“Notes on” is a living archive; every post will be continually updated and edited indefinitely.

1. I don’t seek peace the same way I used to. Bliss, ecstasy, love. I understood those experiences, those states of being, as the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality, and thus, the ultimate expression of God. When I am here, I am close to God. I must do what I can to remain here, because this is where God lives.

   Now I understand it all as God. The darkness is God. The moonless night sky is God. The Earthquakes killing thousands are God. The deadly winters are God. The deadly summers are God. The terror of being swallowed by the complete and total darkness of the midnight, black ocean waters is God. I do not know where the sky begins and where the ocean ends, the darkness engulfs me, and I no longer know where I begin and where I end, which part of me belongs to the sky, and which belongs to the ocean. And it is here that God swallows me whole, eats me alive, and returns me back to form.

   God is light. God is Love. God is terror.

2. I understood God as darkness in a poetic sense. Now there is no poetry behind it. It is just real, true, brutal reality. To be awake, in this day and age, is to live in profound grief. Profound grief. And to be truly awake is to love anyway.

3. Sometimes God feels like a Father. Sometimes God feels like a Mother. I was fasting and walking in the desert, sweat pooling around my neck, and I felt high on God’s love. I wanted to empty myself to make more room for my soul, my spirit, and for His Love. God as a Mother was swimming underneath the nighttime sky, pitch black, sky and the ocean meeting as one and I am engulfed by the darkness. I am in the dark womb. My smallness, even while in Her Arms, makes me feel like I could lose the thread. The thread between Here and There. Between Mother and Her creation. I fear that I will lose myself to the Mother. Or perhaps it is the acceptance that I was never actually separate from Her. The Mother forces me to lose and forget myself to be closer to Her. To remember Her as the original state of being. God as a Father is happy with me if I simply don’t eat, if I bear myself and my body for Him.

4. “Understanding Roots” by Robert Kourik

   

“Notes on” is a living archive; every post will be continually updated and edited indefinitely.

1. There’s writing for love of the craft and there’s writing because if you don’t let this shit out somewhere it will tear you apart and eat you alive and destroy you inside out. I’ve travelled to too many realms. I’ve died too many times. I’ve experienced living in so many different bodies. I’ve lived in so many different worlds. I’ve lived so many extremes. This is why I sing. This is why I play guitar. This is why I’m a music producer. This is why I go to the gym. This is why I draw and paint. This is why I write. The worlds and extremes I’ve encountered are too vast to solely live inside one body. To let this all live inside me with no way out has destroyed me. Not it will destroy me, or it might destroy me, it already has. So, this is why I write. I love the art form, I love literature, I’ve always been a book lover and an avid reader, but my God, it is so much more profound than that.

2. I started playing guitar when I was 20. My brother had a guitar that he bought, and he never used it. So, I just took it and began teaching myself. It is a classical nylon-stringed guitar, and intuitively, I began teaching myself fingerstyle guitar. I tried to learn many, many songs, and not a single one would stick. Whether it is fingerstyle or strumming, it just never clicked for me. Never ask me to play Wonderwall, I don’t know how.

   Now, I can freestyle on guitar for hours, and play something beautiful without thinking much about it. I feel truly connected to my guitar for the first time in my life. It touches and releases something profound in me. Whether it is grief, whether it is love, it can find its way there. It can communicate back to me, it can tell me how it wants to be played. I barely think about a single thing.

   A new friend I have been jamming and playing music with says he has never seen anyone play guitar like me. He said no one does that. No one. You just completely and totally flow with the guitar, and it shows. You let it take you in any direction, at any moment, and it always sounds beautiful.

   I never referred to myself as a guitarist. I don’t know much besides a few basic chords. I don’t know any music theory (God knows I’ve tried), and as I said, please do not ask me to play Wonderwall. or Led Zeppelin. Or literally anything.

   But I can play guitar. In my own way. So, sometimes things take time. Sometimes you have a love-hate relationship with something that makes it hard for you to fully “commit” to, but then enough time passes, and you are just familiar with it now. You just know it. I know how to play fingerstyle. I know what sounds good. I know my instrument. Because I’ve just let it stand next to me, by the corner of my room, for many, many years.

