' I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night,
who poverty and taters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz '

- Allen Ginsberg

Do you believe in fate or free will?

Do you think that our actions are determined by the past (cause and effect) or do you think that our actions are driven by our own desires, which are dependent on an immediate experience, a split second, a choice led by intuition? Answering this question is as impossible as trying to slam a revolving door. This question has left me feeling like I have been inside of my own mind for so long that it has transformed into one of those Gravitron rides they have at carnivals. I start spinning around in cyclic motions of thought until I'm stuck to the walls. The beauty of this cyclic motion is that, like most apposing theories, one needs to exist with the other in unison, like yin and yang, you can't have light without dark and so on and so on and so on and round and round and round and round...until the ride stops and you stumble back onto solid ground with the same predicament that you started with - that the world is one big unanswerable, dualistic joy ride.

' Buy the ticket, take the ride '
- Hunter. S. Thompson

wild little Jewel, the horse

Lilly aligning her seven chakras before the festival

'What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space'

- Italo Calvino

I don't know if it is the high altitude or something even higher that makes you feel high like this? You know when you get to that point where everything just washes over you, like walking slowly through warm rain and watching the world swim past. Something else takes the wheel and you're not even conscious of the transcendence you are feeling because its working on such a deep seeded subconscious level that your brain is too blissfully ignorant to register, until you look down at the ground and realize you're hovering a few inches above it.

Home on the range for Splendour in the Grass

On our way to the chapel to confess our sins

It's strange how you can develop a synergy with a place, a piece of land, as if some invisible umbilical cord binds you together, like you have spent a life time there long ago in ancient times and there are scriptures sprawled across the walls so that when you return in another lifetime you can recognize them as your own and know that you are home again. Everyone has that one place. That place where you feel like kneeling down before you leave and sinking your lips into the soil for one last prayer of thanks. It's that place you come for stillness, for silence, and all you can hear is the sweet rush of blood inside of your ears and it sounds like the ocean and the wind and the fire and the earth. That's what silence is to me, it's when all four elements come crashing together in one huge explosion like The Big Bang and then there is silence and peace and nothing left but a giant speck of dust suspended in the universe. That's what silence is, it's when everything comes to a stand still and pauses in time and space while the angels hold their breath and admire Creation.

Morning family gatherings and rehabilitation before another 12hours of live melodies,
dancing and singing uphill,
chasing each other downhill.

'Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today.'

- Lawrence Krauss

the gold coast, silver when it rains

Awake at 7am from the light leaning in through my eyelids, rousing my senses one at a time. Hearing returns, the sound of waves crunching at the shore, the smell of thick air - thicker that down south, closer to the ground or something, tighter around you, heavy. Sun against my skin through the too wide window with too thin blinds. Taste of coffee, ready and waiting with those who woke before me. Spring out of bed with energy and idle time to kill. Dressed without a shower, saving the first caress of my naked body for the ocean. Take the stairs, in no rush. Slink through the cafe at ground level, share a moment with an old man reading the local rag, drinking his cappuccino - getting his kicks for the day. Cross the road barefooted and kick my toe - no matter. First grains of sand between my toes and I sink a centimeter or two below ground and it feels good to be immersed in something. Walk 500 meters with cold foam at my heels begging me to come play. Climb the black rocks, dark like midnight staining the palm of my hands. Get to the top of the cliff and sit down cross-legged in the grass, chest open, eyes shut, catching my breath. Open my eyes and whoa - infinity. Infinity folding into itself with one silver crease down the middle like a scar, grotesque and beautiful at once. That line where the sky and sea meet seems to go on forever, like peering into an abyss and I feel terrified and yet deeply calm to see no end. To know no end.

' ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful bit of hallucination -'

- Allen Ginsberg

My philosophy tutor and I were discussing a theory called Solipsism, which is the idea that our entire perception of reality is a product of our imagination, a sensory experience whereby we are simultaneously creating as well as perceiving the world around us, similar to the thought process that occurs while we are dreaming. This would mean that The Self, for example your Self, is the only conscious mind in the universe and that everyone and everything else in the univers is simply the incarnation of your dream world. We both agreed that this would make for a fairly lonely universe and that if this kind of notion was commonly accepted that it would discredit the legitimacy of feeling a strong connection with other people (seen as though they are just a play-thing that you have created for your own world). However! there is a similar theory called Transcendental Solipsism, which suggests that once again there is a single Self except that everyone in the world embodies a unique mask for this one Self and each individual stands for a certain facet of this one Universal Self's personality. Think of it as some sort of highly schizophrenic transcendental being. In this case, a belief such as this would encourage compassion and true empathy, seen as though we all share the same mind. This theory, as appose to the previous one, would intensify the legitimacy of having a connection with someone. It could also explain the phenomenon of remembering a past life and the idea of reincarnation, because you may be simply remembering a life that another individual facet of your Self has lived. Perhaps each of us has been inside the mind of a neurotic genius or a Buddhist monk. Perhaps there is a common thread, a power line that binds our collective unconscious. Perhaps not.

the love of my life (above and below)

HAPPY !

'A dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world'

- Oscar Wilde