The Year Of The Equal And Opposite Reaction

This year was truly the year of the Equal and Opposite Reaction.  I'd dallied around the edges of getting this realisation before, in a theoretical kind of way that made sense but wasn't quite felt yet.  This lineage has been building up my entire adult life, with trauma after betrayal after intense life event happening - and then the equal and opposite swinging in with amazing people, realisations, and support, leading to understanding, learning and growth through change.  Often the most traumatic change has brought the most dramatic growth.  

I'd have to say the year of 2012 was when the intense flash cards of equal and opposite started to kaleidoscope between each other the most magnificently.  Our family made sense through the bonding after Zarrathustra's birth, of the dramas that led to us leaving South Australia, that ended up being very good in the long run, and taking us to a far better place.  My friend Michael Lusty committed suicide, and the equal and opposite of such a tragedy was a tremendous outpouring of connected community love.  Since then a Death And Beyond group has started in Nimbin to deal with death better.  And I had a personal moment with my brother through serpentine interconnections, that was truly and deeply beautiful.  I wrote a Note To The Menfolk, and it touched a lot of people.  My blogging friend Lauren of Sparkling Adventures  and her 4 daughters lost her son Elijah and her husband David in one tragic stroke.  I watched her deal with unnameable grief and loss and heartbreak, with grace and love.  We met in person at Elijahs' funeral, and she did and continues to inspire me and change my life.  Where she travels in her equal and opposite reaction to an event we all quail from, has profoundly impacted in a hugely positive way on many many lives.  Another friend Sarah Kerr lost her son Tully in 2011, the brother of Ruby in birth, and honestly shared her grieving and heartbreak, and has gone on with her amazing family to create a beautiful video of her family loving Tully even in death, with an incredible song Blankets Of Love, written by another beautiful friend Loren Kate, which went on to raise money for cold cots so that other families could do the same.  She and her family are travelling the country at the moment, leaving some ashes of Tully everywhere they go, as a heart flowing tribute.  I also met with another truly beautiful human, both inside and out, Bree Daley Forsyth, who is published in the same book as me Birth Journeys, who lost one of her twins Sage, and has gone through a similar underground journey into the equal and opposite of the beauty and growth that can emerge through death.  And right at the end of the year I got a big dose of hate and cyber bullying.  Which pushed me into owning myself, and my shadow and light, and was a very clear case of equal and opposite.  Only equal to the amount of hate and bullying was the amount of love and acceptance that came with the tide.  It's true.  Haters make you famous.  And it pushed me over the edge into self love and acceptance, which meant I could write My Truth

Enter the year 2013.  

First thing of the year was moving into a hoarders house, which was a HUUUUGE amount of cleaning and work just to get there, and ongoing as we tried to uncover spaces.  We got to know all sorts of people, and with true hippy naiveté  thought that love and acceptance would heal everything, even the people who our instincts warned us might be volatile.  

I had an ectopic pregnancy, that was like the shortest pregnancy and most painful birth I've ever had.  And had all the attendants that normally surround birth, of confronting skeletons in pregnancy, and the bonding and oxytocic adventure after birth, even though it was birthing the spirit of Bodhi Seer into our family, who brought many gifts with her like all my children do.  And through the physical pain and emotional pain (because we'd quite fancied the idea of another baby), we were treated amazingly by the hospital staff that helped me through the experience.  And loved and supported by our friends on our community.  Who looked after our babies so that Currawong could be with me.  And all the way driving into Lismore to be hospitalised for a night, we were crying about how loved and held we felt.

As part of the increased learning and growth that was the equal and opposite for the pain and grief of an Ectopic pregnancy, I really got that we had to eat our shadows.  I was thinking and thinking and thinking, for days and days it seemed, and my thoughts almost hurt.  I was trying to come up with my Humanimal Manifesto, and it was flowing and streaming from my pen and my fingers, and right in the middle of it all I really truly got that our shadows and fears are actually our friends, with the seeds of enlightenment and learning within them all.  All the worst things that have happened to me have taught me the most.  Every heartbreak has cracked me through into greater love.  Every grief increased my capacity for feeling joy.  Every pain has eventually given me incredible comfort.  All as an equal and opposite reaction to each other.  I was down on the ground, with my hands on the earth, looking at ants only inches from my eyes, and saying to myself, 'I LOVE my shadow, I wanna EAT my shadow, and all the shadows and fears that have beset me have been BRILLIANT in where they've taken me.  From now on when I see a shadow I'm gonna RUN into it's arms, cause it's there to teach me!'  I was all impassioned, and explained it to Currawong and he instantly got it, and 'Eat It' by Weird Al Jankovich was our theme song for a few days.  

