I moved over the weekend and have numerous creative projects and challenges on the go. I’m living next to the ocean now and all I can think about is imagery and stories with water involved. Nonetheless, here’s another excerpt from my tales from the Inn of Stormy Nights. Walk in The Footsteps The wind blew …
Embracing Vulnerability: A Motivational Poem
Vulnerability One of the most debilitating emotions anyone can ever experience. It feels mortifying to walk into a room and because of looks, experience or lack thereof, dress, voice or anything else to do with your personal identity, you feel less than. You want to run, hide and never walk into that room again. But …
How to Turn to Childhood for Inspiration
Thoughts on the Future, Looking to the Past The value of childhood lies not in the experiences the child hastily wishes themselves out of but in the years later, as the child stands with eyes toward the future and a grateful heart cast to the past. Long ago, if we pull back the vine of …
Sidewalks and Roads and How We Walk
Follow the Road and Who Knows Where is Goes My favourite quotes in life usually involve streets, crossroads, some sort of long straight or winding road. My favourite songs often involve roads literally or figuratively to, The Highwayman by Loreena McKennit (also a poem), Carry on my Wayward Son by Kansas, Carry on by .fun, …
Being Creative: Building a Community of Imagination
Being Creative Every marketing expert and guru of the internet gabs on and on (just talk, talk and more talk) about branding yourself. Sticking yourself to one particular image, one particular style. A bit like if an actor purposely typecast themselves (which I think most, understandably hate and try to avoid like the plague). I …
Somewhere Out Beyond the Walls: There is a World, Poem
Somewhere out beyond the walls travel buses and aeroplanes full of people. Living people.
They laugh at knock-knock jokes and groan a grin at terribly clever puns. Terrible ones.
They run and twirl through marathons and hip-hop duels. Between isles. Over seats.
They play games to pass the time, they sing songs to pass the days, they tell stories to pass the years.
Until they arrive at their destination.
Did you know?
If you circle an aeroplane enough you’ll break the world record. For fun.
Did you know?
If you drive long enough, you might hit the end of the world. Race that bus.
They don’t know any difference though. Those aeroplane or bus passengers.
So truly, the record breaking moment leaves no more impression. Than peanut butter.
They don’t even have that.
It leaves no more impression than baking a birthday cake over the hotplate in the crew cabin.
Someone had a few boxes of those instant mixes which will stay fresh until they drop off at the end of the world. In lava.
They’ve forgotten the world now. The dirt, root-tangled, leaves and lions one.
They have a new one. A normal one.
Living in the circles made by the aeroplane in atmosphere.
Living in the tunnel which never ends in the light of day.
If they can live in aeroplanes and buses which never reach a destination.
Maybe we can too.
Did you know?
The darkness cannot comprehend the light which shines within it because it is darkness.
If you do not know it. You cannot find it.
Shine your light in the darkness. It does not know you. It cannot judge you.
Ride you own bus, your single-seater aeroplane to infinity.
One day you might smell the end. It has peanut butter.
Until then. Keep driving.
Have a Good Life, They Said: A Drabble
Life, They Said, Only Has Colour if You Paint it
I grew up with practical parents, supportive, wonderful parents who did everything they could financially and physically manage for me and my siblings but they were practical.
That meant, work hard, work harder and aim for reliable jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse. They supported my love of photography, giving my the camera I still own and use, fifteen years later to do all the photography on this site but running off and being a freelancer, being a travel blogger, an artist, starving even after the rice, bean and broccoli dues of university, any of that, unthinkable. Not practical. Terribly uncertain and unsustaining.
Their view of a good life did not match mine.
Then again, go ask anyone what a good life is. You’ll get as many answers as people, possibly more, if some of those people have multiple ideas.
“Have a good life,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? What is a good life?
“Have a successful career,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? Well, it’s true I haven’t started. I’m twenty-seven and have only just kicked my butt out the door toward using my creative insanity for something more than road trip entertainment while I traveled Europe for two years. And I wanted to be like you.
All the best started at least when they were a minimum of four and a maximum of eighteen. Or so society has taught me.
They had rough lives. Uphill both ways and sideways too. In sinking sand. To built character of course. They went like lawn-mowers toward their fantasies, not content to just dream them up in stories. They were bulls through the red silk sheets, roaring against the dying of the light.
They probably fought, disagreed and moaned at or about parents, partners, prime ministers and that panda they talked to at the zo once, just because they could. And it shocked the adults.
Or they might have had parents who were as obsessive as they, who supposed, bashed and pushed until the child lived the parental dream of superstardoom.
Whatever that ambiguous alphabet soup is.
Or they might have had parents who ignored them to pursue their own dreams and the children occupied themselves with their own imagination and brilliance anyway.
They were the sort who laughed in the face of offence and giggled in sending it back because the world needs less defenders and more offenders. You can’t win a footie match without them.
This is the match for life.
Even if they were awkward, easily embarassed, introverted or mad hatters, they had more than enough shine to not bother with or about other people’s suns anyway. Then someone loud would find them and helicopters would descend. Lights bouncing and beaming in the treasure trove of brilliance. Personality doesn’t matter so much then. Usually. Sometimes. Probably.
“Have a good life,” she said.
How are you supposed to have a good life if you don’t live said life with vigour, passion and enthusiasm?
Shouting from every roof-top, screaming from every cliff-edge.
Clawing, fighting, biting and bashing against the dying of the sunlight.
They won’t wait for the day a man speaks on a bus, to say, “nine-hundred and nintey-nine stars. The sun is burning.”
No. They will kick down the padlock. Crash the door. Poke their head through and bring on the foretelling by being the prophet of their own future.
Take the Flower: Leap and Dream
Reach out your hand. Take.
Take the flower. Thank you amandapalmer.
TheArtofAsking turned over the dirt, fertilised, planted, watered my imagination. Now I feel the flowers can start growing and giving back.
To begin, I am blogging again. I intend to fearlessly share my photos and writing. This will happen in the form of travel blogs, life blogs, fiction writing, poetry and endless amounts of graphic art and photography.
I hope to share my observations and entertain. I hope to bring light into the dreary and inspiration into the dull.