Microbes and the Universe
Australia: a deeper date
We can’t change the past, but we can work with it. When Australia day is a celebration of an honest and active reconciliation, rather than genocide and colonial terror, then we can earnestly celebrate this country.
Gods of worlds, subjects of one
Conner instructs Duncan into a thought experiment, to close his eyes and explain his experience. I do this too. Stripping away the objects as I know them – my butt, my elbows, my scanty y-fronts. My experience is now just temperature, pressure, sound, and darkness. The biggest trip is focussing on the pressure. I’m not sitting in my chair anymore, there is just pressure around my body and I’m in a dark void.
By having consciousness of this subjective, incomplete perception we have the ability to move between the worlds behind the world.
Modern ape
What I had experienced as an emotional sleepwalker during my late teens and early twenties was what is known as the ‘extinction of experience’. This process is a product of our modern world and we get sucked into it in all sorts of casual, insidious ways. It is the cultural forgetting of our basic psychological needs, of our animalism.
The Rainbow Argument
When mum started talking about what she should do with the boxes in her shed I completely zoned out and started thinking about what I should do with the boxes inside my head. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. Why do we take sides? Why do we identify with material things? Why aren’t we allowed to change our minds or say I mostly disagree? Why do we tear each other down for being wrong when, in all probability, we’re both right in some way?
An imposter, to impose.
Society gaslights us, makes us feel inadequate to hide that it is the fraud. Our constructed systems build us as imposters, but what if we turned around and began to impose, to agitate and activate, to throw stones and fire arrows at society, the real imposter?
Where Art thou?
Art is the great expressor, and without expression the world becomes petrified and white. Ash and chalk that blows away with the wind, with no intention or capacity to sit in the moment. When we are drained of our colours the world will be too bleak for us to survive as humans. We will become ill, then robotic.
Ellipses through love and shame.
“Baby, I saw a comet. He was so beautiful, and I kissed him. I kissed him to feel something new, to be free, and to see what I felt about you in that singular moment.”
I know this is the road to freedom. I’ve thought about it for eons, but this is my first experience, I’m new here too.
Primordial friends; modern problems.
We are creating a world where the microbes that love and protect us are dying out and those that would harm us are thriving. You, me, your house-plants and your veggie patch, David Attenborough and all he’s shown you - we are all little ecosystems, teeming with microbes. And like all ecosystems, we can be degraded. Like driving a bulldozer through a rainforest we kill what is adapted to us and create space for the weeds, the pathogens.
However, all is not lost. We have a plan.
9 lives of Jacoppo.
The wind was in my hair and grandpa was at the wheel. And just like that, I was out the window and headed for a reckoning with a hardwood fence post.
You wanted to know why I didn’t call.
I befriended the wide-open spaces between myself and spoken words.
I sonder, and I remember.
It’s a privilege to know the death of my prey, most of us don’t get these opportunities. But maybe we should all know it, at least once, before we choose to eat it.
The importance of the ‘irrelevant’ up-skill.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could be wasting my life while doing a PhD…
Entropy of a nation.
Colonial Australia thinks that we’re creating order from chaos – from Terra Nullius to ‘civilisation’ – but that’s not possible. You can’t get order from chaos; you can only displace the chaos by spending energy for an illusion of order.