Journals
Step into my journeyThese are my journal entries — a glimpse into the world as I saw and felt it. Through these moments, walk the paths I wandered, and experience the story through my eyes.
Breaking free from the noise
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The year was 2018. I felt my world getting louder, noisier. Everyone seemed to have something to say about everything. Everyone was increasingly trapped in our little phones. Yet, the more I listened, the more I felt lost. I couldn’t hear my heart speak. Even my paintings — my quiet refuge — could not escape the clamour. In those moments, I found myself haunted by a question that George Lucas once posed: "Why are we living in cages, with the door wide open?"
Wild WingsI could hear its call. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning to follow the flight of wings. The inaudible demand of the feral angel was directing me skywards. I felt an urgent demand in my blood. I heard the drum of the sun. Every colour of the dancing clouds an invitation: come. Every leaf in every breeze was singing with the wind through every mountain peak. The messages in the wind were silhouetted in the primal and the elemental. Everything was in oneness with everything. That was a clear calling.
Wild WillI wanted nothing to do with the heroics of the 'solo expedition.' There was no mountain I wanted to 'conquer.' I was looking for the will of the wild, the energy that's purely elemental. In the wilderness of Western Mongolia, I discovered something I had never experienced growing up in Singapore. It was pure freedom. And it was wildly satisfying. It's as if the human spirit has a primal allegiance to the elemental. We think we are domesticated, but deep inside us, we are still feral in pheromone, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in our tongue and hunger. Deep in our core, we are wild.
Wild SchoolGrowing up, school felt like a trooping process to lead the cautious life. Armies of teachers and pedagogical bureaucrats worked hard to feed industrial quantities of the young through the school machine. Controlled, systematic and detached. We were educated to 'stay inside,' within the bounds of a gridlocked grading system. Physical bounds and intellectual bounds. We were taught to value being in the protected zone, to let the safe traffic of routine smother desire for the real outside. But on the edges of Western Mongolia, I learned that important lessons of life didn't require any school. Bekku told me that they don't train the eagle to hunt; it's the eagle who trains the men. That their 'hunting' classrooms were in the clouds, their textbooks were messages in the wind, their teachers were the perfect hunters of the sky: golden eagles. In the wild school of Mongolia, I felt small. And it felt great.
Wild HomeI took seven years over this body of work. I began with no knowing where it would lead to, no idea how it might one day become a book. I wandered, I wondered. I got ill, I got well. I became friends with tribal people who knew the unspoken language of the sky, I came to know the inaudible messages of my own spirit. I wrote journals under the sky, I spoke with the stars. I was guided to follow pathways that opened up questions. I was led to ancient mountains of monumental secrets. I learned that for the indigenous people who lived in the wild, they have a different word for the Mongolian wilderness: home.
Wild LanguageIn the wild, news travels along rivers and the wind. How they move tells us what's happening and, critically, what's coming. Nature brims with communication. The wilder the land, the more tellers of truth there are. For Bekku and his tribe, knowledge comes from communicating with the wild world; through its animal teachers and shape-shifting nature. This 'wild language' never lies. There is no sugar-coating, no clever framing, no spin-doctoring. There is no fake news to contend with. Come to think of it, life is so much more calming when we can depend on language we can trust. In that sense, being one with the wild is being one with truth.
Wild SpiritThe human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is wildly beautiful and complex. There is something in me, like in so many of us, that detests a wall. Having grown up in Singapore, we understand human nature as something well-schooled, tamed from childhood, civilized by society. And having lived in Shanghai for seven years, I know this tepid world of a life trapped in firewalls well. But to the rebel soul, inside many of us, is our natural right to fly with eagles, to wear feathers, to drink stars, to ask for the moon, to experience our primal salute to the sky. Perhaps, every one of us deserves to re-tune our senses to the pitch of the earth. After all, we are -- every one of us -- a force of nature. Perhaps, it is necessary to consciously re-learn what we have never forgotten in our subconscious.
