The places that I live.

There are six apartments in this complex, several mango trees in the back yard and a profusion of bougainvillia in the front as well as the obligatory coconut trees. Weekends are usually noisy around here as everyone digs out the lawn mowers and the weed wackers but today it is quiet apart from the occasional passing car and bird song.

My personal space always looks as though a high wind whirled through it, a feng shui nightmare, with stacks of books, CD's, production charts, painting and pottery supplies expanding to fit the available space. I clear it all away and organize it weekly but by Sunday it is always out and scattered as I flit from one project to another, some scheduled to be finished by tomorrow, some not past the bare bones of conception. All working, all growing, all taking up room and generating clutter.

My colours are orange, brown, oatmeal; spiced with blues, with teal and crimson. A handmade sandalwood fan painted with crysanthemums hangs open on one wall, another sports three straw mats, all circles, which balance the thrust of the green triangle with drawers across the room.No pictures at all. My bedroom is an oasis of white with cool greens and turquoise counterpoint to earth tone sheets and a throw of hot orange, no closet no chair just a bed draped in a mosquito net the limpid green of woodland water, one handcarved table to hold a lamp and the only clock I own.

My kitchen and my bathrooms are models of inefficiency, designed without a thought of function, the drains a direct line to hell, spilling forth immense cockroaches at night - shiny glossy 'mahogany birds' two inches long - if left unstoppered despite frequent applications of boric acid and pleas to the landlord. I do them harm whenever I see them and absorb the sin, the karma for future incarnations.

I think in tangents, each thought bouncing off at an angle, ricocheting forth and boomeranging back along new paths and I live in a sprawl of artifacts delineated by this process while my Moon in Virgo wrings her tidy hands dripping with labels and with order doing her best to tame the swirl of Jupiter's immense attraction and the delicate intrusions of Scorpio that lace my chart. And I sit zazen, observing and acknowledging; releasing what I can and recognizing the familiar landmarks of my journey as I pass them one more time with feeling, still naming them mine.

Sometimes the ultimate pain and pleasure is seeing what I do and how I do it, seeing the ruts in my internal eternal carpet powerless to deviate as I drop another pencil and let it fall, just reaching for another one so close to hand. In the course of my lifetime I have shattered the bonds of habits only to replace them with a new behaviour, distorted mirror in an echo chamber that I need to acknowledge as progress for it is a change. Dilute, dilute a thousand million times each thought, intention, motion and direction until, distilled, I become my own homeopathic remedy and the cause will heal the symptom eradicating the interruption of the natural perfection we are all intended to be.