Sunday, November 19, 2006

Be an angel to a freezing best friend.

OK- so this is more of a Northern-Hemisphere thing, but PETA (People for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) are looking for sponsors to give mercy to freezing, hungry dogs that will suffer and possibly die without your help.

WHAT PETA CAN DO IF YOU HELP THEM

For you:
They will give you a before and after certificate showing photographs of the difference you have made to that dog...
AND
You will be featured on their Angels for Animals site.

For the dogs:
PETA will provide warm, comfortable dog-houses to dogs chained up outside, from freezing, impoverished areas.


Most of all, you can change the life of a beautiful soul and the rewards are unumerable. That dog's life can be a time of happiness and love, rather than pain and hunger.

Why not check it out?

Saturday, November 04, 2006

*Change your LIFE!*


This image shows water crystals which formed after a
Buddhist blessing upon a lake.
Can you spot Buddha?

When I ran away from my retreat in the mountains, where my soul felt more confined and repremanded than healed, I found, instead, a book of Masaru Emoto's water crystal research. This was the healing I was looking for.
I first saw reference on

I watched it last night and cried with truth. Watch "What the Bleep" if you watch any film this year. Ever. (It's kinda a docodrama, really)

Shmicko water crystal site...Hado.net


Click on Dr Masaru Emoto to go to his website

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

That dew-jewelled rocky path...

OK- so it's been a million years. For reasons of self-challenge, I have restrained myself from response to the faceless void. Words may flow in so many colours and you cannot judge the brush for its every stroke.

This blog is my intimate space within such a cluttered web. In visiting this space, you are being welcomed into a space so personal to me. I speak in parody, in extreme, in honesty, I introduce the shadow which I, as we all, have. Denial of such can be held to blame for some of the world's greatest crimes ever. Understand the dark and light flows into it. Illuminate. Grow. Express. Question. Explore.

This weekend, I was reminded of a story of the true experience of absolute immersion with the spirit.

"A salt dog wanted to know the secret of the deep
ocean. As he dived, he dissolved beyond return, becoming, at once one with the truth. With what he knew now, he could no longer be that form. He had merged, at one, with everything."

I have just returned from a meditation retreat in the Blue Mountains. Seeking a cosmic bandaid, I found new 'wounds' to heal, yet in processing such, I grew.

We may expect neatly-packaged solutions to our emotional briar-patches. Be it an alcohol-fuelled outing of denial, astrological-ponderings, hours staring into a patient friend's tea-cup ripping tissues, the purchase of psychiactric architectural psychochemicalelectroemotional re-wiring, or an instinctual calling to an old stamping-ground of spiritual guidance, compassion and hopefully, even elation?..

We think we know the exact prescription of our packages of salvation, but the path is never as we can already guess. That would be life as a constant re-run of "Roseanne".

The path can be rocky, sure. And no-one chooses that, but how can we also choose the elated surprise of rounding the next corner, just as the first rays of dawn come streaming, specrtal, through the dew-adorned rocks, before a heaving valley of effulgent mist. And, without the agony and darkness of the journey up that rocky incline, could that view feel so goldenly drunk into the soul as amber beams first emblazon ones night-chilled skin...?

Without that mindless passage into the jewel-laden future, there would be no surprise.



Nauthiz (Image by Bluniverse)

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Ranting rave...

Aaaaaaaahhhh! The relief of the first mouthfull of icy cold beer...a constant companion beside the cathode-ray nipple which suckles me also...however, methinks that breastmilk may be radioactive... Will there one day be a generation of people walking around with fried eyes and mobile-to-temple tumours...rampant, staggering-Night-of-the-Living-Dead video gamers, computer geeks, artists, students and yuppies...or does that concept even exist anymore? We're being dictated by the fashion industry that we must dress like preppy school-marms with bug-eyes. Fashion is the cynical puppeteer who pulls our strings to don irony-upon-irony of fine and not-so-finery and removes our sense of oversight until ten years later, when we're burning photos of a day when fashion dictated that we looked just great, seduced by the numbness of newness, yet appropriating with extreme predjudice, all times past in the ever-pilvaged smorgas board of social data...oh and did you hear blue's in? Bugger that, unfaithful tourists of azure...you gotta live a lifetime of blue before you really know it, kinda like moving into a small country town and still being an outatowner after 50 years...

