Future Visions

Many moons ago, we were living in a sleepy village of the Adelaide Hills, and we’d just started our market.  The war had broken out in Iraq, and we drove our old Ford with hundreds of statements of peace written on it as a mobile petition to Canberra…………  And that time was almost like a mini Summer of Love.  All sorts of folk from all the stratospheres of our culture came to our market and got loved.  It almost became a cult how loving our market was.  It was a standard of care that we had for everyone who chanced upon us on sunny or stormy Sundays, no matter who they were or how they looked. As the top of the supposed hierarchy of the market, Currawong and I had a unique opportunity to give the power to everybody.  And turn it into a circle, where everyone was loved and appreciated no matter how obnoxious they were.  People came and attacked us, and died with us, and sneered at us, and fought in front of us, and generally brought some of their worst behaviours to the commons, and we all just loved them and us and it, and did our best to treat everyone as equals.  People also came with their best and their most eccentric and generous and trippy and vulnerable behaviours and we loved them even more.  And I’d love to keep going as I’m sure you can tell, but the market is not really part of the story I want to tell.  It was an amazing time and I’ll write about that another day, but for the purposes of this story, there was a particular event that really changed and challenged my perception of the world. 

There was this fella who’d been a hermit for about 15 years.  And he chose the market as the place to come out and play with people again, and he decided to organise a meeting for peace.  Because he’d been a hermit for 15 years he really didn’t have a huge social network, and as it was a small town, not many people turned up.  So there we were early one evening, Currawong and I, the ex-hermit and another friend, sitting in a chilly hall to talk about peace.  The first thing he asked was what peace was.  And we very quickly realised that all we knew about peace, was what was absent from it. We knew all the things that peace wasn’t, and when there weren’t any of them around, then that would have to be peace.  We were looking at the photo negatives of peace, rather than looking at the colour photo. And then we started wondering……..if we didn’t know what peace WAS…….then how the hell could we create it?  And how much have we collectively created all our own hell and strife, with our focus on all the things that peace isn’t, so that we can have it?

So many of us spend our precious creative energy on all the things that are wrong with the world, and each other, and the government, and corporations, and Monsanto, and our modern day diets, and the list is endless of all the things that we’re trying to stop for the good of us, and the planet, and those poor children, and the people over there, and if we all just do the right things and stop doing the wrong things, then it will all get better and we’ll all be happy……………..  In fact we’re so focused on educating ourselves and each other about all the wrong things with the world, that we’ve forgotten that we’re creating it all with our thoughts, and forgotten too, that maybe one of the most liberating, enlightened, revolutionary and loving acts we can ever perform, is that of creating magic with our thoughts and our minds, and in the creative energy of dreaming a positive, peaceful, respectful, honourable, honest and healthy future.  And present reality. 

Now I really got into the more creative aspect as environmental activism, after watching The Secret, and feeling despairing and disempowered after watching An Inconvenient Truth.  I came up with all sorts of ideas to create a more positive focus for our collective futures.  Planting hemp along the roads, and in any spare place, to soak up carbon dioxide and be turned into paper, neo plastic, and all the gazillions of things hemp can be made into.  Creating public focus walls, with folk and groups and schools doing tiles of all the wonderful things they wanted in the future world. When we were school shopping years ago, we spent time at a Maharishi school, where they had a whole wall dedicated to what the kids wanted to see more of in the world, and they meditated on it every morning.  There was more rain, reforestation, safe biosphere, and all the other sorts of things that make a person feel good thinking about.  I also wanted to try and write about it, and create a positive future vision rather than the more easily available apocalyptic horror stories, that are put about in mainstream media as possible futures. 

Growing up in an apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, I’ve been thinking about ‘the end days’ for most of my life.  Even after leaving my childhood religion, I came across channellers, and mystics, and talk about the ‘great wave of consciousness’ and all the 2012 conspiracies.  And now we’re here.  And the most curious thing has happened!  I’ve always contemplated a future after ‘the shit hit the fan’ as being mostly agrarian based.  Primitive.  No electricity or technology.  Hard work.  And Currawong’s been having this love affair with science, and in the last couple of months, for the first time ever in my life, I’ve been dreaming of a future after whatever shift is on it’s way has happened, with science and technology and a quasi mystical science, that creates things based on cohesion and harmony with the environment rather than money.  Sustainability rather than greed. 

And I wrote this thing years ago in the period I was just talking about, and revisited it lately, and found myself adding technical bits to it, and it felt goodJ  I want to keep having my internet love affairs after ‘the shift’.  I want to keep being able to travel in freedom.  I want abundance and gardens and flying machines and funky earthship style homes and little pockets of communities where anything that people can dream up as a lifestyle can be lived respectfully.

So here’s what I wrote years ago with some added bits……

The earth is me.  Microcosm’s of macrocosm’s abound.  Remember that model in the 60’s who asphyxiated slowly to death when they painted her skin?  We were doing that to the earth before.  Before we realised that we’d created it through our fear and pain that we really were seperated from all that we saw.  Before we realised that we were creating it all, and could simply take our attention away from our complete and total destruction, and instead create a happy, joyful, peaceful, greatfull reality with our thoughts.  Pull up the concrete and the hard building scabs on our skin and let our skin breathe.  Isn’t it funny that most of the most watered and fertile land on the planet was covered with concrete and bitumen.  Before we realised.  Before we pulled it up and travelled back along the yarn to the times when we moved around a lot, owned few and well loved things, took care of the earths skin like our own.  Before we realised that all the gentle metaphors the many prophets, seers and poetesses had given us were literal advice stories and instructions to living a better life.  Isn’t it wonderous and lushsome that we all collectively got it.  Got our oneness. 

