mind who tend to attract such disdain. People who are radiant, generous, beautiful and loving. People who I deeply care for. Why is it that they tend to attract such ugly examples of humanity? I thought for a while that perhaps they were just more sensitive to negativity and made more of the situation than I personally would, but now I’m not so sure.
At times I find it easier to hurt than to heal. My mistakes naturally seem to fall that way. Especially among those I am closest to and with which I can avoid the ‘social niceties’. But I still fail to make sense of deliberate acts of malice. I don’t go out of my way to make hell on earth.
Humans are often influenced by others – pack mentality has been the driving force behind many terrible occurrences. Perhaps many of our actions sit within the simple truth that we would do so much for the security of self within the acceptance of others. Is this why so many desire to break others? To place irremovable scars on brothers and sisters?
