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.



And on the seventh day they rested......

I’ve been contemplating belief lately.  A lot.  On this mad meander of ours across the country, I’ve been contemplating my beliefs that have led us to this point, and the beliefs of the people we’ve had in our intimate circle for the last 3 years, and the impact that’s had on me and my family, as well as the beliefs of the ‘mainstream’ for the want of a better word.  The large group of people that wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, work in the same jobs, talk about the same politicians who are saying the same words, watch the same television programs, eat the same foods, watch the same ads, shop in the same shops, choose from the same religions, have the same hairstyles, share the same polite niceties, live in the same houses, and have the same groupings in which they like to relegate people……..as all the other people in that large group.  With variations of course within the sameness, but a comfortable sameness nonetheless, which lets them decide who’s ‘one of them’ and who’s not. 

And as we’ve journeyed through country South Australia, Victoria, and now New South Wales, I’m reminded really strongly about how me and my family are definitely not ‘one of them’.  I always used to say that folk that liked to stick out, and complained about being stared at, were like women wearing low cut tops and then getting the shits when people talked to their boobs.  And because I’ve been in that really large group for a lot of my life, and can relate to just about anyone I come across, and also because I can’t help but FEEL completely normal, no matter how I may look, I keep forgetting that we stick out like rainbow canaries in more mainstream places, and that we really are very different.  I’ve come to this place from a large and rambling life that’s taken me through many subcultures and mainstream cultures, on a overwhelming quest to find my own truth and become my own self.  And I like how I look and the reasons that I look this way, and I like how we try to shop, and the big ole van with a cross culture of symbols and words on it, and my philosophy on life, and our media free status, and my ability to step to the side of ‘mainstream’ culture…..and observe, and try to read the winds of change, and try to translate what I think the collective consciousness is feeling and moving towards.  I also like how we try to live in ways other than buying or renting a house that is ours ours ours, and there’s the bloody fence, so you know where I stop and you begin.   Even though, as we drive through the country, we keep realising how massively traumatised we are on some levels, by our experience with community dwelling, and living with my mother……..we’re still in search of a community somewhere, to live with other people and ideas and kids and work skills and input and responsibility and sharing of resources and land care and animal care.  And as we drive, and get stared at, and get freezing looks from people sure that we’re gonna jump up and do something ‘bad’ any minute…….I’m thinking more and more about how nice it might be to hang out in a place where there are lots of folk like us, and we can blend in for a change.  Not to mention where there’s lots more free range kids and naturally learning kids and people doing all the sorts of things that we like to do.  Which in this country anyway, is definitely Northern New South Wales.  The mecca of the alternative, homegrown, organic, hippy, community lifestyle.  

At this point I’ve gotta mention that travelling with 6 children could definitely be described as an intricate and lesser degree of hell. The two youngest are just a year old, teething, crawling, and at a brilliant height for mud, grass seeds and burrs – of which there are many in the country we’re travelling through - they don’t often sleep for longer than 20 minutes during the day, are into everything, and can wake up in the middle of the night and yell for no particular reason…...no amount of cuddles or enticements of drinks can assuage their cries.  (People who believe attachment parented babies never cry BE DAMNED!)  Another 2 – the lotus babies - the nearly 3 and the nearly 5 year old, have tantrums the size of Cyclone Toddler, and love to have them regularly – about all sorts of groundshaking matters like who owns that helicopter, and someone said I couldn’t do that, and someone’s threatening to wipe my face etc, etc.  And the two oldest, whilst being incredibly mature and self aware in many ways,  are stubbornly egalitarian, and believe that with all the babying and nurturing going on, they should have their fill too.  So while sometimes they can make all the difference and almost shoulder an adult sized load, at other times they dissolve into two year olds at the worst moments, and with 6 kids around all the time, you’re pretty much guaranteed that one of them will be having a tantrum or will have one soon, or is arguing with someone else like the ugly stepsisters of cinderella.  And then there’s my tired but majestic old 40 year old and 6 months pregnant body, that’s schlepping swags and clothes bags and bedding around every night and morning, and understandably a bit grumpy with the situation, which can end up in an intense mother being thunderous particularly around the packing times.  My body’s regularly having conversations with me about…..”What the f**k are you doing travelling around the bloody countryside, when you’re meant to be doing restful things and thinking beautiful thoughts and NESTING DAMN YOU!!!!” and the like.  To be truthful, if I wasn’t pregnant I reckon I’d be having a ball, but I’ve got this time limit tick tick ticking away, and my body’s getting tired and sore, and every little thing seems huge.  And Currawong is doing his very best to try and become the incredible dividing man – creating as many copies of himself as possible to perform all the multitudinous tasks demanded by us all, and going through the same mood swings the rest of us are.   All in all, depending in which mood you found us, we could either be viewed as the camping neighbours from hell, or the trippiest and happiest big family in a freaky van and tent you ever did see. 