I am downloading a month's worth of software...Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator...I have work coming out of my ears, but it's kind of a relief to not be able to do anything while it downloads. So many times, exhausted, I have loved the bittersweet wait of rendering video. Taking a compulsory break when you haven't allowed yourself to even sleep properly for weeks...speaking of which, time for a real break...

Thursday, May 04, 2006

The Great Procrastinator

OK- definately procrastinating here. So much to do, such big concrete blocks piling up on my tight, sore back... My Yellow Pages ad is paying off and clients are coming out of the woodwork, yet I haven't even had time to properly set up my studio.

I'm such a perfectionistic procrastinator, my desk had been sitting on my leaky verandah (porch) for so long the wood started rotting away. So, I made it my mission to repair that desk perfectly and make it the most beautiful desk in the world, which would glow like a luminous night sky with realistic gradation, glittery constellations and nebulae decopaged between many layers of varnish for a 3-D effect...

My standards are so high the worked-on desk is now sitting, waiting, fearing the rain...two steps backwards,
one step forwards...for all mankind...

Blogging can be the perfect way to procrastinate...it clears the mind and collectively, fragments of linguistic sketches, or mere seemingly-pointless ruminations, can actually build one day towards a body of work...just when you felt productively anorexic...

I have websites, video and graphic work to do and a career to catch up with.

It's like one day I had the absurd idea of being a donkey-cart driver. I bought the donkey and cart from some dodgy dealer and sat down to fasten my sandals before getting behind the reins. Something, perhaps the sound of the screaming wheels of time, alerted the donkey, who took off at a stallion-like pace, leaving me racing desperately behind, dodging falling wares, while the dodgy-donkey dealer rubbed his hands together, smugly pocketing my cash.


Why can't I get off my ass? ha. ha. ha.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Ouroboros

And, so, the world spins on...
Seeking solace from crowds, technology and this often-claustraphobic settlement, my partner and I escaped to his sandstone cottage and slept and sat and wrote in the sun. It was so good just to be- just for a moment after a month of constant technology, illness, stress, tradgedy and melted-glass-warped like only sleep-deprivation can cause... It was my choice to produce such a detailed work, but then, I really have no choice, but to create with precision and detail...it's the digital simeon on my back...or at least sinking its claws right into my cerebro-cortex...

and once again, my train of attention hurtles off minto the night...

Meanwhile, back at my lover's shack...we emerged for Chinese at the local Golf/RSL club. On approach, it was like stepping into the establishing shot in the ultimate quirky Aussie restaurant in Woop Woop. We were greeted by an shiny-black-animated- amiable-tailess cat. I planned a prwan smugglery.

We dined against a cacophony of meat-tray raffle and lottery draws, each revelation
incurring a comment like: "well, they've only been in town for fourteen months, but it looks like thy're trying to win every-bloody-thing!"

Our dinner was mis-ordered because it was so hard to hear, but I did recieve one oddity I asked for...Seafood Birdsnest. Are they flying fish or are they caught by kingfishers, or is life just stranger than it already seems...

Anyway, it was delicious and it gradually died down to a natural human twang.

I recieved the news that my friends had had a baby. The father was once a crazy punk front-man to a band who performed bouncing on clothless mattress springs and living a generally Vivienesque existance. The mother a highly spirited beading gypsy character with a deliciously light hold on normality.

They now live quietly on a worm farm and now a new generation has emerged so soon after all of this death.

Ouroboros bites its tail hard and beginnings and deaths are closer than all the prosaic middle-years of existance.


"Beginning, end...end, beginning- all the same thing!",
Ogra- the Dark Crystal.

The next day my Dad won me a new red bycicle- in fact, the first good-quality, new bike I will have ever owned...

...funny how it all goes round...
Namaskar

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Conclusions

Well, it's a million thoughts, tears and words away from my last post. I have handwritten posts to fill in, but for now, I'll just spill my head a little...

