The power of birth, and sub-tropical storms.......

Life’s been a bit like trying to do a tango on a highwire razor edge just lately.  Our time of house sitting the wonderful Ariad’s home is drawing to a close, and we’ve checked out houses and had lots of offers and possibilities coming up, but no conclusive home was solidifying.  We were all putting a lot of weight on the importance of finding a home.  For me, I feel like finding a comfortable home up here is the difference between being a complete hippy nutter who’s dragged her family across the country to be homeless and have a baby in a caravan park, and one of the arseiest acts of magical manifestation and creating a better paradigm for having another baby I can think of.  On a razor’s edge. We  had a serendipitous meeting with a couple in town who wanted to rent out their house  on a community, and it all seemed good.  They asked us out to see it and chat, carefully watching us the whole time we were talking, and the house was lovely, and they were going to leave some furniture, and all was good…..till they told us how much rent they wanted.  Right out of our price range.  Far too expensive for us mob.

We made these cute little hand written signs asking for sanctuary, nicely finished off with drawings of home by Lilly and Spiral, and put em up in all the places that we want to live, and we found this house that was heaven on earth, and we all did the silly thing of falling madly in love with it and not holding any cynicism in reserve to protect our hearts in case of rejection.  It was snuggled into the rainforest, with a composting toilet and solar power, lots of rainwater and a fenced natural pool using reeds for filtering, a chook house and a big fenced veggie patch, and a beautiful beautiful home with big verandahs and an underground room that stays cool in summer and warm in winter.  There was also a big bindi free lawn, and a sandpit for the littleuns, an outdoor bath as well as an indoor one….in short….everything we had on our list for the home we wanted to manifest.  And it was affordable too.  And when the landlady heard we had six kids, she said that was too many people, and we couldn’t move in.  Razor edge snapped to the ‘oh my god what idiots we are to be on this mad journey in late pregnancy with no haven to land in!!’, and we both got instantly sore, tired and grumpy.  We’ve been hearing all these stories about folk who got here and stayed in the caravan park for 18 months till they found a house, and other folk who took longer than that even, and have been living in substandard accommodations for years before they found a place on one of the multitudinous Multiple Occupancies or Communities around here.    Everyone we’ve been talking to has told us how hard it is to find somewhere to live, and how you’ve gotta pay a fortune to rent a chook shed and the rest.  And we were getting more and more worried, and our optimism was flagging……. 

Till the power of birth stepped in that is.

One thing I know from all my babies and pregnancies, is that there’s a magic that is the combined alchemy of our family and the new baby to be, that attracts in what’s needed at the perfect time, and we’ve experienced it every time.  Griff’s birth was an amazing and perfect hospital birth in Mt Barker, that was a gentle entry for Currawong and I into what we didn’t realise yet as our birthing career.  He was born in his sack, with no-one around but my support people and Currawong and I in the spa bath (which they wouldn’t have allowed if they’d known he was going to be born so quick).  In a bit of a tizz when they realised they’d missed it, a whole stack of nurses and our doctor made it just as he was born, and they clapped and cried and welcomed him to the world, and were blown away by witnessing an ‘angel birth’.  The first thing I said was “That was so easy”, as I picked him up and strode to our hospital room, pushing the bed to the side,  and laying out our futon, so we could all sleep together.  We went home later that day, and had a gentle and welcoming baby moon in our campground house that was just perfect. 

Lilly’s birth was at my mother’s house, and the birth itself was absolutely divine, and the photo’s were great, but afterwards a series of separating and anti-bonding events happened, that taught us all valuable lessons about the importance of bonding, and in a funny way, everything that happened kinda suited Lilly, and the person she’s become.  Her birth experience also taught us how phenomenal the healing abilities of young one’s are, as we healed the disrupted bonding, and watched her relationships with us all change overnight. 

Spiral’s birth was incredible……and worthy of a post all to it’s own, which I’ll get to one day.  We bought a house to have her in, and even though we were 250kms away from our midwife, she was on perfect time for the birth, I didn’t scare the kids with yelling and instead toned and chanted her out, and we had an amazing lotus experience and baby moon, far away from another disintegrating community experience that happened at the same time, and learnt the true value, beauty and magic of bonding done well.  It literally changed our lives and our vibrations and increased our collective love. 

I’ve already written on this blog about Balthazar’s birth, but what I didn’t make too much of a fuss about, was that we had actually moved to Victoria when I was pregnant with him, and were living in a house on land that was about to be ravaged by horrific fires, during the time that we would have been freshly out of hospital after having an emergency caesarean, with no family or friends around, having had major surgery, and all the rest.  We would have been evacuated about 7 times from that house.  Instead we were back in Adelaide, with friends, family and community nearby, had two wonderful midwives to help us through the process, and the perfect healers for afterwards and to help deal with post natal depression. 

