Zen from Manly Dam

The wind has no sound, but conjures those things it moves through into sounding.

Be like the wind, quiet and abiding in your direction, igniting discussion through your actions.

The ocean is not blue, it's just a mirror to the sky.

Be like the water, let yourself take on different colours but remain pure and transparent.

Hope springs eternal

It is a gushing rushing surging sort of feeling when you're hopeful against the odds. It does spring eternal and there's an infinite ocean out there to drift on... Got to remember you phone and wish for good reception.

In your head is a map that you seem to be able to remember, but truth is you're just making up the continents you hope to find.

There are real roads we travel, the kind made of bitumen, and walking down those roads is the way to stay afloat the ocean of hope in your heart which, at times, seems to leak out into the real world. Walk in the direction you need to go in and meet what you find when you get there.

Waking up to your self

Extremely late or very early one morning I woke with a dead arm that was resting above my head. At first I thought there must have been something long and heavy that had placed itself near my head, I lay there for a while, unperturbed because the thing wasn't breathing or making sounds at me. Eventually I reached up with my other hand and realised it was my own limb - wow!
Then I was wide awake, I realised this is what it's like when other people touch me, because the dead arm couldn't feel a thing, I might as well have been shaking hands with the Queen for all I knew.
I touched my own hand, noticed all it's wrinkly bits and how it felt surprisingly dry and weathered. This was amazing, it struck me as being the kind of experience I want to have more often. I think we're all a little obsessed with the idea of getting into someone else's head and coming to know what it's like in there: but re-meeting your own body as though you'd never inhabited it is something altogether creepy/lovely/new/POSSIBLE.

Sometimes when you are drifting off to sleep or sitting still in meditation you feel like you're falling or you have elephantitis of the hands, or that your hands are miles apart, or that your hands aren't even there at all.


Every now and again you are forced into acknowledging a part of you afresh.

Sadly, I like metaphors. I'm a metaphoralomaniac: embarrassed but attracted by my own allegories. Like a teenager fixated on a pimple.

Loving someone should be like walking into the front door of a party and playfully tossing a bottle of red wine to the host.

I mean that it’s a gift, you give it away. Don’t always expect to share in the drinking: your host might be an alcoholic and down the whole lot and look to you in a drunk stupor foolishly asking for more when they were too hasty to enjoy the first lot anyway. Or maybe your host is too dim witted to even see it coming, maybe they misunderstood the little upward jerk of your eyebrows that said “Ready?” when you tossed the bottle and it smashed on the floor in a million little pieces and made a big red hard-to-scrub-out stain on the carpet, in the foyer, for everyone to see.

It’s up to you to make friends with people who aren’t that slow and aren’t that greedy. Hopefully you befriend someone who has two wine glasses in their cupboard, or mugs or bowls, or any vessel that could contain a fluid, or if not doesn’t mind passing the bottle between you. Maybe you’re connoisseurs at this and swill and sniffle at the fumes and talk about different ‘notes’ and vineyards, but it’s more likely that the reason you’re there is because you both just enjoy the company.

For the meantime I don’t drink.