Chapters three and four....

Here’s the next instalment of my book.  Currawong’s very concerned that people who don’t know my blog well, will come along and read the story in the wrong order, so I should tell  you now, that if you haven’t already started reading the book that I’m posting on this blog, then you’ve got to go back a post and start at Chapter 1.

That being said, here’s the next bit.  It’s funny.  I’m finding that I’m really sensitive about this book!  It’s such a part of me, and I guess after having gone through the process I described last time of birthing it, I’m as protective of it as I am of my children.  I was sure that nobody liked it after I posted it for a whole hour and didn’t get any gorgeous comments….(ha!)  But then feedback started to come in, and I got over my jitters.  The urge to let it out into the world is proving stronger than the urge to be a wus J

So like I said before, I’d left the Blue Mountains and emigrated to South Australia, and had been in SA for about 6 months when I decided to go back to the mountains for a visit, met Currawong, and then went back home to write this book.  And I left the mountains cause it was all just too confusing.  In my time in the mountains I’d been a fundamentalist church goer, a very unpopular school girl with braces and glasses and knee high socks and below knee skirts and a head taller than all the boys, a dropout, and I disappeared for 3 years after I left home at 15 under police escort and lived with my sister in Bathurst for a while, then went overseas to Europe for a year to do the famous Aussie backpacker tour, then came back briefly to the mountains to be a Council postal clerk by day, and an RSL root rat by night, then went down to the North Shore in Sydney and sold Life Insurance, got pregnant and moved back to the mountains to become a single mother, then a goddess worshipping guided meditator, then a bisexual activist, then an almost separatist lesbian, lived with my girlfriend and our daughters and wrote for the local lesbian magazine, then left her and had a relationship with an eccentric man who worshipped the goddess Kali, at the same time as with a woman who wanted to look after me and take me to Holland………got too confused by everything and ran into a relationship with a young punk fella who had a very iconic name and a sweet heart, started a business in the main street of Katoomba and had some very big and grandiose dreams come to nothing, and then found it all too much and decided to move with my punk fella to Adelaide. 

Pulling silly faces with my best mate at school.....after losing the braces and not wearing the glasses for the shot....

Living in Bathurst with my sister

Sitting on King Arthurs seat in Edinburgh

Selling life insurance on the North Shore in Sydney.....

Being a single mother with a daughter

Being a lesbian at the beautiful Avalon restaurant in Katoomba

At the end of my time in the mountains, I could walk down the street and meet someone from church, then someone from the lesbian community, then a council worker who remembered my time there, then someone I’d slept with from the RSL, then a client from the business I was co-operating, then one of my single mother friends, then a fellow goddess circle member……..and it was just all too much.  I decided it was time to go somewhere and start fresh, without all the baggage of my past.  And Adelaide was about as far away as I was prepared to go.   The punk with the iconic name and I didn’t last long, so there I was in a new state (literally), on my own with my daughter, and trying to work out who the hell I really was after all. 

One of the first things I noticed was how I didn’t have any healthy relationships with men in my life.  So I spent some rather intense months trawling singles sites and having phone sex and talking to men on the internet to the point that I couldn’t talk to people in real life anymore.  So I cut all that out, and tried to make friends in real life, and my next big realisation was that I didn’t know how to fit in and be ‘normal’.  After sticking out so much my whole life, it had become my comfort zone, and I freaked out as much about being ‘normal’, as a lot of normal folk would freak out about being ‘different’. 

So I decided to go undercover, don some ‘normal’ clothes, get a ‘normal’ haircut, try and slide into the reality of the majority of the people around me, and enrolled in Community Services at TAFE.  I gossiped, I talked about boring shit, I didn’t tell any stories about my life, and blended in quite nicely.  And all was going well, and the strain of being ‘normal’ wasn’t too bad, and I was getting great marks…….till two strong personalities in my class started pushing my boundaries.  One of the girls who was verging on being a bit of a bully came out with her homophobia, about how she thought AIDS was a good thing, and the class clown decided to come out with his racist dislike of our indigenous folk, and I just couldn’t hold my tongue.  I literally stood up in the class with the girl speaking homophobia, and bore witness to my experiences and why I thought she was wrong.  And I also spoke very deeply about the racist fella’s opinions and what else I thought he should know. 

My cover was blown.