Flowmads made their artistic ways throughout the countryside and cityscape, pulling some of the scabs off our skin, letting the white and shriveled parts of our flesh see the sunlight again, breathe the blue skies, grow weeds then flowers then fruits in our flesh again.  Wherever they went they left green ground and tent sites, sunbreathing shelters and coloured flags, lush gardens and freebreathing trees.  They also left life enhancing sculptures and weavings and sounding pieces that aged along with everything else. 

When all the human animals remembered their animal selves and stopped being tamed lions pacing round their cages, they took up the artistic, shamanic, and percussive arts, telling stories and leaving inspirations.  They all started pulling up the scabs in whichever ways they could.  Peeling back the hard encrusted beliefs and bitumens and crumbling ways. 

They started birthing in colourful tents and underground grottoes, cool river pools and warm salty baths.  Their births became ecstatic and orgasmic, private moments of a families deep connection and love for each other.  Babies were welcomed into the world gently and quietly, being left to acclimatise in whatever way they needed and their families felt drawn to.  A soft lit, easy slide into life and awareness outside the womb.  A simple instruction into the arts of birthing human animals. And safe and respectful medicines and procedures sat quietly in the wings, in case they were needed.

Their sexuality was allowed to express the myriad of ways and paths imagined by the unique collective consciousness, and understood as ways that the universe had found to express itself.  Everyone’s sexual journey was seen as increasing and improving compassion and empathy for the vast sea of possibility that is sex. 

Death became far less traumatic, as we made it more part of life.  We formed elaborate and soulful rituals around letting go, washing and dressing the body, singing and playing music and telling final stories.  Carrying the dead around the places at home they liked best, and then burying them in the gentle folds of the earth, and planting tree’s on them, so we could always eat fruit from the tree and know that we were eating of the essence of our loved ones. 

We realised we were all one literally with the cosmos, our planet, other animals, each other, and ourselves.  Everything we did, we did to ourselves.  And we created it all with our thoughts.  We started creating a beautiful, unified, loving, greatful, diverse, respectful wholeness.  A healing for us all as a planet and everything.  Letting the waters and ourselves flow.

Because we’re all made up of mostly water, and we drink it, swim in it, bathe in it, eat it, use it and love it, as it carries memories of all the places it’s been. Water and energy, that moves and flows constantly.  For whom stagnation is death.  Water and energy that is affected, changed by, and remembers thoughts and where it’s been.    Water and energy that’s melted into our atmosphere from interstellar journeys, bringing knowledge and memories and connectings with us and our water already flowing.  Water and energy that travels an 8 million year cycle of plunging into the depths of our earths heart, and then floating up to the seabed again through hydrothermic vents.  Water and energy that remember being locked in rooms to make bargain goodies.  Water and energy that are a constant flow of stories and memories and learnings to be heard whenever we want.  Water and energy that contain the ingredients for everything.  And who respond most of all to love and gratitude. 

We became flowmads and caretakers, and whatever else we wanted, and we lost all the baggage that politer religions suggested we leave behind, as we started living the reality that everything around us is us.  What constructions did we like on our skin?  What elements did we want in our water and blood?  What did we want to do with our fertile valleys and shores that begged to have food grown from them?  How did we thank and love the other animals, our brothers and sisters and diverse parts of self, who provided so much for us? 

We told ourselves the truth about how our ownership had become a burden, and we relinquished our burdens for the flow.  We strived to retrieve our animal natures, our noble sovereign natures, and placed ourselves back in the wheel of equals.  We set up Human Animal Wildlife Sanctuaries…….where human animals can just be.  Can remember what it feels, looks, sounds and tastes like when life is lived in bliss, being simply who we are.  Putting love, thanks and respect into our food, our clothing, our habitats, our water, our families, our lovers, our children.  All of us animals living cohesively, respectfully, co-operatively, lovingly together. 

And then we met together with all the other animals and traded, and played, and danced, and sung, and created community together.  Created the magic of community that gave form to our glimmering dreams of sharing tasks and learnings.  Community where there was room for everyone, and everyone was loved and thanked for the unique magic they brought to the whole.  Where we understand that what we focused on we got more of.  And the best and most fertile ground for this community to grow in was the bed of a market.  Spontaneous, fertile markets that erupted from daily living and life around the areas we cohabitated, or on the trails of flowmads. 

Technology exploded into radical places when we got rid of the money god from our psyches and explored and invented for the good of all.  We searched the depths of the deep deep seas and found the secrets down below.  We sent off crafts to the outer reaches of our galaxy and beyond, exploring our neighbouring life forms.  Sky craft became our motorized mode of travel, avoiding the need for highways, cutting out completely the toll of dead animals taken by roads, and freeing up our means of travel.    Run on water and built with hemp and recycled parts, they revolutionized the way we move.  Solar, wind and water power became the standard, and our esteemed spiritual scientists worked out myriad ways of cleaning up the messes our ancestors created.  Our homes became far more natural, nestled into hills for insulation, passively solar and well placed for growing gardens within, on top, and without.  

And we collectively grew up, married the matrifocal mother to the patrifocal father and welcomed their learnings from the lengths and breadths of where we’d been in our evolution.  We all woke up from our self induced coma, and recognised that the time for change was now, and we really were the ones that we were waiting for all along.  We’ve explored the far reaches of human potential, and now it’s time to meet up again, take notes, and put it all into perspective as we evolve into an age of enlightenment, love, thanks, and consciousness.  We all knew the toll, deep down, that our greed and hungry culture has taken on ourselves and our earth.  And we made the changes necessary to make it a whole lot easier not only for ourselves, but for all of our brothers and sisters. We take responsibility for shaping the world as we want it and need it to be for a long, healthy and happy future for us and many many generations to come. 

