About Me

When I was young, I read a lot of books on nature, music and philosophy and started to get interested into many things but it was in my early teenage years that I began to have hobbies. I was always interested in the outdoors and spent most of my growing up outside. Sport has always been a significant interest for me when I was a child. I played football a lot and had a real passion for it and loved the fitness aspect to sport. Exercise is very important to me, I always put in the hours of hard exercise, especially weightlifting and running, it's not just good for the body, but essential for the mind as well. I got interested in martial arts early in my teenage years and I have done training in it in the past couple of years.

 

In the evenings I did a lot of drawing growing up, some sketches but mainly technical drawing and geometric art, that was something I really loved to do because it involved mathematics, I was good at it but it was the visuals that got me interested in geometric drawing. Having a mathematical set was a big deal for me, it as like having something really special, because I knew that I could do a lot with those basic tools. Geometry was something that I kept doing over the years as it had the combination of the knowledge with mathematics and the artistic with the visual part of it. I find that doing some drawing from time to time is a great way to challenge yourself intellectually but it also teaches you how to have patience, because the creative ideas that you have may be very exciting but you got to be patient and take your time. That's the thing with things like that, you should never rush things, especially the things that are most important, as they usually end up worse than if you had taken the proper time, focus and love you have for what you want to do.

 

In my early twenties, I took a break from some of my hobbies to do some writing, mainly poetry and philosophy but it was poetry that I wanted to pursue as I felt that there wasn't anyone writing about the goodness, beauty, nature, honesty and purpose of life. I took the time to write over a few years, it took me a while to put the words together but with some work and reflection, I began to make progress. I was always very good at rhyming and the messages in the poems that I wrote just united together so I decided to put all my poetry together. After doing a lot of poetry, I decided to write some philosophy, which was always there inside but never got it out. Like the poetry, I took some time away from things and focused myself. I wanted to write an immense piece just on philosophy with topics got to do with acceptance, freedom, understanding, morals and creativity. Philosophy has been a massive part of my life and I apply it to everything I do.

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It was only in my mid twenties that I took an interest into woodworking. I already had a good amount of knowledge when it came to trees and forestry but I didn't do a lot of woodwork, I did some in school but that was it, so I always wanted to get into woodwork. I got to know what it was all about by reading some books, watching some old videos of men doing some carpentry. I began to invest some time and money, so I got a few tools for myself, some basic tools just to get me started on a few projects. I came up with a few ideas of what I wanted to create and decided to make some wooden stools, birdhouses, bird tables and I made some wooden mallets. There were some really old tools in the shed that were rusted so I restored those as well. As I got to know the woodworking tools a lot better, mainly by testing them out and using them on different projects, I can now fix things, I know what to do with certain tools as I have a better understanding and knowledge from my experiences. Every single tool has a purpose and there is a tool for every job. The thing about woodworking or anything is that it's not the amount of tools that you have that matters, it's knowing how to use the tools the right way and to become more skilled the more you use them along with the correct method.

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When it comes to music, everything that I couldn't do with my other hobbies went into music. I was always into music, from when I was very young up to now. I listened to a lot growing up, from traditional, classical, ambient, jazz to world music. I played the tin whistle when I was in school and got more familiar with notes and different melodies but it was only when I got a guitar that I realised that the guitar had more versatility to it other than many other instruments. I took the time to get to know the guitar and studied different scales and chords in my bedroom but it was only in my late teenage years that I began to take the guitar more seriously, as I began to see certain patterns with the guitar scales. I did a lot of practice with it, started to learn some music theory and began to make up my own melodies from what I was learning. It came to the point where the guitar was something I had in my hands every day. I compose my own music now, which is something I feel very good about. If my music had a style, it would come close to ambient music and it consists of improvisation and a vast amount of melodies that I come up. I play slowly as I like to let the notes ring and it gives atmosphere to the music. The guitar is something I love with a passion but I decided to get a Native American flute and absolutely love it, the sound of it is beautiful and it is easy to play. Throughout the years, music has helped me in many ways, it got me through some hard times in my life and it made better times. Music has been that one thing I always turned to whenever I needed to express myself when I couldn't with other hobbies. Making music is something that is soulful, because it's a very personal thing, being able to play an instrument and communicate with notes. It's a language, with the notes as words and melodies as sentences. It is a universal language that all living beings understand.

 

Astronomy has always been an interest of mine every since observing the night sky. I remember when I was really young being outside late at night and looking up at all the stars, it was like the night sky was covered in a veil of stars. I think what really got me interested in the universe is the not knowing factor behind it all. I was always very observant as a child, so the night sky just fascinated me. I learned a lot about many things from just observing, from how we get our seasons to the impact of the sun and moon throughout the year. The interesting thing about the stars and planets is that we can only see certain constellations and planets at certain times of the year. I already knew some of the constellations, with their associated brighter stars and planets from reading about them in books as I always had a book on the night sky at home. At home, observing was never an issue as we always had very clear skies in the west of Ireland. Observing and studying Astronomy helped me to understand physics better. Looking up at the sky, sometimes seeing the moon, other times just seeing the different stars, understanding where the sun would be, it certainly gave me a lot of things to wonder about and also gave me a lot of interesting ideas for different projects. There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing, for the same reason that we stand, time after time, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is an ancient wisdom, encoded and embedded in our body, that knows its point of origin. We are made of an enigma, this is why when we stand outside under a clear celestial sky, we feel some ineffable movement within, something that connects us to the cosmos. If the oceans are only the surface, certainly there are more answers far beyond the skies.