And would you believe it, they both thought I was awesome for it and all of a sudden I was the most popular girl around!!  Sitting next to me became a privilege, I started clubbing with the more open minded ex-homophobe, and the ex racist fella did an essay on the indignities suffered by black fella’s!  Since there was no point pretending to be normal anymore, I just moved towards wearing clothes that were comfortable for me, and celebrated getting over my normalphobia by just being me.   And people loved me for it.  And I wasn’t reacting anymore.  And I started feeling really good about who I was.  And decided it was about time to go back to the Blue Mountains and catch up with old friends and let them know how successful I was being in my new life.

Little did I know that I was about to meet my soul mate……..

CHAPTER 3 - That first glimpse.........

She’d briefly seen Balthazar that age before when she’d been walking the street with her young male lover.  Her Adonis, young and strong, full of testosterone and laughs, smooth of skin, hung like Pan.  She’d glimpsed him a few times and watched her Adonis grow in battle of preen to outshine him.  They were similar, these two men.  Similar in style and cover and show.

She and her Adonis had walked together down the busy street.  Busy with gossip, busy with conversation, busy with sights and sounds and smells, busy with memories, busy with energies.  They walked the street where everyone met whatever from their past, whichever ghost they most needed to see.  They walked and she held to his arm, his brash young innocence, his muscled good looks, his sliding blend of male and female, his love of her dominance, his obvious difference, and she watched quietly from within.  She watched the reactions to her, to him, to the couple they made, she watched the assumptions made and judgements reached, she watched the souls of others fly by her in eyeballs, she watched what people wanted from her or from their belief of who she was.  And she watched for the qualities she wanted in her next lover, as indeed she knew she’d have one, for this young one, this Adonis, this fear of invisibility, this run away from her past, was a boat that was ferrying her to the other side.  To the shore she knew she’d seek before too long, that would welcome her as its own, and show her the map to herself.  So she watched from her safe place by his side and she’d noticed him......Balthazar. 

She saw his eyes and felt consumed by them instantly to the past they’d shared, the wealth of love, the tangling images one upon the other flickered inside, and she felt drawn into the whirlpool.  She’d seen him, known him, loved him, feared him, felt him, taught him, learnt him, burnt him, claimed him sometime before....but not in this lifetime.  She wrapped him around her like a warm cloak of sanity and peace and the dark......and knew they’d meet again.

...........

He’d seen her strength and soul but couldn’t look, as he was not quite ready to see her yet.  There were a few resolutions just made that he needed to put into practice before meeting her.  He had some patterns to clear, some habits to destroy, some judgements to challenge, some thoughts to stretch.  After a history of enslavement and fear and bloodshed, there were some wounds to heal.  Some salve to supply.

He started heeding that voice from across the gulf when it whispered to him.  Started seeing other selves within.  The strength and bones of his being.  He traversed the gulf and began building bridges.  And finally acknowledged the mother.

He looked around him and surveyed the damage he’d wrought in his battle lust.  He mourned the dead, begged forgiveness from the wounded, and set about paying recompense.  And looked to the mother to see truly within.  All she’d ever asked was that he see her in himself.  See her and love her part in him.  This was all she’d wanted all that time when he’d bullied and railed against her to tell him her secrets.  And even though he thought he’d destroyed her, she existed still in every separated particle, for each particle had once been part of her.

He wept at the waste and bloodshed caused, and the information he could have gained, insights grown, had he only asked respectfully for what he hungered.

And he knew that this time he’d hold her hand.  Respect and love her.  Treat her as divinity.  Share knowledge and support and growth and learning.  Revel in her power and sex and intellect.  Roar with her humour and passion and anger.  And he recognised her as Nimue.  He knew he’d see her soon.

CHAPTER 4 - One year later......

   She shed her young male lover, and her hatred of mankind.  Shed the skin of who she’d been.  Traversed the underground and died to herself, then rebirthed into who was within.  Shed her childhood, her rape, her lost innocence, her wounds, and grew into her whole self.  Her arching sweetly sexual side.  Her dreaming shadowed passionate side.  Her amazon leather bound worldly side.  Her darkly despairing alone side.  Her philosophical truth searching theory side.  Her strong joking tough side.  All were her, all were loved, all were divine.  She was Goddess incarnate and spent time on herself and her senses. 

She created ritual and body scent, inner clothes and outer clothes, stories and experiences, mind stretches and style.  She shed her past and stepped in the flow and decided it was time to return to the street.  To bring with her the new clothes she’d fashioned in the hills.  The new tools she’d learned to wield.  To marry her worlds and heal her past. 

