Spring, 2019

I flew to Europe for a solo backpacking trip. I told people it was intended to be a traditional young person’s experience-expanding expedition, but truthfully, it was more of a retreat into solitude. I struggle to recall where exactly I went in each city I went, because I found that I had no agenda other than to observe myself existing in the world. It almost didn’t matter that I was across the ocean. I became obsessed with gazing at my own subjectivity, and feeling the edges of my own awareness, so I came and went without photographically recording very much.

The things I did capture, on paper and in camera, felt simple and true.

My journal entries during the 32 days on an olive farm in the Xixona region of Southern Spain describe the headspace I was in at that time, and continue to serve as a mode of operating in my day-to-day life.

“I shall write here the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely of the integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became works of art?”

- VIRGINIA WOOLF

I sometimes think of a quote that goes: “Art becomes Art in the sharing of it,”.

This leads me to wonder what art is before it is shared, if it is worth trying to identify and define the edges of it; if the purity of the work can only be conceived when one is in the thick of it, when you are an instrument in and of yourself, if what one recognizes as Truth is just the sensation of sublime originality.

Today is a sleepy, slow-dream Sunday.

It’s crisp and windy outside but we’re going to Altea, along the coast, to visit the old Spanish hippie buildings and visit a friend of Carola’s. I’d prefer my own company but my time here is limited, so I’ll rely on the company of others to expand my experience.

I’m feeling lazy and languid - I don’t feel like I need to try and be anything today.

All along my left flank, sunlight shifts through the window and dust motes fall into streams of consciousness that are insistent on leaving my head.

I hear the northerly winds brusquely pushing the pines, I smell the cotton green blanket beneath me.

I’ll be a sharply dressed man, and no one will suspect I’ve the mind of a child today. Who is this guy who tries so hard?

evening

Standing beside the fire, I roll my shoulders, crackling with soreness from working in the fields all week. The fire satisfyingly crackles back.

I think being a responsible creative adult means training oneself to pretend and imagine like a child from time to time.

Like meditation, it is an allowance - a letting go of the prescribed “should”. When I create and I am persistent, there is a reward partway through - an emergence of the elusive It.

I let It come through me. If I’m on the verge of quitting a session of creation or meditation, there is a dissatisfied part of me that wants to try a little longer.

The letting go happens in my periphery, it isn’t something that can be forced. Only when I’ve distracted myself with a stray daydream do I realize I’ve fallen into this Flow.

How strange and wonderful to breathe and see. To know stillness of a monumental quality.

To be a child, curious, dreaming; to be a man and contented with existence, knowing that these seconds of my life pass in and out of this world.

Right now, I understand my life. I’m here, as long as I’m conscious and my interests are to do with the Here and Now.

My every sentence, drawing, photograph and thought is punctuated by death. Every act of creation is a star, a spark, an inferno on the beach. Every act of non-creation is done in darkness, on the payroll of death.

This is nothing definitive, but it makes a lot of sense to live my life according to this for a while.