Jesus for Johnston

Yesterday morning I received a call from the notorious Mr Jenkins, the 'Rubbish Warrior'. There's an election looming an Tevor is fully engaged in campaign mode!

His persona this year: Jesus for Johnston!

He asked me to help him get some props for the campaign, but I flatly refused. "I want nothing to do with your mad attempts to hijack the democratic system! Besides I work for a church! Do you think Jesus would approve of you doing this?"

"Yes" he said then he proceeded to describe an interview inwhich he discussed his policy platform. 
The question he was asked was "How are you going to reduce the cost of living for Territorians?"

His answer was convincing and articulate. He simply repeated some basic instruction that Jesus had left his disciples a couple of thousand years ago which completely contradict the current capitalist attitude of smash and grab when it comes to our common welfare and the management of resources.  

Sneak peak at Trevors policy platform:

"campaign slogan is JESUS FOR JOHNSTON The two planks of the campaign are LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YUR HEART MIND AND SOUL  and THE SECOMD IS LIKE IT   LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR

as you love yourself ie do unto others as they do unto you  on that hangs all the law and the prophets THATS  HOW I LIVE LITERALLY I LIVE WITHUT MONEY AND TRUST IN JESUS CHRIST OYU CAN DO IT TOO Thats hoe id reduce the real cost of living for the ggod burgers of johston LIVE WITHIN YUR MEANS AND BE SATISFIED WITH WHAT YU HAVE With food and clothing let us be content GIVE AND YOU WILL BE TAKEN CARE OF YOUR CUP IL BE OVERFLOWING UP TO THE BRIM AND OVERHEAD GOD BLESS 111How good is that amen..."

I thought about it and agreed. I doubt that Jesus would mind his theatrical political performance if that is the message he chooses to take to the poles.

I saw Trevor on the side of the road this morning, in full swing, electioneering.

Stay tuned for more political updates and results.

Spaciousness

I can sit on a rock at the most popular recreational area in Darwin and have the place to myself. Sitting beside a bird with a neck like a snake that no one even sees.

Being comfortably invisible alone and encompassed by earth and sky and sea. The bird preens unaffected by my presence. 

Speck on a rock

I go to this rock between the jetty and the pool as often as I can. Take off the shoes (thongs) walk across the soft clay stone, observe the level of the water, sometimes high tide, sometimes low, feel the breeze. Be still. Today I lay flat on my back and focussed on the waning moon and watched the clouds drift across the sky. It almost appeared as though the moon was moving away in the opposite direction. I had a real sense of being a tiny organism, a speck on the surface of a globe spinning through space... what was I thinking or worried about before that moment? Can't remember, don't care.

Bringing home the honey

From a single ivory flower on the smallest battered bush on a salt swept rock, one stingless bee finds bounty for the hive.

And on another flower on some other bush, another bee struggles and finds what it seeks.

No matter how unlikely, or how slight the chance, life persists where unity exists

Interplay of Sun & Moon & Earth

We were talking for ages about balance and extremes, the topic constant contortions between the madness and the sane. And thimble of darkness that infiltrates the light and bright specks of something that interrupts the night.

The cliche symbology we tattoo on upon skin. The hardness of the Yang, softened by the Yin. Did you consider it spins? A centrifugal power that contains us all within!

And the places where our feet fall and the people that we meet. 

The wild delightful places that appear just off the street.

To stand in the vortex between this place and that, and To be without breathing a mind sharp as a tack.

To watch the Sun rising while the moon is in sight, and in turn as we're spinning she retreats from the light. 

The power emitted in the spinning of orbs, and a life so committed to the life that it knows. To stand on the shore as the tide draws in and know that now is only time there has been.

About the bass

Sound! birds, wind, frogs, clap sticks... Music!

The vibrations that pass through my ear canal and are somehow assimilated into separate causes, meaning, messages of warning, danger, safety, diversity, spaciousness, populated by innumerable other entities, each with its own frequency, rhythm volume... All conducted through my nervous system and processed in my brain in fractions of a second. 
Identified, sorted in terms of significance, prioritized and delivered to the decision making department.

Last Friday I got a new set of ear bud headphones. The sound quality totally blitzed my old set.

It's so weird, I don't know if other people have this reaction. When I had the volume up on a couple of songs the tone and depth of the BASS brought such a feeling of elation my heart sunk and lifted with the tones, skipping past the logic center, fast tracked to the heart! It brought tears to my eyes.