The first night we were inundated by mosquitos in Sherlock, as we left it all too late to set up for the night, and I realised that I’d worked out everyone’s comfortable bed but mine.  Didn’t get any sleep, and went and slept on a rug on the ground for a while – till I thought it was getting a bit too overcast, and got back inside the van just before it started raining.  The next two nights we set up in a beautiful, freezing, grass seed ridden camp spot by a dry lake in Walpeup, and slept comfortably out of the van. 

The fourth night was in Nyah, by the river behind the showgrounds, where we put up the little two person tent for Currawong and the lotus babies, while I slept with the twins in the back of the bus to see if it would be any more comfortable.  It wasn’t.  We got there a bit late, and were still trying to set up in the freezing night.  The next night was a roadstop called Birdcage, with the cleanest composting toilets I’ve never smelt, and we tried sleeping the other way (the way we always used to sleep before I turned us round thinking we’d fit in the twins better) and SUCCESS!!  All squeezed in the bus in our cosy beds, we were all comfortable at last, and slept about the best we’d done since starting our adventure. 

 I didn’t realise I was feeling like a failure about how we couldn’t sleep all together in the van, until we managed to pull it off.  And from Walpeup, we were dancing ahead of burgeoning storm clouds, being chased by a chill and persistent wind, and it followed us all the way to our next stop, which was the Bendick Murrell rest area between Cowra and Young. 

We slept well there too, and got clear about how the two eldest really just needed to hang with the babies for an hour in the morning and night, so we could set up and dismantle the campsite the easiest.  The wind finally abated, and we set off on the best day we’ve had since leaving home.  I was getting all happy about nearing my birth land, and travelling was easy, and the land was beautiful, and we felt like we were really starting to get into the swing of things.  I reminisced with everyone about Bathurst, where I spent some awesome years as a teen after leaving home.  And we headed for the place that I’ve been talking about since I got pregnant with the twins – Sofala.  Only a few kilometres from where I was born, a beautiful and dilapidated gold mining town on the Turon river, and the place where I came as a 17 year old to Flats Café, where we ordered a spinach quiche, and watched them walk down to the garden by the river to pick the spinach before they made it……  I spent a lot of time in and around this river both as a child, and as a teen when I moved back to the area for a while.  And on our seventh night, and for our seventh day, we set up our gorgeous soul pad in the dark, and tempers frayed, and we woke up in the morning……….in totally freezing, but visual heaven. 

And here’s where the belief comes into it.  I’ve been freaking out, and scared, and worried that we’re damaging our kids by taking them away from everything they know, and terrified of this big leap we’re doing into the wild blue yonder, and grumpy, and fretting, and snappy, and seeing all the ways that we could be viewed as complete failures as parents, and worrying worrying worrying about this baby inside, and who’s going to midwife it, and how and where we’re going to find a place to live to birth it, and focusing on all the ‘bad omens’ that have happened this pregnancy – negative predictions from a midwife friend, Balthazar bashing the crap out of my birthing necklace and breaking the cow bone Kali bead that I’ve had since I was pregnant with Griffyn, the vague feelings of ominous portent that has lurked at my shoulder through every pregnancy, and the final straw was leaving my dressing gown behind.  The dressing gown that I grew and nurtured the twins with, and that I’ve used as a bit of a security blanket for a while now…….was left behind.  And all these days of travelling, I was focusing on all the bad bits of the kids behaviours, and spending a lot of time in tears, and feeling real sorry for myself……….till I had a chat with the two women I love best in the world, and felt like my world started to tilt a little into perspective, and a few choice statements that Currawong made sank in……..and I really got that it’s all about belief.

