'In the sunset of dissolution everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia'

- Milan Kundera

Nostalgia. It runs through you body and makes you glow on the outside, like the phosphorescent skin of a gemstone. You remember a time, a scent, a song. The feeling is overwhelming. It pulls you right back there, like a rip, the more you swim away from it the deeper it sucks you under. Nostalgia is a time machine. It blasts you into the past. This is the power of memory. It is the centrepoint from which our entire history detonates. Without it we are nothing but shells, a complex nervous system built as a catalogue for the soul's remembrance.

'As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing,' I will be a writer.'

- Hunter. S. Thompson

Mass creativity seems to come in waves of unified labor, as though there is a psychosomatic bank of ideas that each individual taps into at once; a divine antennae plunging down to earth like a waterfall in slow motion, pumping its human vessels with illumination. Sometimes the stimulus that surrounds us is so full that it feels tangible, like you could tilt your head back, open your mouth and swallow it. In order to create I must consume. I want saturation. And I want the things that I create to saturate.

'The imagination is not a state: it is a human existence in itself'

- William Blake

I feel like I could stay awake for days. There was a time when I conspired against sleep because I thought it was a social control tool. If no one slept I'm sure there would be many more lunatics around. Creative lunatics. When the batteries in your brain are starved for a while you begin to naturally hallucinate. And we all know the best ideas come from vivid hallucination. You see your wildest dreams (or nightmares) play out in front of your eyes. My feelings about sleep change from day to day depending on which world I am enjoying more, the real world or the dream world. You can become dangerously good at dreaming, so good that you start confusing your mental landscapes with reality. You can get lost inside of your dreamscapes and this is all well and good until you start missing the weight of the mortal realm. There is something grounding about this three dimensional space we call home, it bears a heaviness and sincerity that is equally as satisfying. The flight of imagination is a joy ride but sometimes you want the real stuff, the stuff that makes your insides splinter into a million pieces, because that crushing sensation reminds you just how fragile it all is.

'Submissive to everything, open, listening'

- Jack Kerouac

People float in and out of your life like the knowing maws of a rocking tide. Some will be omens. When they come to you it is because you both have something to learn from one another. When they come to you, know them, trust them, listen. Be open and submissive. For a fleeting moment in time you have crashed inside of one another. Your journeys will collide, enmesh and widen like a never-ending labyrinth. There will be no map and no coordinates just instinct. And when the time comes you will meet them again on your way to the middle.

'Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.'

- Hunter. S. Thompson

Truth, a thick word full of layers. The truth that will protect them. The truth that will protect you. The truth that's a lie to yourself. The naked truth. The truth that peels open your chest with its bare hands. The truth that's so true that it hurts. Truth is a surrendering. You must give it over fully and with open arms. You must set it free and in return free yourself. Because without letting go of your truths you remain captive, you are a slave to them and they live in a cavernous black hole that falls from the back of your head and casts a heavy shadow over your heart.

'It works if you work it'

- Sharne Scott, find her here.

I like to think I have a firm grip on the reigns of my destiny. I also know that there are times when I need to let go of the reigns, even if it means I might get bucked around a bit. Sometimes you need to let go of everything you know and believe so that you can open yourself up to the unknown. Everything is driven by either love or fear, it really is that simple. But fear is not to be feared, you cannot loose your fears even though we are all very good at jamming them deeper inside of ourselves to give the illusion that they have been conquered. I have found that in most cases, you need to change your own perception of something in order to transform it into something that can be used. We are immensely complex creatures with an immeasurable capacity to feel. If you feel fear, use it. If you feel love, use it. It works if you work it.

'Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?'

- Marcel Marceau

There is a missing link between the heart and mouth. Language has cured our silence but left an open wound in its place. What tools of the body do we have to speak from the inside out? What poetry allows the sensation of two bodies becoming one? How can you truly write what it is like to feel yourself blurring into the flesh of another. When you are feeling open and receptive enough the wall between the self and the other falls and you can feel just how hopelessly entangled all things are. Some of the purest conversations I've had have been spoken with the body and the eyes. If you open someone up from the eyes there is a tunnel that will lead you straight to their middle earth, that place where all things unfold. Here lies the nectar of truth, but by the time it leaks into the mouth most of the nutrients is gone. And by the time it spills onto paper it will be like reading invisible ink.

'I got a freeway mind, let go of my head'

- Kurt Vile

You can feel when your life begins to speed up. The walls of your dimension pulse outwards and your vision expands, everything in wide screen. It's no epiphany it's more like you have taken a deep breath inwards. It's a feeling of wakefulness, of new air inside of you. It's like that moment when you first hit the free way...the speedometer swings over, the road folds open, you lean forward into the infinity point where the land and sky meet and never look back again.

'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.