Over our sky, no cloud ever passed
- Nietzsche

A friend of mine once said that she had no desire for children because they were 'like little drunk people.' In any normal case this would have seemed like a nihilistic statement, however when she said it in her Leeds accent, the words rolled off her tongue with a soft curve, like she was expressing some deeply pondered philosophy about the intoxication of childhood. Her statement, along with the many other elitist doctrines that she often discussed, always stayed with me. Whenever I experience a childlike moment; running into the water with all of my clothes on or stripping off my boots and inhibitions to dance like no ones watching, it makes me wonder what happens to the human spirit when it matures? Whilst wading through the murky waters of adulthood do we leave a certain part of ourselves by the wayside? and are we able to tap into that 'little drunk person' in dire situations when we desperately need to re enchant ourselves? So, in light of this thought, I solute the child..'to you who are intoxicated with riddles, who take pleasure in twilight, whose soul is lured with flutes to every treacherous abyss' - Nietzsche

Artwork by Leif, see more here.

Tame Impala at Golden Plains

Nick cave once said, 'I stepped into the abyss and it was only knee deep.' Tame Impala left me neck deep.With a switchboard of pedals at their disposal the sound was amplified with a surrealistic buzz reminiscent of hard fuzz rock from the 60's and soft psychedelic rock from the 70's. The strobe lights glowed violent pink, igniting the stage like a flare gun. Rain poured down, catching the ripples of distortion in each drop and leaving a pool of tremendous noise for the crowd to splash around in. Everything moved in perfect synchronization, like a sail catching in the wind, launching into uncharted depths, provoking a new type of listening not yet synthesized. And even now, If I close my eyes, I can feel the vibrations seeping into my minds-eye and showing me just how deep the rabbit hole goes..

ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away - Oscar Wilde

Golden Plains

You know that electric feeling that curses through the air just before it storms? I think that festivals of this kind have mastered the fine apothecary of bottling that intoxicating energy. In a place like this even the dirt caught underneath the sole of your boots seems holy. Life slows down to catch your breath and take it away. Everything is smoother around the edges. Everyone caves into the contours of each others posture like a jigsaw falling into place.

Jack Ladder

3 nights in a row bats filled the sky, like falling stars on the dark side of the moon.

Dear Earthbound Ghost
Living in a twelfth dimension
Shadow without a shell
Where was I when you fell
From space
Faded into dust.

Dear Earthbound Ghost
Afraid to materialize inside your armour
Moping like a war widow
Why won’t you unveil
The depths of your dent.

Dear Earthbound Ghost
Introduce me to the people in your twelfth dimension
So I can gag and bound them shut
And you can open up
The doors of your perception.

Dear Earthbound Ghost
Roam again with me
In the desert of the real
So you can exist
Like me, undreamed.

If you’re looking for Infinity, Just Close your Eyes

The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry with us. (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!) – Milan Kundera

Tempest

The walls are leaking
The sky is seeping
Lying up-side-down in my bed
But I’m not sleeping.

Unsure of what I see
How conscious can I bee?
If the eye of the storm
Is staring straight back at me.

Lightning cracks in sync
With each illuminating blink
The night sky allures me
With a suggestive wink.

Slowly I see the eye fade into grey
Keeping my curious mind at bay
Awake until the break of day
Waiting for the tempest to come back and play.

'Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast'

It’s not every day that you are greeted with a friendly ‘Welcome to Wonderland’ upon entering a brick-a-brac store. Nevertheless, this introduction set the tone for a day filled with phantasmagorical discoveries. If only we had known that there was going to be a giant dome tent in the middle of that field! Unvarnished nonsense is never too hard to find in a rational world. You just have to know where to look. In the words of Alice herself, ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?’

photos by Freya

At 11pm last night we stopped procrastinating and painted our bathroom. Approaching the task with reckless abandon, everything between us and the walls was at the mercy of our paint brushes. Moving to the drum of Lilly's i-phone beat we lacquered the walls in a color which Bunnings has aptly deemed 'Ice Mist.' The experience took us through a spectrum of mood swings which rocked from extreme playfulness to extreme madness to extreme frustration and then finally into a frenzy of extreme body art. By the end of our creative endeavor the paint fumes had stripped our skin bare and there was nothing left of us but a pile of bones floating peacefully inside a bubble bath.

Words, when you are truly possessed by them, they seep through every orifice in your body until you can’t open your eyes or ears without them jumping out at you from graffitied walls or song lyrics. You are bound in linguistic matrimony and there is no other companion sweeter than that which is sapped from your own mind’s keg.

“Every once in a while, but not often, you can sit down and write a thing that you know is going to stand people’s hair on end for the rest of their lives- a perfect memory of some kind, like a vision, and you can see the words rolling out of your fingers and bouncing around for a while like wild little jewels before they finally roll into place & line up just exactly like you wanted them to…” - Hunter.S.Thompson

My hair has stood since the first time I read this passage. It rolled into place form me. The will for writing, the addiction of it, you become a feigned for those brief, explosive moments. Just when you think you have lost your touch, it slides its hand up your leg and reassures you with one pure sentence. Purity. That’s why you do it, for the little wild jewels amongst the rough.

Under the surface our lips embrace
You suck the air from my lungs
My gills gasp open.
( releasing a mermaid back into the sea )

Eyes like jellied sapphire, skin like silk
the deep blue
swallows
u

No gravity
oxygen depravity
invisible world
take me under.

Ariel!

we found a portal to another world without suitcases and fuel

where the trees shed their petals

'I hear water..
I see falls.'

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can Never express, yet can not all conceal.
- Lord Byron -