Let the World
Tell Your Story

Interview with: Finn Astle
 
 
About Finn and Interview/Story:

Finn Astle is a creative storyteller, writing and walking every day, this story covers four continents, roughly 2,000 days and many many people.

Feet walking over desert sand, wind shaping the desert, feet leaving their temporary imprint.

All stories are part true and part myth. Anything we share is a story — even if it’s a fact.

A fact is usually a story we agree on, or history’s winners do. Stories have heroes, villains, beginnings, middles and ends. My story gets less interesting to me the more I walk, listening to other people’s stories along the way. My story has been told before.
Person resting upon rock with a greco-roman water fountain beside them. Both waterless, looking at an eagle fly above.

Collective consciousness is an idea you might be familiar with.

It suggests that we as humans, as a species, share a primal evolutionary conscience or memory. Millions of years of experience remembered into instincts, reactions, emotions, needs, desires, dreams. The fights and the flights — feelings we’ve had since we were born. Dreamers look up, scavengers look down.
Close up of rocks as ants crawl over and underneath them in the Australian desert.

All stories really begin within yourself,

no matter the country, situation or language, your mind will be the first part of you to translate your experience. Like our lives, stories start and end, we are the narrator to ourselves.

Collectively we build cities, on our own, we build a life.
A cityscape, with evermoving cars and highrises, particularly in Beijing the biggest city in the world.

Life is a story that’s difficult to write sometimes

and if you’re not careful the world will write it for you. Putting your words, plot points and character development into the framework of a city, civilisation and laws.

 

While we’ve started telling stories with modern media, our structures and plans were represented in this same consciousness million years ago, advertising, cave paintings, TV’s, fire, monuments and mountains.

 

In the world I was living, death occurred next to me, taken by a train. So I went searching for life in other world’s.

Montage of ancient diagrams as they relate to the landscape and symbolism of southern india, specifically the Saora Tribe in Bhubbaneswar India.

When you are on the way to something,

have you ever noticed how the way there feels so much longer — than the way back?

 

Expectation creates excitement and travelling in new worlds you see new things, new representations, new translations. At their core the structures, languages, or representations, while new, remain all too familiar.

Soviet-era statue of two horses rearing. From inner mongolia, A city abandoned in China due to the mines clearing up.

Memory plays our lives back to us.

As we talk and listen to other people’s stories our mind uses memory to put it all together. As you’ve been reading the images, words and sentiment my memory has conjured to tell my story, you’ve been writing your own subconsciously.

A television screen looping an abstract vision. It is mounted in a desert, contrasting the sands of time with the ever-changing channel hopping nature of media.

I’m going to stop talking and listen.

Get perspective and look at the clouds, they don’t judge you, they are objective, they don’t have memories.

 

I am trying to take the time to pause, and really listen to what the clouds, mountains, sun and sky are saying more. Trying to find where the simplicity, the purposeless beauty, the calm existence of nature, exists in my narrative.

 
Blue sky above the clouds, the viewer is based atop Mount Fuji Japan.
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