> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://diarist-at-large.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Travel epiphanies/'clinging to the heart of the world'/Diarist, the newsletter - URL: https://diarist-at-large.ghost.io/travel-epiphanies-clinging-to-the-heart-of-the-world-diarist-the-newsletter/ - Published: 2026-07-30T19:43:51.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-31T16:08:21.000Z - Description: This, I knew immediately, was a synchronicity. A lining-up of time, space, attention and intuition. - Author: Diana Bamimeke Let’s begin in the autumn of 2023\. I was fresh off the heels of my first break-up and stewing in isolation in the attic room of the north Dublin houseshare I’d just moved into. I was no-contact with my mother, and very low contact with the rest of my family during a period of interpersonal troubles. It was pure kismet that, months earlier, I’d planned two trips abroad, things that would occupy my fraying mind and keep my body moving during painful transitions. The first trip was a short hop to London for one day of the Frieze art fairs. The second was a week-long trip to Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, where a work conference related to my then-job was taking place. I stayed in a hotel about five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. Besides talks, workshops and karaoke in the main hall, I spent much of the time in Ljubljana by myself. Just walking. I walked the cobbled streets and noted the beautiful architecture all around me. I dropped into a gallery whose name I can’t recall now, but whose guestbook I know I made sure to sign. I stood on a bridge and watched the river Ljubljanica thunder beneath me with a ferocity that felt out of place in such a relaxed city. ![Image of the facade of the Cooperative Business Bank Building in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is a five-storey building. Its facade is reddish-orange, with windows and doors lined with red, yellow and blue geometric patterns](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/22/a6224ccb-d6ed-48e8-94f3-e5dc84cb85f8/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1583.jpg) The Cooperative Business Bank Building, Ljubljana Travel has a funny way of temporarily shifting your logic; I considered abandoning my whole life in Ireland for a permanent move to Ljubljana. How would it even be possible on a non-EU passport? No matter, the fantasy sated me enough. I found my thoughts drifting away from my ex and towards the felt possibility of a new life. I was *actually* in a new country, intentionally engaging people other than the person I had emotionally glued myself to for almost two years, and living in my singular body. The realisation that I’d given so much of myself away in this relationship came into sharp focus while I was sitting on an outdoor terrace in the early evening. I had to accept that I had been hurt, but also that I was here in the transmutation of this hurt, proving to myself that I could grow beyond it. On the plane from Ljubljana to Amsterdam, for my connecting flight to Dublin, I was reading the book I’d brought with me, *Black Paper* (2021) by the art historian and essayist Teju Cole. Subtitled *writing in a dark time*, I thought the book would be my best literary companion in a dark time of my own. It’s a collection of essays about darkness, its applications in the history of art & contemporary popular media, and about its relationship with global understandings of Blackness and Africanness (see the term ‘dark continent’, for a start). I was in an aisle seat, finishing one essay and flipping to the next, ‘Pictures in the Aftermath’, which opens with another writer’s reflections on the classical music piece *Ninth Symphony* by Gustav Mahler, one of Cole’s favourite composers. When I’m reading, viewing, listening to or thinking about something that I especially enjoy, I can lose touch entirely with the world around me. I become totally absorbed in the subject matter, in a way that draws me from other people and into myself. Thankfully as a solo traveller, I had no one with me to reassure of my attention in this or that social situation. I only had the words in front of me to fall deeply into, while the plane rumbled in anticipation of take-off. But something pulled me back out. About halfway down this first page, I felt this urge to look up and around. As I did, I noticed a passenger in another aisle seat a few rows ahead of me. She had a tablet propped up in her lap, its screen filled with lines and symbols I recognised as sheet music. There were words at the top of the screen but they read too small for me. I pulled out my phone and zoomed in on the screen to allow more clarity. The sheet music was for *Ninth Symphony*. ![Image of a tablet propped up in front of a passenger on a plane. The screen shows sheet music for a classical music composition. At the top of the screen are the words 'Gustav Mahler' then 'Symphony No. 9 in D Major'](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/22/a6224ccb-d6ed-48e8-94f3-e5dc84cb85f8/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1581.jpg) This, I knew immediately, was a synchronicity. A lining-up of time, space, attention and intuition. I thought about talking to the woman with the tablet but decided against it in the end, preferring to keep the moment for my own posterity. At the time I felt like something enormous had just been revealed to me. In the preceding months I’d been leaning more spiritual, watching lectures by the Buddhist monk & peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, reading about non-duality. I grew up in an authoritarian flavour of evangelical Christianity that I resisted immensely as a child and teenager, then became an avowed atheist in my mid-to-late teens. But basing my worldview around the absence of something didn’t work for very long. In my early twenties, during my undergraduate