(Image: Yasmine Ganley (anyone girl founder) + Jiho Yun) A recent series of poems featured in collaboration with Anyonegirl.com, speaking to communication barriers, female instinct, and the weight of our words. 1: www.anyonegirl.com/you-yourselves-are-a-letter/ 2: http://www.anyonegirl.com/voice-mail/
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Some more thoughts shared with Self Practice Journal. Considering the role of compassion and resilience, and how we might employ these virtues when facing the tricky business in our society today. 'In ongoing attempts to see beyond monotony, and consider with more weight the paths I cross on a day to day basis, I often wonder how the world would wear the warmth of my appreciation in moments like these. As I walk, do my feet paint a trail? Is it gentle, digestible, helpful?' Shared thoughts on memory, growth and nostalgia, in an essay written for Self Practice this month. (Photo: Franz Erhard Walther) will you take me somewhere nice? i promise i’ll behave. we will go there in our minds when your arm links through mine to build a bridge so we can get there faster. Categories(Photo: René Magritte, The Art of Conversation) Just a quick note to pen, because I’ve been playing around with my tendencies and motivations this past two weeks - in regards to what is worthy of documentation, and what really needs to be publicly shared. Having just spent nine days at sea with old friends the slate of my mind feels clearer. The short break from existing like the rest of humanity carried with it more than I initially expected, and I’ve really just noticed that now. Today as I relive the sensations, moments, and rituals that were our reality for most of the trip, I’m trying to look more deeply at our natural tendency to appreciate the weight of things only after they have passed and gone. Rather than resent myself - demanding I be more present next time - I want to gently view it all, with curiosity. Because in actual fact, as present as we aim to be in the present, it will never feel like a full enough picture to soak in until every form and detail has had it’s chance to come forward. Something that I’m beginning to see only happens in retrospect. On the flight home yesterday, still salty from our pre flight swim in the ocean, I asked myself: what are the really important things that need to be documented, expressed or explained about this trip. Because surely the world doesn’t need another photo of a girl posing in a bikini at the bow of a yacht. Surely it needs to know more about the joy of eating breakfast slowly with friends at your table, the generosity of others sharing their reality so you can find your dream, the freedom in trusting nature’s course, and what happens inside of you when you witness the vastness of the night sky while anchored at sea. Being on the boat taught me a few valuable life parallels. Like planning ahead and knowing variables / conditions, all while staying fluid, flexible, adaptable. It got me pondering states of flux - The ebbs and flows of weather patterns. The wind and tide being not too dissimilar to emotions. The understanding of home as more of a feeling, not just walls and windows. When I was at the helm one afternoon another boat up came up ahead carving a similar route to us, and Polly said to me, ‘stay on your course so he knows where you’re going.’ It struck me as a practical instruction, but later I came to look at it through more of a philosophical lens. There were no mapped rules in that moment. No lines in the sea. Just as there aren't any for our relationships, or life for that matter. But perhaps this tells that it’s with our actions we can best communicate where we aim to end up as we travel along blindly, and hopefully avoid collision in doing so. Thoughts and questions on documentation - I think at times I concern myself too much with capturing things rightly, all to make them more real or justifiable. But why does another’s knowledge of my experience make it more notable? Why do I give over the sacred nature of my very own moment to rest in the hands of others, letting their perceived judgment of it dictate the way I move about in that space and time. Do I let it easily pull me away from the very people I am in it with; only to give a very fickle glimpse to those I am not with? Why do I value the approval and opinions of some people in my life over others? What makes me so calculated in these times? Experiencing my life as a movie in my own head. I can faintly hear a constant storyteller’s voice - myself in my old age - recalling these little and big moments to someone down the line. Then letting that narrative dictate my movements, and influence more considered decisions... Ones I would like to watch, read, and hear about. “Substance over form: learning to pay attention to how things work and feel, not just what they look like.” I read these words somewhere a few months ago and they’ve stuck. I’m still learning, but I think I’m liking the result of the process. (Photo: Saul Leiter’s home by François Halard) Everyone I speak to seems to be contemplating the weight of the world at the moment. Navigating this elusive sense of life not having quite started yet, we all seem to agree that the years of our 20’s are bringing with them a certain feeling of limbo - a state of transition that doesn’t have plans to resolve anytime soon. What are we doing, why is it happening? Will we ever feel like where we already are on our own two feet is a good enough place to stand? I know for me I still feel 19, like the past 5 years didn't actually happen and that I’m now warranted a free pass to instant life-understanding for no particular reason. I’m running around chasing things that I think might be over here or back there, but perhaps the settledness I really want will only ever come when I decide to let it. These words of Henry David Thoreau revealed to me that time is irrelevant, and a bit of a trick. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” As much as time may pass, it will forever stay that way - permanently impermanent, and as much as I'd love to go back to places, or have a sneak peek at what's ahead, things right here really are pretty magnificent so I may as well take a drink from that constant stream of change. i think a lot of those days these days but where will that get me. because it’s worse remembering better times with a now forgotten recipe. I turn back for a moment, to see a showcase of iridescent reflections being cast from the water, lighting up the trees that guard the edges of the lake. I submerge my upper body, swimming out deep watching the image of my hands enlarge, becoming distorted as they rise to break the surface of the water with every stroke, sculling on until my arms and legs feel ready for a break. I tread water graciously, amongst speckles of white fluff that has blown to rest from the surrounding trees. Residual drops of water fall from my cheeks and nose, my feet above an unsure depth that doesn't for one second promote any hint of anxiety, gladly. I feel safe, light, peaceful. I let my legs float to the top, spreading my limbs like a starfish. My skin enjoying the noticeable shift in temperature from the deeper parts, and my ears indulging in the tranquil, welcomed volume of a muted, underwater world. As I resurface, reality reminds me it can once again be manageable, as my ears adjust to the faint twittering of delirious birds talking to each other from their branches. (Photo: Kettle’s Yard, Brian W Ferry) The mornings have been a lot more frosty this past week, consequently I’ve been waking earlier feeling cold after a patch of exposed skin makes it’s way out from under the mountain of duvets on my bed. I’ve been making more of a promise to embrace the outside cold this winter; convinced it will build my immune tolerance, and bring me more clarity of mind. Today, I went for a walk on the golf course near our house just as the sun went down. A westerly wind picked up and as I stood under a big old tree and looked up I watched all of it’s crumpled, orange, dying leaves be blown off with the force, looking like hundreds of little birds flying from the branches. Ordinary, but beautiful. I’ve discovered that the most amazing things happen to you when you are standing around sharpening a pencil or doing something equally mundane, thinking absolutely nothing exciting is ever going to happen. - Jean Van Leeuwen Thankful for the joy that is to be found in small and simple things - the collected treasures from a trip away with my dad a few weekends ago. The more I look at what I choose to surround myself with and consider to be items worthy of showcase lately, the more I realise how prevalent my obsession with collecting twigs, stones, odd shaped cut offs, and broken sea shells has become… (Photos: Olivia Fiddes & Pauline Hisbacq) Perfectionism as an expression of fear. Cynicism as an manifestation of jealousy. Prompting to live your life as a prayer - what is mine asking for? Thinking about career moves. No big leaps, just learning to ‘ride the horse in the direction it’s going,’ so to speak. Not trying to manufacture or predict a life’s vocation while there is still so much I want to learn and explore on the way to getting there. The irony of aesthetic aloofness. When we craft an unassuming demeanour of ‘not trying to impress anyone,’ aren’t we all ironically doing just that, but in efforts to impress people with the fact that we don’t in-fact need to impress people? Remembering the night I overheard a little girl say to a friend ‘mum’s gone for the red wine…’ in the veggie aisle of the Northcote IGA last year. Cravings for a ‘non cyber’ life currently. To not live so much through a screen but to be a participant in the out there world. To be giving, gaining, interacting and existing in the real world of people and relishing in the goodness of real, tangible things. I want to crawl into the hole in his violin I want to sleep there until my flesh becomes music - Ocean Vuong I found a box of old CD’s in our spare room, which I had been looking for for a long time. The past few days I’ve been relishing time alone turning them up loud on my grandad’s old stereo player. Feeling like I did living in Melbourne last year, with the ample records and giant speakers we had in the flat. I would sometimes lay on the floor in the dark and sing as loud as I could - it made me feel so full. ‘The naive untutored art of children, their spontaneity and freedom of expression’ - on the wall of Sunday & John Reed’s Heide gallery As adults we often find ourselves having lost the knack for experimentation, especially in art, because we tend to attach experience with mind, fear, judgment, and rejection. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost the value of play. One summer not too long ago I spun around with my arms flung out wide until I fell over and lay in the garden hysterically laughing at myself. It was so novel and I wish I did it more. |