Baggage.....

So picture this.  We’re all standing and sitting in a massive, gi-normous airport, watching the baggage carousel slowly spinning round, watching other people picking up their baggage.  Picking up their stuff.  Their learning’s that have filtered through their family, religion, schooling, childhood, environment, culture, country of birth.  That have often come packaged with rules.   As well as all the bits of baggage that they’ve collected along the way, not to mention the invisible memory of the baggage they’ve lost. 

And we’re all watching each other, watching each other claim our baggage.  Some of it is all fancy and designer made and covered with emblems of great wealth and opulence.  Some of it is very similar and easily attainable and looks like a lot of the other baggage carriers.  Some of it is handmade and colourful and totally unique looking.  Some of it is in wild shapes and sizes that contain instruments and tools and costumes and artifacts.  Some of it is tattered and worn and sad looking.  Heavy, and offering discomfort and unhappy carrying.  Some of it is indefinably magic and mysterious and delightful looking.  Some of it looks ordinary, but for some obscure reason you get the feeling that picking it up would be a dream.  Some of it is rotten and stinking and falling apart and messy.  Some of it looks like it could come alive and savage a human easily.  Some of it has badges and symbols emblazoned on it that look surreal, or otherworldly, or evil.  Some of it bears the badges and tickets of an incredibly far and wide travelled life.  Some of it has spilled open and is leaking it’s secrets to the world.  Some of it advertises on the outside what’s within in a lurid fashion. 

And we’re watching.  We’re watching who picks up what.  Getting some surprises when forlorn looking people pick up opulent baggage.  When tiny people pick up huge instruments.  When trashy looking people pick up the baggage of a genius.  When earth mothers pick up the rigid files of a lawmaker.  When humans of great beauty and talent pick up the baggage of depression and self hate.  When the ‘perfect’ people pick up rotten stinking bags that are bursting their seams with filth. 

There’s all sorts of surprises when watching the great carousel of life, and the people who are claiming their baggage. 

A lot of the watchers are looking with judgement, and you can almost witness the invisible tallies and categories and stereotypes and lists of woes that are being added up and subtracted and multiplied within their heads and hearts.  A lot of them are not looking at each other and hoping that others will respect this and not look at them either.  There’s also a lot of them who are looking at each other with compassion, watching each other claim baggage with love in their eyes, giving each other little signs and signals of acknowledgement, acceptance, respect.  And those that make assumptions based on the appearance of the person, as to what their baggage will be.  Often they are proved right, and spend their time only with the other people that have the same baggage as them.  A lot of them making a huge song and dance about their wonderful baggage, what lovely baggage it is, and look at my baggage!!  Don’t you wish it was yours??  And a lot of them have code words and songs and statements that define them from the others, and their baggage all wears the signs of their uniforms, and they sing at each other as they claim their baggage, and then each other.   A lot of them are obviously kinda ashamed of their baggage, but they claim it nonetheless, trying their best to muster a sense of self worth and pride even before the judgemental glares of others.  And there’s a lot of people who are obviously victimised by their baggage, no matter how sweet, or innovative, or beautifully mended, or lovingly patched they may be, they are victimised nonetheless.  But most of them pick up their baggage with the unselfconsciousness of familiarity.  After all, they’ve been carrying round that baggage all their lives, they’re connected to it and consider it their second skin. 

If you look really closely, you can notice there is a lot of comparisons going on, and some people looking relieved when others pick up the more socially unacceptable baggage and cop the derision, rude noises, judgement, and approbation of the crowd.  They’re relieved cause some one else is copping it and not them this time.  Or somebody else has it worse than them. 

A huge amount of us, more than you could ever know, silently slink away from our nastier baggage, the baggage that we’re ashamed of, and covertly steal back later to claim it when nobody else is there, or only when the other people we know would understand are there……

Of course there’s also the people who send somebody else to claim their baggage.  Or get it delivered to them.  And quietly sit behind their walls, sometimes even making the most noise and opposition to a certain sort of baggage, from the afar of the internet, or other public forums, that nobody but them knows, is secretly hidden in their own closet.

Some people have learnt the clever trick of having a seemingly innocuous baggage holder on the out, hiding completely different baggage on the inside.  And some have baggage that everyone else can recognise, hiding just one or two little trinkets inside that would get them thrown out of the baggage group if anyone found out.

Some people have a completely new set of baggage carriers every time you see them, but what’s inside stays always the same.

And see, I’ve had lots of different sorts of baggage throughout my life.  I’ve traded one for the other along my voyage, depending on where I am, who else is in the airport, and what my experience has taught me.  Some very incongruous and unexpected baggage has passed through my hands in the various  byways and plane paths and highways of my life. 

I’ve learnt it’s our baggage that defines us.  Or maybe more to the point what we do with our baggage.  What we’ve learnt from the places it has taken us.   How we’ve mended the holes, and the scars, and the rips.  And when we’re really on good terms with our baggage, when we can own it, and claim it, and be completely sure about it’s worth, and teachings and tools……then all the watching and judging baggage holders and avoiders, can just keep going about their business, cause you’ve got your baggage sorted. 

And it’s also our baggage that divides us.  And unites us if we let it. 

If we all decided to just camp out in the airport for a while, and unpack our baggage, and show each other our dirty undies and secret compartments and hidden treasures……..I can almost guarantee you that you’d be surprised about who really had what baggage, deep inside their outsides.  And you’d realise that we share far more baggage than we let ourselves know. 