So she’d come to the street, to bounce energy down the sidewalk, and enthral with her raptures.  Willing and able to engage in life around her, and draw in a partner, wrapped to the soul in hunger for learning and life.  She knew her partner would be a man.

And then she saw Balthazar.

.........

He’d walked through fire and found his own insides, his poet and dancer, his singer and wit.  He’d mapped the depths of the empty hole his anger had nestled in, and drawn up plans for it’s renovations.  But he was still moored to his past in the form of a girlfriend.  A ‘you’ll do for now cause I’d rather not be alone’ companion who had come to him in shared desolation.  They’d huddled together against the storm of the wild around them, and now when he stepped out she told him to close the door against the wind.  But the outside to him was full of wonder.  Bright with promise and new faces and inner insight.  The harsh jarring of his two lives was stringing him tight, tuning his bow.  But he didn’t know where to aim yet so he awaited the sign. 

And then he saw Nimue.

.........

It was in the local pub, inured against the cold with warm clothes and a mellow joint, cold beer by the fire.  She walked round to the back room to sit with her friends and saw Balthazar sitting there, perched on a stool.  Waves of emotion washed her and she went to strike up conversation.  Told him how her young lover had been intimidated by him.  Laughed about the young male pride, gazed in each others eyes.  Communicated without words or mouths or moving.  Balthazar sat with Nimue and their worlds began to collide.

And then another day, on the busy street, they’d chanced to pass, and stopped and enticed, and went for a coffee.  Lazily conversed on spirituality and horses, sex and iniquity....and sent out fine tendrils of lust and promise.  That night at the pub again, inured against the cold by sexual hunger, they’d chatted, then sitted, then glittered their way to a hotel room to shed the clothing of outside.

Love story

13 years ago Currawong and I began our journey together.  We’d seen each other around before that, and casually wondered about each other from a safe distance, but 13 years ago is when I was back visiting the Blue Mountains -  after having emigrated to South Australia a year earlier in search of change and adventure – and we clapped eyes on each other for the first time…….

And it was a serious event.  The full stereotypical catching of eyes from across a crowded pub, and neither of us could look away.  I’ve never, by the way, done such a thing with anyone else……..a moment of recognition, and spark, and melting into deep blue oceans, and time…..just…..stopped.  Only with my bird man have I felt like there was a body sized magnet within me that dragged me towards him whether I wanted to or not. 

It was the beginning of a long and winding path towards each other, through trust, and hurts, and pain, and fear, and all the other feelings a human often feels when taking up the challenge of merging into another human.  Into and around and under and behind and through.  After this initial meeting it took us over a year to actually start living together, and about 5 years before we really started to see each other for who we truly were. 

But after that first meeting, I went back to the Adelaide Hills and decided I needed to write what had happened, and remember it.  Because truth be known, I’ve been a bit of a wild thang in my youth, and decided the best way to get over the sexual repression of my fundamentalist upbringing was to root my way out of it.  So I did with massively happy abandon for quite a large percentage of my 20’s, which resulted in me realising quite clearly that there is a dearth of women role models in our culture apart from the Madonna or the Whore.  

Towards the end of my sexual exploration of the world, I’d reclaimed the title of whore in the old matrifocal sense of the world, and had proclaimed myself a ‘Holy Whore’.  And with this came a certain expectation of stereotype from the people around me.  I was fun, but not the sort of girl who got brought home to meet the parents.  Never taken seriously as I was ‘too easy’.  Or strong, whichever definition you prefer.  Anyway.  Currawong was the first man I’d ever come across who treated me with complete and total respect, and without ever alluding in a sideways manner to my sexual past.  And I wanted to remember it.   

So I started to write.

I was living in a blue slate mansion surrounded by cliffs with my mother and daughter, and studying Behavioural Science at Flinders University, but somehow I sank into a complete parallel reality, and for 3 months I disappeared into my room, and stayed up till 4 every morning writing, and slept in till 2 in the afternoon.  And went out on mad dashes into the city to have a few drinks and remember I was part of a bigger world.  And received visitors at the strangest times.  And through a kaleidoscope of other men, experienced a complete trip as I was writing, where I didn’t know if I was writing the book or the book was writing me.  Misty otherworldly snippets and people and stories coursed through my body, and I felt like I was channelling a whole other reality, and what came out in the early grey light of dawn, through my fingers tapping on my computer………was quite amazing.  I’d read it and think ‘who wrote that?!’ and get just as surprised at the outcomes, as I would if I was reading someone else’s book.  It went from being an account of our meeting, to becoming an autobiography, self help manual, science fiction fantasy, and visualisation of what I wanted to manifest.  And after a few chapters, these ancestors turned up……….