It has been a powerful time in my town. Death and tradgedy has prevailed for months now, sprinkled with all the irreverent mirth of the universe can display.

The funeral was so genuine, impressive and beautiful. All the creative people; even hermits like me, attended and the feeling of loss, but enchantment with a memory.

It was a windy, blue-sky-scattered-with-cotton-wool kind of day, with a determined bite in the Autumn air. As we approached, the words, "Forever Young" flowed upon the breeze from the tree-chapel where so many people were gathered.

We sat and our old school song, "Jerusalem", played. I tried to sing to it, but the words choked in my neck.

So many school assemblies had ended for my friend and I with this song. No matter how mundane, 80s and stressful boarding school was, that song always moved me. It was one of those dusty-sunbeam moments when life feels like a movie and tears intoxicate the motion.

Today, this song brought bitter tears from me and anger at a system that shook our souls like an angry wind to tender blossoms.

Confusingly, this day I was torn between the body of school-based pain that was unlocked by these all-too-familiar strains and chords, yet still, as no longer a teenager, hearing the beauty of William Blake's words still enticed me to be open to this emotional minefield of a song.

The eulogy read as a great person, like you would usually hear on a docoplayed the world over. She had performed to many, but she had so much more potential. I want to take her work out there to the public as much as I can as a video celebrating her, but that's another post...

She did so much for so many and even organised events for childrens' theatre she wouldn't be around to see. She never stopped. She gave so much and she was always there to visit lost souls wandering the outer horizons of their souls.

When she performed, she didn't act,- she became.

She didn't know her worth, yet it's so great. I wonder if she could have seen the events of the day if she would have changed her mind...

Imagine if birthdays really were a celebration of your being here and that everyone who has painted a colour in your life, could come together, as if in a dream.
Look around and life may all seem so ant-paced concrete-unchangeable,
but it's not and it will...

But, imagine if all those people could all converge at home and tell each of us our worth, how differently would we all feel?
Instead of B-days, we need BE-days...

But, my mind scuttles off the thread with junk-shop clarity...

The funeral progressed with live music and a charged feeling in the air.
As it concluded, they played "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". A sweet relief to balance the point of farewell. The crowd clapped a single repetitive beat, like at the end of a play, when you're counting down to the final applause, and when the song ended I tried to begin a round of applause. It's one of those things that you have to jump into fully, or not at all. My clap was loud enough to raise eyebrows, but not enough to command response. Disappointed, I stopped.

My friend had thought of releasing blue helium balloons into the sky, but had appropriately declined, a beautiful idea that will be done at a later time.

Upon leaving, I found myself at the place she was to be driven from. Behind me, in the crowd, someone screamed out her name and I found my will and I clapped past the point of puzzled/disapproving looks until one, then another joined my meagre sound until the whole gardens around us filled with a warm wave of applause.

An exit befitting a star.

As we drove out of the gardens, we fell into the flow behind the hearse. We were only three cars away. For thirty seconds we followed before turning out into the street. She was so close. I was so aware this would be the physically closest I would ever be to her again in my life. As we turned away, I watched through the back window to savour any last grasp of her immediate presence in my life.

As our distance increased, the hearse crept up over a rise that seemed to go on for hours as I watched her disappear surely and finally over the hill and gone.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Goodbye, my friend.

This is all I can think of doing. I just got off the phone from my best friend telling me our close friend has just killed herself this morning.

How do you say that? It just sounds so strange. It reverberates in so many ways and my obsessive-compulsive brain kicks in to re-inforce any of those horrible shadow-impulses that make you afraid of thinking things that are so horrible, so diametrically-opposed to your very thoughts that it is fear that confirms those thoughts' existance.

I am as if walking in a haze. The haze is momentarily comforting in its obscuring of clarity, like cotton-wool wrapping the razor-jaws of life/death reality- the kind that smashes your head open if you don't believe it enough...

Every few moments I fall, weightfully through the same thought-processes.

1.Initial, intellectual appropriate sadness at the actual facts. The response is limited and contained. There is no emotional elaboration. It is what it is.
Simple.
Finite.

2.Next, my emotional brain kicks in and a cluttered conglomeration of elements fly at my face. The rest is digestion of this.

