All of One Intent.

"Just getting it done, that's the main thing"

In the winter months, the gym loses some fervour. What was once pleasure becomes grunt work. Emerging wrinkles, loss of colour, the bags under the eyes filling up.

That way of being is quickly forgotten when summer comes. Even in that laboratory, younger, more alive faces appear for six weeks.

The air conditioning was at full pelt, and between sets the noise of the place came back. I saw a young man sitting inside the frame of an iron machine; he must have been there for some time. Blonde hair of medium length came down heavily from the top of his head.His fingers reached for the handle overhead in a struggle to create a hook, and the forearm readied itself. Out of the hand, the intricate network of cords at the wrist junction ran back into taut musculature loaded up at the elbow. The head tilted, the legs torqued, the core braced. Everything looked to be working, except the forearm; full and quiet with everything passing through it. 

Driving out from Antakya, you couldn’t see much greenery. One night of downpour left the roads flooded, but none of them were closed. Air conditioning units grew here and there off the buildings and balconies, sandy white and topped in earthy red. Between the new ones stood the shells of the old, hollowed out, colourless, ready to return to the ground. 

On the outskirts towards the industrial North of the city, things were a little more sparse. The roads were straighter, and the petrol stations, warehouses, a man sitting outside a garage on a chair with the seat lower than his knees, all stood apart from each other. In the gaps, olive trees appeared.

East of the city the industrial units thinned. Behind a rickety metal gate wide enough for a car, in the garden of a rural Hatay home, a few olive trees rose out of a soil that was dark yet loose enough to mark your hands without muddying them.

"It is good to have."

Up close, the trunk is barely a unified thing. It's more of a free assembly, with each tendon winding upwards individually, all of one intent. There is never more than a hand's width of shadow between two of them. The twisted tendons become cords laid down at different speeds around a single axis.

No branch is subordinate, and the tension of each of the branches reaching out as the charge grows puts the trunk under load. New growth runs out past the leaves, ahead of everything still coming up the trunk.