studies, my mind began craving a new intellectual and metaphysical depth I felt ready for. There was a change incoming and it was more than just going from partnered to single. I was starting to ask myself bigger questions, like how could I integrate my scepticism into a deeper understanding of our world, beyond the immediate or the superficial? Were my political convictions, until then driven only by material knowledge, at all compatible with this understanding? Was there a way to effectively merge the spiritual and the material in my way of living, without abandoning critical thinking? The moment on the plane was a kind of cosmic weather vane. Initially I treated it with a bit of suspicion, thinking that maybe Mahler’s work was really popular with classical musicians & enthusiasts, and that it wasn’t uncommon to see them enjoying it in public, especially in Europe. But the easy thing to do would be to chalk it up to simple coincidence. That was the kind of thought-terminator my teenage self would have gone for. The harder thing, I think, was to make space in my mind for a universe that could be related to in ways other than cold hard logic. I arrived at Schiphol airport late in the evening and missed my connecting flight. Flustered, I ran to the KLM desk. Mercifully, I was offered a seat on the next flight. To fill the time before boarding, I wandered, as I did in Ljubljana, around the terminal, finding a public library and places to sit and nap. I was on the plane home to Dublin not long after. Soothed by the dim lights and quiet patter, I fell again, this time into a dreamless sleep. --- I’ve spent the last few years, since at least 2020, privately grappling with the questions posed from going even deeper into philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality and political economy. The instance on the plane only added fuel to this fire. It felt like something I genuinely couldn’t ignore, a shove towards expansion. I explored the impression it left in my journals (or diaries—I use the two interchangeably), which I’ve kept since I was thirteen. [I recently spoke about my journalling and writing practice more broadly for an interview on Near FM.](https://listenagain.org/?p=62239&ref=diarist-at-large.ghost.io) ![Image of a stack of my journals on a shelf. They are ordered from smallest on the top to largest on the bottom. One journal's spine has handwritten text on it that reads "2019/2020". Another spine reads "JOURNAL 11" and "DEC 2020 TO NOV 2025". Another spine reads "JOURNAL 12".](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/22/a6224ccb-d6ed-48e8-94f3-e5dc84cb85f8/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1586.jpeg) Fourteen years' worth of diaries I‘ve continued to use my diary-keeping as a way to structure my internal world and make sense of the external. It’s also a means of recording how I’ve changed, and how my circumstances have changed too. I became an Irish citizen at a ceremony in Kerry this June. That was the summit of a mountain that felt insurmountable for a very long time. Earlier this year, I ended a friendship with someone who cared much less about me than I thought. Then I quit a job at an arts organisation whose leadership directed casual hostility towards myself and other workers (not acceptable under any pay conditions, but certainly not for minimum wage). Shortly afterwards, I started an online group to complete *The Artist’s Way*, the famous 12-week creative recovery book and course by Julia Cameron. At time of writing, we’re in Week 10\. I continued taking risks, like renting my own artist’s studio for the first time, and applying and getting accepted into an MA programme on visual art and depth psychology. Here is another one: properly starting this newsletter, *Diarist*, after an abortive attempt a few years ago (what Cameron would call a ‘creative U-turn’). *Diarist* is a newsletter that will publish every three to four weeks, and will feature: - long-form writing on art & culture, philosophy, politics, spirituality, contemplation, psychoanalysis, blackness and belonging in contemporary Ireland, and other subjects that catch my attention - in-depth interviews with residents of my local area, artists, writers and more - personal essays, creative non-fiction, poetry and experimental writing If you enjoy these topics and genres (or are curious about them) and are looking for deeply felt writing that both reflects and confronts our times, I think you’ll like this newsletter. --- Though the book *Black Skin, White Masks* (1952) by the psychiatrist-philosopher Frantz Fanon is technically a clinical study, there’s a particularly poetic passage in it about clinging “to the heart of the world”, about the necessity of facing the world as it is. In launching this project, I’m doing something similar. By paying close attention to the people, places and changes that move me, and by earnestly pursuing my artistic and philosophical interests, I secure my footing in a world that wants me spun off-course. I become a blood vessel snaking from this heart, drawing out information and pumping meaning back in. ![Image of underlined text from the book 'Black Skin, White Masks'. The image is cropped to the passage and reads "Yes: make them aware of the possibilities they have denied themselves or the passiveness they have displayed in situations where it was really necessary to cling to the heart of the world, like a splinter-to force, if needed, the rhythm of the world's heart; dislocate, if"](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/22/a6224ccb-d6ed-48e8-94f3-e5dc84cb85f8/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1587.jpg) !["needed, the system of controls; but in any case, most certainly, face the world." The text at the top of the page reads "60 / Black Skin, White Masks"](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/22/a6224ccb-d6ed-48e8-94f3-e5dc84cb85f8/content/images/2026/07/IMG_1588.jpg)