We are the only vehicle moving towards the airport. The water across the sand is calm, and there is no wind. The birds are still asleep, as is most of the inhabitants of these more solid nests. This darkness is an in-between space, limnal, here it feels like potential is waking up.

Darkness is an experience we all share. We also share our differences in experiences of darkness. We can be in the same physical space and yet vastly different psychic places at the same time. My darkness this morning is important to me. I am up so much earlier than usual with the intention to travel across the city to the airport, flying first to Sydney, then onto Jakarta. Typically, in the recent past, if I was awake at this time, it was because I had lost the ability to sleep. The dark held terrors.

My own personal darkness for the last four years had not felt so pregnant with hope.  Life took a turn for the hard, and then harder again. It’s been a time of involuntary breaking, revision, and then reassembling by brute will, appropriate interventions, and an incredible web of support. I felt kneecaped by a clusterfuck of events that eventuated into a diagnosis of PTSD. Only relatively recently, as each day passes, I can see evidence of this becoming post-PTSD (if that is, in fact, possible). I do know that scars will remain and that I continue to keep figuring all this out. I am forever grateful for those who have stood by me in this time where I have learned again to stand confident on my own.

And here I am. Approaching twelve thousand kilometers high. The horizon is a rainbow, and the outside is freezing at -55°c. Up here is where life like ours can not remain. Though I have read that even in these extreme environments, the life of certain staminas’ can survive. And over ‘there’, where the rainbow meets the Earth, adventure and wonder dwell.

This is my first post-covid tour.  I am on my own this time. I tell people I am traveling with a trio called vegetable.machine.animal, a non-human/technology/human ‘band’. I’ve never been a massive fan of electronic music, yet here i am pedaling a modular synthesizer across the sea.  And I’m no scientist, but I have become immensely interested in the interspecies networking, the symbiotic coexistence, and the evidence of a massively weird and interconnected world unfolding in scientific findings of recent years.

In this ‘band’, I am able to detect an echo of these connections. I have a biofeedback module on the synth.  This enables the electrical signal of living matter to become an influencing player in the circuitry and programming of the synthesizers computers, producing random, dynamic, and interactable sounds. I hear these sounds and then attempt to drum along .

This is the project I want to now take out into the world. This is how I want to reconnect. I heard a story once about how the great navigators of the Pacific had the skills to be guided by the dark. It was only in that darkest of environments that the next passageway became obvious. If you could read the stars, then you could identify the direction to head towards when the next sun rose. I am happy to be reminded that the darkness, among other things, is also full of awe.
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Hours later:
It pays not to think too hard about the concept of trying to sleep in a tube hurtling above the earth. Fortunately, it’s so uncomfortable, and trying to bend into some form of sadistic yoga pose provides comfort only in knowing that at least I tried to be comfortable.. not that I was.
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The old boy in the chair behind me has burped constantly from Darwin to Dempessar. I am not not impressed.
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Just like this morning, we seem to be the only vehicle on the road.  Out my porthole, over the wing, I see layers of pinks, blues, browns, and greys… like sediment,  less geological… is atmoslogical a word?.. probably not.

There is a cloud in the distance that looks different, darker, and taller with solid mass.  I wonder if at this altitude that it might be from the active volcano north towards the Philippines.  I’m no  expert, but it didn’t look like cloud, more the haze of smoke. It has none of the fluffiness and features of the cloud forms beneath it.  A thick and flat featureless gray  smudge that spans what I can see of the horizon.
 
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I see land mass below.. or are they shadows of cloudbanks? ill-defined and uncertain… I imagine the landmass rising and falling like they are relations to some mighty cetacean kin.
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The slightest shift in something.. air pressure? angle?  Incline?  is reminiscent of some mighty bee bending is snout to some destination called flower.
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It’s been a long day.