This will probably be a short blog. I started work on a tarot deck on December 2008 and we are almost there again at December 2009. 5 more cards left to complete and the project will be done....as far as the illustrations go anyway.

I still have to ink and color the Fool card, the King of Swords, King of Pentacles plus some i can't reveal yet lest i be snuffed out. I have to do a few little touch ups here and there before i can release it out into the public. It was a very inspiring and informative venture the past year and drawing the cards, i suppose i started to see life in a different way.

people do things..but the hows and whys of why they do things are often the results of other things in the past. When you start to see things like that, it makes you more understand and able to accept things. i know we can see that of course without tarot but i think it brought it home to me more...almost like things are layed out like a plan, a book or scripted thing that we write our own sentences of the book of our life due to the things we do.

I plan to illustrate more decks in the future. So far the art and ideas behind it have been well recieved and that makes me happy.

Over the past month or so i've had quite a few interesting "moral tale dreams" or "illustrated ideas" but in dream form. It usually occurs just before sunrise and what i've seen has influenced me to begin work on an oracle deck although i will seek the guidance of a person wiser than myself to see if the ideas are suitable. When you dream them they seem profound...to your own life at least. So far those illustrations have been almost the way i had envisioned them and i am pleased with that. Some are about events we go through and also a few are about chakras(something i truly believed was a load of nonsense but due to experiences i am convinced they exist)

The oracle deck will probably be the next project i work on. I will worry about the funding of it at a later date.

But i must say i am grateful for Chanel's insights into the tarot and her request for my art to grace it. Quite frankly without Chanel the deck would not exist as i really was just illustrating her vision and insight ( and now and again where appropriate was allowed to add my own stuff provided it benefited the card). So it was all checked first. I have been informed that many people can easily understand the meaning of the tarot cards which is great as that is what was the main requirement. So.....we did it! thank goodness. But along the way i have picked up a little bit or two about the tarot.

www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/kings-jour...

thanks for looking

James

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Stay strong for her

For this is her day of unhappiness

Stay strong and put a smile on her face

You can grieve with sorrow in your own time

Whenever she has fallen asleep

In this age it is hard to find rest

for the days are filled with ghosts

restless interaction and activity

it is hard to trust in a woman’s heart

when the books she reads are filled with

the sorrows and insecurities of other women

the authors are damaged and angry

wanting her to be bitter too

but stay strong for her

for this day is for weeping

stay strong now and have her smile

the days are colder now

darker now

soon her love will be for another

but tonight is not yet tomorrow

and tonight is for her weeping

love died in her

when the universe lost it’s magic

when life lost it’s meaning

and he was but a mere disposable distraction

and oh Lord, how he hated that title

ah, but women, this is what they do

forcing a man to desire to be on his own

by reawakening all his sorrows

By J Battersby

Something about the old style of songs that reminds you that heartbreak has been around for years, decades, centuries. All the untold tragedies of love.











i have to wonder at times if there is such a thing as actual true love that endures. i am reminded of that old couple sitting looking out to sea last week and i know these things happen...but what if you can't get your mind off someone who acts mean towards you because she is scared of getting close..it is just too weird

I think the earth is a strange magical place, and all the things in it. Sometimes it seems that the natural magic has been covered over with man/woman made things.

 But you can hear the saddest song on the brightest of days, and it’s a combination of the sunshine and blue sky and blue mountains in contrast with the combination of notes in a song that makes you melancholy that somehow lets you see that a strangeness in reality is just there around the corner, for really we associate sadness with dark clouds and shadows, but also with personal things like airports full of strangers and torn invisible heartstrings when leaving something or someone behind, or at a graveside. That is my sadness. That and scraping and clawing back the ancient memories of a time when you saw a part of you in a part of a particular place that you can’t go back to…because of the time moving on. And that place that was living and breathing and around you, interacting with you, it’s gone for ever never to be relived except in the memories that almost seem to create who you are right now.

So to hear the sadness through brightness of day, a spiritual sadness for the world that visually exists with no picture except a purple sky of stars, yet existing in a spring/summer day where the birds sing in the trees, and hawks soar about in the air, it’s a certain magic, especially knowing that behind the blue sky is an entirely new place of existence which meanwhile only exists in how we choose it to be…the emptiness of space, or a space full of many wonderful races perhaps similar to our own.

....actually, listen to this song, as this was the one i was refering to in this writing :)

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I may be too young to know what love is, but then I wonder, perhaps even as children we know and understand love to some degree. Maybe in it’s purest form. The love of parents, of grand parents, of brothers or sisters, though arguments at living in such close proximity growing up can often make our minds clouded to the love that was there.

I sat thinking about the words I had been left with during a phonecall from someone who I wanted to get closer to. Learning someone new is hard, but time knits two lives together, sometimes fraying but still being tied to one path, one chosen way to walk this earth with all it’s human trappings. The human body being trapped on earth with no immediate exit except suicide, we learn then to adapt to life like everyone else. We gather memories, sometimes hurtful but sometimes beautiful and it’s in those beautiful memories that we remind ourselves of how far we’ve come, how long we have been together, and we see that all of this could unravel if either one decides that the time shared was wasted or too rugged and wearying to continue the journey together.