I really believe that we create our beliefs with our strength of BELIEF.  We’re creating everything with our beliefs, and thoughts, a bit like the creation of Tinkerbell.  The more we believe, the more real it becomes, and the more our belief is validated by what we’ve created.  I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have REALLY believed a lot of different and seemingly opposing realities.  I was born into a fundamentalist religion full of mystical and everyday miracles, and I felt the spirit within me and KNEW that I was a member of the only true church in the world.  And I was also a member of a channelling group, where I channelled a being that was part of a group of aliens, that were focusing on sending healing energy to the planet, and the other 3 members of the group were MEANT to be together with me, as we did our important work. (I haven’t often told people THAT one, cause it makes me seem like a flaky freak nutter, but I DON’T CARE!)  And I was a solitary hereditary witch, and I FELT the lineage of strong women I’d come from in the Goddess times, and the legacy they’d left me.  And I was a leather wearing dyke that felt sorry for all the women who would never know the completeness I felt in the arms of women, and KNEW that I was going to be a woman loving woman for the rest of my life.  For a while there after all my varied and intense beliefs had kind of melted away after Saturn Return, I felt like a bit of a flibberty gibbet, a vague and valueless vagrant in belief land, and a whore to different ideals…….until I realised that all of those experiences had been real, and I’d really believed them, and gathered a huge amount of learning from them, and thrown myself completely into them, body, mind and soul, and that there was nothing wrong with that at all.  At least I didn’t get cynical and think that there was no other belief for me when I grew out of the first one.  Or get hung up about how there could be only ONE truth, and once I’d used it up, that was all there was.  And it helped me to realise that everyone’s truth is really that – everyone’s truth – because it’s what they BELIEVE in that’s real for them, and that they’re creating as a reality in their lives.  And having surfed so many different beliefs, I know a lot of different languages that I can speak with all sorts of people.  And I can believe in everything.  And nothing.  And a combination of them both.  All at the same time.  And that would be my valid and proper belief.  And sometimes people really need to believe in their own beliefs to the exclusion of all others, to such a degree that they feel justified to judge, or put negative beliefs on other people, to support their own belief.  And their belief is such, that to acknowledge another person’s reality would cause their own to unravel, and that’s just the way it is.  And I can respect that. 

All that being said, we’ve been hanging round with people in our close living situations for the last three years, who no matter how much they may like us in lots of ways, have very strong beliefs of their own, that made it imperative to see us as lazy, selfish, neglectful, unreliable, despotic examples of bad parenting, bound for hell, messy, and a whole heap more really negative words.  And it’s had an impact on us.  But only while we believe that they might be right, or are worried that they see something we don’t.  And only while we give up the power of creating our own lives around our own beliefs to them.   And there’s a whole stack of folk in that mainstream culture, who have been informed by their media that folk like us are potentially dangerous, could be terrorists or drug smugglers, and likely to be dead beat parents.  And you know what?  That’s all okay.  Everyone is doing what they need to do to survive in their beliefs, and support their own way of thinking, and if I buy too much into what other people believe about me, I’m negating my own strong beliefs about who I am, and what value I am to the world, and also, funnily enough, buying into the belief of a lot of alternative people that the mainstream is ‘the other’ and can never understand them…….  So love to me and love to you and love to everyone who has their niche in the world that they’re happy with, because it all comes around in the end, and we’re all learning what we need to learn, and we’re all richer for our diversity, and love is all there really is in the end.

And I gotta say right here and now that I BELIEVE that all those ‘negative’ omens about this baby to come are not negative at all, but a really strong indication that this baby is going to be born it’s own way, and it’s a good idea to let go of all my safety rafts and worries, and just let it be a completely new experience and birth, without the baggage of expectations from the past.  And I BELIEVE that we’re bloody amazing to be travelling with 6 young children, (at all!!) and in a van, and sleeping in it, as well as in a big beautiful tent, and yes it has it’s trying times, but there’s the times of pure gold as well, and at least we’re giving it our best shot!  And we’re resilient buggers to have gone through all we have, and come out the other side of it travelling to Sofala, which we’ve been talking about for years now.  With twins on board.  And all the rest of it.  And debriefing on the way.  And letting go of fears.  With style.  And there’s a huge amount of love between us all that may be a bit messy in translation at the moment, but given a home and a safe place to birth, and some folk around us with similar beliefs to ours who support the very best parts of us, and we’ll all sail gently on the balmy waters of love again, and express ourselves in ways that aren’t tantrumsJ

Northern New South…..here we come....