Funk

I’ve been in a funk.  A blue mood.  Full of conflicting emotions and realities and perspectives and worries and attitudes past and present.  All my most prized and hard won beliefs have been parading past me like a gay pride march, colourful flags billowing, sequins body suits sparkling, signs and symbols of lessons learnt emblazoned onto brightly painted placards.  Or sneaking into our bedroom at night, slipping between sleeping babies to kiss me on the cheek and remind me of their worthiness.  And all the doubts associated with the getting of my beliefs have been re-animated as ghosts………did I really get it ‘right’?  Did I really stretch and tease and pull apart my beliefs and iron out all the wrinkles? 

Sitting with babies and cleaning their messes and feeding them food, BIG THOUGHTS come and dance a whirly gig in my head.  HOW AM I GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD? thoughts, and WHAT DIFFERENCE CAN I MAKE? thoughts play intricate games of chess with my mind.  And when they go quiet, the seductive pull of self doubt and feelings of aging come sneaking round.  Why do I think it really matters what I think, when I witness the enormity of the universe, and entrenched beliefs around me, and that great wheel of life that never stops it’s grinding procession?  Who am I really, but another aging hippy trying desperately to hang onto the vitality of youth?

I guess it all started with the business course.  Determined to carve us an income from our lifestyle, I launched into an ecourse feet first.  And landed heavily on the glass shards and needles of my attitudes and life experiences around the monetary drive that I’ve periodically ignored and explored throughout my lifetime.  The justifications I’ve used to pursue it, and the rationalisations about how I’d use it better than I’ve seen.  My lust and disgust for it.   And then my last post ‘money’ galloped out of the wings, trumpeting wildly about the beauty of the places where money isn’t, and placing it in the hall of mirrors where I nearly always end up.  Me, and my unique spark of the universe that I carry with me wherever I go, nearly always end up sitting on the floor in a vast reflective cavern, where I see my spark mirrored there, and there, and there, glinting and crackling along with all the other sparks, that contain every spark within them.  My drop of the ocean that remembers where it’s been. 

When the dust settled on my introspection about money, I came to realise that my dreams of having money almost always end up in some kind of “We’ll buy our farm and close our gates and set up our own private heaven, and the world can just pass us by” fantasy.  I think our lack of money keeps us far more real.  And sociable and interacting.  When it comes it will be perfect though, and we’ll know how to deal with it.

Then we were sitting at home one morning, facing another day of feeding babies/cleaning babies/entertaining babies/cleaning up after babies, and the call came to action!  We tumbled into the van, oranges and nappies flying, and we swooped off to a nearby town where Metagasco was digging a pond to hold toxic water, the ‘waste product’ of the system of gas fracking.  One of 5 ponds in this town close by, that are shallow, and leaking, on a floodplain in a regularly flooded area, that is totally fertile and growing food.  Coming from 9 wells that are operational, only 2 of which that are working, quietly humming away in this town so near where we live.  We were gutted.  And elated to meet so many disparate folk coming together and forming community around protecting the land.  And devastated when we looked at the reality of this unsigned pond in front of us, leeching poisons into the waterways.  And delighted to passionately speak to the man who was making a movie about CSG.  “Just wait a minute, I know this is going to be profound and I want to be filming it” he said, when I came up to him to tell him one last thing.  Lilly found spiders that were the same but different on tall grass seeds, and he filmed her reverently observing them, exclaiming over their beauty.  And we were sick to our stomachs as we watched this pond in our backyard…….I thought it was only happening in Queensland!  And they’re MINING THE KIMBERLEY’S!!!!!  The only environment on the planet where there’s no record of anything having gone extinct!!  They’re stealing our planet, and our children’s future, and ‘they’ve’ got to be STOPPED!!

And our activist clothing came snaking out of our closets, settling on our skins and in our minds so easily, so neatly.  Our old bedfellows of righteous indignation, and wrath for the despoilers of the planet snuck into our bed that night.  Squeezed between me and Currawong and Zarrathustra, leaving the head lice of the countless wars waged by ‘them’ on our pillows.  Keeping us warm with all the ideas we were hatching, for saving the world.  We spent years being passionate advocates and activists.  Once you start to open the book titled ‘Humanities damage to the planet’, carcasses spill out readily, and atrocities bleed through the pages.  Where do you stop? How can you choose which is worse than the other? A mind numbing litany of heartless cruelties heaped onto refugee’s, indigenous clans, wild landscapes, ancient artworks, millions of other species, waterways, oceans, forests, biosphere…….you know how long this list is.  It’s an overwhelming and despairing list.  That can hurtle you to burnout quicker than a shuttle.  But fuck ‘The Secret’ with that whole concept of Mother Theresa not going to anti-war rallies, but only peace marches, and how what you focus on grows!  Protest is powerful and productive, just look at Iceland, and Ghandi, and Protestors Falls, and the Franklin Dam, and all the other amazing things that have happened.

