Splashes of Summer
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about astrology and the elements. Being a virgo, I’ve been forced to believe that my element is Earth. However, I reject this ideology because the connection I have always felt with water has left me thinking, well, what if I don’t wanna be an Earth sign?
When England sees its fortnight of Summer and heat I find it hard to stay away from water. Whether I’m drinking it due to de-hydration or purely just immersing myself in it, it’s the one thing I can’t resist during the short Summer period.
The photo above was taken in my back garden when the heat was at its most powerful. Primarily it was just gonna be me in the nature because I wanted to honour the element I’ve been stuck with, but then I thought, what if I combine my favourite element with what I’ve been given. The freedom of being with nature was amazing. The cold water against my un-tanable skin felt perfect, right even.
So I concluded that over the next year I want to honour the elements in the only way I know how- photography. This is dominantly the image representing water. Next up I want to use wind in the gales of early October. Wind is empowering. Wind is wonderful.
Winderful.
I’m drinking the last bit of cheap-ass cider I have in my bottle. And you know what I’m thinking about? Skin. To me, that seems like a perfect area of life to be considering. The fact is that skin makes up five per cent of your body. Your body; five per cent of it is made up of these little layers of delicate tissue that account for your appearance.
I hope I can put this into perspective for you.
How many people are in Britain? Millions, right? And I bet you’ll find it hard to spot one person who hasn’t considered their skin ugly at some point during their life. Every day I see people: friends, family and strangers on the street who are coated in something I have tried, and yet still despise- fake tan. It seems to me that wherever you go, someone will have spent time out of their day to spritz and spread a formula on themselves which will change their ethnicity. I know to them it is a way of making them look more ‘healthy’ and ‘sun-glowed’, but ultimately, why does it take a bottle of dirt to force their confidence and comfort?
I’ve grown up in a household which has never been blessed with the gene that makes us catch a tan quickly, or even burn; people have told me that I was meant to be ginger because it looks like I’ve avoided the sun like the plague. And you know what? They’re right. Not once have I considered this translucent, veiny, cold-looking complexion a bad thing. Growing up, I always thought that a tan was what people aimed for; an image of health and luxury. And being the little weirdo that I was, I wanted to rebel against that pile of shit.
Even from a young age, I could tell that embracing yourself was something that was admired (multiple superstars drilling into my brain that I was ‘perfect the way I am’ stuck with me), so I never tried to catch the rare rays cast upon this shit hole named, Great Britain. I’m lying; one time I caught the sun on my shoulders in Wales on a beach whilst burying a crab’s corpse and my mother told me I looked ‘healthy’. Being the little boy I was, I saw my mother’s face have an intriguing smile and wanted to make her proud; so I burnt a little more. But the more I grew, I realised, it’s not her skin to change.
It’s mine.
Perhaps this is the memory carved into my brain that makes me realise that I don’t have to please anyone else in terms of my appearance. It all began when I learned black people used bleaching products in order to make their skin lighter so they would be accepted by society. I may have even ducked my head in shame. In my eyes, I think, because the skin is primarily the first thing someone sees on you, we should embrace it, not hide from it. I know we all go through that dramatic teenage faze where we feel no one accepts us, but let’s face it: the only acceptance you need is your own.
So when I see people change the way the most dominant feature about themselves, I feel sad. More than anything in this world, not attempting to live as you is so pitiful. I think we need some kind of celebratory shit for accepting our races as they are, because after all, that’s us. So next time you pick up that bottle of bleach or fake tan, think about it: are you changing your skin tone, or are you completely changing what people see? If you adopt a new skin tone, I feel, you’re adopting a new persona. One that isn’t yourself.
And let’s face it- that’s always fucked up.
I’ve been thinking about dance. Dance is a creative format used to express emotion. Much like anything else we do. The way we walk, the way we contort our face and our bodies, even the way we mouth words. Everything is expressed through what we do. Dance may be one of the most creative and beautiful ways to do this. But then I think: can our expression really ever describe how we’re feeling inside?
Every day, I can’t tell you how many different emotions I feel; it’s usually worse when I’m drunk but that’s a different matter. When I wake up, I feel resentment- hatred, poison, like some vixen out to cast a spell. I don’t do fucking mornings. Then during the day I feel almost neutral, because there’s so much shit going on that I never know how I feel. I suppose emotions are so mixed up because we don’t know how to feel. For example, today, I bought a packet of cheap-ass cigarettes that were fifty pence more than I expected. Fifty pence. That’s half a pound. That’s half a shot on a good event. And when I got told that, there were mixed feelings inside me. At first I felt a little angry because I had to use my card to pay for my sticks of toxins and I knew how poor I was to begin with. I had three pounds ready and waiting and I expected change. But when told the disgraceful amount, I craved them so much, I tapped in my pin with daggers and snatched the cigs away. The second emotion I felt was sadness. I was sad that my sucky job only pays me enough to get these cheap cigarettes, which appear to be cheap no more. Bastards. Then, finally, I felt confused.
So many questions were whirling round my brain, telling me I should ask why the cigarettes had gone up in price. They weren’t any different; same size, same taste, same effect. As I wandered round in my boots after leaving the shop, I wondered ‘why is the economy so fucked that addictions cannot be served at a reasonable price?’ Then after that I didn’t give a shit. Because I had my smokes and I could puff away, even if I was fifty pence closer towards poverty.
Dance allows us to use movement to express our anger, happiness, sadness and any other emotion within us. But, what about those forgotten emotions? If I didn’t sit with my cigarette, killing me slowly, I never would have considered how many feelings I had within the space of five minutes when buying them. Sometimes I feel like we don’t appreciate that we can feel so much; we’re caught up in an emotion that we focus so much, we feel we have to express it. But I feel we are lying to ourselves if we don’t include those ‘in-between moments’. We are ignoring the pain and the misery that we feel between the happiness, excitement and freedom. But why? Because they aren’t prominent and won’t obtain our inspiration? So what?