At one point I was yelling to the sky 'Just bring it on!  Bring on any shadow you want, cause I know  that it will evolve me!'  

And we bumped smack bang into one of our fellow community dwellers who was as brilliant……as he was an evil wolf, and we'd made friends with him in his sheeps clothing.  And he went all psycho at us and another family, threatening to kill Currawong, and holding us under siege for two nights.  We also fell out in similar but unrelated ways with many of the others we were close to.  Overnight it was over.  And yes I did think to myself 'eat this shadow silly bitch' almost as soon as it happened.  We got out and away, and were totally traumatised, it was in the middle of winter, and we were suddenly homeless with 7 kids.  And I shut down my blog and stayed fairly quiet online to keep our whereabouts hidden.

And the equal and opposite to this event has been quite stunning.

We drove off our community in full flight and trauma, straight into the Rainbow Cafe for lunch, where I met my new best friend and we had an impassioned talk and loved each other on sight, and then straight to a new friends house where she cooked us a roast and filled us so full of unconditional love it was stunning.  In the process of her and her family helping us in the dead of winter, we actually helped them in a sweet and unexpected way.  And then needing to sit somewhere and work out what to do next, I thought the very best place for a bunch of hippies to hide………was at a christian farm stay.  I knew there was an unschooling camp coming up at Hosanna Farmstay,  so I thought we should check out where it was going to be, as well as give the kids a holiday to take their minds off being so freaked out at seeing us scared for the first time in their little lives.

The minute that we explained to them what was going on, (we thought it was only fair) and we worked out that they were ex-hippies and I was an ex-christian, it was love at first sight.  They nestled us under their wings, and their gentle WWOOF'ers took the kids on the farm chores, we were in tears often, and had all sorts of inspirational conversations.  Even though I was into the eating of shadows, I was also into loving myself wherever I went.  So I went totally into all the emotions that came.  Fear, loss, grief, betrayal, anger, hyper vigilance.  Many tearful conversations were had, between me and Currawong and especially Alex at Hosanna, while we stayed there a week.  There was a moment of pure gold, when I was desperately trying to find connections and understandings talking with her, and compared god to chaos and gave her on a silver platter the opportunity to barter for my soul…. (I would have taken it up in my christian days myself).  And she fixed me with a piercing gaze and said "We're all different, and God treats us all individually……you don't need to be like me" with a huge smile and hug.  Could have kissed her I could.  And the caretaker and his family were a treat, and Dutch, and came to us seriously one morning with the kids in tow, and sat down with the dad holding Currawong's hands.  And they told us a story about how they prayed to God every morning, and wrote down the messages that came, and a month or so earlier, one of their daughters got a message that a family in a big bus was coming, who weren't christians, but they needed their help.  They said a week before a family had come in a bus, but they were christians, and they thought maybe that detail was a bit different, but then we turned up and they knew the message was right after all. And they were so there for us in such a deep and unexpected way, and so much more than a safe place to hide, that I could just hug them all, and hold the memory as a golden star.  They were angels of mercy and love, and when we left they threw us a huge lunch, and we parted to many promises of seeing each other regularly.

From there we were sheltered in a cosy and comfy shed in the garden of a mansion on a thriving community in Nimbin, and found all our needs and legal requirements beautifully met in the most amazing and resourced town I've ever lived.  We were so fried from what had happened and working it out, but the landscape, dwellings, and friends who passed us around and sheltered us were so very beautiful.  Currawong and I learnt about the long term effects of adrenaline on a body, and had many tense, teary, and desolate moments, looking at the chasm that had grown overnight between us and the community dream we'd been living.  But while this was happening we were also being treated beautifully by the Police people who were dealing with our case of being intimidated, and then  violating his bail conditions.  A big burly constable was about as gentle as you could be with my shaky questions.  People all around town helped out wherever they could.  As well as our extended network stretching all over the country and welcoming us wherever we thought we needed to go.  With legal matters we're here till they're done though.

And on the morning when I had us all packing up and going on the road till the court case, we fell into the most amazing house that we've ever lived in.  We couldn't have tried harder to not get it than if we were actually trying - no references beyond phone ones, no income statement, fluffed phone messages, too many of us, but we just seemed to fall into it.

We love it so much it's silly.  I feel so good living here, that I compare it to all the other people I tried to fantasise about a future with, as opposed to meeting Currawong and just settling into that future and meeting so deeply.  It makes me think that every other house we've lived has just not been the right one.   It holds us so well and beautifully.  I've fallen in love with the land, it's powerfully intense, behind a major sacred site on a mountain.  There are magnificent fig trees that I'm yarn bombing.  I could burble on for a while about it's beauties, but there's a point I'm getting to.  So we love it.  We're happy.  And thriving.  And have realised a lot about ourselves and each other.  I also had the most magical metaphysical experience of my life…..but those are all other stories.