Our old clothes fit us so well, that we wore them for days, and were having passionate discussions and feeling heavy thoughts on our shoulders as we sat with babies and sheparded them outside.  As a brief interlude one night, we sat watching photos and videos of our journey to our new home.  Marvelled at how beautiful and nostalgic our trip has become in hindsight.  Now that we know it all turned out okay, I can look at the worry lines on my brow and laugh, knowing that I had nothing to worry bout.  I could have just enjoyed the ride. 

So we went to bed that night, in a bubble of remembering that the very best thing we can do with our lives is to smile, and love, and create beauty and inspiration.  But in the morning our heavy clothes had snuck back on.  “How could they mine the Kimberley’s”, and “How many billions of dollars do they need?”, and “What can we do?”, and “Don’t they have children?”……………..  “They” started dancing over there in a place where I could get them in my sights and SHOOT THE BASTARDS cause they didn’t deserve to dance on mother earth with me and Currawong and my precious babies and you and all the other peaceful people on the planet with love in their hearts.  We felt remembered and real aches and griefs and deep down sorrows about all the destruction our species has wrought. 

Currawong went to visit a smiling wise hermit on the hill behind us, swapped shorthand stories of deep and yearning places, as you can learn to do when you’ve a mountain of children that hug the toes of every interaction, and he came home crying.  “Surrender!” he cried.  “It’s all about surrender.  I can’t hate, and attack, and pursue loggerheads with this world………….because it’s all me.”  It felt for me like a light had been chiselled, and then all of a sudden warmth wrapped me, and with it came instant peace.  Like a bulldozer had just dumped a load of remembered perceptions and lessons on my head that crackled through my system.   We brainstormed and swapped quick flashes of realisation, and it all tumbled out of him like sour tasting words that he knew were true for him nonetheless.  “Of course that waste water pond has been built badly, cause that supplies a need for the clean up team, who then require a holding team for when the ponds overflow and need pumping out and holding till later, which provides work for another team, and it’s all interconnected and perfectly interactive cause it reflects the way evolution works, and the millions of fine tuned balances that keep our world spinning.  Every single thing reflects everything else in it’s complexity and interconnectedness.  From fast food chains, to enormous corporations, to the Kimberley’s, to our governments…….. Of course it works so well, because it’s reflecting the brilliance of the universe!”

Microcosm of the macrocosm.

And he’s right.  And it’s interesting to note that 12 years ago when we were settling into our first nest together, we both remember an argument/debate we had that lasted all day.  From the pub, over the bridge, through dinner, and into bed, where early in the morning we had to agree to disagree – He thought (r)evolution could only come from changing the system till it filtered to the individual, and I argued it had to change in the human till it filtered to the system – and realised we were arguing the same thing from different angles, and finally got some sleep.  And another one I said when we met absolutely infuriated him.  I told him he had to stop hating George Bush, cause he WAS George Bush, and that argument lasted years.  Later during our market years, I dropped many a jaw, when I said that George Bush was one of the greatest environmentalists ever.  Think about it.  The man lives in a five star rated environmentally friendly and energy self sufficient home, and has galvanised more people into environmental and political action since Ghandi, and was definitely a harbringer of many people realising that their governments weren’t to be trusted.  I can just imagine him sitting in his rainbow dyed t-shirt hashing over his plan with a friend, “So if I turn into a complete knob, get dad to make me president, and destroy the environment, take my country to war, blow up the twin towers, start a war on terrorism to destroy individuals freedoms, and come across as barely sentient and monosyllabic, then I’ll galvanise a huge amount of sleeping dreamers to wake the fuck up and get in control of their insides and this runaway train we’re on!!”  But I digress…..

So after Currawong’s passionate moment of clarity and realising it was all about surrender, and all a reflection of him………..all these little lessons that I’ve learnt along the way came out of the wings in their slightly bedraggled tutu’s, pirouetting remember songs in my head.  The first time, sitting in the sun on my sister’s lawn in Bathurst, when I really got that love and hate could co-exist.  And were indeed the same thing.  I hated my stepfather and what he’d done to me and my family, yet I loved the special attention I got, and how he was careful with my sensitivity.  While I was trying to settle on whether I really did love or hate him I was in a quandary.  When I accepted I could do both at the same time, I was peaceful.