The next time you dance, consider the fact that you’re always feeling.
You’re always emoting.
And ultimately, you’re never completely unaware of the other feelings racked up in another part of your brain, on the shelf containing the cigarettes you ignore.
Over the past week or so I’ve been obsessed with this one song. I can’t even remember the name of the song or the artist; the actual lyrics were complete shit, but the fact the band wrote them themselves made it feel sincere which makes the simplicity of them beautiful. Then I got to thinking about simplicity and how wonderful and impossible it is.
The simplest of things aren’t actually as simple as they seem I think. Think of a little box, a little red box. In your head it looks like the simplest thing in the whole fucking world, but delve a little deeper like you dive into the urine-infested community pool. Think of all the particles in the atmosphere that flew together to make that little box. Us and everything around us is just atoms anyway; millions of them. Billions. Trillions. Eternal amounts. It’s not really so simple.
To me, simplicity is not simple; I sat in my garden on a chair smoking three cigarettes the other day and I was sat staring at my reflection in a puddle on the table in front of me. It was quivering like I do when it’s November and my bones are stiff as fuck in the cold. But it looked so simple and innocent and I liked it. That’s when I started thinking about the whole thing. Because the breeze had to blow the water to make it quiver, and I had to be sat in a certain way to look at it, all the while my brain was telling my arm to ascend and descend as I inhaled the toxic smoke, poisoning my body, putting it through minor internal agony. It wasn’t simple. It wasn’t simple at all.
So I lit another cigarette.
Even as we’re sat doing nothing we’re doing something. We’re sat down and our thoughts are thrown around in our minds like a manic club scene. It’s still not simplistic. I think the way I think so fucking much is why I find it so hard to meditate- something I try to do a lot, especially lately (I’m not an annoyance trying to find another approach to life to be different; I just want some peace). I find it hard to focus solely on breathing in and out whilst trying to maintain the posture of Buddha Vairochana with my eyes half-closed. Because I think I’m doing it wrong and then I start thinking of that and my thought process of the inhale/exhale process becomes fucked up. So I give up and lie down and stare at the ceiling instead sometimes. Other times I stick with it until my back aches and my eyes strain. All of that to find peace and contentment; turns out, that’s the last thing I find when my hunchback is begging me to slouch and my black-lined eyes cry for me to close properly.
Even trying to find simplicity is complicated.
Ultimately, I don’t think simplicity is real. It’s a beautiful ideology shared in our world. One of the most beautiful things in the world, and it’s not even real. We’re all to god damn busy to even thoroughly analyze its real meaning. Because we don’t want to.
We just want simplicity to be kept simple.
I stubbed out that last cigarette and went inside. One leg in front of the other, my brain sending messages to each limb to perform the most simple of tasks. I turned on that song that I still can’t remember and my deep thoughts were left outside. I sat down on the kitchen floor. I spent the whole day doing nothing.
All the while, doing something.
Today I got to thinking about butterflies.
I say today but it was really almost two or three months ago. But all the words weren’t merged together properly then; but they are now.
Butterflies are pretty and they can fly. To me, I feel this is the ultimate dream. Because how relevant is the human race if we cannot fly away and go where we want to be? No one is happy being where they are these days; if they’re born in Manchester they wanna be in London, and if they’re born in London they wanna be in New York or some pile of shit like that.
We should all accept where we are and be happy with it; but we can’t. We won’t. We won’t ever be.
Butterflies start out as these little squiggly caterpillars that then build this little cocoon around themselves. We do this; we all go through that stupid teenage, hormonal, depressing stage where we convince ourselves we’re not enough. Then we build a cocoon around ourselves, otherwise known as a defence barrier. We need to get the fuck over it and skip those teenage years. We’re not happy in that faze. But then again, when are we ever happy?
The aim of the cocoon is to one day blossom into a butterfly. A beautiful, colourful, free butterfly. It always confuses and amazes me how a little green wormy-looking thing can turn into a creature so filled with colour and beauty. That’s what we all are; just hibernating in our defence barrier until we become beautiful. Adolescence is dead.
But the one thing that grabbed me most about butterflies is how they only live for two weeks or less. Two weeks is a healthy butterfly. But if they have any connection to the human race, who the fuck is healthy these days? Think. Think about what you do in two weeks. You could probably start and end your exams, or cut your hair before is returning to its original state which you were unhappy with. Maybe you could climb a big mountain or you could run a marathon before eating a greasy, fat cheeseburger to regain the momentous amount of calories you lost whilst running. Maybe.
But imagine if that was the only two weeks in your life. Imagine if you could only do one thing in your life before being struck down and killed by reality. Imagine. Life is such a beautiful thing, and such amazing creatures like butterflies only get it for two weeks. Or less. It’s so strange and sad; just like a teenagers mind.
I often imagine how wonderful it would be if I could climb into a butterfly’s mind and see what the little nerves and neurons and particles create in their tiny brains. Do they know they’ll be a forgotten insect corpse in a fortnight? Or do they have an agenda to keep to in their short life span. Either way it must be a miserable life. So I wonder: are these beautiful creatures happy? Because there seems to be a portrayal in the world that suggests they’re happy and free creatures. But the reality is: if they’re as realistic and pessimistic as teenagers, they must be depressed, sad and miserable creatures. We cannot sit and wait in our cocoons until we’re beautiful.
Accept the long life you can have. Because butterflies won’t; they can’t.
They may look free when they flutter their rainbow wings. But reality will hit them I bet; whether it’s a raindrop or a bird preying on them, they know something will hit them. And kill them.
You’re not a butterfly. Fortunately.
