A 27km New Zealand Bike Ride

Biking from Twizel, Mackenzie Country, New Zealand. The air is so crisp that you say your teeth are somewhat sensitive. Your fingers like little salami sticks pulled out of the freezer. The tips of the thumbs for some reason, more numb than the rest.

Cold, but damn we’re alive!

Keep your eyes on the track. Make sure you don’t end up in the tussock grasses. Look up over there at those snow-topped mountains, but not for too long otherwise you’ll end up with grazed knees! We dont want to get the first aid kit out of the bag now do we?

Keep smiling. The legs are throbbing after that incline you just peddled up. Nearly at Lake Pukaki now.

You haven’t seen the lake nor the Alps for more that ten years. How does it look? How does it compare with how you remembered it? You smile again, the genuine kind of smile. “Amazing, its overwhelming” are the words you use.

By golly, working hard and biking up here made it that much more rewarding!

 

 

 

Her Cashmere Coat

It stuck to her, to her form, in all the ways you wouldn’t expect a cashmere coat doing so. Following the lines that would not usually be followed. Along the shoulder blades and covering the collarbones, the top button fixing tight to her chin.

She looked at me impishly, with the chilled wind blowing through the strands of her fringe. With a posture slightly cowered forward as if she were cuddling a hot water bottle onto her belly while standing.

Turning and leaving footprints in the snow, she left little size seven boot marks.

That was the first memory I have of her, of the one that means the most.

My Queen

My queen sitting on her throne, head down, in a foreign place.

Life can’t be that hard being a queen.

Like all queens before her, stubborn and brave, she dreams

She rules from a distance, behind those ‘bangs’ which fall on her face as yellow drop-down curtains.

With fine lines under her bum, the fingerprints of her thighs. And baby toes so gooey, wriggling when touched.

Light is easy to find in her cloudy eyes.

She learns to see in herself what he sees.

Her festering wounds

She dipped her toes in the water, but ran away after realising it was cold.

Her gasps,

Another idealization of love, leaving her and disappearing,

Still blinded to her own festering wounds.

The Feminine

Mystique is the first word that comes to mind, along with a smattering of emotions, one of the more interesting, is fear. One might wonder why such an emotion would be aroused at the idea of the feminine. More introspective men might know why, but to put it extremely simply, it is selection pressure. Women select. The crushing power of nature upon your insufficiency and nakedness. The Medusa is the perfect symbol of this, the snakes for hair representing the deceptive nature and to gaze upon her turns you to stone. The feminine is what makes men self-conscious and to be in the presence of a beautiful women can quite literally turn men to stone. To come before her is to come before the great judge. Will you be selected, or not. Are you worthy, or are damned to join the near majority of men in history who’s line has ended with them. Destined to live out their day in the crushing punishment of rejection from the feminine. All the while, his work and often his life will be sacrificed for the feminine.

I chose the word mystique because of the mysteriousness of the power of the feminine. In our modern society the narrative suggests that women are incapable and weak, needing of society to boost them up. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Modern society has come to define what is valuable as masculine traits, which is idiotic, short-sighted, sexist and egomaniacal. If one has an appreciation of symbols and imagery, one can see the feminine in a very different light.

To understand the feminine one must understand the human psyche, or better put, the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a shared set of ideas, actions, journeys, roles which are represented in archetypes. We generally don’t know we know them, but we know them when we see them, we all know the hero archetype and the heroes journey. The Feminine is a powerful symbol and set of archetypes which influences us from the very core of our beings. To really conceptualise this, you have to think about mankind as an evolving being, not just what we are and how we live in modernity. Man has not always lived in the way he does now. There were times when we lived in trees, feared snakes above all, and roamed in small packs. The psychological effects of these times still affects our minds, as much so as the dawning of consciousness.

The coming of light, as it is often conceptualised, is common in almost all mythology, from the Bible to the Maori creation myths. This symbolises the dawn of consciousness. Part of the development from this stage was the influence of the feminine, a selection power which continues and ends blood lines with totality and without magnanimity. I don’t intend to speak of the Darwinian process, but of the effects this selection had on the psyche of man and woman.

The Earth, the Sun and the Moon are recognised as symbols of the Feminine and The Great Mother. The Earth is the mother of us all, she nourishes and protects, provides for us and houses us in her womb. The moon represents the mother, nurturing, childhood, home, roots, belonging, sharing, caring, soul, emotion, compassion and empathy. While the Sun is warmth, energy; it is the light and the way, the mother of mothers. These traits we have found, embodied and recognised in these celestial beings are ones we draw from the women we see before us. Our mothers, sisters, aunties and daughters. Their humble beings before us hold all this greatness. Many societies recognised and worshipped the Feminine, they saw the importance, the meaning, the purpose. They saw this is where life was created and they respected that by offering the highest praise they could, by deifying it.

I find it hard to really describe what I have in my mind on this topic, it just doesn’t translate well into words. What is in my mind is a mixture images, feelings, and symbols? I believe to truly share what I think of the Feminine, I must do that with images.

We must give our honour and respect to the Feminine for man is always brought into this world by the feminine, the masculine is preceded by the feminine. Man is nurtured by, as well as born of the feminine and the Great Mother. The feminine is an instrument of the Great Mother, a servant who enacts the her will.  Inside we know The Great Mother, we know Medusa, we know Demeter, Isis, Gaia and Cybele. We are born with the knowledge of these Archetypes within us, many of us embody them.

