Writings From Beyond #4 - Click And Swoop

The second thing we did in the second workshop was about tying an abstract idea to something concrete - the latter being an animal. Cameron did a whole book of these in The Zoo In You. My immediate idea was this one here, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Hope you enjoy :)

Click And Swoop

I glance over the terrifying drop.

Suddenly, I hear a swoop and a click near my ear -

A magpie has made it clear that I shouldn't be here.

I'm in amongst a group I don't really know.

I see a magpie - and I duck my head down;

Perhaps he won't see me if I can't see him now.

I walk up to her door, I raise my hand to knock -

Was that a magpie? I don't wait to find out.

I run back down the path - it would have hit me, I don't doubt.

Fear is a magpie.

And if you let it have control, 

Pretty soon you can't get anywhere

Near his tree, when the magpie is on patrol.

Writings From Beyond #3 - Master Of Motion

In the second workshop, we focussed in on animals. We had to think of our three favourite animals - and order them - and then write about one of them, in a particular way; he had us go through a bit of an imagination exercise first. Then it was the burst writing first, this time. Again, it's more narrative, and I'm not a big fan of it; the turn was again quite difficult. I don't think this is as good a one as the other bit of burst writing, but it has some nice moments. I know it ends quite suddenly - I ran out of time, and that was the line I needed to end it on, but didn't know quite how to get it there. The imagining was feeling yourself become the animal, and then moving as the animal, and then facing a challenge, and then seeing yourself in the mirror, and the animal speaking a line to you - that last line was that line, and it's something I really wanted to use. But yeah.

Master Of Motion

The water streamlines past. I am the master of motion; there is no wasted movement, no clumsiness. Everything is sleek and perfect. Where my bottlenose turns, so do I. I move my tail up and down, and I burst out of the water in a graceful arc. As I come back down, I notice something - is that my brother? No, the fins aren't right. This one isn't from my family. I challenge them, but they are not deterred - so I charge at them! They don't turn away, but instead charge at me as well - we get so close, and then SLAM! My bottlenose crumples and my body spins into some invisible wall. I don't understand. What is this? I am hurting, but more confused than anything. I am meant to be free.

Writings From Beyond #2: The Echo

This is the second in a series of writings I did at Beyond Festival in Cameron Semmens' workshops. In this one, we did a burst of writing, and were encouraged to explore the different senses, as well as talking about an issue in the world of today. I think the idea that I got was reasonable, but I struggled with finding a reasonable turn (point where it changes and surprises you, like the 'colour wars' in the previous poem). I did manage to get one in there, and I think it's okay - but this is more narrative, not poetry as such. Hope you enjoy :)

The Echo

The turn of the jailer's jangling keys reminds me of that echoing gunshot that reverberated through my whole life. He smelt bad - it had obviously been raining outside, but those brown stains from his shoes clearly weren't just mud. His squelchy, heavy footprints came closer, until I could almost feel the humidity coming off his soaked dark clothes. He says it's time. I turn to my little brother, and tell him that I'll see him again soon. Will it be soon? I don't even know. I hug him for the last time. I make it a good one - people call them bear hugs, but I must have been more boa constrictor. Too quickly, the jailer steps in. And takes my brother away.

I can still hear the echo. 

Writings from Beyond #1: Which Colour?

I was at Beyond Festival over the weekend, and was fortunate enough to have some time in a couple of workshops with Cameron Semmens. If you haven't heard of him, look him up! He's a great performance poet, and in each workshop he took us through a few different things to get some writing happening. The first one was around several key things to remember when writing, which he talked about a bit, but I'll just list here:

• Be invitational, not confrontational
• Ask good questions, rather than giving answers
• RE-humanising, not DE-humanising
• Raw + personal + honest, not preachy + idealised
• Light touch, not sledgehammer
• Metaphors, not commands

And then we did some writing, keeping in mind those ideas, but particularly looking at the idea of just using questions. You can read that one below. There's a few other bits of writing that I did in the workshops, and I'll be posting them all up in quick succession! This one I rather like, and I hope you enjoy it too :)

Which Colour

Why do people not like grey skies, when it makes everything more green? Or do people just not like green?

Why do people like one colour more than another? Is my colour better than yours? Are we going to have colour wars?

Would you fight with balloons of coloured powder, or super soakers that spray colour everywhere?

Do all colours fade - or do some get brighter? Which colour are you?

Scraping By.

I currently have $20 to my name. Check that, $15, because I decided to spoil myself with a hot chocolate. Or at least, when rent goes through at some point today. Thankfully, I'm getting paid tomorrow. Unfortunately, most of that money is already going to vanish to pay for something else I'm working on.

