I wrote a little while ago about how I felt I was maturing in the aesthetic, this growth is coming to a head now, everything around me has taken on a slightly different colour, a slightly different façade. For example, over the summer I have developed a broader range of things which I see as valuable, and have learnt to really look around me and feel the beauty and power contained in normal every-day things; a previously boring walk though my local estate has become a wealth of beauty, history and expanded fiction. I find myself making up stories about the places and people I see, thinking about the history and future of the standard-yet-unique things all around me. As I walk to the shop I’m seeing families and imagining their lives, how they ended up living on this street, where they are going next, how their children will grow up and what sort of world they will inherit.

I’m seeing geometry where I previously saw just buildings, I’m seeing photography where I previously saw just streetlamps to light my way home, I’m seeing waves and oceans in the approaching rainclouds… In some ways this growth has made me more distanced from ‘reality’, I can feel further from the faces that walk past me, more detached from the cultural and political forces pressing upon me, distant from the motives I once had; but in other ways I am closer and more enveloped in what is going on around me than I have ever been, I feel close, involved in a near timeless sense with the omnipresent movement and flow constantly giving birth to life, beauty and death. It’s not as if I’ve found god, or found Gaia, it’s a change within myself rather than a change to the world around me, maybe even the cleansing of another set of doors of perception.