Internalise the golden rule

Treat others as you would like to be treated is important.
Treat yourself as you would like to be treated should come first.

When you make mistakes do you forgive yourself or do you punish yourself?

Watching

It sounds crazy but I feel like I am at least two people.

The person I am who I find most interesting is an enigmatic observer. A genderless ageless being who watches. When I feel in connection with that part of myself I feel peaceful and curious, and more able to act from love.

When I am seeing from this part of myself I lose my opinions and I see clearly. I take interest in strangers, and I love to look at their faces. I love to see their emotions and attitudes in their eyes, in their mouths and in their posture. I love to imagine asking them what they need to be happy. I love to imagine them consoled, nourished, undone and laughing. I find humour in the frustration and exhaustion I see on urban public transport because I have felt frustrated and exhausted too and I know that it isn’t compulsory, it’s just a game.

These days I feel more connected to the observer within me because I have removed myself as much as possible from being pulled into a capitalist lifestyle. I do that which rewards me intrinsically and leave that which rewards me extrinsically. Intrinsic rewards are connection, joy, love and knowledge, extrinsic rewards are money, status and objects.

This means I am poor financially and rich in experience. It’s not all golden sun rays and butterflies, being rich in experience means finding the strength to face the heartache and pain and sadness that is part of life. It’s hard to do that, but the reward is that you feel like a real human being instead of an empty fish tank.

Feeling like a human being isn’t hard, in fact it’s so simple that we forget how to do it. Feeling like a human being means feeling the temperature of your breath on your upper lip, feeling the weight of your body where it rests, feeling the ground when you walk on it, hearing the sounds that surround you, noticing the texture of leaves, touching fences.

This personality and this body is a lens for my self to see the world through.

Mountain meditation

Sit upright with a relaxed spine, close your eyes, place both feet flat on the ground.

Notice your breathing. There is no need to alter your breathing. Breathe naturally.

Feel your feet supported by the ground. Feel the Earth supporting the building you are within.  

Imagine you are a mountain.

When you are a mountain, you are sturdy, you are fully grounded. 

There is nowhere to go. There is nothing you need to do.

When you are a mountain, you are still, you are silent, you are impartial. 

As a mountain, you have no worries and you have no opinions.

As a mountain you are simply and naturally beautiful.

Take a few moments to witness whatever emotions may be present within you. 

Do not comment, judge, avoid or collapse into your feelings, just witness them. 

Imagine your feelings are mineral or rock deposits within the mountain that you are. 

Feelings are natural formations, so allow them to sit naturally within you. 

Sense your steadiness.

There may be thoughts in your mind. See your thoughts as birds flying past the mountain. You may notice a single eagle that is circling around and around, or you may notice a whole flock of birds flying past. 

Do not comment, judge, avoid or fly away with your thoughts, just observe them as they are.

Return to your steadiness. Rest here. 

Allow your feelings the space they already have within you.

Allow your thoughts to pass just as easily as they arise.

Keep returning to your steadiness and rest here.

To do list for the frigid part of you

Things that I have found are very important for the full expression of your being and connection with your whole self.

Sounding:
Don't misuse your fantastic human vocal range and dexterity by containing it within the boring use of language! How many sounds can you make that can't be spelled? Humming and hissing, growling and yelping are all under-utilized and potentially liberating experiences. Groans and moans naturally emanate in moments of heightened emotion, so why not use sounds to help express and relieve emotion? I have sung many made-up songs to myself, had many private barking sessions, and I can tell you that it has given me space and deliverance when I have felt captured and overwhelmed.





Sex:
Good sex brings deep connection through absolute vulnerability. Whether it is with your spouse or a stranger, the opportunity to give and receive complete focused attention is totally unlike any other experience. Sex can not only make new people, it can make existing people new again through recognition, surrender and acceptance. When you share an experience of being completely exposed you cannot hide and honesty is non-optional. Attentive sex makes you a more open person.










Moving:
Getting weird with your body is liberating. Music assists by providing a rhythm to propel the momentum of movement. You are only as limited as you decide you are, so the deeper you want to feel yourself, the further you need to push yourself. Feeling "alive" in your body is like having had pins and needles without knowing it, and suddenly all your nerve endings awaken. Weird dancing is the fastest and most satisfying way that I've found to feel alive and free in my body.