I was cycling along the coast and I just felt so overwhelmed with the beauty that I started to quiver and tears welled up in my eyes.

I threw my arms up in the air and let out a howl and kept riding. Drifting, gliding... On two wheels but somehow in the air, my blood pulsing, skin electric, enveloped by the humid morning air... mind tripping, heart skipping wheels spinning, horizon drawing me near to a place beyond the clouds, gravity failing to hold me and the beat driving me on from my head to my toes tears falling behind my magic carpet on two wheels... Smile stretching, eyes reaching every soul I passed. Bass divining spirit through layers of reason.

To have my hearing is a blessing. Making gratitude my foundation and embrace the bass.

The Greatest Smallest Forest

This week was the birthday of my friend Nathalie (Nat)

https://smallestforest.net/

An artist, with many talents and a woman who I admired for her humor, her capacity to see through bullshit (including mine), her straight talking cynicism, her taste for strong coffee and her propensity for freedom over comfort and truth above conformity!

It was heartbreaking when Nat died at the end of February last year. I have missed her deeply.

She had so much talent to share with the world and produced art that in my opinion was the best in Darwin!

Nat was also pretty good at Calligraphy she designed and drew the guest book when Prince Charles visited Darwin in 2018. 

My mum has a hand written copy of Desiderata that Nat wrote in beautiful calligraphy before Christmas in 2018. It must have taken her ages.

Please check out her work on her blog The Smallest Forest, it is full of so many wonderful surprises. I have no idea how long the blog will continue to be hosted. Chances are it will be taken down pretty soon.

The Smalest Forest

Specials entry

Hi... this is a truncated post from my phone because I just lost an entire essay I'd written about Terry Hall and The Specials when my finger slipped on the screen of my phone.

It was about a coincidence and a realization that I thought was pretty cool but now I just want to go to sleep.

Here's the short version.

I saw a cool video and song by The Specials, liked the band and the style of singer Terry Hall.

I also liked a version of Our Lips Are Sealed that I had downloaded onto my phone, not knowing who the band was that recorded it. (Not The Go Gos)

So I looked up the band and they were called Fun Boy Three. The band Terry, Neville Stapple and Lynval Golding created after The Specials broke up.

So there it is. My big coincidence for the week!

BFD! If you'd read my essay before I deleted it you'd probably be ringing me to say how you relate and how freaky that is because what I'd written was exactly what you were thinking exactly as you were reading it and how the convergence of ideas caused a spike in space time continuum and that all the socks you'd lost in the wash for the past 20 years suddenly shows up! 

But of course that'll never happen, because I deleted the whole freaking thing!

Here they are, Fun Boy Three with Our Lips Are Sealed.. yay.

The scent of place

We arrived at the house, street green with trees and shrubs, but dry lawns desiccated brown.

Summer heat draws all moisture summons fragrance from living things.

The exposed soil has its scent the garden another, a special smell living, resilient beauty, tough and gentle. Each time a little different, always life giving in the contrast to dead bitumen streets. Mood affected by flowers in bloom. 

The smell of roses is sometimes strong, but lavender will overpower everything, brush past the rosemary or crush it under foot or car tyre and it leaps up and fills the senses.

On this morning before the dry sting of rarified aircraft ventilation had worn off, the garden did smell faintly of marzipan. I don't know why or how. 

Another dry, hot year, not many flowers blooming. 

Definitely marzipan.  Subtle... marzipan. Just slightly but enough to know. A sweet welcome. 

Home.

And in the paddocks a peppery mixture of dry dust and golden wild grain, the smell of grass and sedge. I have no idea what the grass is that produces that scent, I can show you the stem, the flower and seed, but I don't know the name of it.

We name, names mean something, but the sense of smell tells all. 

That grass rustles when the wind blows or when you walk through it. It smells stronger in the heat.

The eucalyptus has a smell too, it is strong and winds through valleys on updrafts and breezes, it moves with the change of air pressure. And the morning dew produces a trace of something else, sweet and heavy in the green grassy valleys of foothills between the city and the dividing range. 

Before the fires consumed our forests, the dark moist earth of tree fern gullies had its scent too. If the intimate beauty of that place ever returns I'll remember the scent in an instant! But that will take a long time. A lifetime, maybe longer. 

I couldn't wait to leave Darwin, the tropical air with its own pungent smells of dead rats, cockroach shit and mold. Every year when the rains come so many rats are flushed out of their homes to die on the road behind the bins and in gardens. So many dead things... 