   Sometimes what it means to be “good” at something can contradict everything you think you know about what it means to be “good” at something.

3. It is an intense experience to have the writer in you be just as loud as the musician just as loud as the artist just as loud as the athlete. I feel myself intensely pulled and created by all these forms of being and expression. I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t always be able to give myself 100% to all of them, and that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned them either. There’s seasons where writing may be more of a focus than music, and that’s okay. But at the same time, there is a beautiful synergy between all these creative forms. Writing makes me want to make music. Making music makes me want to make art. Moving my body and working out makes me an overall more open, vibrant, and energetic being. It opens up my libido and in the seasons where I am soft enough it also opens me up creativity. Anyone who says that you must just pick one thing and stick to it does not understand what it means to be truly multi passionate. My soul needs this.

4. Maybe the reason I’m finally starting to find my voice is because I need it more than ever.

5. My self-concept began to shift when I saw myself less in the people around me and more in the writers, artists, and musicians that inspire me.

6. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise this, but my creativity was never about anything I’m going to create.

   My creativity is in the life I live. The person I choose to be. What I create is just the end result of that.

   I am the song I am the dance I am the art I am the poetry.

   I am.

   

7. I had moments of my life where I intensely craved the company of older women. I then got to know a number of older women here and there and what that made me realise was I was actually craving myself as an older woman.

   I craved the guidance, power, authority, and most importantly, the creative expression of an older version of myself.

   And most importantly, it made me realise that absolutely no one, not one single soul on this earth, can give me what I am searching for besides myself.

   No one can dig inside my mind and soul and body and turn it into the inner authority I crave.

   No one can dig inside my mind and soul and body and turn it into the words, art, and music I know I am here to create.

   I am the older woman I so intensely crave, even if I don’t get to be her just yet.

8. I realised that for me, it was never about the medium.

   It was never about writing or art or music in particular.

   It was always about alchemising whatever it is that lives and breathes inside of me, that which demands to be felt and known in whichever way possible, in whatever way pulls me in that very moment.

9. Renewal, digital collage.

   

   This collage translates into images and symbols how I feel when I sing and play music (guitar, drumming).

10. For the first time in my life, that critical voice in my head that is always worried about whether or not I am any good at something is finally quiet. I don’t care about skill or talent or whether or not I am doing things “right” as a creative.

    The only thing I care about is expanding life next to grief. The only thing I care about is creating more space for spring and its flowers to bloom after a cold, dark winter. A winter that in some ways, has lasted 6 years, and in other ways, 28.

    Winter, you’ve served your purpose, my roots have deepened, my love for Love has deepened in ways that could never have occurred if I had solely lived for the Light.

    But there is more to life than winter! Duality is the inherent reality of life and being, every single thing has its opposite, if there is winter, there must be spring, if there is night, there must be day. There must be day.

“Notes on” is a living archive; every post will be continually updated and edited indefinitely.

1. I spent 7 years living in Edinburgh, Scotland, before I moved straight to Cairo to live in Egypt for the first time in my life. Whenever I see videos or photos of Edinburgh now, I feel a sense of both grief and estrangement. I struggle to acknowledge this sense of grief, and then all of a sudden it washes over me, and I feel as though I am mourning something akin to a dream. There is a total non-reality to the feeling that makes me feel like I’m missing something that barely even existed. And in that grief is how I recognise this city and its streets the same way I would recognise my own skin, the same way I would recognise my subtle, but obvious-to-me birthmark on my lower chin. It is an instant sense of familiarity and knowing that something belongs to you (even if it no longer does).

   Once I said that I miss Scotland the same way I would miss an ex-marriage, it’s not as simple as missing a physical location but missing a whole entire life. Someone told me that is grief. It was the first time I considered what grief could mean or look like or feel like when there is no death involved. Although now I can clearly see, is that I had undergone the entire death of a life that was so wholeheartedly mine. I left because I had to, because my visa had ended, and I am glad I was forced to leave because it forced me to create a new life of my own outside of those specific circumstances, outside that specific comfort zone, which I knew was already too small for me. At the same time, I know there is just no way I would have left if I wasn’t forced to. I was comfortable, and I felt at home.