All those times I thought to myself as a young thing “Why does she have so many children if she can’t be nice to them?” And I’ve since learnt exactly how she might have been grumpy.  “Why doesn’t she just keep that child quiet?” And I’ve learnt how you can be in a situation where there’s nothing you can do to stop a baby having a tantrum.  “How can she smoke when there’s babies around?”  You guessed it.  I know how that can happen too.  “How can they be so nice and together, and then go and do something like THAT?”  I’ve done things that people would think such things about.   "How can women have caesareans?"  I got that one too.  “Why does she say all that, and then go and do the opposite thing?”  Yup.  Been there too.  In fact just about every time I’ve said “How can they/she/he” do ANYTHING………I’ve been totally destined and fated from that moment to have a life experience that will show me exactly how.  

I started noticing that every time I had a falling out with someone, they would say exactly the same things about me, as I was complaining about them.  After observing and listening and learning for years, I realised that every human being was capable of every single thing under the sun…..including me……given the right circumstances.

Maybe I was more fine tuned to the ‘darker’ side of life from my childhood and my family and the stories that pulled me and made me feel.  Maybe it was leaving my childhood religion and knowing that I had to re-educate myself and that I knew nothing.  Maybe I just have a deep place inside me that’s never forgot how dark I can be throughout my many incarnations.  I was reading a poem about the witches that were burnt one day, and felt in detail my fingernails being pulled off one by one.  I’ve heard loathsome and fearsome and disgusting stories of human depravity, and I’ve hunkered down and cringed…….but I’ve never been surprised.  It’s always been recognisable.

I’ve sat with murderers, and businessmen, and rapists, and clergy, and paedophiles, and politicians, and dominatrix’s, and doctors, and prostitutes, and psychologists, and drug dealers, and fundamentalists, and bikers, and police officers, and just about anyone else that might have graced the likes of Australia’s Most Wanted, and seen myself.  Connected with them, not as a judge, or a do gooder, or trying to hide a sensationalised voyeur…….but as an equal.  And been honoured and privileged that they also showed me all their beauty, and fragility, and sensitive hurtness.  Their inhumanity and humanity all together and intermingled.  Not separated into the polite and nice boxes that we often like to keep ourselves in.   

And I’ve got a doozy of a lesson that I’ve been wanting to tell you about for a while now, and here’s where it belongs.  I’m a survivor of incest.  I had body memories and flashbacks when I was 24.  And went through all sorts of groups and books and modalities of healing to try and make peace with it.  Now nicely packaged along with sexual abuse, often comes weird arse sexual fantasies.  Where a person can fantasise about rape, and feel totally fucked up and despicable because of it.  Sure that if anyone ever knew what went on in their head, they’d be hated and avoided forevermore.  Obviously that person was me.  Many moons ago when Currawong and I were still in the flush of new love, we set our feet on the path of honesty, and gently showed each other our scars and deep wounds.  And loved and accepted each other despite them.  In this climate of acceptance I was running a well known fantasy in my head, with me as the abused.  And decided to switch perspectives and become the abuser to see what happened.  And got off on it. 

In that moment I knew that I could abuse.  Given the right situation, and provocation, I could.  I understood my abusers and how they could hurt me.  I realised they were enacting what had happened to them.  And in meeting this strange and unloved part of me, I knew I could accept it as  me, and would never be so removed and in denial of it, that it could hijack me into doing something I wouldn’t choose in a loving space.  Now I’m not saying this is the cure for incest, but this is what worked for me. 

And another thing happened.  If I could learn such heart stretching deeps and compassions and love from these parts of me that I saw reflected in others……………….then how could I say it was wrong and bad?  How could I apportion judgement and blame onto anyone or anything?  If they were all potential experiences and lessons that could bring about so much acceptance, learning and love?

