Sometimes It Feels Like I'm Living In Narnia

Anyone who's tried community living in Australia, whether it be formal or informal communities, like we have for our entire relationship……..knows that there's usually some form of rules on every single one of them about animals, and what sort are allowed there.  Cats and dogs are usually forbidden, for the damage they do to the environment, and other animals are negotiable.  Even on the informal communities we've lived on, there have been other folk who owned it or had been there before us, who had their own animals, and requirements for what sort did and didn't come.  So we've been pretty animal free for years.  We had a cat called Fuzznut who ended up getting old and really over babies, and let us know that she chose to retire to my mothers and daughters house, and a dog called Scratch who couldn't be with kids after she broke her pelvis and retired to my mothers too, till she died.  Little Scratch came everywhere and got snuck into places she wasn't meant to be, cause she was so small and inoffensive.  

But for 7 years pretty solidly now, we've had no pets except for the rats that we got at Billen.  And we've dreamed about getting others, but been on communities up here in the Rainbow Region that wouldn't allow them.

So in moving here to our (mostly) private rental, we decided that the time was now.  It was starting to break my heart, that Griffyn, who'd wanted a cat all his life, was 12 years old without ever having his own animal.  I figured it was just time to let some animals in our lives, and that the relationships you can only form with other animals was a really important part of childhood that my kids were missing out on.  Not to say that they weren't finding and connecting with as many wild species as they could……they find creatures in the weirdest places, and hang out with them as long as is safe, and then let them go.  Lilly who loves all animals had a hard time getting to love leeches, but all of them have quite a large respect for leeches now, and will let them feed till they drop off.  We're usually asked to take photos of the creatures we come across, and here's just a few, but there's lots more of them peppered through our photos.

I so love how Lilly manages to pick up bugs with stings at the front and the back gently, without hurting them, and then releasing them after she's admired them….

We even had a wild duck follow us home and hang out for a night.  She hung out in the house for the afternoon, and at night she sat on the lounge next to me, moving step by step closer until she was sitting on my lap. In the morning she went on her way, but we loved her visit….

But what really got us started on the animal collecting, was when our neighbours were away, and their rabbit had been ripped apart by a goanna, and had left 5 little babies that were too young to survive really.  It pulled on all our heartstrings and maternal instincts, and we did our best to save them.  I even crocheted them a handspun rabbit fleece blanket to lay on.  But they died one by one, and we buried them with many tears.

And then 'stuff it!' I thought.  It was time for us to invite animals into our lives.  The first animal that came along was a beautiful rabbit called Nimue, or Nim. And in the process of meeting Nim, we also met the gorgeous Rhea and John of R&J Pets and Aquariums in Lismore, who have totally impressed us with their love for all animals as well as people, and their true integrity and compassion in how they run their pet shop.  The first time we went in there, I was in the small animal room, and there was a bunch of younguns talking over the rats, and one of the girls was talking about how they wanted a big fat one, so they could see it in the belly, and I realised they were gonna feed one of these little hand raised rats to a snake.  Rhea came in, and they picked their rat, and they all filed out and it was just Rhea and me for a minute.  I told her what I'd overheard, and she walked out, coming back a few minutes later with a triumphant smile, and released the rat back in with his brothers, saying 'they're not feeding one of my hand raised rats to a snake!'  I was so impressed.  And just a wee while ago, John told a story on Facebook, about how an elderly lady was there one morning as he opened his shop, asking him to find her budgie another home, as she wouldn't be able to feed herself with the new budget, let alone her beloved budgie.  His answer was to give her a stack of feed, and to publicly tell folks that pensioners now had 20% off all animal food to help out.  I love those two.  We find any excuse we can at all to go in and hang out and swap stories.  

But back to Nim,  Griff and her really loved each other.  We'd never had a bunny before, so we tried to let her be a house living bunny, but that didn't work out.  So we made her a big enclosure, and had a cosy bunny house for night, and all fell in mutual love with each other. 

And cause we found R&J's, it was a great excuse to fulfil a bit of a life long dream for Currawong, as well as a huge desire of Mr B's, to get an aquarium full of fish.  We knew we'd found the right people to advise us on it too.  For example, I didn't know until John told me, that goldfish need a huge amount more room than most people give them.  He won't sell goldfish unless you have a massive tank or pond.  Cause if they don't have the space, their internal organs keep growing to the size their meant to be, even though their body can't grow any more, and they end up getting suffocated by their own organs.  He created an underwater garden for us, and gave us incredible information and advice, and our little boys (and the rest of us) are totally mesmerised….

We also got some chookies, but they were very young too, and one died a few days after we got her, and the other one ate something under the house and choked.  So we had just the one chook for quite a while, and we called her Storm Chookie.  

Being the only chook for a while led to some rather…..interesting……behaviours.  Cause she thought she was one of us.  She fast became one of my favourite friends.  And comes inside to visit us, and threatens me with laying her eggs on my printer, unless I provide an adequate roost for her.  There's lots of Chookie stories that I've told on Facebook, but to get to all the animals, I'm going to have to keep it concise.  Enough to say that I love my Chookie.

And we got a cat for Griffyn called Dreamer.  You can see her on the chair in front of Storm Chookie.  They tend to hang out together.  She was a kitten who was born into love at a friends of ours home, and raised with the utmost bonding and respect.  And she's quite unique.  Currawong and I were both a bit dubious about how other animal friendly she'd be, and were prepared to build her a large cat cage off the house if she proved to be a killer.  I've had cats all my life, and know that they usually disappear off for a while every day, and who knows how much they kill in that time.  But Dreamer is different.  