So now picture this.  I’m walking into the airport with all my favourite clothes on.  My harem style pants with the velvet waist band that I made from some real Indian silk, fresh from a stock creating trip, that was given to me on the first day I brought Lilith to our market after she was born, and has been through many incarnations.  The diamond cut hippy skirt with the applied crochet circle, that I traded for a crocheted creation with that cool chick with dreadlocks, who pretended I didn’t exist anymore, after she heard some stories about my baggage that she judged as worthy of blocking me out.  That purple top I made out of a tube of stretchy purple that I zigzagged through the middle, leaving me a shipwrecked look for a top and a pair of pants.  Made me look like a great purple pirate when I wore them together.   My hairs up in the style for which I crafted it, with long healthy slightly curled hair streaming out, beneath the dreadlocked horns that I’ve sculpted with a strip of wool wrapped wire plaited through my dreads.  I’m wearing jewellery for once, the big lapis lazuli and coral laced chunky necklace I traded a beautiful mantle for, with that awesome woman in Eumundi, who was inspired to never use soap again, after I left a residue of my scent on the top of her shoulder after hugging.   My favourite rings, the diamante studded spider and the copper scarab.  And I’ve got on my handmade felted boots that I stomped courage, strength, compassion, empathy, love, peace, respect and freedom into, through different coloured felt stamped onto my sole by a muddy earth.  

And I’m walking into the airport, and before all the different eyes, standing in my power and proud of who I am, and willing to recognise myself in all the optic nerves connected to memories eyeballing me.  Wrapt with what I’ve learnt from my life and my travels and the baggage I’ve carried, but most of all totally in love with the baggage I carry now, all the nice bags and darker bags and secret bags and life long bags and messy bags and nasty bags……….all of them are embroidered with gold and yarns, and encrusted with gems, and have features that may or may not fit, but make some sort of sense in the end, and in the interim, and in all the bits that went before. 

And there’s some parts of my baggage that I’d like to share with you.  Not all of it though, cause that would take a really long time, but there are some precious bits of my baggage that I’d like to unpack with you.  Cause I’m not ashamed of any of it.  I’ve got some baggage that has parcels in it that are severely judged, and some that are in the public discourse at the moment, as people stridently take sides, offer statements of ‘How could they do that!’ and the like, trying to convince themselves and others that there’s only one right way.   I suspect that there’s some folk who have made assumptions and judgements about me, based on my mother earth kinda appearance, and that’s just not healthy for anyone.    And I’m  noticing more and more that there’s a growing movement of people just wanting themselves and everyone else to be who they are, and get over the judgement. 

But maybe more to the point, after travelling through a childhood and picking up various baggage and parcels that often contained lies, hypocrisy, betrayal, duplicity, and hurt, I’ve spent my adult life creating a collection of comfortable, claimable baggage, that carries things with honesty, trust, authenticity, and my personal truths.   

So I’m walking up to that great carousel in one of the many airports of life, and the first bag I’m claiming is my baggage of rules.  It’s full of zippers and compartments, and made out of sandpaper with soft edgings and handles.   And has an enormous amount of pockets that are full of information sheets, and lengthy lists that have boxes in which to write ticks and crosses.  There’s some clandestine pockets hiding other people’s score sheets and test results, and secret judgements I’ve made, that I pull out occasionally to make myself feel better or worse with.  And there’s also a tool bag made out of leather, where I keep the tools of the lessons I’ve learned from rules and unlearning rules.  

So let’s sit down in a comfortable seat for a while, cause I’d like to show you a few of the tools I’ve sculpted along the way, but first I want to give you a glimpse of my external/internal rule sheet. 

Which has a whole heap of rules that I inherited by being born, right at the beginning of my sprawling parchment made from my skin. That have been slowly crossed out, or have arrows pointing to later realisations.  And there’s a big line about a tenth of the way down that has THE ONLY ULTIMATE TRUTH IS THAT THERE IS NO ULTIMATE TRUTH written, with lots of underlines, and everything going before it squared off.  This is the epiphany I wrought through eating cheese and playing solitaire for two weeks, after leaving my home, family, friends, school, religion, horse, cat, cello, piano, and area, under police escort, to go and live with my sister at the age of 16.    Everything was gone.  My carpet had well and truly been ripped.  And this was the best sense I could make of the void, that the disappearance of so many rules and regulations had left.  The rest of my rule sheet is full of diverse rules, beliefs, stereotypes and judgements that I’ve felt variously oppressed and esteemed by through different stages of my life journey.  The other main rules that really stand out in their scattered places around my sheet is the one that says WE’RE ALL CONNECTED,  written in blood, and the calligraphy of THOUGHT CREATES REALITY that I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve quipped.  There’s a woolly kind of fibre that’s a cross between carefully crafted yarn and freeform wildness tucked in an envelope that sits in a pocket on a far flung reach of the parchment.  And with the fibre, nestle small pages full of all the wool rules I took on, and the rules I crossed out, and rules that I deliberately broke.  With little addendums of all the rules I didn’t even know existed, that I broke anyway.  And somewhere over here is the one I saw time and time again on my travels, YOU BECOME WHAT YOU HATE (OR FOCUS ON), and over there on the right is another rule that I’ve had to learn time and time again, that EVERYTHING IS PERFECT…….no matter how imperfect it may have been at the time.  And these are the main rules that I really took on, to steer me through my journey, and that I learnt from my own experience, so I know they’re true for me.      

And scattered through the whole bag, are scrunched up bits of paper that have rules that I’ve totally abandoned, and in some pockets, the scrunched up papers have been neatly flattened out with realisations written on them.    