The big lesson of the year for me, or maybe more to the point, the reaffirmed and confirmed lesson that I've been learning all my life that has really kicked through this year…….is that of the equal and opposite reaction.  Every action, has an equal and opposite reaction, and that doesn't only count for physical things.  When we send out love, it can often bounce back as hate, and vice versa.  And this isn't dire or drastic or dastardly, but a reflection of a perfect composite of opposites that bounce off each other to change, move and become.  Every single thing in the universe is energy that is constantly destroying and creating itself over and over, and we are also the same.

This year has been huge.  I've learnt how good I am at 'making things good'.  I've learnt that you really can't love someone who doesn't love themselves, cause they'll always prove you wrong.  I've learnt to accept my equal and opposite of extremely good and bad.  As well as the same in those around me I love (and hate).  As good as a person can be, is as bad as they can be, and the scariest people are those that only own their good.  Or their bad.  We all project onto others the issues that we don't deal with in ourselves, and I've learnt enough from the arts of projection to be able to be projected at, without taking it personally anymore.  I've learnt that security is an illusion.  I've learnt that surrender is really the best tactic when dealing with everything.  I wonder if we all do ourselves a collective disservice when we strive towards the good all the time, thinking that bad things that happen are an act of karma, and something that we're paying for, rather than seeing it as the equal and opposite, and the swing to the change, and the down to the up on the great see saw of life.

I'm reading a book at the moment.  I don't read much offline anymore, having my fancy well and truly caught by the multi media splendour that is the internet, but old fashioned books with slightly brown edges and that booky smell still have my heart.  At least I'm trying to read it, but I keep reading the first part over and over, and really stretching my head to fit it in.  It's called 'The Tao of Physics' by Fritjof Capra, and it's all about how Quantum Physics is bringing the seeming opposites that are really a unity of science and religion together.  Cause I don't know about you, but I think science without god is just about as silly as god without science, and as the man explains, Eastern mysticism has forever kept science and god on fairly good terms.  And I've been most taken by the fact that early in our Western thinking, before Aristotle and Descartes separated everything out, there was a tradition where everything was seen as one and connected.  In particular, Heraclitus, of the Milesian school summed it up about perfect.  And every time I get to this bit in the book it just stops me completely, and I've got to sit and contemplate (or rather contemplate in that part of me that sits and thinks while my busy brain is active performing tasks or shutting out the chaos of 7 busy children) and really let it steep for a while.  It goes like this….

…….The Milesians were called 'hylozoists', or 'those who think matter is alive', by the later Greeks, because they saw no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter. In fact, they did not even have a word for matter since they saw all forms of existence as manifestations of the 'physics', endowed with life and spirituality.  Thus Thales declared all things to be full of gods and Anaximander saw the universe as a kind of organism which was supported by 'pneuma', the cosmic breath, in the same way as the human body is supported by air.

The monistic and organic view of the Milesians was very close to that of ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy, and the parallels to Eastern thought are even stronger in the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus.  Heraclitus believed in a  world of perpetual change, of eternal 'Becoming'.  For him, all static Being was based on deception and his universal principle was fire, a symbol for the continuous flow and change of all things.  Heraclitus taught that all changes in the world arise from the dynamic and cyclic interplay of opposites and he saw any pair of opposites as a unity.  This unity, which contains and transcends all opposing forces, he called the Logos.

If I wanted to sum it all up, I'd say it was interesting that I posted the story of Spiral-Moon's birth and bonding and the shift of our energies that destroyed and created a whole new community for us at about the same time that the very same thing was about to happen again.  During the very short pregnancy and miscarriage of Bodhi Seer, which is the name that came to me when contemplating this baby, we experienced the very same shift through grief and bonding, instead of birth and bonding, and a very similar destruction and instant creation of the old energy, making way for the new. And it was so clearly obvious the equal and opposite, that for all the people that exited stage left rather traumatically, a whole bunch of people turned up on stage right straight away, that were similar but different.  Everything that was destroyed was created again, fresh and new and brighter.   And the change brought great growth.

Looking at life this way just really works for me.  It makes sense of a lot of things on contemplation for a start, and it also takes the sting out of the 'bad' events, along with the guilt and self blame I've carried for the negative events in my life.  Take the judgement out of good and bad, and see it instead as equal and opposite, and two interdependent parts of a logical whole, and all sorts of mini miracles can occur.

I wonder what next year will bring…..

