Brief reflection

Last night I went to a rally decrying the Australian government for it's appalling treatment of refugees on off-shore detention centres. Then two friends and I walked to a dumpling house, and along the way encountered two big dancing dragons who were blessing businesses and scaring children as part of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. Firecrackers meant people were blocking their ears and scrunching up the little scrunchy part of their noses, coughing from smoke and just generally looking sweaty and dismayed in the hot sun. Business people in halted cars looked despondent. A dragon with golden scales and a furry fringe around its face came and nibbled on my head before jerking back into formation and spasmodically bowing, like a huge caterpillar that had been poked.

Doing magic with feelings

My dad used to sing a lot of made up songs, a lot of the time.

Sometimes they were so absurd that you just had to laugh. He had a knack for riffing off everyday phenomena, and also for creating peculiar insular worlds within ditties. One recurring lyrics was “and a bucket of glue”, which was used as a summarising statement of sorts. I also seem to remember a lot of fart noises.

One time when I was 15 years old I was looking for something in his studio space where he was chortling away in a manner that was particularly relentless. I was irritated and I told him to stop it, in reply he suddenly yelled at me “IF YOU WERE IN THIS MUCH PAIN YOU WOULD BE SINGING TOO!”

I walked out of the room, stopped on the stairway as my heart dropped into my stomach and I tried to sob quietly. It hurt so much to learn that he was transmuting his pain in such a silly and joyous way, and that I had attempted to shut him up. He was living with heart disease and cancer at the time, and I didn’t realise his songs had become a way to move through the paralysing experience of living inside a failing body.

I notice that I also attempt to transmogrify pain, in different ways. When I feel most lost I draw visual puns that make light of how I feel. Cartoons are irreverent, casual and sketchy, so it's the perfect medium for hiding sadness (or ideally turning it into silliness and exploding it's stranglehold).

A public transport stranger

A male in what smelled like his late thirties got on at Melbourne Central. I saw him before he walked through the train doors. He was crestfallen, beaten down by the day - or by what I imagine as too many repetitions of the same day. Over and over, the same routine had engraved very delicate lines into his face, around the eyelids and mouth. Sorrow lines. He seriously looked unhappy and worn out.

He wore a striped business shirt. Navy blue and white, kind of like a gaol-shirt but more sophisticated. He sat, and to my amazement he pulled out a copy of Homer's The Odyssey.

This sweet poor broken human, with his wedding ring like a tiny golden shackle and his dark fitted jacket like a devise used to dehydrate all his character was reading his way through the epic poem. The ultimate epic poem about the hero's journey. The ten years of war followed by the ten years of obstacles. I wondered about this man: who are the lotus-eaters in his life that suck him into hedonism? Who are the unwelcome suitors for his wife's hand and how will he slay them?

How did we, as a species, record such a fable and manage to translate it into so many languages? How did this epic poem that spat its way through generations via the oral tradition manage to slip silently onto paper? Why don't people talk on trains? I would love to be read The Odyssey on my way home.

I just read something arresting

"For the human soul, it is a great wrong to... direct its acts and endeavours to no particular object, and waste its energies purposelessly and without due thought; for even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view..." (Marcus Aurelius, 121 - 180 BCE)

Aurelius goes on to say that the end in view for humans is "conformity with the reason and law of the primordial City and Commonwealth" which serves a purpose of instilling obedience to the state... which of course quells critical thinking and revolution, both of which I believe are progressive. I want to find a more enlightening end in view to give purpose to my acts and endeavours.

Why did this capture my attention?
I sometimes direct my energy in unfulfilling ways and without thought.

I feel that my attention and time are the two most valuable assets I have, and that physical assets are secondary. Whatever I give my attention and time to grows, it's like life fertiliser. So what is one value that I can practice directing my attention and time towards cultivating?

Something I have realised over the last few weeks is that I have always wanted to experience divinity a.k.a bliss, peace and joy. Ecstatic pleasure is a close runner up, but drug use and sex are poor approximations of transcendental joy. The sustainable joy comes with effort. Sustainable joy is peaceful and clear, not ebullient.