But look at some of these tools! This flamboyantly coloured pair of glasses that when you put on, makes you see only two old men, is the one I made when I was a baby dyke going to my first ever Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.  There was all this talk and discussion and energy about Fred Nile, a fanatic and dogmatic religious dude, who had organised a pray for rain meeting, so he could rain on our parade.  In the weeks following it, there was an article in a gay and lesbian magazine that described a journalist going undercover to the pray for rain meeting.  Equipped with a wig, mobile phone, conservative clothes and a beeper, she strode into the meeting………..to find two old men.  All that fuss about two old men.  It started me wondering about those two old men.  Maybe they were the same two old men who I called ‘them’, and who I expected to judge me, as I walked around in my shaved head, black leather splendour.  And maybe only being two of ‘them’ explained why I’d never actually encountered any homophobia.  Maybe my world wasn’t so surrounded with judgement as I thought.  Mind you, I had friends that suffered endless homophobia, and here are the talismans I have of them, and I know and understand that my experience isn’t everyone’s, but this is my bag afterall.  And I’ve used these glasses often, anytime I’m tempted to feel oppressed by rules or a moral majority or a bunch of ‘them’, whoever they may be.

And this tool that looks remarkably like a headdress, with big scooping ears to listen, and a great hat that assisted in standing in the shadows, and dark glasses that hide microscopes, and a big soft drapey scarfey thing that hangs in a loving hug to feel my heart……..is the disguise I wore for many many years, whilst trying to unlearn dogma, conditioning, fears, superiorities and insecurities…….and rules.  All I knew was that along with there being no ultimate truth, I knew absolutely nothing about most of the things I was interested in.  So I lurked, and I listened, and I observed with every faculty I knew how to use……and I learnt. 

And all these beautifully coloured glass bottles held safely in satin pockets, contain the essences of those lessons.   Here, have a whiff of that charge I got when I found a twin soul in an unexpected incarnation.  And have a feel of this satiny liquid that pours through my body in those moments I have of complete and total oneness with everyone and thing in the universe.  If I open this cork,  you can hear the yip of joy I let out when I get something totally and completely right…..for me.  And have a sniff of the odourous stench I get in my nostrils when I’ve done something that I really wished I hadn’t.  And search my head for ways that I can both acknowledge and transform that part of me.  Have a taste of the bittersweet tang I get on my  tongue, when I have to admit that I’ve been totally wrong, and it’s time to backtrack and find a more authentic path. 

And this tool, this gem encrusted mirror, is the one that I learnt about how you get what you expect, or focus on.  I made this one when I was comparing photo’s with that awesome German woman in Tubingen, in her student loft, of our times in Belfast at nearly exactly the same time, 6 months before.   We’d even stayed in the same youth hostel.  Her photos were full of tanks, armed men, steel clad police stations, huge and aggressive murals on bombed walls.  And mine were of pleasantly pissed and thoroughly pleasant Belfastians in pubs, taking me out to dinner, driving me to the Giant’s Causeway, and generally sightseeing.  She was a student political activist, and I was a frequently pissed tourist.  And we both got what we were looking for.

And this little photo-memory book contains all the reminders I’ve got in my yarns about how worthwhile turning around to face fears is.  All the pretty moments when I was so overwhelmed with fear, but decided to jump anyway, and realised that hulking great dragon chasing me was really a Pekinese yapping at my heels.  

But that’s enough of my baggage of rules now, let’s zip it back up and place it on my trolley.  I’m walking back to the carousel again, for another part of my collection.  But this is enough of my baggage sharing.  I gotta get back to the family now, and get on with my journey, but we’ll catch each other at another airport carousel soon………






And no Baltazar and Nimue this time, instead I'm going to leave you with a song that I was obsessed with for a while.  I used to play it over and over as I sat in my little house and gazed out the window or at my little stained glass candle holder, and wished and wished for Currawong to leave where he was and come and be with me. I think it worked! And on borrowing Northern Exposure from the library I was reunited with it, so I had to share.....

And check out the words!! Quite a song for our times.....

I am the crow of desperation
I need no fact or validation
I span relentless variation
I scramble in the dust of a failing nation
I was concealed
Now I am stirring
And I have waited for this time.

I am the termite of temptation
I multiply and find my population
I am the wheel
I am the turning
And I will lay my love around you.

I am the sea of permutation
I live beyond interpretation
I scramble all the names and the Combinations
I penetrate the walls of explanation
I am the will
I am the burning
And I will lay my love around you.

I am the will
I am the yearning
And I will lay my love around you.

  

A note to the humans........

Say what you like about the nature of humans, for my money we’re absolutely spectacular.  Just sit for a moment and let your mind range over the many manifestations of our creativity, will, spontaneous urges, thoughts, theories, and mind sets that you can think of.  And consider our human nature’s……….our excessive capacity for beauty and our extreme depths of horror.  All the wonderful and terrible things we’ve done together, and on our own, and to the planet, and our homes and gardens, and to our pets and domestic animals, and our wild landscapes, and our sexuality, and our birthing, and our dying, and our collective human spirit. 

And we’ve done the most incredible thing, all of us together, that has never been done by any other species on the planet.  The scope and magnitude of which is absolutely mind boggling.  We’ve pitched our wills against the compelling force and energy of the synergy and symbiosis of the entire universe.  Against the tidal flows of the natural world that cycle constantly and eternally all around us.  We’ve gritted our teeth and dug in our heels and refused the pull of all the natural eddies that shiver around us, and we’ve suppressed our animal self and free born inner purpose based on ideals, and belief systems, and hierarchies, that demand trustworthiness of us.  And routines, and schedules, and rule following, and standardised time, and stability, and settling down, and dream repression, and personality shaping, and a character and nature that stay…….one……..way.  Otherwise you’d be having your cake and eating it too, and sitting on the fence, and confusing people, and too potentially dangerous and flexible and adaptable and changeable and that’s just too damn scary. 

