'So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?'

- Hunter. S. Thompson

Why do we fight for something when it's being taken away? same reason we speed up when the lights go red. It's the fear of not taking a deep swig of chance, it's the chill of sobriety and it's fate snapping at your heels, it's the feeling of the wide world being pulled out from underneath you so that you grip onto it with both feet. People wander the earth in search of that brief reprieve from gravity, that momentary suspension of time and space, but you'll never get it until you let yourself fall hard and fast and full of life-threatening vertigo.

'A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension.'

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

I am learning that the only constant thing is change. You cannot attach yourself to the past otherwise you will live your life in present-retrospect. And when you get all caught up in retrospect you begin to question the sincerity of your feelings that were present in a moment that has now passed. I think the trick is to allow that moment its time and allow the person that you were in that moment to exist in the past and remain unaffected by times bent. You are in a constant state of flux and you will never be the same self that you are right now, never ever again. Enjoy being fully present in your shape, indulge in it, because it will break and shatter and reincarnate itself with the urgency of a cyclone. The impermanence of the universe is a beautiful thing, you never know whats round the next bend until you're hurled into the jaws of it.

'Allow your body to be a resonating chamber'

There has been a lot of movement. I mean this literally. Lots of dancing. Everyone is becoming a little more in tune. With what I have no clue. With each other, with their bodies, with themselves, with the rhythms? Music is a vessel for accessing an invisible force. Dance happens when you you are possessed by this force. The sound vibrations run through you and it feels like a shot to the mainline. There is a reason why song and dance are so deeply embedded in the history of our culture, they surpass the orderly nature of our modern existence and we seek our escapism and transcendence in them. Or maybe we just do it to keep warm? Either way it feels good.

'My witness is the empty sky'

- Jack Kerouac

I am light headed from running circles round an earth that was once flat, under a sky that was once holy. When I force my heels into the dirt it cracks and I hear the sound of waking life. There is a cognizance at the core of our rock, she howls and we pacify her with our smog. The smoke and mirrors are fading out slowly and soon we will be breaking open heads. Holiness is to be aware of a something greater than the Self. Now is the time for devotion.

'For just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm.'

- Jack Kerouac

Reflection, always too much reflection. Living my life while writing the book of my life. Outside of myself looking back through my own eyes - too far down the rabbit hole, deep inside of things that are sometimes shallow. Gimme a little more shallow, shallow is lovely. I drift between being so intensely inside of the moment and then outside looking in. The latter state is a kind of hyper-consciousness, and this is the disease of the artist or perhaps every man or woman with some urge to re-create the world around them. In this state you become the patient and the shrink, you are the passenger of your own trip. Slightly anxious. Slightly mad. Sometimes melancholy. Sometimes euphoric. One half of you feels like the child holding tight to a balloon and the other half of you is the balloon, always getting high.

'The crystal lost in the stone'

- Allen Ginsberg

I have walked over hot coals just to know what it feels like to be set on fire. Sometimes the feeling is lost to me. It is interfered by the need to intellectualize the burn. At times I am distracted by the urge to comprehend a sensation rather than to feel it in its extreme purity. And I burn, I burn deep and hot and breathless, probably more than most people. But I want perfect submission. I want to be consumed by the flames and disappear. i want to surrender to the senses. I want to feel without thought. I want being and nothingness. I want the blaze to run through me until I'm nothing but blue crystal embers.

'The universe itself is a living creature with a soul as well as a body - not just a lifeless chaos of material atoms swept by the aimless winds of chance.'

- Plato

Lay me into the ground
So I can sleep on a bed of thorns
And watch the clouds
Draw animals with horns
The hide on my back is yours
I tore it from your skin with my claw
Your saber-tooth left my body in a jigsaw
There's rapids tattooed on my legs
from walking barelegged through your river
When you put your ear to my thigh you can hear the torrents
Rushing towards the plunge
Of water
Falling