And when it was written, I bundled it up, with a bunch of crystals and velvet and candles and sacred objects and clothes and a tent and jumped in my little Holden Gemini of 1984…….and drove off into the sunset of the Australian desert in the peak of summer, playing and driving through temperatures  of over 50 degrees, and decided I was going to face all my fears, and run into the arms of my Saturn Return, burning my book at the beginning to release it all to the universe, let it go, and call in my future. 

Which is a whole other story.

But on the way home, I stopped in at the Blue Mountains again, after not having seen him after our movie stare and first meeting for a year, and just as I was about to leave and drive back to the Adelaide Hills, he walked into the pub I was sitting in, and where we’d first met, and our eyes caught each other again.

I’d written a book about him, and he’d written a song about me, and everything that I’d written about in my book had happened.  And when eventually we got together and continued our journey leading us to where we are now, we started off by completing all the other things I wrote about in the book, and fulfilling the manifest destiny that was written on the wall the moment we met. 

Now that book has been largely buried for the last 12 years, and I think it’s time it came out.  Just after I wrote it, I showed it to lots of people, and read it to folk all the way through my desert journey, and I had incredible reactions to it.  One amazing man, who was a very hard man with a very soft centre, and who I met in Alice Springs had tears in his eyes after I read him the second chapter about Balthazar. He couldn’t believe that I was a woman, and I’d written so clearly what happened in his head.  How did I know how to write like a man?  Some people said it was one of the best books they’d read.  And only last year, a woman I hadn’t seen in 10 years and I bumped into each other, and the first thing she said to me was ‘have you got that book published yet?’  No I didn’t.  But it keeps jumping around at the back of my head and reminding me of it’s existence, and this idea just keeps playing hopscotch in my mind of serialising the story here for a part of the book………and then selling it complete on a memory stick in a cute little crocheted pouch for anyone who wants to know what happens. 

And all you gorgeous people who are reading my blog now, might do me the favour of giving me some feedback about it………and maybe it will finally get published, even if I have to self publish it, which I suppose I am in a way really.  It occurred to me only the other week, that this blog is truly a living book.  A book that’s being written as I live it, and stories coming hot off the press of my reality. 

So here goes.  I called the book

“Balthazar and Nimue – A Love Story”

CHAPTER 1 - She Wakes

Once there was a woman who’d lived many lives, and her name was Nimue. 

She tumbled from lifestyle to definition to attitude to face, amazing herself at her flexibility.  Then one day she noticed that she never quite finished anything, or stayed anywhere long enough, or knew anyone deeply enough to actually let anything or anyone in......realised she’d danced through life as a shadow, miming the actions and staying cold as ice inside.

 Then she got pregnant from a one night stand and had herself a baby girl.  Discovered her woman power, found her witch self, and startled onto knowledge of women’s hidden past, shunted from their glory by a jealous, angry, one god.  Roared at the injustices and suppression railed against her kind.  Went through a time of near separatist lesbianism, rattled feminist theory, women’s literature, and her mother’s hidden faces.  Tried the multitudinous forms of alternative therapy and scourged many demons from her past.  New realisations began to emerge. 

She started looking.  Peeling pieces off her skin and examining what lay beneath. 

Scratched at old wounds and picked at old scars and started to dive beneath the surface of the emotional stability she’d set anchor in.  She examined anew the multitudes of one night stands and sexual encounters and serious relationships and friendships she’d set up through her life.  Realised the stories and fabrics and lies and deceptions she’d been fed.  Stepped from the front of the mirror of the reality she’d looked at all her life and saw the great worlds beyond.

She’d been spawned by denial, grown on guilt and fear, and weaned early on a diet of loneliness and self hate, managing her shackles as well as able, shrugging her baggage on her back.  She’d begun life alone, kept from social circles by her glimpses of hidden knowledge.  Knowing that somewhere, somehow, it had to be different.  It took her a while to find where to look.  She delved into her childhood and discovered some ghosts. Some hidden evil deadly ghosts.  Some give you nightmares ghosts.  Some wreak havoc and ruin in your relationships ghosts.  Some nasty, never live men ghosts.  She recognised the underworld of her fathers and brothers sexual fantasies.  And she finally remembered her earlier entanglement and childhood rape.  All the denial and suppression and energy and passion it had taken to keep these memories from her were unleashed.  She felt emotions she’d never before felt, shocked into feeling the world around her.  Stepped from the wrap she’d been held in, numb to her power and life.