Houses stink of food scraps rotting in the bin, but not our place, when I return from a trip I smell, frangipani, Moria or sometimes the happy plant. A home must smell good. A brief respite from the onslaught of death and rot. 

On my first day back at work I cycle past the vacant block where the overpowering smell of human shit, reminds me that 100s are sleeping rough, mostly unnoticed by office workers who only pass from air conditioned, house to car to office and back again. But I smell it.

I smell everything and so little of it smells sweet. 

A sleepless night

Two months of great health drinking water, less caffeine, eating less, but the last few days have been a bit different. Too much coffee! Couldn't sleep, mind slipped back into impulsive and beatnik tendencies.

I was there I had the chance, 

I'd heard the name but didn't know 

Wasn't ready, what would I do?

Big Sur, a park, a place on a Wild coast, a wilderness to visit. I was right there but I didn't go, I didn't know.

Then one time alone in Bali, staying in the house of an ailing sober friend of Bill, (he was away receiving treatment for cancer). I found the book in Dave's collection, Big Sur. 

I knew Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums', 'On the Road'. The mad alcoholic adolescent decadence, I knew the life I'd skirted, the orbit drawing closer to final oblivion, I saw the collapse of reason, or ability to live in any reasonable way. I knew that life but without the glory, or romantic success of poetry beat ranting celebrity, without the intelligence, or fame, women or interesting friends to abuse and neglect. I knew it at its core reality and bleakness, I knew its sham and hope without reason.

From the edge of experience chance brought grace, my trajectory deflected by the atmospheric density of the sphere, confounding gravity that pulled me down, I was cast blindly into the gaps between the stars and looking down at the waste resurrected.

I read Big Sur with a sober eye and truly saw the sadness of the life of Jack, a soul sacrificed for the sake of desire and self will, addiction and his own funeral pyre. I read it and I knew that with all of my experience and all that I knew I am the same. I would struggle with solitude. The forest is fine but like Jack I'd known that Emerson was right and I am weak! 

BUT I must go! I had intended before I knew what it was and now it taunts me like it tortured him! 

So many beautiful places to see, but I am compelled to return to visit Big Sur. To find a hidden hollow and without booze, or drugs or human company, confront the demons Kerouac put there for me!

This has been on my mind for about 15 years. I don't know what exists there now. Don't know when I will be there, on the other side of a dying planet. 

I am watching the film right now as an actor speaks the ranting words I'd read years ago. Filling my head with the madness of the alcoholic author in the deathgrip of addiction, his soul clutching for hope too late.

It is a rescue mission to find the man and chop a log for Jack.

To the wall

Saturday afternoon, miscalculation of plans... no plan, no idea, no patience.

I wasn't sure what to do, I did have chores and a responsibility to fulfill a commitment to a friend but I just wanted to fly.

Decided to go to the museum.

I totally recommend going, there are some really great exhibitions on at the moment. 

A beautiful collection of art relating to space, moon and stars from a range of cultural and creative perspectives. (Worth visiting on its own)

There is a collection of indigenous and Macasan smoking pipes. 

Smoking - The shameful vice of modern times, Lung cancer, chemicals, disease, anti social, obnoxious, imposition in public spaces, emphysema, broke poor, stupid expensive, death!

But, once an exquisite pleasure of the privileged elite, warriors, elders traders and pirates. In Arnhem Land this must have been more true than anywhere. 

In Queenscliff I found this really old tobacco pipe in the shape of a Sultan's head and I thought, 'I want that'. I would smoke again with that in my hand and I'd imagine myself some time else. 

The Sydney Nolan collection.

Although I was familiar with some of the paintings, seeing such a large collection I finally got the humor and the seriousness of this art. It is good!

And the one that really grabbed me. A huge exhibition of Therese Richtchie's amazing work.  

https://thereseritchie.com/

Now the exhibitions were all brilliant, but what capped it off for me was another one of those magical experiences. 

So I've got my headphones on and I'm listening to my extensive collection of tunes on random play and wandering slowly through a room full of the most colourful, politically pertinent, outrageous and totally familiar creations. 

I'm feeling kind of elated, in a rapture of belonging and totally connecting with the images on the wall, I've got a warm fuzzy feeling and I'm looking at an image of a woman yelling at a line of NT coppers and Elvis Costello chimes in with a beautiful song 'Veronica' (look it up on YouTube, I can't embed it) before the song is over I glance down at the plaque...

The lady's name is Veronica!

Nothing more I can say about that.

Make life ART!