And with the twins, we were in the perfect place again, with the perfect midwife for the job, the perfect healer to help Merlin come not too long after Max, and the perfect situation afterwards to highlight some deep held patterns that kept leading us to rejection by our communities and never having a home.  All the people we really needed were magically attracted to us, and I’m still realising lessons that I learnt about myself and our family dynamics and patterns from the experience, that are absolutely essential to our growth and the ongoing process of enlightenment that’s unfolding from our lives and births together. 

And now we find ourselves in a place where we feel like we’ve finally found our tribe, where people look at us deeply and listen to our words to judge us, rather than asking us for references and resume’s, and a serendipitous little thread has picked us up at the last minute, and is working it’s magic in our lives. 

To rejoin the story again, we were losing hope, and getting grumpy, till we woke up last Sunday, and Currawong declared that we were going to find a house that day, that someone was going to walk up and say “I’ve got a house I want you to live in” and all our worries would be over……..I was cynical to put it mildly.

We got to Nimbin, and I was all sad with pregnancy worries and skeletons in my head closet that need clearing for this new baby, and I told him I wanted to avoid the market, and go to the bush theatre instead.  He was happy to oblige me, but also really really wanted to go to the market, so we agreed that we’d go where the parking was easy, which ended up being the market.  And within moments of getting there, I sat with a midwife we’d met the week before, and I really fell in love with her approach and herself and her attitudes.  We had so many common thoughts about birth it was silly, and so many ideas poured out of us both about birth and family groups and big birthing concepts that my head spun.  She’s a real midwife.  There’s a special kind of energy that only a real midwife emanates, a glowing vitality that comes from witnessing birth regularly, an openness to just about any concept or attitude from the dance they do with birth and thereby sex and death as their trade, and a deep loyalty and caretaking attitude towards birthing women and their families.  Not to mention she’s just drop dead gorgeous.  When I was first told about her, and how she was a grandmother, I had a picture in my head of a silver haired crone, and when a tall, lithe, tanned and stunning woman in a mini skirt came walking towards me, I wondered briefly if that was the midwife I’d been told about, but dismissed the idea, cause she didn’t have silver hair.  But it was.  She’s also got a lot of experience, and was trained in Germany, and is firm in her beliefs that sex plays a huge role in birth, and all it’s attendants.  And she also straight away set about trying to find us a home, and hooking us up with people who might help us, and using all her knowledge and contacts to try and ease our birth into this community.  It seems we’ve found a ‘birth worker’, and I’m absolutely thrilled and delighted at who she is. 

She said if the worst got to the worst, she’d just create a meeting of the locals, so we could be looked after and found somewhere to live, because the community wanted us to stay, so they had a responsibility to help us!  Another woman who we’d met 6 years ago when we first met Nimbin was also around, and between the two of them they swapped names and possibilities, and cooked up a scheme where Annetta, our birth worker, was going to ring all the people she knew, and let us know later what she turned up.  Currawong went off to get the bus so we could head for the pool and wait for her, and bumped into the woman who owned the first house we’d looked at that was too expensive. 

And guess what.

She said that they’d had other people come to look at their house, but after talking to us and observing us carefully, they wanted us to be the ones to move into their house, and they were willing to take what we could afford, plus a day a week’s work in exchange.  Currawong was right.  And very intuitive.  And I’m glad that he got us to the market instead of the theatre!  So within 4 weeks of starting our earnest search for a home, we’ve done it.  And it’s on a community with an old friend of Currawong’s he hasn’t seen for over 12 years, who we bumped into a few weeks ago, and who I instantly loved and felt like we’d known each other for years, and another amazing woman that we met when we were here last.  A safe and comfortable home has been found, and my faith in the power of birth has been confirmed. 

But that’s not all, because there was a gap between the house sit ending and our new house being available, and thanks to Annetta’s networking, we drove off from the pool and met the most awesome family we’ve met since the last time!  Another homeschooling mob of 4 kids, living in an amazing home on a community, all totally gorgeous both inside and out, and we all liked each other so much we ended up staying for dinner.  There’s a community house on their community that they can give to people for short term stints, and they’re doing their best to organise it for us to live in it until our new house is ready to inhabit, and we’ve made some awesome new friends to boot.

And on the way home we experienced our first real tropical downpour.  It was awesome, and scary, and huge and intense.  Sheets of water so dense we could barely see through them, and hailstones bashing the roof of our van, and lightning and thunder so close you could almost touch it.  Tree’s were falling by the sides of the road and we had to stop four times while Currawong and another fella cleared them.  We had to pull over and stop in a service station while the storm was at it’s zenith and hailstones were pelting all around, and all the kids were a bit scared.  I just thought the raw power and energy of mother nature was absolutely awesome, and was thrilled at the intensity of it.  And Currawong was worried about his van, and got us as carefully and safely home as he could. 

But the biggest thing we realised was that we were really really glad that we wont be sleeping in a tent in Nimbin Caravan Park afterall, especially when it comes to storms like that.  Cheers birth energy.  I’ll never underestimate your powers……..