Cheers

Sugar ticks and selfie sticks
Cobbled streets basted in oil slicks
Swipe to the right peepshows
Broken sleep, wandering where your mind goes
I wish I had never led us here
If I could only clamp my eyes and plug my ears
The City of corrupted fiends
Your behaviour my soul demeans

Litter-strewn and vomit-soaked
Lines of mandy, nitrogen-oxide smoked
No room to breath, no space to sit
Stiletto heels seemed for you a better fit
Offering the City what was once intact
Your affection, like a summer's day, a vanishing act
Now wrapped up in knowing what I lack
Short skirts in taxi cabs, both black
Frayed wit and hollowed eyes
Walking past off-licences stacking putrid pork pies
And cornish pasties
And kebabs

What do I do now without you here
A place so easy to feel your worth does not exist, as I disappear
Half-awake on trains where no one speaks
Internally focused on what the iphone leaks
While I hear sirens and tyrants' bank balances soar
More, more, more
Embracing the fast, gin-soaked race with some trendy herb
Festering mattresses retired to the kerb
Steeped in rain and melancholy
No longer necessary
(Like me)
Beside boozed-up lads banishing love with another round
Don't worry mate, plenty other birds around.

The anatomy of melancholy

Being 'in love', like being 'in imagination'. The concerns of everyday life all dissolve in the daydream and halo of the other.

Is it an illusion to be distrusted? Do we reject what the soul presents to us? Something so pure and simple at the time that will eventually lead us astray?

Does love make us blind to the flaws of another, or does it make us see the true angelic nature of a person? Is it all just an illusion, a trick of light that makes us see what we want and abandon reason?

Does it distort more than reveal? If only I could stop what I still feel,

Goodbye London Town

“This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore nil desperandum. March forward hero!”
― Sivananda Saraswati

With these words echoing in my hollowed soul, I march on. The Scottish Highlands beckon. And so I load all the shrapnel into a tin can, move to the folds of the mountains up north to start a new chapter in my life. London has been a hard but fair teacher, and despite it being a challenging move I will miss it dearly, and all those that made my time so healing over this last year. Three and a half years here have brought many new experiences into my life, and it seems almost impossible to be able to encapsulate all of them and their impact in one post. I have volunteered in the house Handel lived for most of his life, learnt about what weeds you can eat, enjoyed very civil high teas, been offered lifts by strangers and hitched rides on lazy canal boats. I've sunbathed on locks and overcrowded parks, and sampled only a handful of the hundreds of museums the city has to offer. I've explored cobble streets Dickens, Shakespeare, Hemingway once walked on, cycled up the Pall Mall on many occasion (my favourite car-free stretch of London), eaten dinner in a 1940's disused underground station, sampled cuisine from Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, Hawaii, the Caribbean, Mexico and wandered through China town on rainy Chinese new years.

I've eavesdropped on many a Polish conversation, drawn people on public transport until they noticed me, dressed up as a zombie, fed foxes, seen street art that made my eyes pop, guerilla gardened, poked around Victoria cemeteries, walked through the Thames tributaries in waders, fallen asleep on night buses, minded the gap and found to enjoy the unique delights of a British carboot sale. I've hugged 100 year-old oaks, seen where Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy lived, been to folk festivals in old abandoned war-damaged chapels and acoustic concerts by log fires. I've fallen in love with food markets, learnt about natural dyes and raw food, lived in London's first eco-village, become a cyclist, shopped at food co-operatives, planted trees, volunteered at peace gardens, learnt about foraging, built clay ovens and attended climate change protests. I carry all these memories with me now to a new adventure.

What I've held onto to so long no longer exists, with each exhalation I learn to accept that a new breath needs to replace the old one. I lost my best friend year, but as a truce London offered me many new ones to help mend my broken heart. As well as this new chance to live mindfully in the mountains. I hope to share those experiences soon. London, you really have been a treat.

Be ground

Some more wise words, this time from Rumi:

"Be Ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony too many years. Try something different. Surrender."

“You only lose what you cling to”

In French, you don’t say ‘I miss you'. You say ‘tu me manques,’ which could be taken as ‘you are missing from me.’ Missing from me, like a beating organ, or the flow of blood.

 A limb that was, now no longer. A hand to hold, a mouth to taste, so soon discarded, now replaced.

You filled your time with another so quickly.
Deaf and dumb with each new kiss, as if the dream of us did not exist.

He is no longer mine

It has been over a year since I have blogged, and it would not make sense to continue writing without acknowledging one of the major tremors that occurred toward the end of last year. The man I loved most parted ways with me. Going through all my photos over the year, and deciding what to write about had a heaviness attached to it. My memories all had him in each of the frames, and it feels like a heavy burden for me to carry them all on my own and not share them. Maybe it is like a wound that needs to be drained, sharing my sadness to lighten the load somehow. This was one of the last photos I unknowingly took of him and remains one which epitomises him best: a soft and tender soul, with a hint of sadness in his face I foolishly did not see at the time.

Mr Handsome turned and walked away, and I turned to medication. In hindsight a decision that I will never make again, and one which I would not recommend to anyone. At the point where I could no longer distinguish my own thoughts and sensations from one another, I stopped taking the medication and decided on taking a less numbing approach, another Vipassana meditation course (an experience I will share too). Thankfully going again solidified my practice, and if nothing else reminded me the inevitability of change and impermanence. And now as Valentine's Day approaches (the horror among horrors of days stuffed with notions of rampant consumerism) I recall this poem to what love honestly is, neither red roses nor blue violets:

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

Here. 

It will blind you with tears 

like a lover.

It will make your reflection

a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,

if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,

cling to your knife. 

And so I journey on my own from this point. Do wish me luck, and I do hope to write and photograph some new stories and interesting things in the near future. This blog too will change and adapt to something new soon..

Polish pretties

Another autumn, and another visit to Poland. This time exploring new parts of it, and being pleasantly surprised by the contents every time. Beneath the at-times crumbling Soviet union blocks and stern comebacks from strangers lies emotive responses to difficult transitions, a visit to any art gallery shows how artists are tackling issues of its dark and difficult past. Wandering through a forest park dedicated to Communist miners in hometown Katowice, having my fill of old family photographs again, and visiting a nearby turn of the century mining residence of Nikiszowiec was rich in history and meaning.

Visiting Wrocław was a colourful stroll past renovated buildings, beautiful town squares, fresh food markets (oh the forest mushrooms!), museums and riversides. One is reminded through street photographs that much of the city was destroyed during WWII, but its colour, charm, and scattered tiny gnome sculptures are a treat to explore. There too my mum and I came across the first vegan restaurant I was to see in Poland (the most delicious one at that and always busy), and shows the slow and steady changes that are arising. All for the better.