We’ve known for a very long time now how to shape and control the human nature, how to encourage our young to put on their own blinkers, segregate and divide, and become consumers or warriors for the great monoculture in the sky.  The Spartans used to throw a baby to the ground after it was born to create warriors, the Mayan’s would bury the placenta on the battlefield, and we circumcise our baby boys and separate baby’s from families as soon as possible.  And mothers from fathers, and brothers from sisters, and divide into age groups, and abilities, and likes and dislikes and the scene is set for a rollicking good old war drama, as we play out on the world stage all the inadequacies and fears we hide inside.   Fear of death and mortality becomes a war on terrorism, evolution, and drugs.  Fear of sex and birth becomes a war on homebirth and honest, trusting, relationships.  Fear of sickness becomes a war on cancer and a multibillion dollar industry in medicine and insurance.  Fear of our essential human natures becomes an open slather war on the entire natural world.  

So we buy our beliefs, and our basic characters that all our choices refer to, and our sexuality and our birthing capacity, and our fear of death, and all our little labels and belief systems and uniforms and badges and find the right groups that represent who we are, and then we insure everything we have to prevent mishap or grief, and if we just follow all the rules and party lines, then everything will be all right, everyone will be easily identified and catalogued, and grief, death and great illness will all happen to someone else, but if they do happen to us, it’s all right cause there’s someone else to blame and someone else to pay for it, and thanks to those greater and wiser than us, all will be looked after.  And we all send in postal votes when it comes to the big decisions in our worlds and environments, because we need our energy for the little human worlds we’re creating, and trust the biggies to those that we agree are responsible for it. 

We’ve been convinced that if we just keep on heading towards the sky, and father gods, and off world aliens, and science, and our relentless march towards total separation from each other and our universe………..that we’ll come up with answers, or saviours, or other planets, or solutions, or final solutions that will prove us all right, that we were never one of the dusty earthy animals afterall, but a superior being sent here to safeguard, mine, farm, domesticate, tame, order, organise, shepherd, control, shape, and dominate. 

And now the far reaching tendrils of science have squeezed themselves into impossible spaces, and witnessed events on unimaginable scales that are leading us on a great cosmic fool’s journey right back to our roots, to where we all came from, and the symbiosis that’s been spinning along quite nicely out of our reach.   And as I stand all drop jawed and awestruck at the magnificence of the universe……….I realise that all roads really don’t lead to Rome, they lead to the understanding that everything is truly connected.  The sun has a heart beat and sings it’s sweet song to the universe, and our land is in a state of constant convection from the lava deep roots of our world to the dry and crusty surface.  Which reflects the convection of subterranean sea to the beaches and shores, and the convection of our air and biosphere.  The earth has about as much water on it as there is water in our individual bodies.  And when I started learning about all the fine tuned balances on which all the multitudinous forms of life on our planet rely on to survive, like the Biosphere, and distance from the sun, and formation of weather patterns, and all the pests and weeds without whom we’d perish…………it’s impossible not to realise that there’s an inherent balance and connection between everything we know how to observe.  Reflections upon reflections upon reflections show us time and again that what we do to the world around us, we do to ourselves.  Quantum Physics has measured and danced with mind numbingly minute particles and energies that show time and again that thought creates reality, everything is intrinsically connected, and reshuffles itself through infinity and back with every thought we think and movement we propel.  

And all that stability and those routines and our static belief systems haven’t been serving us afterall, in the chance filled magic of the universe that favours flexibility and adaptation.  We collectively decided to pull away parts of the whole on which to experiment, destroy, probe and explore, hoping that in understanding all the different parts of the creature that is everything we are connected to, we’d ultimately come to understand ourselves.  In endlessly dissecting the alien life form of the natural world all around us, we’ve understood the lifeless parts, but not the connecting web between it all that animates it.  Till now.  And it was what the indigenous folk and spiritual belief systems were trying to say all along – that it’s all connected, like the massive mallee scrubs that are at their roots the same tree.  Like the ocean that is vast and made up of billions upon billions of tiny drops.  Like snowflakes that are infinitely unique at the same time as being indistinguishable.  What we’ve done to the world ‘out there’ we’ve done to ourselves.

And now we’re the most domesticated animals on the planet.  We’ve learnt to suppress our natural urges, and be as polite as every other caricature in the cartoons we create, where animals trot around gaily in clothes having cups of tea…..  Following our road rules and our council rules and our government rules and our church rules and our school rules and our fire season rules and and our self imposed rules, and any other rules we can find.  We neatly tuck away our grottier more animalesque rituals of birth, sex and death, and we don’t like to talk about great love, grief or illness in polite company.  We cover over our signature animal scent with designer perfumes and keep our naked born bodies nicely clad and covered.  We build pretty houses in neat rows in a standardised way that would do any factory farmer proud. We’ve replaced our reverence for life with the love of money.  We’ve used our collective creative energy that used to grow food and make and learn, and build homes, to create media that focuses on our dysfunction instead, while we perform our seemingly innocuous button pushing jobs that destroy our world from afar.  We’ve built machines and weapons that could annhialate us over and over, in desperate search of the enemy without, when it’s within us all along.  We’ve separated ourselves so far from each other that we treat other cultures and belief systems as different species, which justifies our numerous genocides.   Yet the earth and all it’s inhabitants are literally our bodies…….what would you like on your skin?  In your air?  In your veins? Under your skin?  Going into your body?  As your thoughts and relationships?