Making things:

Whether it's a scribble or a delicately executed watercolour, visual expression extends your ideas, perspective and attitudes beyond your head and your body. When you can see such aspects of yourself in an artwork you can think about and talk about them more objectively. Creating artifacts naturally invokes self reflection, which is a critical skill for personal growth.





There are so many modalities for healing and connection. These ones are so loose that they give plenty of room for experimentation and individual style.

Observations from travel

Extracts from my diary over the past few months:

"How thick is my loneliness? How deep is my contentment? How viscous is my bravery?"

"The gap of light which falls between train carriages tickles the grass."

"A hard plastic children's slide hovers like a blue worm in a vast flat grey front yard."

"The chimneys of factories are giant cigarettes shitting spirals of toxins directly into the mouth of the sky."

"Museums: the extraction or acquisition debate."

"This is me, in my body (if I may be so bold as to say it is mine) experiencing utterly new environments, with no one else to protect me or to refer to. This is me, at the frontier of reality, with a spinach dumpling. That is why I am here.
The simplicity of a spinach dumpling deserves my appreciation. I am here to taste, to see, to smell. Why should it be any more complex?"

"A roasted wrinkled lantern of a yellow cherry tomato. Glowing. Frail skin."

"All about me are the humans. Couplets of bipeds feeding... How strange to be surrounded by consciousness. How strange to feel lonely with people all around."

"I also enjoyed Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum. The wall text described the objects inside as 'non-art' which is true, but I found it more profound that they were objects of mimicry... plastic pretending to be a peanut, a double ended penis, a pigs face (or two)... this is the pictorial plane transformed into 3 dimensions, and far more mundane and perverted! Oil and pigment pretended to be trees and people for centuries, and here plastic and wood and metal now pretend to be other things."

"The woman who picked bones from her teeth (or maybe it was gristle?) is mean. She makes fun of the young waiter. Her mouth twitches as she questions him, pinning him down with embarrassment. He is a bland little moth with a pin through his thorax, where he feels a bit queasy. I don't know what it's all about, but the head waiter is in on it too. The balding man laughs with an incredulous open mouth at his wife after the young waiter has passed. He finds her funny. I find her bitter. She's a lemon, why else would her lips pucker and twitch like that? Sour puss."

"Three or four people surrounding a dog lying down, it's lower jaw was snapping up some food like a wind-up toy."

"Entering tunnels through mountains is like penetrating the earth, I am a little sperm."

"Slow falling big snowflakes remind me of polystyrene - shouldn't it be the other way around seeing that snow came before human debris?"

"Human and earth's architecture change between countries. In Italy, pastel coloured apartments: apricot, yellow, yucky pink, turquoise and brown. No small wooden huts at the side of the train tracks as there are in Austria. The mountains are softer - less pointy and less snow. The roofs are flatter in Italy."

"Art galleries are places where people come and look confused. I suppose they come here to experience beauty, but the way they wander around and turn their heads suggests bewilderment."

"Sometimes when things are put in close proximity they begin to merge. Like when you pack a banana and a sandwich in your lunchbox and your sandwich ends up tasting and smelling like a banana. Such is not the case with Europe, despite these countries being so small and close. No, they have maintained their distinct flavours. Although a somewhat bland English language sauce has been splattered on top. Made from b-grade ingredients."

"I knew I wanted to grow by exposure."

"Today I went to the gallery of Modern Art. And that is all I have to say about it."

"Today I saw one of the conmen who was pretending to be a station official at Termini again, walking down the street. So unlikely that I would see him twice. He was the old guy with the hat who was a bad actor. He was wearing the same clothes, a brown leather jacket. He looked worn out."

"...there was a parade of Bolivian dancers on the way. Strange vibrant tokenistic cultural experience. Pumps, short dresses. I love chunky thighs."

"I saw a man wrapped in a piece of golden spandex with an Egyptian mask on his face. He was being a living sculpture. He was all wrapped up still like a pupa, but I saw him jerk with a sneeze."

"I gave a clementine to a homeless woman. I found a tiny plastic bird on the ground."

"The sarcophagus of Raphael was there. The inscription said that nature thought she might die herself upon Raphael's death. Such an incredible statement. By what process does marble obtain it's bruises and veins? There is no other substance so deeply connected to the earth. It is earth. Dense earth. So interesting to see it enthroned in an edifice to more ethereal divinities.
We get to the sky god through the earth's belly."

