Traveller's Times
Application of intuitive Life Story Brief-Case
I don’t have a regular CV of “employment” along my chosen career-path.
I did very well in my schooldays, achieving high grades with no real studying.
I gained my first-choice placement in higher education, on a course in Electronic Engineering.
I didn’t know what career to choose, and so had simply asked a friend in my class on the day of filling out the forms.
My best friend committed suicide a week before the Christmas exams, 3 months into my 1st year at Galway Technical College. I passed all the exams with ease by studying with classmates on the night before each exam, but my heart and mind were not dedicated to the outcome of my degree, and I chose to give up on college and focus on social and ecological awareness-raising instead, with a group of mature-students in the college.
I’d been studying and intuitive Astrology in my teenage years, and so I was well aware that I had a natural aptitude for writing and for publishing, my birth-chart focuses around the 10nth House of publishing.
I’ve always had a distinct and primal love of Nature, and an in-built desire to “save the World” from the injustices of environmental destruction, a natural distrust of Governments, and an historical understanding of cultural imperialism.
In dropping-out of College, out of institutionalisation, I natural fell-in with the alternative views of sub-cultural channellings of youthful rebellion.
I’ve been working as an amateur publisher since my late teenage years, firstly with an environmental awareness magazine called Tuar Ceatha, in Galway city, beginning in 1993.
In 1995, I moved to Dublin city and founded Catalyst Magazine, again environmental, but also more focused upon political as well as cultural regeneration and the spiritual spectrum.
After producing 5 issues over 3 years, Catalyst Magazine had played a massive role in gathering together an alternative stream cultural awareness as well as initiating many little groups into a national force-to-be-reckoned with.
In 1997 we were central in organising Ireland’s first living road-protest-movement at a place called “The Glen of the Downs”, just outside the outskirts of the Capital city of Dublin.
We were well aware that we were borrowing from the experience of British protest culture, and we adopted and adapted for the Irish situation.
We were careful to describe our opposition to the road-expansion as a “vigil” rather than a protest.
We were inspired to bring our People together, not against.
I had been particularly determined to find a place and cause that represented all the ills of modernity, as a means of solving the distribution difficulties of a small hard-copy publication.
We had already achieved distribution relatively nation-wide and island-wide, through connection to a Health-food shops distribution transportations company, which allowed for our magazine to be stocked in shops, however, being an independent, unwaged, entirely voluntary and happen-chance organisation, we had difficulties in collecting back and keeping track of monies from sales.
This was all happening on the cusp of the advent of the internet.
I had realised that having a nationally significant place to gather in defiance against the wilful and ignorant destruction of one of the last remaining forests of sessile Oak trees in Ireland, gave us the chance to be at the forefront of so many steams of cultural awareness involving Ireland’s historical rape and pillage, of our economy, our language, our natural resources and our natural resilience.
The Glen became the centre of Irish unity, breaking awareness into the mainstream media, onto the national Television talk-shows and continuous coverage on the national news, papers, radio and TV.
This was ground-breaking for our success in distribution, as people pilgrimaged to our site in the physical forest, and brought our magazine away with them, having left deposits of donations in the process.
Success can lead to the greatest failures, and though the camp remained on-site through from July 1997 until Spring of 2000, our magazine failed to transition from entirely voluntary to relative employment, and folded in upon itself through inevitable power-struggles between individuals struggling to survive the circumstances and the pressures we had brought upon ourselves in the process.
Issue 4 had been a perfect publication, 40 pages, hard cover, all recycled paper.
Our launch party for issue 4 had been the launch-pad from which the first individuals determined to stake their comfort and their lives, became the first people to commit to camping out in the woods.
15 moths later Issue 5 was slightly less “together”. Some of us had suffered arrest, some of us were still in jail. It had all become more than any of us could contain. Our safe-houses were under surveillance. Our parties were being busted, and our initial friendships were often sinking in feelings overwhelmed with too much responsibility and not enough clear and united organisation, resources of trust.
After falling foul of an infestation of scabies, brought over by visiting protestors from a site in Britain, I left to recuperate at my parents house, and shortly thereafter to be offered an internship at Ireland’s first Eco-village in Co. Monaghan, to try and straighten my life out, to recover from exhaustion and disappointment, early in the spring of 1999.