Today in our Western societies we have lost the value of the Feminine, the Mother, Motherhood and the Great Mother. We have abandoned all of this in the name of progress, equality and equity. Society once cherished the beauty of the mother, but now it directs women away for motherhood. There was a time when society knew the value of the Feminine and its pivotal role in society, now it directs women toward masculine roles, it teaches our young women that what they are naturally is unimportant or a symptom of a patriarchal and oppressive system. Their nature is to be repressed, pushed down and ignored. They’re driven to compete with men instead of looking inside, finding their inner feminine and offering all the beautiful, powerful and import roles they can, including the most important role society has, motherhood. Without mothers, we are lost, without mothers, we do not exist. The problem of existence is an existential threat in Western society such is the extremity of the problem. Birth rates among westerns are so low in many countries they are even well below replacement.

So why have we have we led our men and women astray from the beauty and power of the feminine? Why have women lost the desire to be mothers, and why do we not see this as negative? Answering these questions goes outside the scope of this topic but I plan to follow this with a piece that approaches those questions in the future.

What I did want to address here is the question of why we should value the Feminine, the Mother and Motherhood itself. What are we without mothers (and fathers), what is our world if we do not cherish that which gives birth to us, nurtures us, and feeds us. The Feminine is not beautiful, it defines beauty, it defines love. Worship what (the) God(s) gave us, appreciate the radiance of the expecting mother, appreciate the pureness and beauty of a young woman, give thanks to those ageing mothers in your life. Above all, worship the Feminine. In the end, I’m afraid my words fall short, they do not capture what I feel, see or experience. They fall short in measure, in grace, in presence, in beauty and in prose. So I leave you with one final image, I hope you see what I see.

 

The secret moment

When blowing up a balloon, excitement running rampant.

“I can’t wait to play ping-pong with it” she says.

“I’m giving mine to my mother when she picks me up,” another second grader exclaims muttering.

Time goes by blowing, with breathlessness and dizziness defeated by strict perseverance.

Exerted, jaws aching.

Eyes pressurized, like that of the balloons ever expanding.

Both balloons pop.

Faces splashed with its own slobber.

Surprise reflexes immediately all encompassing.

On the verge of tears from freight.

They recollect and acknowledge the other.

They succumb to laughter.

And looking into each others eyes, knowing this is their secret to keep.

 

 

*I would like to acknowledge that the beautiful image is not my own.

The Idea Bank: Safety Deposit Box I

Caffeine seeping into my veins, bringing with it the morning kick-start for the heart. Why am I drinking coffee? I don’t really require a rev up. Coffee fills the stomach, fending away tummy grumbles and the feeling of ’emptiness’. Practicing intermittent fasting does this to you. It continuously leaves you wondering whether you are or aren’t hungry. Is it hunger or just me thinking its hunger?

Today will be filled with contemplation. I will fill today with contemplation. Always too many things to ponder and consider, to keep one step ahead of the rest, one step ahead of myself. The internal battle between the expectations of my life and of life itself raging on. As if I am the clairvoyant of my own life, predicting what lies just past my own line of sight.

My ex-girlfriend arrives back, walking back into my life with complexity. How do you sacrifice yourself for others? How do you allow yourself to wear masks, concealing your intentions from the ones you want to open up to most? How do you endlessly hurt yourself and close yourself off the way that you do?

King Louis XIV, the Sun King, was one emboldened, visionary man. Bending for others but never breaking. To live without judgement of circumstance is the true lesson he had to teach. How does the noblest of kings treat a peasant with the same sincerity and wholeheartedness as he does his courtiers? Did this empathetic nature make him he noblest of kings?

Are trees happier when they sway in the wind as opposed to standing cemented?

Relationships: when the wheels fall off

Being isolated and truly lonely, you turn on yourself and everyone you love and could love. It’s the sense of losing all hope. People do not need you at the point in time you need them most. To receive anything, the way a starving man needs anything edible within his belly. Deep emotions, inner turmoil fighting in hand to hand combat with your thoughts. The deep insecurities are sometimes too deep and cold to swim in.

‘How can I transform myself into a fish to swim to an underwater home? No, I do not belong down there. I need the sun and a breeze.’

Your lady is not by your side, who is she sided next to? If you want to be with someone wouldn’t you just be with them? Life is never sweet for long. The bitterness of sacrifice leaves an aftertaste in the mouth only the brave can handle. It is a taste which is as sharp as the spade which digs the hole for you to lie in. The hole too dark to see out of. The person you are entrusted to hopefully stops to realize the damage they are doing while digging, sweat on brow, spade in hand. One person’s everything can be another’s nothing.

I think those that matter most, are not aware of their value.

Being A Dad

Being in my twenty-somethings and having friends falling pregnant, I often wonder. When I become a father, what will being a father entail. This is my attempt to define my imaginings:

 

The time had come, I am a dad. From the first time I saw the porcelain sheen of her forehead, never would I forget. Never would I lose touch with that moment. A man keeps the memories that inherently make him a man, close to his chest. Some would say in his blood. I say in me.

In that moment something bizarre happens. For the first time in any man’s life, whoever it may be. Stuart Green the smiley, charismatic next door neighbor. Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler. The plumber that you hired, once you realized the blocked sink really was not going to fix itself and might have been a fraction too far outside your skill set to combat. See all of these men, at this exact moment in their existence were greeted, introducing their child, their newborn bundle of joy into this world. We are adults, we knew and damned well expected that our lives would change. But in what ways and by how much?