   Another thing that happens whenever I see photos and videos of Edinburgh is that despite the sense of deep familiarity, I also feel a sense of shock that I ever lived there. Egypt’s chaos is now what has become familiar to me. Even a small, nature-filled town like Dahab is full of overwhelm. It is somewhere that forces you to have your wits about you, just like anywhere in Egypt. In a sense, there is this sense of “innocence” that I associate with Edinburgh that I feel estranged from. The softness of the first-world and the hardness of the third. Nowhere is all sunshine and rainbows, but there is such a true, real wretched quality to the misery in Egypt that is just totally and completely incomparable. There is a deep humiliation to it all that has really and truly destroyed an entire population for decades on end. To live in Egypt is to feel and experience this heartbreak all the time, everywhere. It lives in its people more than it does anywhere else.

   And I wonder if I would feel the same sense of estrangement from Edinburgh if I had simply moved somewhere a bit more similar, or maybe if I hadn’t gone from one extreme to another. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons I feel so estranged from a whole entire chapter of my life is simply due to the fact that it couldn’t feel further away from my current reality. I think there are very few places in the world that could contrast so deeply with one another. When I first moved to Cairo, I felt so much grief for losing my relationship to nature; I felt like I had lost the one friend I could always rely on. This was by far one of the hardest things to adapt to. I remember when I first got to Dahab, it was the warm hug of the mountains and the ocean that made me feel a sense of myself again for the first time since I moved to Egypt.

   Maybe a little bit less of myself would have collapsed over these last few years if the changes were just a bit more subtle. I’ve said it before, I move with so much optimism that I don’t fully notice, acknowledge, or take in my reality until I’m waking up at 3 AM and I can’t go back to sleep and I am asking myself why I feel so anxious. Until I spend a year in a state of mental collapse so severe that it makes me feel borderline psychotic. Until I am constantly questioning what is real and what is not. Until I get into a relationship and I find myself consumed with total rage in a way I had not experienced since childhood. Until I realise it has been years and I’ve barely picked up a sketchbook. Until I realise years have gone by and I forgot what I used to dream of, what I desired for myself, for my life, for my future. Until I realise that there even is a future to life for, a future to strive for.

   
   The thing is, I had already felt so much grief before I moved. I already felt like I was living a life that did not belong to me. I felt like I had been deeply derailed from myself, from my body and spirit. By the time I left Edinburgh, I had virtually no friends there anymore. I don’t ever know if I’ll be able to put into words the piercing heartache and loneliness I felt right before moving. 7 years of my life, and I felt like I had nothing to show for it. 7 years of my life, and where is the evidence of the deep love I loved here? Nothing. There was nothing. I felt like I was living in a rotten animal carcass that was suffocating me with the smell of its death. I was already in deep grief. I had wasted the last two years of my life in a relationship that ultimately destroyed me. After gaining over 30KG in less than a year, my body was completely unrecognisable. After dealing with a health breakdown, it felt like I had been abandoned by my own body. It felt as though every “home” I fully and wholeheartedly inhabited no longer belonged to me.

   
   Now, finally, after six years of constant death, I feel as though I have rediscovered home within myself. This sense of home has come with a sense of power. This sense of power has come from recognising and holding onto what cannot be taken away from me. You cannot take away me, from me. You can never, ever, ever, take away me from me. Only then may true death make itself known.

   

2. I spent a year supporting genocide survivors in Cairo while also fundraising to support their families in Gaza. I became very close to the people I supported and to this day I consider most of them good friends of mine.
   

   As necessary as this work was, the reality was that I experienced a severe nervous system breakdown as a result. After I quit this work and moved from Cairo to Egypt’s hippy beach town, Dahab, I developed debilitating OCD that felt like it bordered upon psychosis. I had many moments where I felt like I was struggling between reality and fiction, what is real and what it is not, and now I am in the process of trying to rebuild trust with my mind again. I was also a very toxic and unwell partner in my then relationship, with anger taking over me quite often. One time a small argument about nothing ended with me yelling and banging my head against the closet.

   Aside from the fact that this would break anyone with an open heart, I had also just moved to Cairo from the UK, where I lived for 7 years and was made to leave because my visa had expired. Although I was born in Cairo, it was my first time living here. Cairo is not an easy place to live, and let’s just leave it at that.

