From inside a tree...

... the view is surprisingly magical.


It's such a peaceful place to be too. If I was on my own, I would have stayed much longer...



I suppose you would want to see the tree from the outside too, so here goes...



And another...


The photos were taken earlier this year. Although it was a warm place, it was cool and quiet inside. Like I said, I could have stayed in there for a long long time if I was on my own.



Who knows? Maybe I'll come back here sometime in my dreams...

Bodies and Souls

Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?
What if a beautiful body came to you and there was nothing inside?
Would you keep it around anyway, because it looked good?
What if a soul came to you without a body?
Would you pretend not to see it?
Or would you open up a door to madness without a moment's hesitation?
Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?

The key turns...

They spiral out
from inside of me
all the who's
that I could be...

(This is an old drawing, dating back to August 2009)

Unlocking the alphabet matrix...

You learn the alphabet in a certain sequence, but in order to use it for any sensible type of writing, you will need to break that abc sequence and leave behind the rules you were taught. Mix the letters up and employ them in a way that goes against the grain of your learning... only then will they begin to hold any true meaning...

In the same way, to do anything useful with your universe, you need to take it apart... (t.y.m.)

The Field ("stories" or "infinity")

Last week, when my sister was out of town, I was looking after her two cats for a few days. Because it was rainy, I took a taxi there (I don't have a driver's licence or car - another story of my failings but I'm not telling that now). On day two, as I got out the money to pay the driver, there was a tiny slip of paper in between. What was on the slip of paper was the following quote by William Blake:

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

So, being me (i.e. a little weird) I gave the taxi driver the piece of paper with the quote along with his money.

On the way back the sun was out, so I decided to walk. My sister stays just on the edge of that large empty piece of field that still contains a few of the remnants of streets and foundations that had been District Six in the 1960s. It's empty now. Drug dealers and copper wires thieves hide their wares there. At one time there were a few shacks, but the truth is, the authorities had forgotten who (which department or whatever) owned this piece of field so it just lay there...

As I walked this length, my inner muse said Go on, throw it. I knew instantly what he referred to. In my bag, I've got an old A4 sized diary in which I write my story ideas.

Every page, till the middle of March was filled, some with several different ideas on the same page... my creative wealth, it seems (although, to be honest, I've accepted that at least half of it will probably never get written)... now my mischievous muse was challenging me to throw it into the field, for the pages to scatter and be lost... I felt a mix of panic and longing... because part of me did see the attraction of clearing the slate, starting again... being empty... Then he said, I couldn't do it either. But he didn't need to say it for me to know one day, I will toss the book... when my bones no longer has the capacity to house my soul and my spirit would rise and the pages would scatter like seagulls... off to seek other horizons..

Later that day, my muse said... I could have given you twenty new stories if you did throw the book... now I can only give you ten...

And today... I was drifting into a dream, an imagining, surprised by what I 'saw' with other eyes and going cool I wanna put that into a story. I yanked myself back to the here and now to write it down.. and part of me realized that, my 'being a writer' was sometimes a little counter productive to the other needs of my soul. This impulse to go hey, that would make a good story sometimes slashed like a whip through my stream of consciousness, halting it...disturbing it... where perhaps it should not have halted...

Being a writer is wonderful, but am i really putting my imagination to the best use, by just mining it for ideas? By snatching the very first flowers along the path home and going heh-heh, got them, when perhaps instead I should be travelling further along those paths... perhaps this compulsion to take 'field notes' of every momentary dream is really an interrupt. Infinity is out there. I don't need to stuff it all in a chest until it loses its shine... it will be there till the end of me...

I had a dream in which...

.... I found myself in a Victorian study, with dark wooden panelling and book shelves with leather bound volumes and two men were discussing my skull and it was 200 years after I died...

This one had been at least fifteen years ago, and technically speaking, it was a hypnogogic vision - you know, one of those very vivid dreams that occur before you are fully asleep.

When I was much younger I had a series of 'Alien invasion' type dreams, in which I'd find myself threatened by this little aliens ('Grays'), but the real freaky thing about those were, I knew, inside the dream that it was a dream and always managed to escape by willfully waking myself up out of it. Then, a fresh twist came. One night, I dreamt I was practicing to fly. That must have been hands down the most enjoyable dream I've ever had. Swooping and diving and whirling through the air without a single thing to hold me back. The thing is, some time after the flying dream, I had another of the 'Alien invasion' type dreams, but instead of waking myself up, I reasoned, wait, you know how to fly now, you can just fly away. And I did.

A Chinese poet called Zhuang Zi wrote, "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. "

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi

So, what DO we know about our dreams and about our waking... ?

This morning, first thing, my inner muse said... try this, tell something from your life, something that makes you feel sad and worthless, as if it was a only a dream from which you've woken up, so I did... and some things hurt a little less when you do this, and some things even make you smile...

I had a dream in which.... I lived in a place I hated and all I wanted was to leave and never never come back, but the more I wanted it, the more things went wrong and I could never come close to getting the money for a plane ticket... you know those dreams where you are in a supermarket and you know you don't have any money, but you can't leave and you can't stop piling things into your trolley.... well, it was exactly the same, except on a larger scale... (a snapshot from my twenties)

I had a dream in which... I had a million notebooks full of stories, and I was always telling myself start one, start one.... but whenever I tried to grasp one, it would shatter into a million pieces, that just became new story ideas....

The dreams themselves can explore fears, repressed emotions or even alternate perceptions...

I had a dream in which.... God gave me this cool body change, but then my Mommy didn't know me anymore...

I had a dream in which... I created this brilliant music, but when I woke I could remember only tiny bits of it... just receding snatches, nothing I was able to write down...

I had a dream in which... someone came to me and woke me up...

Why we dream of broken things...

Last night I sat at the water's edge and wrote a dedication to someone who changed my life. I meant to throw it in the ocean that lay between my world and his, but then my family said we had to go... so the message remained poignantly unsent... it was typical of the incompleteness that plagues so many dreams... a singer would dream that his band was playing a new song. Everyone knew it except him. He had to get the lyrics but somehow, it was time to go on stage and he still didn't have them... we dream of wrong directions. We dream of broken things that never get fixed... Why... because our dreams are really our souls' message telling us, you are broken, you are not whole... And so when we close our eyes and our souls sees the truth of this reality... we dream the pieces... it disturbs us... we think it is our fears coming out... but meanwhile it is really the desires of our broken souls yearning to be complete, that is coming out...

Monkey

If you took a monkey
and dressed him in my clothes
would that make him me?

Would he think my thoughts
Would he dream my dreams
And tell you what I see?

(t.y.m. ~ thank you for sharing & caring)