 She shed her lesbian skin and entered the shadier waters of the bisexual realms.  She mixed through the silky liquid of ambivalence and suppleness, paradox and ambiguity.  The light above the murky waters she’d swum all her life was becoming stronger.  Her mind and instinct swam before her, leading her onwards and upwards, towards her own truth.

She remembered who she was underneath all the layers of skin that had kept her iced in self defeat.  She shed those skins and discovered magical facets inside her, privately polished to glorious shine by earlier invisibility, ready to glow to the world she created around her.

 She realised she’d never had a father, brother, uncle, male friend....she’d never let them in again after her childhood realisation that all men were fucked and would only feed you betrayal and lies.  She’d avoided any reminder that a part of her lay in her enemy, and a part of them in her. She’d worshipped the mother and ignored the consort.  She’d slept with her anger at night.

She whirled from her altered perception and fell into love and lust with a young Adonis, an unthreatening androgynous man with which to test out her new knowledge.  She used him as her escape from her home, the street which held such memories and ghosts, to run to the hills to shed more skins.  Not long after, she shed the young Adonis, and began afresh in a crystalline setting with her mother and daughter.  The trinity of womankind that rocked her through life waters.

CHAPTER 2 - He Searches

Once there was a man named Balthazar, who knew there was a flow somewhere, but everytime he thought he’d entered it’s waters it turned to mud and broken shells slicing his feet and crawling up his shins in sludge and murk.  Inside lay pure light of truth and whole that struggled to shine but instead got snuffed by the death and stupidity around him.  He tried to be his best, tried to give his best, tried to show his best, but when faced with people that let him be his worst and still adored him, he refused to unfurl.  He knew he could grasp the clarity of wholeness but saw no reason to reach it with such blindness around him.

He fucked people over and stole their hearts, and stomped on their entrails in defeat.  He shoved his knife of light into the innards and annals of the life around him and held his blade up despairingly, bloodied with fear and grief.  Searching always for the limit, the boundary, the quiet and calm ‘no’ to let him stop.

In the quiet times he curled inside to see his heart and the grief knee deep and warm.  His wound, his bloody sore, his gaping hole, his soft and lightly beating mass of ache.  He cried for his scars and the pain he inflicted, and knew somehwere that things could be different, but how?

He’d educated himself in his cruelty, knew that his culture of phallus worship was a relatively recent upstart, shattering the hold of the mother.  Knew that woman held the power of life that he held in death.  Knew that the customs and rituals he saw around him were mere shadows of what had been and could be.  Knew that somewhere he held the role of consort.  But when he’d first tried to share and show his learning’s he’d been disgusted at the meek obedience of the women around him.  Repulsed by their slavish devotions and ‘fuck me’ ways.  Horrified by their ignorance of power and how it worked, and their refusal to accept and wield responsibility and strength.  And even more sickened by the women who hated his kind, but struggled to become him.

So he kept to his ways, cheating on his women, drinking to oblivion, shattering love’s hope and grinding it to mush.  Forgetting small pleasantries, ignoring soft feelings, spitting in the eye of feminine wiles.  He created children to grow in the womb of the world and then left them crying in his wake.  He pushed and ground and kicked and stabbed and crushed and bruised and spat.  He created a religion of cock for his women, then fucked them into despair.

Till one day it stopped.  He could feel no longer.  In his rage at his world he’d destroyed even his own anger.  He suddenly saw with thumping clarity his own stupidity and fear.  Saw how he’d destroyed others in arrogance, and not realised till now how they reflected him.  Understood that even in his seeming rebellion against the way things were and could or should be, he’d actually played a part he didn’t choose.  He’d pillaged and raped his own life and become a puppet for those he despised.  And he’d let his own despair fashion him a tool of hate and given his life to it.  He was an empty shell.  The passion he could have moulded and fed and grown had been used up in death, with hooded skulls and blood.

A quiet, wry, deep voice somewhere at the back of his mind started whispering over the gulf.  Told him he was at a crossroad.  He could fill his emptiness with himself and green shoots of growth, or fill it anew with the death and gore he knew so well.  He could bed his anger or let it translate itself into passion and direction.  The choice was his......

Celtic knot picture from   http://www.spelwerx.com/celticknots.html