She was given her name by our friend from her birth, and we all assumed we'd change it when we got to know her, but ended up realising that the name suits her completely, cause she spends most of her time sleeping.  We always know where she is, every moment of the day, cause she's always within sight of us, and she cuddles with Griffyn every night, and gets the shits if he sleeps away too long.  She puts up with the little boy pack being rough with her, and laying on her, and carrying her around (we do our best to minimalise it) and seems to just love all of us.  The kids the most though…..

But the most amazing thing about Dreamer is her love for the other animals.  Like I said before, the relationship between Storm Chookie and Dreamer is quite cute.  Dreamer spent a lot of still and silent time winning Chookie over.  Convincing her that she was a friend.  And we quite often see them hang out together.

And then came Pixel.  Lilly's been wanting a dog for ever so long, and another dear friend had puppies that needed homes, and we brought a little boy pup home the night before christmas incidentally, and it didn't take long till he chose Lilly as his person.  We call him Pixel.  And if he gets fat when he's old, we can call him Mega Pixel :)

And like Dreamer, Pixel loves all the other animals, and they all get along.  He was only 6 weeks old when we got him, and his mother got sick and her milk dried up, so he was just a baby when he came to us.  And we attachment parented him, not out of any ideology, but because we couldn't leave him on his own, and there was always so much going on around him.  So now Pixie is convinced he's one of the kids.  He's a cheeky and sweet little thing.  

So we were in pet heaven for about 3 months I reckon, and everything was sweet, and we learnt all sorts of things about the animals we have, and how best to look after them.  And then Death came to town.  Our neighbour has a habit of leaving her rabbits out of their cages, though most of them have met untimely deaths that way.  And even though we asked her if she could put her male bunny away while we were trying to housetrain Nim, she refused.  Inevitably, they got together, and we didn't realise it at the time, but that meeting was fatal.  The male was far too big for Dwarf bunny Nim, and when she went into labour, a baby got stuck (it was never going to be able to get out), and we took her to the vet hoping a caesarean or something could help her, and were devastated to hear that rabbits really don't do anaesthetic well, and the chances of her surviving were minimal, and very expensive.  I was in tears, and prepared to get a loan to pay for it, and had to ring Griff up on the phone and break the heartbreaking news to him, and in the end the best solution for everyone was to put our dear Nim down.  

It was horrendous from top to bottom.  My eldest daughter had come for a visit the day before, and it was a shock for all of us that such a tragedy had happened.  Jess was awesome in helping and comforting, and we were all glad she was there.  On the night after she died, Griff went to bed and cried and cried and cried, and it totally broke my heart that my firstborn son was going through his first big heart break.  Dreamer cuddled so close to his face that we knew she was totally tuned in.  And I got very angry at our neighbour.  Threw a lot of judgement at her.  And the very next day, after changing the procedure for the rats, trying to be extra careful that they got more shade on a hot day…….I quite stupidly put them in a place where they got full sun if we were away for too long, and in the process of that mistake, Lilly's favourite rat Snuggles died in the heat. We managed to save the others, even though they were thoroughly heat stressed, and Jess was amazing again in her calmness and assistance.  

We were beyond distraught, and I wailed and said sorry over and over, and instantly thought that my judgement had come back to bite me on the bum.  It seemed a harsh lesson for us all to learn.  And was so very very sad.  We all cried a lot.  And built some graves for our loved animals.  

But the next morning, after we'd lost two of our most loved animals over two horrible days, Lilly and I sat and talked on the verandah.  She said that in a horrible way, she was getting used to death, and to the grief and loss, and that maybe in a way, that was actually a good thing, as we knew we were going to love lots of animals in our lives.  She was also the first to notice in the following days, that there was a change in me.  Up until these traumatic events, I'd been nice at arms length to Lilly's rats, and really didn't realise how much I'd come to love Nim.  And it cracked my heart open to such a degree, that I felt like I pushed through that arms length approach, and reverted back to the full hearted love I had for animals when I was younger.  I vowed to honour the demise of our loved ones by being a better animal carer.  And went into full sook mode with Lilly.  As much as it was awful, it also helped us appreciate the animals that are left in our circle even more.  I took on the remaining rats with Lilly, and fell head over heels in love with Dusty, who is in the photograph with me and Storm Chookie up above as well.  

And even though Griff didn't want to replace Nim, and knew that it would never be the same as it was with his first love, he fell for a bunny in R&J's again, and helped by Jess, who so wanted to help him heal, and bought him a beautiful bunny habitat, we ended up bringing Fleur home.  She's not the same as Nim of course, but she's delightful.  And very cuddly.

Zarra and the other little boys love her to bits, and visit her first thing every morning to feed her and pat her.  She loves a pat more than any other rabbit I've met, apart from Nim.  And she loves to lick their hands and faces.  He can't resist getting in for a visit sometimes. 

In fact…..lots of critters love to steal into Fleur's cage and hang out with her.  Between her little home here and the big bunny cage outside that she's busy creating an underground home in, she has a pretty busy and loved life.  Her and Storm Chookie were even timesharing her little night home for a while.  Chookie decided for a bit that the bunny cage was the only place she was going to lay an egg.

With all the equals and opposites and ups and downs I must admit to being utterly thrilled by having all these animals in our lives.  It does help us get used to death, and work out how to deal with it.  And it also helps all of us to develop relationships with species that aren't only our own.  There's so much we learn from all of it in fact, that we're always on the plan for more.  But the best thing is the love.  The huge amount of love given and received by us all.  Not to mention the relationships between all the animals and how they all inter relate and get on!  Sometimes I feel like Fern in Charlotte's Web, sitting outside just to watch and observe the interactions all around me.  Not to mention the wild animals that come into and around the edges of our existence.

So much to learn.  So much to love.  So glad that we finally got to this place where we can explore this most important dimension, of the truly deep and human love and need for animal friendship.

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. 

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.