I couldn’t see what anger was because of my personal wounds of discrimination and what anger was because of my response to the war. The two are so interlinked in my body that these three weeks have felt like a medical procedure to unbraid my own experiences of racism, outrage and pain from the current destruction on the news.

Here’s the thing that no one tells us as creatives. The behind-the-scenes emotional labour of turning life into art will never stop. It is messy, triggers us at inconvenient times, and isn’t easy to explain. Oh, and one more thing, if the creation is aligned to purpose… then emotional work is unavoidable.

He said something I’d never heard before, and I hope I never forget. He told me that “not everyone will agree with you, and you’ll be judged” - yes, I know this, I thought. And I thought he would follow it with, “but you’ve got to ignore that and do you anyways”.

It’s the same with us as creatives; though we can’t control what downloads will come as we meditate/pray, we can at least show up in silence and tune our senses to recognise & reel in the fish.

“Thank you for listening, I extremely like death.” These were the last eight words that the Russian Samurai said to me before we parted ways. And the first eight words? Well. That’s where it all began. 360 degrees the conversation circled back on itself like a Japanese ensō.

Have you ever been made to feel uncomfortable and doubt your actions because someone else doesn’t understand them?

To me, time feels as though it is slipping over and under itself like tectonic plates, and when plates collide or separate volcanoes and earthquakes happen. Something that’s really been helping me to ground within situational earthquakes is not trying to fight the flow and put a reason about why things aren’t adding up.