When Currawong and I finally got together, he was such an enigmatic and angry bastard, and had convinced himself through numerous situations that he was unlovable, that he was Faust.  And I was fresh from healing my hurts, and learning mammoth lessons, channelling the amazing book I wrote after meeting him, and in the prime of living in the moment, and seeing absolutely everything and everyone around me as perfect and me.  And lots of things happened between us that many folk would have found abusive, and he certainly was expecting me to throw accusations at him, but all I could see was another fear faced, and another lesson learnt, and how perfect he was to get to all those hard to see places where my fears had taken refuge.  I’d been through the desert on my Saturn Return initiation, and faced my fear of the dark, of being alone, of the unknown, of the heat, of the desert, of men, of so many things, but I hadn’t ever lost my sight, or my glasses, which I did when he stomped on them during a wild new years eve party at the end of 1999.  That was a deep fear and hidden hurt I’d had since 6^th class that I didn’t even know was there.  I tripped him out when I thanked him.   And when I was dragging him by the hair off the property after he went psycho during an argument, I realised in one crystal moment, that no matter how far I was pushed, and how angry I got, I would never kill someone.  Which was always a fear at the back of my mind, once I realised I had a volcanoe inside me from all my stored anger and repression as a child.  I thanked him for that one too.  And he got that one as well. 

I also realised years down the track that all the time I thought I was ‘healing’ Currawong, we were actually healing each other, and we both needed that time to learn how to let love in.   And that process has scaled all of our secrets, and all our dark bits, and all our hidden selves.  They all get accepted, and all get loved eventually.  Unconditional love can wreak miracles.  I’ve experienced it over and over again. 

So back to the story again, all this stuff was bubbling and boiling in the background, and I sat on facebook one day and used it as the oracle it is.  Threw out my nets to my friendship web and peered at what the deeps brought me.  And there was a theme that set me rattling off into stories and memories again.  And all my recent experiences, and our passionate discussions and revelations kinda swirled around the links that I stumbled on and  they all coalesced...........

Here was the first fish in the net.....

Then came this one......

This one really got me.....

And this one topped it all off

And here’s my point, that we’ve been walking towards here, and that you knew I was going to make.  Our western world in particular is so dedicated to our ‘godliness’.  Our ‘goodness’, and ‘white light’ and ‘pureness’ and ‘love’, and we’re so convinced that following the rules and doing the ‘right’ thing will lead to an eventual reward, that we’re all neglecting our shadow selves.  Our dark.  Our deep.  Our dead.  It’s like we’re all walking through life with these blinkers on, where we can only see the parts that we collectively sanction as ‘true’ and ‘right’, while behind those blinkers, in our collective blind spots, our shadow selves are twiddling their thumbs, and getting a bit bored, and making us act like puppets on strings cause we refuse to acknowledge they’re there.  We send them to ‘those’ people who are evil, and ‘they’ over there who do things that we just can’t understand, and have set all our dark selves loose on the world through our neglect to acknowledge and learn from and love them. 

And they’ve proliferated and thrived in the compost of our dirt that we refuse to own.  “I’m good, and I’m kind, and I love everyone, and if only you’d do the right thing, you too could be happy like me!” we proudly proclaim to the world, whilst our shadows are knifing each other in the background.  We’ve left all our nasty baggage on that great carousel, and they’ve slowly spread their hidden power to the neighbours.  They’ve run off to the Wizard of Oz, to make that Great Wizard even greater and nastier while the little man pulling the levers has been hiding himself from himself.  They’re snaffling schnapps in the boardrooms of the great corporations that are eating our world.  They’re metagasco making toxic wastewater dams on floodplains.  They’re dancing as the puppeteers behind every tradgedy and sin. 

And it’s time that we claimed them.  Owned them.  Loved them.  Learnt from them.  Sewed them back into our souls like Wendy did for Peter Pan’s shadow.  Let them blend with our white, and create lots of greys, and fine tune our pure, and add depth and dimension to our love.  When we pick up our dark children from childcare, and bring them home to ourselves, there will be no more room or energy for ‘those’ people to wreak such havoc in our world.  No more will we be able to hurt and harm our skin the earth, and our internal landscapes that we’ve endeavoured to domesticate will return to harmony, and a reflection of the bigger chaotic harmonies that exist all around us.    

From all of my lessons and life experiences, I feel that the very best thing I can do with my life and my love and my learning is to be honestly, truly, and completely me.  To follow the flow where it takes me, through overworlds and underworlds, and learn from everything that happens to me.  To acknowledge all my sides and potentials and understandings and respect it all for the broadness of view it brings.  To follow the thread of everything being connected to all it’s possible permutations.  To continue my endeavour to marry the worlds inside me and see their interconnection, and allow that interconnection and respect to translate itself through my touch and imprint on the cosmos. 

And to smile, laugh, love, respect, acknowledge, honour, beautify, empathise, and inspire as much as I can.

Cause it's all me.