"Watching a gaggle of Chinese children playing - leaping and racing and climbing. They are enjoying themselves."

"Like water that forms the shape of whatever space it is poured into, I form the attitude and outlook of any socio-political context I'm poured into."

"My experience as a human is an embodied experience. Yet there is a complication somehow. My spirit refuses to be on the receiving end of so much oppression, and so I disassociate with womanhood."

"When my body is dead, I want it to have been well loved. It's that desire to be consumed. Individuation blurred through the construction of bodies. When you stick things together, they seem more whole. If I stick a lot of humans in me, will I feel more whole? Connected?"

"The waitress is beautiful and has one broken eye. It looks inwards."

"Art and Language perpetuate a culture of elitist rhetoric. Even though they are sardonic and reflectively critical of Western art history they are just as exclusionary. People can't approach them."

"Have no home and no money. Create a web of relationships founded on trust, sharing and respect."

"I smell like wet dog. Like dirty clothes. Like hundreds of thousands of dead skin cells. What will I be like when I am 35? Will my chemical composition have changed dramatically like that of a cake? Will I bloat and rise? Will I become more wise? Wiser? Will I be wiser? Do polka dots come from Spain? Did they spread like measles across the planet on bags and skirts, infecting people with their symmetry and simple joy? How are they so happy, these little dots? They are like a perfect society. they are a perfect Socialist state. Each equal size with an equal amount of space around them. I am sitting in a flamenco bar."

"I cried a bit just because I'm hungry and tired and so close to the end of my trip. A drop of liquid snot fell out of my right nostril like a nose tear."

"I don't think it's an ideas day. There's so much going on in the world - but right now I can't see how to comment on any of it in an innovative sustainable way. Boo. I'm only having mundane domestic ideas. Idea: obtain cars that are going to scrap metal and make them into community gardens."

"Right now I am feeling especially prone to doubt regarding my capabilities.
My capability to make good art, to dedicate myself to art, to be focused, to comprehend the vast web of connections and meanings in the contemporary art world, to make something with appropriate balance between coherence and ambiguity, to make things rich in meanings, to make things grounded in politically potent human experiences, to not get lost in the intellectual side of my work, to be good at promoting myself, to realise my relationship with the capitalism of the art world, to have faith in myself and not chicken out on my art...
Dedicating myself to my art is a frightening possibility because it involves:
- MAIMING OF MY EGO IF I ATTACH MY IDENTITY TO THE WORK OR ROLE 'ARTIST'
- POTENTIAL POVERTY
- UNWAVERING FOCUS AND FAITH IN MYSELF AND THE WORK
- GIVING EXISTENCE TO WORK THAT IS EXPLICIT AND PROVOCATIVE (thus limiting my future possibilities for employment and possibly causing some tension in personal relations)

Fear of failure should not be enough reason not to try.
The possibility of giving something: a new angle, a different position, some humour, something sobering, something informative, the possibility of sharing should be sufficient impetus to try. Really it is a duty to carry out these ideas.
It would be wasteful not to try, and I'm all about sustainability.
If I really want to live a zero waste lifestyle, I should not waste my
TIME or my POTENTIAL or my IDEAS"

"Talk to more people about everything."

"When I am delicately drunk, things are pleasant and I am relaxed. When I get back to Australia, I will picnic, I will make sangria, I will get my bike fixed (maybe), I will write postcards to my friends, even the ones I see often. I will relax, and by relaxing I will have surreptitiously fucked the system."

"All people want to individuate and simultaneously be consumed. What quantum process is this ??????????"



As you can see, I am far more lavish with my usage of punctuation, capitalisation and underlining in my hand written diary. There are lots of drawings in there too, but I will keep those for my own private enjoyment.

Transgender

People practice a bifurcation of reality.
The most elementary discrimination one makes about a stranger is whether they are a man or a woman, a girl or a boy. I haven't seen gender help anyone, I've only perceived it as a constraint.

Humans like to split things into infinitesimally minute pieces. For example: man, short, angry, middle class, white, fat. These labels are like mental maths games that add up to some kind of "answer". The answer is invariably a judgement.
A judgement can never be verified as absolute truth, but judgments are nonetheless believed in.

Getting back to gender: I do not believe it exists, but I can cede that other people believe in it.
Transgender is an actual modality of experience, which pretty much poos all over the gender binary. The fact that transgender is little understood or poorly publicised does not mean it is illegitimate.

