We never say what we mean, we never mean what we say.

These words are a battle.

They pick misleading paths through vocabularies that grow like wild forests I’ve never been to, I don’t know the topography or the ecology. There are flowers which grow in your jungle that I’ve never seen before.

I’m just hacking my way through language with a blunt machete; its dull glint is nothing but an image in your mind.

Birth of a difficult child

Pain is the child of change. It lives and kicks and cries and screams, so nurse it gently, rock the crib slowly and speak to it in a hushed tone.

Sometimes when pain grows up it turns into a big pain, and sometimes when pain grows up it turns into acumen - be a foster parent to your pain, acknowledge its existence and know that any child of yours is not you, it has it's own ideas and will walk along its own path.

How can we raise pain into a beautiful and intelligent being who in the end we can learn from, not one who eats our hope? Every time I have been in pain it is because of change: changes in relationships with other people, places, ideas, objects, situations... relationships disintegrate, shift, transform, exceed or don't meet expectations, maybe without a clear reason or maybe for a very clear reason.

If change gives birth to pain, consider not how to avoid change but how to be a good midwife.

Solidarity in multiplicity

There's nothing more frightening than the question "who are you?"
It becomes a precious baby nursed at the nipples of ego.
It's hard to answer, it demands stability, it implies uncertainty.

I've been thinking about the self existing as relationships. Instead of being Emma (or EmB or Embi or Em~B or Em Bee) the person, I am the contact between sight and the things seen, I am the contact between words that come from this mouth and words that come from another mouth. If we all existed in this state imagine how expansive and pervasive your self would be. In fact, what would divide us? What would stop us from all being one self? We would fish the oceans as we wash our bodies, we would cultivate the Earth as we brush our hair: with sensitivity, with measure.

Relationships can be tenuous or strong, meaningful or flavourless, harmful or joyful. Your relationships are manifold. In this worldview, articulation becomes the skill through which you become more yourself. Relationships are the resting place of your soul. What else do you have in your life?

The moral may be to give more fully. If you close your mouth and eyes towards the things and people that surround you, you exist in a silent darkness. If indeed you are your relationships, the more fully you give, the more human you are.

Claim nothing; enjoy!

The title of this post is from the Eesha Upanishad: a text so old that it's authors are unknown.
Proclaiming you have a right or title to something is like eating sand: doesn't make sense, isn't natural, not much nutritional value. You do it because it's an option... maybe you do it because everyone else is a sand eater. Don't be a sand eater.


Don't hold onto things! What do you own now that you owned as a baby? What function does a pacifier, a rattle, a perambulator hold for you as an adult? As you grow the things you possess shift beyond your needs.


Don't hold onto ideas. They rot. You change and so should they. There's nothing embarrassing about being a communist last year and a democrat this year. Allow your ideas to be shaped by your life, don't allow your life to be crippled by your ideas. 

Even the body you have always lived in will become refuse.
There is a tremendous surrender in renouncing possessions and you become free.

paths blah blah blah

There are painful roads to travel marked by responsibility and expectations, hard work, musty traditions.
I'm cautious not to quote Frost as for me that that poem is too romantic but I must admit these sentiments do smack of the jaundiced trees.

I would like to talk in simple terms. Some of the people I know who haven't gone the common route (career and family) are tormented by their perceived errors.
Occasionally these people are proud and happy: find those people and befriend them if you feel any tingle of revolt towards convention.

Find a person who is the paragon of the virtues you want to assume.
And if you exceed them in possessing some value you find important then exceed them only in that. Hubris blinds. 


Above all you need to be comfortable in your self. Once others see that you accept you, it's hard for them to reject you. 

The old look on the young as an elephant looks at a fish

We're born with no experience, and the older a person is the more respected and mysterious their wisdom seems to be to the young.

I love talking to people who are older than me because they talk about such abstract things as marriage, divorce, careers and parenthood... I have absolutely nothing to offer on the subjects and thus probably make poor company for these friends, but they give me a glimpse into a place I feel I might never enter: middle age. 

Because we're born without a voice and we grow our own vocabulary as we age it can be very difficult to make oneself understood while we're little. To worsen the situation our perceived inexperience in terms of years lived is looked on most often with a general disregard. Of what worth or interest is someone with no solid opinions? No background? No fixed grasp on their own reality? It's hard to counter that except to say that children have a psychological liberty from the cemented adult mind that makes their companionship just as interesting as my middle aged friends.

There's poetry in children's speech.

There's injury in the ideal of adulthood.

I remember as a child being impatient for my own adulthood because I felt that once I was there, I would be listened to and asked questions of. I felt that some of the adults I encountered spent very little time listening to or asking anything of me.

I recall a particular event when I pulled out hundreds of sheets of drawings to show to a family friend who I had met maybe a few times beforehand, he seemed kind and his character not too domineering. I remember sitting with him and taking great pains in explaining the narratives pertaining to each of my drawings whilst his wife and my parents talked at the same table. These were ideas I had spent a large amount of time visualising (I was undertaking the project of creating a religion). At the end of my explanations he made an exhausted and sarcastic remark about my use of time. He used false praise to mock my efforts and I found it disquieting and disheartening. I guess he must have been tired and drunk and unenthused by a child's art. He was a nice person, but must have misinterpreted my capacity to read his turn of phrase. 

There are other such events that mark a piercing intersection between outsiders and my private world of artmaking as a child, I won't go into them. 

The seed of truth in all of this is that in any kind of communication, when the other person looks on you (not at you) with a sardonic smile it does not inspire confidence in your value as a person.

Front of your head

Having drawn them for a long time I find now that human faces all look the same in the end. I'm not too vain, I don't look at myself too often - only to focus on squeezing a pimple or applying mascara. So when I do take a considered look at my face I am alarmed to see that it doesn't align with who I feel myself to be.

A silent blank face is like a vacuum: sometimes appearing to be a mask of nihility, but then shocking in its ability to break into an ebullient display of meaning, letting us into a personal world view.

Whenever I feel cynical of people I don't know, I like to think about the people who I perceive as valuable and interesting, the people I cherish, and I think of how they are also probably looked on with cynicism by certain people who don't know them. A face is a facade, behind walls are rooms filled with the stuff that makes up a life.

The world is big and you're allowed to look at it

It's rare that I would give a review of some media product in such a formal domain, I'm more likely to tell you about it when I see you and I'm not a big consumer of media anyway.

I went to the world press photography exhibition at the Mitchell library on Tuesday night. The whole event has a peculiar air to it: there is so much drama in every photograph but never melodrama because these crises are real. The faces are captured in a simple honesty, in most situations it's not likely that the person with the camera is the main concern of those subjects during the onslaught of whatever provocation they are faced with. The faces are so direct that I feel I have really met the troup of illiterate young policemen in Afghanistan and the drug addicted prostitute in Ukraine. 

I have respect for media that is used as a weapon against ignorance and this exhibition really does explode.