Intrepid Transit

Expression beyond algorithms, grounded in perspective 🌐 Explore my work → linktr.ee/paintedladystudio

[intrepidtransit]

The Day the Trees Spoke

I was twenty-something, half-feral and fluorescent with jet lag, on a working-holiday visa that had turned into a pilgrimage of accident. London had been grey noise and lager light, so I took a train north, chasing a rumour of silence.

The carriage hissed through fir and granite. We passed a station called Hel, which felt like a private joke from the gods of marketing. The air beyond the window looked distilled as if someone had taken all the colour out of existence and left only its soul. I disembarked at Foss, a name that sounded like the hiss of falling water, or a sigh through teeth.

There was almost nothing: a café, a rack of hire-bikes, one postal worker winding down the road on a small red motorbike, Hermes in high-vis.

I started along a path that slipped into the forest, the way a thought slips into dream.

At first it was the kind of silence that’s polite. Then it thickened and it began to breathe. Somewhere in the canopy, magpies rearranged the syntax of the day. And then fear, that clean, ancient fear that arrives when you realise the world is vast and doesn’t particularly care if you exist. I sat down on a rock to negotiate with my nerves.

That’s when I heard them.

Not 'heard' like sound more like registered the trees. They were speaking, not in Norwegian or English or even metaphor, but in vibration.

The trunks were resonating with a slow, sap-heavy grammar. I couldn’t translate it, but it went straight into the bloodstream. It said something like: You are temporary. Be grateful. Keep still.

For a moment I thought of black metal, the corpse-painted priests of distortion, and understood they were only trying to imitate this: the forest screaming its own liturgy of life and rot.

The voice of the land was both terrifying and tender, like being stared at by eternity.

When the spell broke, I walked back toward the station, carrying silence like contraband.

The café’s lights flickered on, and Logos, the ordinary, measurable world resumed its paperwork.

But inside, Mythos had already filed its report. The trees had entered me; the world had briefly remembered my name.

[intrepidtransit]

A Quiet Nod, A Cosmic Signal

Yesterday I got a message from someone I really respect.

I’d applied for a mobility EOI that didn’t land.

What came instead?

A surprise: feedback that my CV and pitch were excellent. Thoughtful. Strong enough to share with other teams. Not the right fit for that particular role - but the kind of thing that signals something else entirely:

💬 “You’re operating well beyond the standard processes. You’re built for broader, higher-level roles.”

And the timing? Couldn't be more cosmic.

🌙 Transit Moon in the 6th House What hurts becomes instructive. What nags becomes clear. This wasn’t a sting - it was a clean insight. A knowing.

☀️ Sun + Mercury in the 10th House Reputation. Public perception. Career energy. Not performative visibility - but earned visibility. The kind that arrives as a quiet endorsement, not a headline.

💥 Mars in the 12th Inner friction. Hidden tension. You feel underestimated - until someone says: I see it. And suddenly, it’s not just inner clarity. It’s confirmation.

That message reminded me:

Progress isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a few words from someone who didn’t have to say anything - but did. And that’s enough. That’s movement. That’s alignment - strategic and cosmic.

[intrepidtransit]

“You don’t need to know,” he said, after a long pause.

The voice on the phone had already been rambling when he veered wildly off course. At first, he had been complaining - something about washing machines, the fridges, they tamper, he’d muttered.

Witchcraft. Astral projection. Hauntings. And of course, them.

“But let me tell you something else, something real.”

The line crackled. Somewhere in the distance, a radio played a song that had no right to exist anymore.

And just like that, we were inside the husk of a ruined bank. It loomed over Sarajevo like a broken tooth, its windows nothing but yawning black sockets.

The war had done this, long before I arrived. Shelling, fire - then time itself had taken its toll. The concrete stairs crumbled beneath our feet as we climbed, each step an exercise in calculated risk.

Bullet casings littered the floors. In some corners, charred office chairs sat abandoned, their fabric long devoured by rain and wind. The husk of a filing cabinet stood defiantly against the elements, rusted drawers frozen in mid-scream.

"People come here at night," he said. "For graffiti. For ghosts. For things better left alone."

And then, near the top, a shift in the air.

We were not alone.

Two figures, pressed close in the twilight of a war-scarred ruin. A boy and a girl, caught in something intimate, something fragile.

For a moment, none of us moved. Then, without a word, they slipped away - not walking, not running, but disappearing into the stairwell, silent as mist retreating from the dawn.

The caller exhaled through the receiver. “You ever heard of astral projection?” he asked. “Witchcraft? Hauntings?”

The static on the line seemed to deepen.

Instead of answering, I let him continue.

“And speaking of spirits,” he said, almost cheerfully now, “want to hear a joke?”

I hesitated. “Sure.”

“What do you call a pregnant woman with a glass belly button?”

The silence stretched.

“A womb with a view.”

From somewhere behind me, in the empty office, a chair shifted just slightly as if someone had been sitting there all along.

[intrepidtransit]

Not a comeback. A reintroduction.

I was part of something once.

A strange, beautiful pocket of the internet called The Melbourne Collective. We posted, reblogged, created, unraveled, found fragments of ourselves in tags and text posts and low-res images. That space doesn’t exist anymore. Neither do we, not quite in the same form.

But I’m not here to relive that era. I’m here to close the loop. To draw a clean line between who I was and who I am.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is intention.

I’ve tried other spaces: Instagram, Medium, Substack. But they turned expression into performance.

All metrics, no margin. Feeds built for reach, not reflection.

The most valuable thing I own is my perspective. Not a brand. Not a following. A way of seeing.

This blog is about showing up.

As I am now.

Not to go viral. Just to be real.

Let’s begin.