For the last few weeks, I've been living pretty close to being bankrupt a number of times. If you've been keeping up to date on Facebook, you'll be aware that I currently have no car. As much as I enjoy not having to deal with having a car any more (I seriously hate cars), it makes it rather difficult to get work - and I have enough difficulty normally. Not being strong, not being fast, and not being able to sell stuff takes out trades, hospitality, and retail straight away. That's probably 80% of casual jobs or something. Yeah. But I've probably ranted about that before at some point. 

Regardless, money isn't being fun for me right now. Thankfully, I don't tend to spend that much, so I can get by okay. I don't really go out much, I don't drink, and since I moved out I've gone vegetarian. So that all helps. 

There's been a lot that God's been doing this year. He's given me lots of challenges, but lots of opportunities as well. I had the album launch recently; I've gotten bits of work here and there that I've been enjoying; the internship has given me lots of space to help my church do what it does even better. And I've got no clue what he's got planned for next year, but I think it's going to be big.

But right now, I'm not seeing how I'm going to even get there. Financially, short of something big coming through, I'm going to be in debt before long. Emotionally, I'm swinging between being relaxed and being a wreck. Spiritually - I'm having major difficulties in trusting that God is going to get me through this. I believe that he will, somehow. But I don't know what state I'll be in when he does.

I've shared a couple of videos recently, talking about how the opposite of addiction is connection. Well right now, there's a lot of times I'm struggling to find or see that connection. All too often, it seems to exist more in theory than in practice. And that's hard. 

I don't really have a nice one-liner to end this on, folks. I guess we'll see what happens. 

Thoughts on Money and Work.

Warning: rant approaching.

The world does not take kindly to creative people, in general. It doesn't have time for dreamers, for idealists, for those who want to follow their passion. You wouldn't think that, of course. Because the movies, the media, always says that that's what we should do. Follow your dreams, follow your passions! Pursue those crazy ideas!

Oh, but....you need money. You need money. You cannot survive without money. We have made it so that you cannot do anything without money.

People can have a perfect idea of what they want to do with their life. They can have a dream about what they want to do; know exactly how it is they could do it; have a plan for how they want to spend their time; but they're not able to, because of how money works in this world. The number of people that you have that dreamed of doing one thing, but then ended up doing something else - is just way too many.

And really, this isn't just a problem for creatives. It's probably especially a problem there, but it applies across to so many other fields. And it begs the question: would a society without money work? Are there jobs that people just would never do if they weren't paid for it; are there people that are so greedy that they would never let it become possible? Or does it just seem too much like socialism, or communism, or head-in-the-clouds thinking, and people will just be against it from the start?

For my part, I think that it should work. And that it could work. But whether it would....perhaps we have gone too long like this. Time will tell.

</rant>

Pushing On.

I haven't been posting much - at all - over these last few months. And it hasn't been for lack of time - I've been having a fair few days free here and there - and neither has it been for lack of things to talk about; there's been rather a lot. Unfortunately, I've been really struggling with self-motivation this year in general - guess that's what happens when you move out! Does make it harder. The fact that I've got a decent helping of Nine in me probably doesn't help. (Enneagram reference. Yay!)

But yes, there's been rather a lot happening. Work has been all over the place; I finished up at Koorong, started doing a few other casual jobs - but then my car decided to pack it in. Or, rather, I had a crash. Thankfully, everyone was okay, though my car looks like it had a run-in with the Incredible Hulk. Getting to different jobs without a car has been markedly more difficult; even getting to church or the shops can be an issue. It just takes a lot more time out of my day. I don't mind walking - I actually rather like it - it just takes a lot of time. I've started to look around for other work that's either more easy to get to by public transport, or that I can just do online, but not too much luck yet.

To compound that, money is a bit of an issue at present - I thought I'd be okay with the jobs I've gotten, but the problem is that I haven't had a shift yet at one, and another is project-based; so it pays me half at the beginning, and half at the end. Wouldn't be a big deal, but our schedules seem to not line up well, which means that the end of the project seems to keep getting further away. Since I'm under 25, I have to pay the age excess on top of the normal excess to insurance, so it's a fair bit of money that's coming out of my pocket each week - and not nearly as much going in. So I'm trying to find a job quickly to even out the balance, without going back to jobs that I'm neither good at or passionate about, which is why I finished up at Koorong.

Just to make things a bit more interesting, God's given me a bit of a challenge. I talked about it a bit in this video. Essentially, at the end of this year, I'm taking a week away somewhere - I really don't know where - to re-focus and start with a bit of a clean slate. And then just asking God where he wants me, what he wants me to be doing and focussing on - because I've really stretched myself thin, and it shows in a lot of ways. So starting from scratch, finishing up with everything I'm doing, and going in to a new season. I have no idea what that will look like. But we'll see when we get there.

We do have to get there first, though. The end of the year is still four months away, including this one. And for me, I know that each day has been hard and challenging in different ways. Sometimes, because of loneliness; others because of worry, or fear; sometimes temptation; and sometimes, like I said before, dealing with my lack of self-motivation. It makes everything harder, really.