It was from here that I got offered a lift to Glastonbury Town, to witness the Grand Cross Eclipse, in August 1999.
I chose to stay and investigate this strange little hamlet in this foreign land, and stayed for 6 years. By spring equinox 2000, I was looking to create a new magazine, to be called Accelerating Times, however, what I actually produced was a 2 hour long rhythmically rhyming spoken-word Faerie-tale.
I gave the poetry-persona the name of Kelfin Pa Tricks Oberon, a phonetic play-on-word-sounds from my given-name of Kevin Patrick Byrne.
Thus, unintentionally, the title of “King of the Faeries” became attached to me ever since.
I met a man called Steve Reeves on the streets of Glastonbury, who was drawing intensely brilliant art on his jeans and anywhere else, whose line-drawings also flowed from some ancient well-spring of native British indigenous faerie realms.
I published a zine-type prototype that summer of 2000, and by summer of 2001, I published a 100 page A5 size book of my faerie-tale, lavishly illustrated with Steve’s art incorporating my rhymes.
Entitled “Accelerating Rhymes, The Return of The Faeries”
Fall from Grace – realising that the solution to the world’s conflicts need to be resolved within, in order, to be expressed with success in the outer world experience
2014 summer of return to festivals … ending in not the end of the world horse-drawn festival
we in a van, relation ship sin king
I break up worlds into constituent parts, deeper meanings, origins of etymology, sounds joining to make complex meanings, communicating evolutions in the collective mind over countless generations… I seek to simplify the evolutionary complexities, in order to understand my own mind, and where there is cause of conflict between mind and heart communications and free flowing
I broke into the realms of the psyche, as an innate capacity, within the spectrum of genetic inheritance as well as trauma-based fusions of walled off mental-emotional discrepancies
My father died in November 2021, and all this inner investigation has reaped the benefit of being able to integrate the congruencies of my child-self, along with the deep senses of rejection that have plagued my adult life.
Cultural exile
I am a handy-man, a builder a bodger and a carpenter.
On the canal boat, I became a mechanic as well.
I am fiercely independent, struggling to feel supported, struggling to be understood and accepted
as a school-child, I excelled in my own ways, and felt condemned as “too intelligent” to be part of the gang.
As a parent, I have excelled, yet struggle to be accepted as “head of the family”.
I’ve had “daddy issues” around fear of rejection, around fears of having a monster buried deep within my psyche, which can be triggered into taking over my conscious self-control and acting-out my suppressed childhood experiences.
Triggers of the past, continue hold me at gun-point, my inner-imprinting upon my sub-conscious expectations, resulting in self-sabotage.
Too shiny, I expect to be robbed of my successes. These were childhood issues, buried in a child’s comprehension, hugely brought to light in the wake of my father’s death.
I feel I have climbed Everest over these past 7 months since dad died.
Things are a whole lot clearer in my conscience nowadays.
I’ve begun working to learn how to set up online “print on demand” for my poetry books, and to begin publishing the more recent works of research into technological advances and the inherent dangers of technological abuse and social and environmental disruption and destruction, as well as the more spiritually inclined philosophical implications of the nexus points being reached through human evolution combined with the meteoric advances of the technological Singularity.
I have quite a “following” over the years on Facebook, but I had never been willing to give time and attention to developing a presence on multiple on-line platforms.
I’ve had good reason to feel the need to to be wary of just how much time and life-energy the online experience can consume. During my 3 years studying computer science at Goldsmiths, we were continually taught and encouraged to design our applications to include addictive psychological tricks to entice the user to give more and more of their attention to our creations, in order to maximise our profit at their expense. Such is the “business model, and as such I suffered revulsion about the inherent psychological manipulations involved in the industry.
I have settled my issues around the manipulation these days, and have found ways to build-in honesty to my communications, by teaching what I have learned, by choosing a humble path rather than main-streaming the manipulations for the trickery of dishonest “returns”.
contact and/or donations - welcome - paypal too
wiselands23@gmail.com
