It’s been a while…

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Stanley Kubrick

The last time I posted on this blog was over five years ago.

So to start posting again now, after all those years, begs the question; why?
Am I writing for a specific reason, with a specific motivation or goal in mind? Well the simple answer is no; I’m not writing for any particular reason. In fact, I’m not writing because of reason at all. Reason has come to dominate the culture in which we live to an extraordinary degree and what increasingly gets me excited is unreason, emotion, creativity, spontaneity, the moment.

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to stumble upon or be guided towards the work of many enlightened people. Their work has provided me with solace, it has made me happy, it has filled me with joy. It has helped me.
Today I write and create for pleasure, and because I’ve tried not flexing my creative muscles and it makes me feel much worse. To put it more bluntly; I am yet to find another effective coping mechanism for living in the Anthropocene.

Maybe one day, my work can help someone else the way that others have helped me and I can pay back the gift I’ve received in order to complete the circle.

Although I haven’t posted anything on here for a few years, that’s about to change. As my attempts to see into the future have not yet succeeded, I can’t tell you whether these posts will continue with regularity, but what I can tell you is that it’s certainly my intention to try and write substantially, to the best of my ability, and with frequency going forward.

One of the reasons I have posted so little of my work on the internet over the last few years is that I’ve been suffering from somewhat of a crisis of confidence. I often start writing and then quickly become plagued by the question of what I’m actually trying to achieve; who exactly I’m writing for.

The speed and abundance of information in todays world mean that it’s easy to find people already writing about almost anything you can think of somewhere on the internet.
This can be a big confidence killer because as soon as you think of something interesting that you believe is worth expressing, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll find someone who has already written about it, and from there it’s even easier for your mind to be lured into the trap of believing that because someone has written about it, everybody already knows about it.

In actual fact, every single person in the world has a different level of knowledge and therefore there’s someone out there who might benefit from pretty much any idea you can think of. I think what’s important is context, intention, and the WAY it’s expressed.

The film critic Manuela Lazic said on a podcast recently that for her, writing is about forming ideas about things. It’s the actual process of sitting down to write that enables those ideas to materialise out of the void and without that process there would be nothing to express in the first place. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that when we write, we are simply communicating pre-existing thoughts and ideas but Lazic is right; I don’t think that’s how it works.

I think writing is integral to distilling loose thoughts and ideas down into their material essence which probably goes a long way to explaining why I often feel so compelled to write.

It was always my aim with this blog to attempt to communicate some of the things I have learnt and experienced to those who might be interested and in todays complex society, I feel there is a greater need for clear communication of experience than ever before.

But that’s not my only aim. Another reason I want to start sending my writing into the world again is to get some practice, with a view, over time, to improving my ability to express myself using the beautiful medium of words.
Writing was never my first love; I despised being forced to craft essays and objectively analyse the subjective art of poetry as a teenager at school, but over the years it has slowly wrapped its tendrils around me and the more I read, the more I fall in love with the ability of the wordsmith to express the deepest and most profound insights.

I’ve been writing into the void for a few years now, not sharing anything I create. In that time I’ve managed to amass over 125,000 words about a huge range of subjects and forming the beginning of countless potentially exciting creative projects. And I think to a certain extent that’s fine; as I mentioned above I primarily write for myself because it makes me feel better.

But I feel there comes a time in your life when you have to make that jump from writing for yourself, to writing for other people.

There are obviously basic pragmatic reasons for this like achieving feedback in order to improve as a writer, but on a higher level, I sense it’s more about paying back the gift of knowledge, experience and education that those who have gone before us have so selflessly shared.

Of course , if you’re not into it and find what I write dull and vacuous then please don’t hang around. Life’s too short to be bored and miserable. Go live your life like a cowboy on the badlands with a world of open plains and radical possibility in front of you.

So what might be appearing on here in the near future?

I’ve got a lot of exciting projects on the go at the moment, some of which will hopefully see the light of day in the coming weeks and months, but I plan to use this blog as a place to post more experimental stuff and informal articles. I also want to use a lot of my own photographs and chuck in some videos and music as well to make it a bit less text-heavy.

If you want to follow me for updates on stuff I do in the future, Twitter is your best bet for now, but in the longer term, I’m planning to make my website the hub of my creative endeavours so keep your eye on that too.