But I keep pushing on, because I know that God is with me, and helping me to get through. I don't really know how he's going to make everything work. And it's quite possible that not all of it will. I don't know. But I trust that he's going to get me through, one way or another. However long it takes.

What is life?

This time, you won't find the blog post here. Rather, I'm going to do a bit of a redirect, to a new site that I'm working on, called Crux.

The post is centred around a simple, but important, question: what is life? You can find a link to it right here.

Politics: what *should* it look like?

These days, it seems that pretty much everyone is tired of politics. Tired of the Devil's Fork to choose between, tired of things not happening - or the wrong things happening - tired of people spending too much time on things that should be simple, and tired of the ever-increasing length of ballot paper.

Here in Australia, we run under what's commonly referred to as a democratic system. Technically, however, it's actually a democratically-elected oligarchy (oligarchy meaning "rule by the few"; notably different to aristocracy, which is "rule by the rich"). This means that everyone gets together and votes for a select group of people to act on their behalf; rather than everybody voting and discussing and having authoritative power on every decision, because that's rather hard to do in a country of any reasonable size. And the prevailing modern Westernised opinion has been that all democracy is good; anything else (for example, monarchy, autocracy, socialism, communism, etc.) is regarded as generally bad. At this point, however, I'd like to put a good ol' spanner in the works. 

Recently, we've seen rather stunning evidence that national votes on important issues can lead to rather disastrous results (see: #brexit). Similar patterns - though not quite as large-scale - have been seen or predicted elsewhere, as well. It's the general idea - which isn't particularly new or strange - that while individual people can be quite smart and sensible, large groups can often display the opposite (unless the group is skewed, of course; talking here about a random selection across the population).

But then, what happens to this idea of representative democracy (which America seems to call republic, even though that's actually not quite the same)? Well, it rather falls a little short of where Western society seems to hold it up. But by the same token, we intrinsically distrust leadership by one person alone, whatever they're called - we too easily see the faults and failings in the individual. And yet, time and again, it has been the individual that has brought great change; sometimes for the better, and of course, sometimes for the worse. So the problem becomes: how do you choose the right person? Or, what does the right person even look like? Which qualities are most important? Courage? Vision? Innovation? Wisdom? Moral character? Experience? Trustworthiness? Or perhaps the old system is better: rather than trying to find these things in someone, choosing someone earlier in their years and training them in these things. 

Perhaps there is no 'best' way, though; like as not, each has as many flaws and failings as the next.

What do you think? What would you like politics, or government, to look like?

The Second Act: Yeah, I See You.

Warning: HERE BE SPOILERS.

Yesterday I went to see Now You See Me 2, alternatively titled The Second Act. I was quite a fan of the first one, so I went in with high hopes. I must admit, I was a little disappointed. But there were some good points - so I'll focus on these first.

I loved the continuation of the Lionel Shrike story, and bringing back in a focus on relationship, and giving a nice twist to Thaddeus Pike. I probably should have seen that one coming, given how it was twisted similarly to the reveal at the end of the first one. There was also a bit of fun in seeing more tricks again from The Horsemen, as well as ones from other players. It was also nice to see the scope expanded a little - but I got the feeling that it wasn't necessarily done intentionally. Here we get into the negative.

The film starts in the US, like the first, but then spends a lot of time in Macau (part of China), before finishing off in London. In some senses, this seems a little strange. They try to explain it away with lines like, "One of the oldest magic stores is in Macau," and "the Eye has a lot of history here," but it still feels like they're just there perhaps because it was cheaper to shoot, though that's not something I've researched. I also found Daniel Radcliffe's character a bit strange; or perhaps I'm still just not used to him doing other roles than Harry Potter. But I saw him as very over the top, and cheesy. The new Horseman that was brought in did an okay job - and they did do a good job of looking at how she worked, or didn't work, into the group - but it did feel a bit strange with her there so suddenly. (Though, admittedly, what else are they going to do?) The Eye also felt like rather a let down, though there is a suggestion that something could come up for a third movie - but that's if they can get enough support to make one. The twin idea was also a little strange, but they pulled it off okay.

The most annoying thing for me, though, was that I was able to see how they did a lot of the tricks straight up. As soon as I saw the rain, I thought that it was probably a rain machine. As soon as I saw the twin bumping into a 'hobo', I knew that that would actually be someone. As soon as they got to the 'hangar' and they were having lights shone in their eyes and the like when they were getting on the plane, I knew that it was just a more elaborate version of what had already been done to the Horsemen with the two different tunnels, and that they weren't really getting thrown off the plane. Maybe it was just me, maybe some other people noticed these as well.

So while I enjoyed some things about the movie, and had fun with it overall - I was a little disappointed by it. What did you think? I'd love to hear!