We seem to be caught in a loop, where we’ve largely forgotten with our short memories that we’ve created it all ourselves.  Literally.  A few weeks before 9/11, I watched a movie where some Muslim terrorists flew a plane into the twin towers.  We’ve become so entranced, enthralled, and horrified by what we’ve created that we’ve become stuck in a repeating cycle of showing ourselves to ourselves, showing our horrors and our fears and our hatreds to each other in television programs and movies and books and music and computer games and ideas.  Created a self perpetuating war with ourselves that we project out to the screen of the world.  Most of it based on our long ago creation of our gods, and our morals, and our life purposes.  Somewhere along the line we forgot that we created them, and instead have allowed them to morph into the great one god of greed, power, hierarchies and control, using money and dogma as it’s figurehead, and like the Great Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, a huge and smoke belching machine has been ordering us about, with a few sleepy old men behind the curtain at the back, who have probably forgotten why they’re doing it anymore anyway.  And we’ve let them preach to us and lead us into a future that no-one is consciously caretaking anymore………

We’re the only species ever on the planet, that has thought that it has to be something other than it is.  Something other than living, breathing, birthing, dying, creating, destroying, procreating, surviving, suffering, laughing.  When we talk to each other about ‘who we are’ we mention jobs and possessions and groups and ideals and belief systems……barely ever the tick tick tick that keeps us alive and our spirits enriched.  Barely ever the deep cycles within our lives that link us to every other living thing. 

Which brings me back to my original point.  We’ve separated ourselves so far from our natures, our planet, our creative potency, and ultimately ourselves, that it comes as a earth shattering shock to us, that we did it to ourselves all along, and that our scout that we sent out to make sense  of it all in the form of Physics, has returned with the answer and solution of Quantum weirdness, where everything is connected, is created by our thoughts, and a reflection of the ageless spinning cycles of the universe.  We got so far away from our source, that our method of separation – our sciences –have found that they were eating their own tails all along.  And now have to teach us how we can reintegrate.  We can take our star stuff to the ball now, no-one needs to miss out, and re-create ourselves and our world in a vision of community, love, respect, peace, and freedom.  This is the point in our collective evolutions where we step up to the plate, pick up our minds, use those frontal lobes that we traded easy births for, and start spinning an encompassing web of beauty and growth, lessons learned deeply, and a respectful and creative enhancement of all life.

Now Currawong and I have talked much about this subject over the years, and we both agree that there needs to be a Human Animal Liberation Foundation or the HALF movement….cause you’re only half alive unless you acknowledge you’re an animal.  Or a soul in a human’s body.  However you choose to look at it.  ( Incidentally, if we are spirit in body form, truly massive and omnipotent sparks of the universe, chosen to trip a lifetime or two in a human body, wouldn’t the point of our journey be to truly experience the human capacity?  Wouldn’t it be anti-sense to try and spend that human life attempting to transcend and overcome the very body of our lessons? )  And we decided we needed to set up Human Animal Wildlife Santuaries.  Or HAWS.   Where humans could release themselves into the wild.  If Osho could get rolls royces gifted to him, we could get land donated to everyone. And along the lines of understanding that the earth is our skin, we’d disassemble the buildings, put on some composting toilets, fruit and nut trees, a big tin roof with no floor and walls to collect water and be shelter in the open, and gardens.  Maybe a few gypsy vans with computers and scientific equipment so the human animals drawn to technical creation can keep playing with alchemy to create environmentally friendly technology.  Maybe some beautiful temples built on rock and caves to combine a new spirituality to include everything, and help us to keep adventuring into the unknown depth of our world and the far off reaches of space. People could come and stay in whatever they wanted, as long as it was moveable so the earth could get sunlight.  Respectful trespassers would always be welcome.  Few rules, no dogma, no organisation, no evictions, no money involved – just folk wanting to honestly release themselves into the wild, or as wild as we could create on our domesticated planet, as we tried to discover our true human natures.  What would David Attenborough’s documentary about the Human Animal look like?  What are our rituals, habits, environments, survival techniques?  How would we survive if all the tools and materials of our separation were taken away?  How would we survive as another respectful species on the planet?  How much are we really capable of if we decide to use our monumental powers for good?  What amazing things could we tickle out of our combined creative powers?

There’s a fella called L. Robert Keck who wrote a book called ‘sacred eyes’, in which he compares the evolution of our modern culture to that of an individual.  In our infancy we were held close in the arms of a mother goddess and close to the cycles of the earth.  And then we hit our teenage hood and our era of bachelor father gods.   In which we threw our focus on a heavenly future and an off world solution to our worldly woes.  And now we’ve all collectively reached Saturn Return, where we study our past to remember our forgiving and destructive mama earth, and our present where we’re tumbling towards unimaginable destruction that we’ve wrought while focused on our father god, and bring the two together.    Which you could read as bringing the genders together, bringing the polarities together, bringing us and our universe together, bringing science and religion together……  Bringing our evolution and our spiritual natures together. 

He also wrote a paper about how he didn’t buy that humans had always been violent, and that it was a fundamental part of our natures.  He stretched back to a time when we did indeed reflect the cycles and symbiosis of the planet, and lived in harmony with it.  And there’s plenty of examples of indigenous tribes that lived and live in equality, peace, harmony, and freedom.  And I know this is possible too from personal experience.  Currawong and I have 5 years co-creating a market back in SA that was a home to fringe dwellers, and helped create manifestly unique possibilities of being, in a totally sovereign and anarchistically harmonious way, under our belt.  As well as our experience of life together, of introspection, dealing and healing.   

And I believe now with every fibre of my being, that the very best, most revolutionary and world changing thing I can do with my life, the most fundamentally healing mission I can begin to restore our planet to it’s majestic perfection……..is to be who I am, to love my family and my man with all my heart, to treat every person and creature I come across with respect and as an equal, and to use my vast creative energy to envision, write, sound out about and manifest a future for us all.  To tell my stories.  To be as honest as I know how.  To contemplate every action I make and assess whether it will move me and the planet towards love or not.  To explore and tease out the great learnings from my true life experiences. 