3.I feel guilt. So much guilt. She tried to contact me so recently to spend time with her, but I didn't find the time. Momentarily, I think of a friend to call and inform and the thought occurs that "will I be the first to tell her the news?" and the my whole self kicks in and screams at me "how dare you?!!!" and I realise that the gossip angle means nothing to me and it's just some sick obsessive compulsive impulse kicking in, but even in intellectual comprehension, another wave hits me. There's no intellectualising away emotional gut-reflexes and the more you try, the more they'll be re-inforced with a diamond-titanium head.

4. Anger. At a system which didn't understand her, like a machine which processes a constant procession of souls, like petals in an unrelenting cogworks.
At the futility of so much talent and fire-cracker-bright personality disposed of.
Ceased like the after-echo of a final exclaimation on a vast, empty, blinding stage.

5.Disbelief. When I heard the news, the words, "committed suicide" sounded apt, following other behaviour, but as soon as I heard it in my memory's infantile initial perception, it sounded real, but my mind instantly thought- "it's not final. We can resucitate her now we know." It sounds like such a mutated dream, we can undo it in the supposedly re-assuring light of day. But, after 3 minutes the brain dies -and the rest soon after that. How can regret, panic, remorse, guilt, compassion change the cold-concrete-block reality of it all?

Answer: it can't.

6.Understanding. It feels right. So many details suggest it was so well-considered by her...and so understandable. If she was ninety and in real physical pain, her death would be considered sad, but a just relief to so much pain. Why is this so different? There must be some kind of mercy in the universe. She didn't deserve what she suffered.

7.Panic. If this is the right reality, I fear all that is to come. Waves of realisation hit again and again, passing momentarily into hazy amnesia, bearing only an intense, untagged body of emotion until comprehension again forms the recognisable figure of reality and my soul reels again under the shock.

8.Sadness. Already I miss her and I think of the realisation I had that she was like a sister, at least in background.

She was so talented, so eloquent, beautiful, kind, generous. Her need for 100% perfection was hanging always over her head, yet while she was closer than most to that 100, every point less made it impossible for her to continue as a self-decided blemish upon the possibility of 100%.

Why- for fuck's sake? What did it matter how well she elocuted, whom she impressed, what scores she attained, her CV, her impressing of the right people. Now she's a corpse, who the fuck cares how perfectly she spoke?!!!

It's this fucked-up WASPY mentality of impressing all, whilst staying neatly dressed and emotionally threadless.

WHY?

I must say, my response is partly selfish, here- but how do you separate emotions, thoughts, impulses to neat, organised categories?

I am personally spooked because my friend was the person who most resembles myself in personality and background. She was the only person I know of who went to my school I was still in contact with. She was affected so similarly, but it manifested differently as far as cold, psychological labels go, but it came out much the same; desperate to please all, yet really trusting few or none, highly achieving potential, yet so constantly defeating the outcome by protecting herself from the sheer velocity of feeling with the bitterness of toxins. A beer, a pen and paper are the most immediate and undemanding allies. We hide in the dark room of being us while outside in the searing examination-light of day, those we try to please bang loudly and accusingly on the front-doors of expectations.

Why? For fuck's sake, why?

So many times in sadness, I have pondered upon the thought of "I feel so unloved and misunderstood- if this bus hit me now, what meaning would they derive from my objects I was carrying? Would everyone who had wronged me feel put in their places? Would all of my potential be recognised post-mortem? Would my name make it to lights regardless in the wake?

Wake- the backwash of a life lived and ended which has left those associated with the need to anhibriate, commiserate, whatever.

This is the first friend of mine who has died. this is the first person of my age close to me, the first suicide, the first senseless, passionate, unresolved death in my life. My cousin died last year. I saw the damage, I felt sad, but I had never felt anything in common, apart from last name, but this is new and I still don't know how it feels to me. It's all too immediate and abstract to organise into neat, understandable piles of emotion.

I just don't know.

I just don't know.

All I have left are salty tears, bitter words and guilt at any satisfaction apt expression may serve.

I wish I could just hug her.

It's such a full-stop.













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