Civilizations have always progressed falteringly. Anything revolutionary or contrary is initially snuffed. There are knowledges we have destroyed because they extended beyond the boundaries of a dominant worldview. The first nations people of Australia (note nations because hundreds of nations lived on this land) knew everything necessary for survival in this country, but because that knowledge was contrary to the invading Western worldview it was destroyed. I do not even know how many nations, people or languages died.

In a sort of similar way, third gender, gender neutral or ungendered are concepts that this particular society (Anglophone Western) cannot really understand and therefore see as irrelevent. Our language doesn't accommodate pronouns for such people, which indicates a belief that such people have never existed. We have always existed.

I am uprooting the gender-centric mental maths games I play in my own head because I know that I am gender neutral in a female body. So it would be unfair for me to go around assuming a person is a man because they don't have breasts, because they have a beard, because their voice is deep.

Gender and the physical body have been so bound together in our thinking.
But think about stick insects: they sure look like sticks, but they are not sticks.
Think about elementary particles: solid objects are comprised mostly of empty space.

Appearances only offer a shell of understanding, the substance is often invisible.
These days I see gender as a shell of sorts, an armor for protecting the purest and most inexpressible part of oneself. I feel a need to disarm, to allow that ineffable self to be seen. Perhaps I will surgically modify my body, or gender neutralise my clothes or change my name. Or maybe I will decide those things are unnecessary. The only thing I am sure of is myself.

How am I sure? Because it is so uncomfortable wearing this shell.

Clammy clam calamity

INTERESTING FACT! Transgender is often perceived as an intermediary state. "Trans" comes from Proto-Indo-European "to cross over", and many people believe that transgender people are crossing over from female to male or visa-versa. That belief excludes the whole gamut of gender-variant individuals who are beyond or between male and female.

Humanity is a big jerk who is beating up the Earth

If humanity was one person, from an inter-stellar perspective they would look like an innocent child who grew into an adult jerk.

The things that we all subscribe to and act out seem to be, how to put this gently... unintelligent. As a species we seem to work primarily with our basal ganglia: the parts of our brains that are concerned with dominance, control, aggression and territory.

It deeply concerns me that humans mine into the crust of the earth to extract minerals for the purpose of creating plastic bottles that will be used once and then put back into the Earth as a piece of garbage that will poison everything they contact as their toxins are released for up to 450 years.
It deeply concerns me that humans have developed complex law systems and regulate when and how people cross roads but do not adhere to the law of nature which states that ALL THINGS ARE IMPERMANENT and disrespect this fundamental and self-evident law of reality by "possessing" things (land, houses, animals, beds, key chains, televisions, letter boxes, paper, food, fences, ideas...)
Any thing that exists I will guarantee you will be consumed physically and legally by the human desire to own.

For all of our talk about how rational science has ushered in a quantum leap for human consciousness, we have made very haltering progress on the frontier of human rights and have moved in retrograde concerning Earth's rights. If we can't treat our own species with respect and kindness we can't develop our respect for non-speaking beings such as forests, oceans and animals. If technology is not eco-centric, it's because people are not eco-centric. People are not eco-centric because they are egocentric. If people continue to think primarily about themselves and not about the environment, we will not have a hospitable planet to live on. Earth is finite.

The truly disappointing thing is that humans have examples of generosity and interconnection surrounding them in their natural environment yet few of us follow such a way of life. We are largely unconscious of it, but we already are interconnected. Sunlight doesn't just touch you, it penetrates you. We breathe in tandem with the plant kingdom. Whatever you consume orally drives you nutritionally. You are constantly shedding cells into the atmosphere. Ironically, you don't own things, you are everything. 

When animals eat each other, it might appear violent, but actually they are just sharing. Sharing around the nutrients. When humans kill each other, that is actual violence. We simply destroy. And contrary to that, we also compulsively make. Yet because energy is not created or destroyed, what we make always takes its toll. The consequence of feeding the unstoppable demand for more stuff is that we deplete Earth's resources and enslave each other. That sounds extreme, but it's not. It's simply true. We don't talk in such ways because it causes guilt.

Instead of being guilty, just recycle as much as you can, just foster an attitude of respect in yourself for other beings and learn how you can act in accordance with your values. Just share your concern, like I am.

Bird recycling a worm.