I sat thinking about how far I have come on this journey and the people I have left behind. There was always something like an invisible wall that I felt keeping me from those who were prepared to love and care about me. I could sit in silence for hours barely uttering a word for I was used to the isolation. These times were spent inventing ways of telling someone of my sadness and pain about the invisible wall inside me, except that I could never use verbal words to describe this “thing”.

            I used to draw many violent things as a child, beheadings and other sad terrible things. I suppose many children may go through this. Over the years the artworks changed and I found I was able to draw much better. I painted a little too and it developed into a way of expressing my desires for the things I needed…or at least the things I thought I needed. But I grew bitter towards society for having shunned me. As a young man I was beaten at school regularly in fights. It took about a year of this before it ruined most of my confidence from then on. The following year I sketched much of my desires on to paper which was mostly about revenge while attending school and being spat on and kicked about. There was never any love shown. I tried to make peace with the enemies but it was denied.

            Even down the street with my family, I encountered the same enemies and they mocked me and recalled the many abusive things they did and enjoyed.

As time went on I joined college. I was isolated thus far and stayed by myself, eating by myself, walking by myself. My artworks at this stage were very inspired by The book of Revelation. This suited my previous dark and hate filled style in some ways and I enjoyed immensely painting and drawing meteors falling to the sky and destroying cities and people, a society that my warped mind felt deserved to suffer, just as they had let me suffer, For these humans and their spiteful children would continue to inspire the circles of hate in schools for many years to come. I saw them all, the insane masses of people rushing around like insects looking for the crumbs that the government machine drops every so often. They scurried around raping and destroying the physical bodies of others, the mental bodies of others, causing the stress of heart attacks, all the cheating and debauchery, the greed of corporations and the exploitation of the simple minded consumers. The militant atheists looked like their crown chakras were well and truly shut down, like once bright lights dulled by the tired clinging of the years. The Christians worshipped a man on a cross who died trying to focus their attention to worship only God yet forgave them anyway for their desires to worship things they knew little of, like money, positions of power and tradition.

In the winter, when I walked down the street it seemed I took on the persona of a homeless man. I was not homeless but I felt lost in familiar streets of a familiar town, lost in purpose, lost in soul, lost in society. It was cold, the streets would reflect the rear car brake lights and indicators and the fumes in winter were more crisp. All of the place was grey and sucked of all life. Painting after painting was of destruction and death. I was very very bitter at the world. There was no outlet. No friend, no girlfriend, no confident in which to talk to about my anger. When I ate lunch by myself near the trash cans down some lonely back alley I knew that I would remember that day. And I do remember that day even now. It was about 10 years ago. I know personally now because I am older that if I saw a young man eating food in some depressing dark alley beside trash cans, I would know in myself that that was a very sad thing to witness for any passer by.

            But I was a loner. I could say that I didn’t need anyone, but I really did. I just had no one I could trust enough to admit it to.

The years past and the knowledge of love was shown to me. Suddenly where there was darkness, the clouds in my head seemed to turn white, and the mental sky was blue. It was like the cobwebs had been cleared from my soul and my dark shroud was thrown off. But I endured so much hurt up until that point that when I knew love in some fashion I sucked the life out of it. I was like an invalid learning to walk after so many years, learning that not every one wanted to mock and make fun of me. Those who had known me before received the dark depressed version of myself. I could not love, for my heart was like a stone, and in the end, I knew I could not be of any value there. But when I found the knowledge of love, I transformed. With hope my paintings were turned to impossible fantasy and love, something I had no idea I was capable of. She inspired many paintings in me and transformed me into who I am now as an artist. But like all things that die with smothering, I loved too much and grew jealous of her attention towards other men. I suppose in my fragile recovering mind I was not secure enough to see these things as being ok. Maybe I did not believe in the love I received.

It broke me. Ever since that, I would look for someone to replace her with in a manner of speaking, but I could not find someone who could understand me. When I felt that I did, it turned out to be a deception. The bars were full of drunken women who had no sense of decency or even balance. Puke, mascara and wine down my shirt, the results of drunken women and the numbing, dumbing down of my own generation. I wandered the beaches in winter with the northern sea freezing me to the bone. This was the beginning of what I see as self harm. Some people cut themselves or burns themselves. Sometimes I would run my hands along hawthorn hedges and it was so painful. But I had to admit, that pain started to feel welcome. It was usually my hands that suffered but sometimes I run my arms through the thick of it all and pulled it out quickly, sometimes just to see the result.

            I think my favourite thing to do was to feel the deathly cold winds at sea. I did think of harm to myself then, but in those times there was quite a lot of suicides around the local areas. I did not want to end up this way myself and also it would hurt my family because they wouldn’t understand. I would stay in the caves and write poems, or write about sorrows and throw them into the water. I thought that if my mind saw this, it would register something in my soul that allows me to move on as though these things were written out of me and thrown away.