And I call on every single one of you reading this………to be true to your inner nature.  If you’re slaving away in a job that’s soul destroying, while a hidden dream keeps whispering in you ear, dream it.  Find a way to pave a path for your passion and purpose inside.  If you’re an artist, create with all your heart the things that you want to create.  If you’re a poet, craft words that will inspire, and create a path forward into a future you want to inhabit.  If you’re a musician, compose the soundtrack for the triumphant return to ourselves.  If you’re a craftsperson, bend your will to crafting your dreams, no matter how impractical they may be.  Never leash your passion to money.  Never create something because it will make you money.  If you’re a gardener, tend your gardens like you’d tend your hair and body.  If you’re a wordsmith, flesh out the possibilities of returning to sense and harmony with the worlds around us.  If you’re a builder, search for ways to build homes that reflect the synergy of our embracing world surrounded by a protective atmosphere…..and spare a thought for what you’d like on your skin.  If you’re a hunter, strive to remember how to work within safe parameters to ensure survival and thriving of species.  If you’re a networker, create networks where people can use their only power in a money based society – their money – to support local artisans, food growers, builders, animal caretakers.  If you’re a recycler, invest your energy in creating from rubbish, and turning everything we make and then throw away into usefull reincarnations.  If you’re a mother or father, think about what skills are going to best help your children survive in the world as it is NOW, and do your best to show them, learn with them, and honour their unique ways of walking through the world.  If you work with other animals as a shepherd, work out how you can honour both your own and their natures, and pay due homage for the gifts they bring.   If you’re a scientist, explore the amazing places on our planet and in the universe that we don’t understand yet, and help the rest of us understand the intricate interconnections between us all.

Let’s all use our magnificent energy to craft a future that will be inhabitable for our children.  Let’s step to the side of the madness we’ve created whilst taking no personal responsibility, and take the ultimate responsibility of creating societies based on who we really are, rather than our fantasies. Let’s simply outcompete the rabid beast of our modern and senseless civilisations by making more sense, stepping back into the flow of natural cycles, and adding the weight of the universal attraction to life and creation to our cause.  Let’s tell each other our stories, our lives, our experiences, and talk much and earnestly about our taboos of birth, sex and death, and how we can respect them and learn from them better.  Let’s learn to respect and heal our ecosystems, our food, our water, our shelter, our deaths, our births, our sexuality, our sovereignty.

Let’s craft ourselves a new world, where being true to our deep natures is our only imperative, where diversity is celebrated, and where the humans can roam with equal freedom, love, peace and respect as all the other beings. 

Are you in?

And here's some chapters of Balthazar and Nimue to continue on the serialisation of the book.  To start from the beginning and the first two chapters, go here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/love-story.html then for chapters 3 + 4 go here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/chapters-three-and-four.html for chapters 5 - 8 here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/last-installment.html for chapters 9 + 10 here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/law-of-repulsion-and-more-book.html for chapters 11 + 12 http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/yes-you-read-right.html and now you can read on........

Chapter 13 -  She Spreads Wings

She took to eating ripe watermelon and kiwi fruit, peeled apples and carrots, steamed potatoes and snow peas, and wooded herbs.  As she walked she felt tall and light, nobly stepping like a horse.  People started to watch her as she walked.  Noticed her energy enfold them like a warm caress and drift on by.  Men, the brasher of the breed, began to talk to her in public places, inviting her for drinks and fine chats.  Then other people started commenting on how she looked and the figure she cut, tried hard to word the glow that shone round her.  She dealt calmly with life tasks, and rode the gentle swell of whole.

She started being asked advice and knowledge, to bring her calmness and rational thought.  People looked to her for strength and her leading role, as they danced down the path of self knowledge.  When away from their gaze, she sculpted figures and crafted talismans, wrote her soul out and wove webs.  Her time with Balthazar was a daily respite from the strength and the clarity she kept at her side.  They kept talking their future, and early one morning as the sun crept the hillside, they planted a thought.  The thought of a new one, a small one, a wise one, to come to their circle and marry their clan.  She felt that a new soul would give them some lessons to share from their world. 

Chance meetings and serendipity breezed through her story, dripping bright jewels of lore.  She began writing snippets of the life she was living, loosely based on her new found love.  The webs started weaving, and she slowly realised she was writing herself in a new born light.  Then somehow, someway, a tale that she’d thought of years gone came to mind.  It dreamed and it twined it’s way through her head, and she knew it was time to begin.

And the ancestors grinned their approval.

Chapter 14  -  He Starts To Fly.....

He started waking in dimlit hours of the morning, to play music with his instruments.  Played and relayed lilting melodies, that transposed and transformed and opened.  Tunes that travelled on feelings and dust motes, coffee and sex, played through his earholes and pulsed through his hands.  He was caught up in the trance of his dance to the world, to his woman, his lifeblood, his magic, his worth.  He moved down the path of this fragile reality, and started to open to a soft new world.

One asked him to play at the local pub, mixed with beer smells, smoke, and drunken despair.  One asked him to play in a cool wooden studio, with techies and gadgets to cut a cd.  One asked him to sign with his international company, and make his music exclusive for them.  The monies rolled in like the patter of jaffa’s hurled down the carpet of passion and life.  He could dredge up his soul from his demon to demigod, and pulsate it out in a weaving cord.  He spent his time with her trancing and talking, wishing and dreaming, and planning their babe.  And his new child, her girl child, her heart’s soft caress, went on gleaming and loving and spinning in light. 

He thought that his life couldn’t get any better, but still it did.  Thought he surely wouldn’t know deeper, yet it still became.  He worked with the men round him, and opened their eyes to the wound within.  He talked with Nimue, and discussed all the aspects of who they were now, and where to from here.

And the ancestors took notes.