Beehave

The problem with realizing we’re all deluded is that it leaves you with nothing much left to believe in…

After a bizarre morning reflection at work today I found myself having to wait half an hour for a car to be repaired. I’ve been feeling absolutely aimless and lost lately, desperate to escape, or hide or do something completely radical.

Tempted to just wander off into the scrub I compromised and went and sat against a tree on a city street curb. That odd loneliness, a fog. 

So I spotted this tree and I just wandered across the road and plonked myself down on the ground at it’s base. I recognized the foliage it was an Allosyncarpia ternate.

I sat a while, completely submerged in my narcissistic shrine of misery… Then gazing through the mist of reminiscent longing for youth and freedom and the wide open road, outward to the blandness of Daly Street, I noticed a couple of minute black stingless bees clinging to my shirt. Immediately I felt the warmth of being connected to something, a reprieve from the emptiness. Not just bugs… these were Bees! 

Allosyncarpia ternate

What makes Bees so special? Well that’s a long story. I have happy memories of watching a cousin tending his hives when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the way he was able to handle the hives without incurring a major attack. I remember him spinning the racks and the vat of hot melted honey filling large tins with beautiful golden nectar. In those days he could place the hives in woodlands dominated by particular species of trees and each tree species would deliver it’s own unique flavour. From year to year the flavour and consistency of the harvest was slightly different depending on flowering times, rain, and proximity of the hive to flowering crops. There was a kind of symbiosis between the bees, the plant life and the apiarist. To me it seemed a beautiful, magical place where gold was spun.

Since that time I’ve had various encounters with European honey bees, although I’ve never kept them myself, I have visited their hives, ridden my bike (accidentally through a swarm of bees), been stung a few times by accident and have managed to touch them, pat them. I don’t know why but throughout my life I’ve had a fascination bordering on affinity with the bee.

Somehow, possibly by coincidence (As if there is such a thing) I was named after the Yiritja bee (not stingless yet I still haven’t met this family).

As I sit against that tree with my friends the bees humming around me I laughed out loud at the ironic absurdity of feeling alone. 

Thudering Insomnia

Weeks of Insomnia,

Bad news, Back pain etc...

I searched my Soul and found it wanting...

Determined to find the point of it all and came up with zilch! 

Letting go of illusions, expectations and beliefs leaves very little to cling to when I ask what's it all about?

Lately I have been desperate for solitude and as much space and time to myself as I can steal... 

There is developing in me a strong aversion to company.

But like most people I have commitments to family and work which must be met. So on life roles and in spare moments I slink in to a quiet corner to consider... "What next?" 

Needing to get out of our fetid unit we gathered the kids and went down to the foreshore where the kids could play and my wife and I could look out on the sea and get some peace. My heart felt lighter, no one demanding anything of me I could just watch nature in action and breathe. There was a large flock of small migratory birds roosting on the rocks. So beautiful, wild and completely free! A tonic for a troubled soul.
Then people started to notice, a couple holding hands, lovers looking for a romantic photo... a man and his son exploring the rock pools, a family out for a picnic. They were all excited by the flurry of feathers, all those birds taking flight. So of course the birds did take flight and each time they attempted to land the people would approach them and cause them to fly again. The birds may have flown many thousands of kilometers to arrive on that beach and at high tide there were very few other places to roost. They were forced into the air time after time while the ignorant (yes naive) destructive humans enjoyed the spectacle of so many birds in the air. And I wondered... With so little of the natural world remaining in tact, will we ever learn to appreciate it as it is? Or will we always be guided by our own selfish desires, putting our dumb curiosity first?

People enjoying the spectacle of birds in flight

Woken at midnight by a violent thunderstorm, demons bashing about causing the windows to shake in their frames and the dog, senile and half cripple,whimpered and farted as she clawed her way under my bed. 

I know I should be more understanding but I tell her to fuck off and leave me alone!

MIDNIGHT COWBOY

By 1am I realized that tonight was not going to be my night for sleeping. Turned on the laptop and flicked through my dvd collection. I considered a few films but found it hard to choose one... for some reason I kept glancing at 'Midnight Cowboy' I'm already depressed why would I want to watch that? But after the 4th glance I took the dvd out if it's cover and stuck it in the machine.

Sometimes when you're down it helps to look at life not from the street view but from the gutter! The film is full of the pain and self doubt I have been feeling lately. It didn't leave me feeling uplifted at all but at least somebody bothered to express this in film! 