   I was also recovering from a pretty bad health breakdown that encompassed a fun mix of gaining 30KG in less than a year due of PCOS, debilitating chronic pain (I was later diagnosed with fibromyalgia), plantar fasciitis as a result of my weight gain (it was extremely painful just to walk) and a scarred bladder/kidney due to recurring kidney and bladder infections.

   I was also trying to find myself again after totally and completely losing myself in a two year, toxic relationship (which is also when my health breakdown began, aside from the kidney infections, that was before).

   I’ve written about these last few years so many times, yet I still don’t know how to put any of it into words.

   I have been in a constant state of trying to find myself again, for many years, after experiencing so much intense, overwhelming change in such a short amount of time.

   Now I have finally realised it is not about “returning” to yourself as much as it is about recreating yourself. But I am still trying to understand what that means.

   I have more to say, but I also know I can write multiple essays on all of this.

3. “The mortificatio is felt as a deep melancholy, a darkness of the mind, an affliction of the soul. Images of darkness, defeat, torture, dismemberment, death and rotting are found throughout the alchemical texts.”

4. “Delay”, digital collage.

   

I think this accurately represents the mortificatio stage, although I had made this before I started reading about alchemy. Symbols live in the soul before they are absorbed and understood through literature.

5. “The day came when the cat started to eat her too, joining in with the ghost in a feast of chest and breast and throat and hands and feet and the very tongue she used to speak. Words became more difficult, her tongue bloodied and ripped up and torn to small pieces. The tongue that she used to speak her dreams and ambitions and all the things her soul yearned for her to do. She went so long keeping her mouth shut tight, resting what was left of her tongue, that she forgot all the dreams that were once at the forefront of her mind. Her battered tongue and her bitten hands and her bruised feet meant that she had another purpose now, to learn how to live with the nails that had been hammered into her, keeping her trapped, stuck, tied closer than ever to her ghost. Amnesia set in like a poison gas, making her forget who she was and who she is and who she longed to be without even realising she had forgotten. A poison of loss and grief without knowing something had been lost, until she could no longer talk or walk or breathe without being in pain.”
   

   Stream of consciousness excerpt

“Notes on” is a living archive; every post will be continually updated and edited indefinitely.

1. One of the hardest things about slowly but surely really and truly returning to myself is remembering how much I forgot.

   
   I forgot how intense my emotions are. I forgot how rapidly I can swing from ecstasy and bliss to hollowness, terror even. I forgot that I need to write quite a lot to process life on this wavelength. I completely forgot that I am actually quite open and friendly and even kind. I forgot that I often used to talk to strangers. I forgot that I was someone who tried to prioritise love and kindness above all. I forgot that I was always drawing, that I always had a sketchbook in my hands. I forgot that I used to take my guitar out in the park and play music by myself. I forgot all the ways in which I really and truly did not give a fuck. I forgot that I lived with the knowing that God was the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality. I forgot that I lived with that knowing as my guiding point, my compass.
   
   I don’t know what else I have forgotten, I’ve only just started to remember. Only just.

2. Warmed by spiritual fire, pastel art by me.

   

3. I’ve not been writing. I’ve not been making art. I’ve not been dancing. I’ve not really been making music. I’ve not really had much of a social life. For years. And for years, I’ve felt like I have been living underground, yearning to return to the world of The Living. I started writing about the world of The Living a year ago, and how much I long to return. For years, this hollow, empty darkness has plagued me, and now I am coughing it all up, I am coughing and coughing and choking on the black tar that has consumed every branch of my lungs, untying the rope hung around my neck, to belong to a world that I recognise as mine, to become one with The Living once again.

4. In the last few weeks, I have been deep in the underworld gathering the tools to reinvent, to create, to breathe new life into a body that has known nothing but contraction. In some ways for the last few years, and in others, my whole life, in the quest to create something entirely new.

   It is a revolution of the mind, body, and spirit. It is a revolution of my relationship to God. It is a revolution of my relationship to everything that is Higher Than, including and most of all, my creative power.

   I have no doubt that this is where true Greatness is made and created.

5. The light of the sun

   

6. The cost of coming out of survival mode is finally feeling all the grief your body, mind, and soul have been storing, perhaps for years, perhaps for your entire life.

