“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.

Fire. Transformative. The imagination in combustion. The alchemists tool to purify metals and the arsonists drug to burn his baggage. Fire has been chasing me these months.

How do you tell a fool from a Jester? The distinction lies in awareness and the way to spot them is to watch their reaction. The Jester feeds off a reaction, they know they are playing a role and if you pay attention to the signs they’ll let you in on the joke. And the ignorant? Well, they don’t even know they’re playing a character.

Because true freedom isn’t about saying everything we want, but feeling the need not to say these things because we trust who we are. I’m not totally there yet, but that is my task this year - to drown out the noise and concentrate on going so deeply inside…

This is more that just asking us to look at our tastes. It’s about asking the deeper question underneath - what does the thing you love about your influence say about you and how you would love to express yourself?

I thought I was done, truly, I thought I was over sitting in spaces where Islamophobic remarks are thrown and I put on a false brave face pretending not to be insulted.

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.

We can only connect to the world to the level that we are willing to be seen. You can’t fake that level of connection because real speaks to real. We feel when someone loves us and we feel when someone is trying to trick us.

“You only survive here if you’re creative AND type A” he said to me through tipsy laced lips. I’m a sober gremlin and so the words marinated in me differently. He went by the name of Chip. Chip is a seasoned New Yorker - he came up through the NY AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, and carried a locker of well worn anecdotes about the Dylans, Warhols and Patti Smiths of his era.

The ‘tourist vs purist’ is a concept that there are some of us whom are tourists in this world, we dip into main stream pop culture without pushing the edges. Then, there are some of us whom are relentless in our seriousness of the game…

What will be important in this next part of my career is how I’ll be curating and piecing together these elements to make it a slick experience for people to enjoy.

This is deeper than simply ‘a Wednesday feeling like a Tuesday’. This is like climate change, political change, collective exhaustion and lack of emotional intelligence all mixing together in a soup called ‘the public’ without the language or physical evidence to point out what is happening. And whilst no one is saying it, people are feeling it… a n x i e t y.

I came across this word, a recent invention, which describes the creative quests we Gremlins go on. ‘Coddiwompling’ is about the journey, which makes it a cousin of words such as ‘roaming’ and ‘wandering’.

Our artistic dream is a stepping stone towards serving each other. What if, in order to fully devote ourselves to a collective, we must first allow ourselves to fully embrace our hearts deepest passions and talents?

When two or more idividuals come together it creates a third entity - a mastermind. Between two people a mastermind may look like a shared desire to take a trip or a vision of their future relationship.

I’ve got some paintings, poems and pictures for you.
All the good stuff.
Straight into it. No filler.

Have you had the experience where you get a really good idea and it’s in the ether but you’re not ready to catch it? And then you worry, what if some one else is?

Because if we can’t reinvent ourselves and truthfully mirror our personal lives in our art, then who can? I think that the humility to change, out loud, is one of the most courageous things anyone can do.

Route. Structure. Routine and commit. This is the foundation for the next part. This next three-six months is about slowly and steadily building on what was laid.