Meditation will strengthen that sweet peaceful internal joy, but how can I practice joyfulness with people? I want to lighten people, I want to give alleviation from psychological pain, I want to refresh jaded minds. I want to only do things that will somehow result in joy for people, because joylessness is not uncommon and desaturates life. But I'm afraid that I'm too contemplative and sincere to evoke joy.

Perhaps joyfulness is singing more frequently about everything, laughing more at oneself, galloping daily down the hallway, playfully teasing your lovers and friends with hair tugs, asphyxiating hugs, bird peck kisses and running spanks. Perhaps joyfulness is meeting people with the intention of loving them.

Subterranean junk

I keep trying to fill myself with people, and I end up empty.
I am insatiate when it comes to deepness.

Deepness is witnessing the submerged stuff inside humans like pain, love, hope, traumas and sexual desire. I want to share and know these things. Getting deep is different to being close. Being close is becoming nearer in proximity but maintaining protective boundaries, going deep is the next step - dissolving boundaries and somehow merging. Deepness is vulnerable.

Often people feel free to dissolve their boundaries with me, and then they pull me in. I curl up into their pain, their love, their hopes and traumas and I play with their sexual desires. I curl up and I soak it up like a foetus-shaped sponge and it grows me like placenta grows real foetuses. I learn how to be compassionate, gentle, objective, curious and empathic by going deep with people.

With the right people I can also melt my boundaries and offer my innards, but I never get enough of it. I feel hurt by people's satisfaction in a quick deep dip, because consummation is temporary and I want eternal union of some kind.

The dissatisfaction comes from my one year old heart who wanted more love and attention than what was offered. Loving my child heart relentlessly is the only way to try and get satisfied. Other people become disinterested or have other agendas, which is a simple truth and not a character flaw. I'm just scared that I will get lonely if I concentrate intently on loving the desperate little youngster in my chest.
I've got to get deep with myself. I thought I was deep... but I'm kind of tall which means there's a lot of space for storing deepness.

Small meditation on the present moment

Approach each action as if it were your last and naturally you will do what is helpful, loving and selfless.

Every action is your last, because there isn't any other location for experience except for the present moment. The future is imagination.

You don't experience the past, you just turn to hug it.
You don't experience the future, you just yearn to kiss it.

Your only opportunity for clarity, peace and liberty is now.
The moment is eternal, that's why boredom is the worst sin.

There's nothing sadder than waiting for eternity to pass.

Dressing

I am exactly the kind of person my 11 year old self would have found terrifyingly sexy.

That aside, 

I want to write about costume. Halfway through last year I wanted to live more in alignment with my attitude that possessions perpetuate pollution and slavery, so I bought some fabric, went to a dressmaker and had three identical unbleached fair-trade cotton kurtas made. I threw out nearly all of my clothes and wore nothing but cotton kurtas for about 6 months thereafter.

At first I felt very self conscious, I looked a little bit like a Buddhist nun and it felt like everyone was looking at me.

After about a month I stopped caring. I became very comfortable. I didn't have to make any decisions about what to wear, I just threw on a kurta and walked out the door. I also stopped wearing makeup, and began to enjoy the comparative androgyny that my face has without cosmetics.

Six months in, I began to feel like I was missing out. Everyone else got to choose what they wanted to look like everyday - but I was living inside a weird self imposed spacious beige gaol. 

So I dyed one blue and one red, and am juuuust settling into the concept of a yellow kurta, because I might miss the unassuming appeal of unbleached cotton.

The loose kurtas were also a gender-neutral option which I found appealing. I was sick of wearing skirts and dresses because I felt unseen in them. 

Recently I've tentatively explored drag as an empowering method for exploring and expressing gender nonconformity. Now that I write about it, you couldn't really get any further from plain cotton than drag, with is notoriously outrageous and sparkly.

Perhaps this appreciation for drag queens is the accumulative effect of six months in beige. 

I enjoy that I set myself these little personal social experiments.