   It is finally tasting the rot that has always been there, but it is the compost of a new bloom, a new harvest, one that you’ve been hungry for as long as you can remember.

7. Rebirth, digital collage.

“Notes on” is a living archive; every post will be continually updated and edited indefinitely.

In the last 2 years, every time I’ve experienced a major mental-emotional-spiritual breakthrough, it has been paired alongside an insanely high sex drive.

I want to sink and dissolve in the rivers and oceans of desire and being and ecstasy, the same way I do during sex or self-pleasure.

This hunger then manifests on multiple planes: the mental, the physical, the spiritual. I am hungry for sex, and I am hungry for God, and I am hungry for desire for the very sake of desire because desire makes me feel so full.

Everything feels so potent and powerful and whole, and I feel it all in my very body.

1. Sensual, digital collage.

   

2. “Last month I initiated a breakup, and with that I began a new chapter in my relationship with mySelf & I. Days after our breakup I felt an intense surge of energy in me, and soon I began to experience this energy sexually. I remember speaking to a friend and telling her about how, I, newly single, was eager to find a sexual partner. I was holding my lower belly and told her, “but I feel it all in here”, “it’s more than just feeling horny”, it felt like it was coming from inside my womb, a call for renewal, for regeneration, for ecstasy beyond “casual sex”. It felt like a call for creation. I was holding my lower belly, but didn’t make the connection to my sacral chakra at the time, but now I recognise this is perhaps the first time in my life I feel like my sacral chakra is being experienced, unblocking, releasing, flowing. I remembered how the sacral chakra is characterised by water. The space in between asking and receiving is more potent than ever, in free-flowing movement I’m experiencing for the first time in my life. The creative doesn’t feel as terrifying. The sexual feels more exciting than ever.”
   

   I wrote this July last year. I am in the exact same place right now. Exact same. Except this time it is coming from a much more profound space. Profound in power. Profound in meaning. Profound in transformation. This is why I am obsessed with the symbol of the spiral. I keep meeting myself over and over and over again in the same spaces but on much, much deeper levels. Over and over and over again.

3. Power is sexual. It is financial. It is creative. It is political. It is how you feel in your own body. It is how you feel towards the world around you. It is how you take action. It is what holds you back, and it is what drives you forward. What does it mean to hold and feel your own power, especially as a woman?

4. Hunger, digital collage.

   

5. Power is the force that it takes for a seed to grow into its rightful form. Power is also the force that turns peaceful waters into deadly tsunamis. Power creates, sustains, destroys, and annihilates. It is up to us to use and cultivate our will to decide what form power will take in our lives.

6. Sex is one of the most powerful forms of alchemy available to us. The simultaneous disruption and eruption of energy through the form of orgasms, combined with a loss of sense of self, is a natural psychedelic.

7. Orgasm, digital collage.

   

8. The manifestation of sexual energy like most things has its light and shadow. This is evident in the misuse and exploitation of sexual energy more than anything else. In both East and West we live in a completely and totally pornified, pedophilic culture with a violent and shameful attitude towards sex and sexual pleasure. Even feminist attempts to reclaim female sexual identity, in my opinion, have totally failed. Most men consume way too much porn, if they are not already full blown porn addicts. They are totally disconnected from their own bodies and the bodies of the women they have sex with. Porn has hurt sexuality more than we can begin to fathom.
   

   At the same time, the higher octave of sexuality and sexual pleasure is a profoundly powerful tool for deeper feeling, deeper knowing, and deeper healing. Orgasm is a part of this. Orgasm disrupts, resets, and can allow us to rebuild. This expression of sexuality is actually considered taboo in our sex addicted culture. It is taboo because it means acknowledging the sacred power behind sex rather than solely delegating it to animal-like pleasure (which there is also nothing wrong with). It is taboo because it means recognising that there is true agency and power within how we choose to approach sex and our sexual energy. This expression requires radical honesty and truth regarding one’s relationship to sex, pleasure, and orgasm.

   We must learn to differentiate between the higher and lower octaves of sex and sexual pleasure. Enough has been hijacked by patriarchy and religion. So, when I say sex and orgasm are a form of alchemy, this is part of reclaiming the higher octave of sex, sexual pleasure, and sexual power.

9. Erotic, digital collage.