            But I knew in my heart there must be a friend or a soulmate out there who might spark a fire in me that would in time burn the darkness away. I was not a goth or had chains or eye liner or anything that outwardly showed I was hurt in my heart. I looked like anyone I suppose…except the long hair, but that was a curtain in which to hide part of myself. A year or two rolled on and I studied the book “ instant confidence” by Paul McKenna. Things started to make a bit more sense after that. I’d went to the doctor quite a few times and all they can do is push pills on you. And when you read the very common side affects they included depression, nervousness and paranoia, a few of things I was trying to get away from. You ask if you could see a counsellor and they send you to a website. It was then I realised that this was how the world was. You cannot send someone who desperately needs human connection and who wants to be listened to…to a website. I just needed someone to talk to. I forgot what a hug felt like, or just someone there, that human connection.

So those things in my mental state were not going to happen and not even a doctor was going to help me out. I guess for a time I just started writing more and more, and with every thing that you write, you delve deeper into the place where the hurt is. Now and again you bring up something that some people think is “wise” or profound and you don’t really know if that’s true. And even if it was, the wisdom wasn’t something you created. It belongs to circumstance and experience.

But I began writing a lot, sharing too much information about myself with this desperate need to be understood or accepted. The sad thing was, the more I wrote things, the more I lost the ability to verbally communicate. With the help of some very beautiful lovely intelligent women, the past year or two they’ve started to bring me out of my shell, really cared about me and tried to rehabilitate me as a human man.

The journey of this life for me has led me to many places both in the physical realm and the spiritual and mental, just as it has all of us. But I sat thinking about love and wondered if you could understand the meaning of it at a young age. Often I’ve felt that I knew how love felt, and various people have told me that I was a dreamer, or niave, or that it was just a crush. The thing is that might all be true, these things they say. Do we find love with age? Just last week I saw a very old couple sitting on a bench overlooking the sea as the sun hit the horizon. You could tell that somehow they’d figured things out. There was no mind games or fighting anymore, it almost seemed that there was never a doubt in each of them that were they were right now with each other was the right place to be. And it almost seemed that they knew that the only way they would part was when death took either of them. I saw that and I think I kept that image in my mind. I see what people call love…the love of chocolate cake, the love of lust, of money, of getting one over on others. We throw around the word love so easily and eventually the word loses it’s meaning. “my lover” is another one. How many “lovers” have you had. It’s like people are afraid to call it what it is at times….lust. Or maybe it is love, who am I to know. Would any of these lovers however protect you against insurmountable odds? Would they be there if you were falsely accused and people started gossiping and out casting you? Would their love be strong enough to endure? I am only 27 on this earth but I wonder at times, of these who claim love, are they really that more knowledgeable on the subject of what love is than you or i?

Love to me, in all my naivety is about learning to compromise, to forgive, to care for the person when they are sick, to be a confident for them, to want the best for them while letting them make their decisions and to support them in that, to compliment them, to believe in them, to accept or learn to accept their flaws and see that those things are what makes them who they are. And when you learn her, she becomes less and less of a stranger you first encountered, and more of a friend, someone to believe in and rely on, and it’s not wrong to need her and admit to her that you need her.

            If there’s one thing I’m niave about, it is not being that skilled at keeping my distance or feigning a lack of care. When I like someone, they know it and it’s precisely the knowing without a doubt that can ruin her interest in you. I’ve been told by many Women, that women always want the men they know they can’t have…which to me has always seemed a bit bizarre. Does this mean they are forever lacking contentment with their partner? Does this mean they are prepared to wreck marriages to get a man they know they shouldn’t have? Perhaps the idea man for them is unattainable because he cannot exist in the physical world but only in dreams? The woman may claim that she wants a caring sensitive man, and yet this might be ok on a Monday…but Tuesday follows after monday and the sensitive man isn’t cutting it. She needs drama. She wants a B*stard to make her feel unneeded and unwanted, so that she can feel bad about things and complain to her girlfriends about how much of a pig the guy is. On the Wednesday he has to be very confident with a wealthy air about him and on the Thursday when she’s feeling a bit like a rebel she wants you as a punk, Friday she lets her hair down and wants to relax, listen to the doors and be a hippy. Saturday she wants you to be the most sought after man around town, just so she’s clinging to your arm and saying “ hey he’s my man” and a Sunday she’ll want you to be a…probably something like a Black man which  from my present circumstances would be hard to do lol.

            Maybe I am so damn jaded. Or maybe the whole purpose of these fleeting fascinations in women are down to hormones and the constant need to run away from boredom. And good Lord, if they follow fashion that’s even worse, because then YOU as a man inevitable become a fashion accessory. I’ve had women braid my hair and I’m good with that lol, perfectly fine. I’ve had women pick out what clothes I should wear, that’s fair enough, but when they want you to act different and “city wise”….hey sc*ew that, I’m just myself. I don’t see it as being stubborn on my behalf. I see it as keeping a piece of who I am, because if you change yourself where you can’t see yourself, then you just live a lie. Then you realise you have to leave and most likely never talk to them again, because they sadly became strangers to your soul.

I don’t actually know what this blog is even about, it went very dark and intense and then somehow I went on a rant about women….weird!

James