‘…People stopping, staring
I can't see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes…’

(Harry Nilsson) 

You want a coffee?

On Days like this music blasts through pain to fill my soul, the lyrics are an arch and tunes I could never have created or imagined into being propel me through in absolute rawness and bitter joy pass through me! I stagger about misty eyed full of rapture and simultaneously my own impotence. What I cannot express cannot do. Nothing original, nothing real just an insignificant fractured half entity clenching desperately to stolen Clichés 

Now I'm going for a walk, on my headphones is Dire Straits One world

"...They say it's mostly vanity
That writes the plays we act
They tell me that's what everybody knows
There's no such thing as sanity
And that's the sanest fact

That's the way the story goes..."


That's the way it goes!

Precious

The clock has ticked past 12, it's now the final
day of 2014. Just another day really.

Tonight Sam and I remembered, quietly and sadly friends who have died this year. 

It has been a tough year I have spent the past week just hanging out at home with Sam 

and the kids but in the back of my mind I worry about friends who are alone. This year we have seen too many unnecessary deaths! 

3 lost to suicide (all unrelated) and the tragic loss of two more beautiful children whose lives were cut short.

I know so many lonely people, so many people who are under pressure and too often alone, they suffer from loneliness but often they keep their despair to themselves.

When I look back over the years I have lost way too many friends to this thing! Something is wrong! Something is broken that so many would think there's no other choice but to take this most drastic step.

I don't know what I can say really, except acknowledge their passing and remember that our time here is short and soon we will all be dust.

We will all pass and before long forgotten. It's no great matter once we're gone. But while we live maybe there's room for just a little more kindness.

Candles still burning for Jenny and the kids. Morning after memorial on Rapid Creek.

In June this year news spread of a shocking incident which took place on a friends property in Jingili. The death of Jenny and her two children left our community numb and confused. Our hearts were broken to learn what had happened. The final report stated it was double murder suicide. How do we deal with such a tragedy? Can we ever understand the effect this has had on the families of those two children? I have thought of them over the Christmas period and pray they get some respite from their suffering. For the care of children it is right to ask ourselves what more could I have done!
A couple of days after the incident an impromptu memorial was organized by close friends and held on the bank of Rapid Creek. I am sure I'm not the only one who felt ambivalent about the situation. I was angry and sad, rage swelled in me to think a parent could do this to her children, yet it happens a lot. Pain! Too much pain. By the end of the service had resolved a lot of my outrage and could only think to care for so many lonely people, I had no idea at that time I would loose two more friends just 5 months later.

I left the memorial alone, without talking to anyone but returned the next morning before dawn. 3 candles were still burning. I sat by the river and watched the sun rise. Around me life went on as usual. People jogging, cycling, walking their dogs. Over night the tide continued it's rhythm, I threw some left over flowers into the creek, the creek continued to flow and carried the petals out to sea.

Stay - Leonardo's Bride

"...And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
  For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
  (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
      about death.)

  I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
  Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

  Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
  by God's name,
  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
  Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to

  try to alarm me..." 

 - (Walt Whitman. from Song of Myself of the book Leaves of Grass)

5

Your hearts were torn in life, may God bless you as you rest.
Tonight we'll light 5 candles.

The scent of rancid coconut

There is a foot on my head and laughter at my back,
Nothing I do will release me from this trap.
Run around, jump, spin, stagger and fall!
Trapped in a spastic dimension,
Like a clown in a glass box.
Jump, spin, stagger, run around again
You can struggle and strive if you like.
To all ends, No difference made!
You will be greeted by more of the same.
Try to make it work but some things never change!
No talent, No chance, nor music or art,
Just these spastic jitters and a crumpled heart.


I lit a fire to calm my aching soul
Smoke billowed through the yard and the street
A few coconuts for fuel, and their rancid fumes filled the air
Peace torn apart in the smoke and choking stench
Dark birds gathered to pick over burned offerings
My wretchedness exposed
Ready to be devoured like flesh from scorched bones
No time to ponder or chance to grieve
Back to bread labor put away your dreams!

Sometimes every effort is met with calamity, shame and ridicule...
I take comfort, to laugh heartier, louder than the din that surrounds me!
Not hollow or empty but maniacally in Zen.
All is ridiculous, Lets not be serious!
The Gods of Olympia might scoff and scorn but to this life I was born. And so will proceed, whither my headstone does read, Here lies a joke, mock him while he sleeps!