Letter to the Zeitgeist Movement

Firstly, I contemplated how many other movies and movements have similar aims of saving the world in their particular way... For example "What the Bleep" and "Down the Rabbit Hole" and "The Secret" are dealing with similar topics, but in a very Quantum Physics kind of way. Showing how our thoughts create our realities, and how this concept has been used by a few to keep us buying the whole monetary/political system. Also how our focus on it creates a hell of a lot more of it, and we'd be better off to visualise and focus on more positive realities if we want to live in them. Fritjoff Capra wrote a book called "The turning point of civilization" in the 70's, which goes into details of the great bodies in our society - law, religion, science, medicine - and how they thought they were doing a good job by taking away an element to study, and thinking this would help them understand the whole. But you kinda have to study the whole to understand the whole. He also explained how it was all falling apart, and it would be the alternative cultures who would show the way into a new reality.

I also thought about the community movement the world over, where people share resources, land and ideas, and have been doing so since the 70's, in an effort to learn how to share and get along with the earth as well as other people. A rather famous and successful example of this is Damanhur in Italy, where they have thier own form of currency, and are nearly totally self sufficient. Everything is done with a sense of reverence for the thing made, and where it's come from, and they eat together, make thier own clothes, grow thier own food, and have an outdoor temple with huge pillars where they study and co-create a spiritual belief system based around self and responsibility.

Another important and relevant movement is the homebirthing movement, where people are striving to reclaim birth from unnecessary medical intervention, and work out the best way to welcome people into the world and educate them for a healthy life. There is also a movie connected to all of this - "What babies want" - that brings into focus how we presently give birth, which is often highly medical and disempowered. We all know the cute story of putting a baby sheep with humans as it's first contact, in which case the sheep bonds with humans and thinks it is one - what is the impact of taking baby humans and putting them with machines??

But this is all fairly modern - what about examples from the past about all the issues you raise? The indigenous folk of Australia have been living in a cash free, resource rich society for over 50.000 years before the white fella's got here, as well as the indigenous folk of most other countries. They have a lot to teach about how to live with the land and each other as well. For that matter, us white fella's have this knowledge too if you look far enough back. For a good 60,000 years pre about 4,000 BC we mostly lived in earth mother focused, matrifocal, non-violent societies. L.Robert Keck wrote about this in 'Sacred Eyes', and he also wrote an essay about how humans aren't by nature violent. It's all a fairly recent invention.

I totally agree that if you gave folk all they needed for a comfortable life, as well as the freedom to find thier individual passions and selves, we'd live in a wonderful society. It would be arranged in as many different ways as there are shades of colour in the spectrum, cause one of the best things about humans is their diversity. One of the best things about everything for that matter. I personally think one of our greatest mistakes is to seperate ourselves from our planet and all the other species, as it's so obvious that we've all got the same bits as the other animals. And I've often wondered about the frontal lobe - which most scientists believe to be where our consciousness comes from - when dolphins and whales have huge ones!!!

And I reckon there's also a lot to learn from the Friesians. When the Romans did a survey of the tribes in Europe in 0 AD, they did a very complete job, and the Friesians are the only ones still in the same place, and speaking the same language! 700 years before the French Revolution, the Friesians were practicing autonomous anarchy in essence - there was no ruling class, monarchy, or political system - they all practiced thier own beliefs in their own way, and respected everyone elses right to do the same. There is a saying that every Friesian was born a noble, and basically they were a peaceable race - unless you messed with thier freedom. And then hell hath no fury like a Friesian unfree!!!!

That's another group that have parrallels to the Zeitgeist movement - Crimethinc - an anarchist group aiming towards sovereignty and autonomy. "Days of War, Nights of Love" is definitely worth a good read.

And a modern concept coined by our local governments (they're not all bad!!) called 'community capacity building'. This basically recognises that all individuals are equal, and have thier own particular skill to add to the whole. Also acknowledges that all systems are based on heirarchys which don't work, and only disempower folk from finding their own 'thing'. My partner and I started a market in the hills that changed our world, based on this concept.

So all in all, I totally agree with most of the concepts in Zeitgeist, but you don't have to totally reinvent the wheel, as there are a lot of similar groups and beliefs going on, that have a lot to say about where to from here. I don't necessarily believe the only solution is a completely scientific and technical one - as I've mentioned, there is a lot to learn from our collective past.

And as Ghengis Kahn illustrated with his dying breaths, we are stronger together than apart. Trying to work out how to divide his huge empire between his many sons, he took a stack of sticks and held them together, and asked his sons to break them, which they couldn't. Then he pulled out one stick and asked his sons to break it which of course they could. And he told them to remember that lesson. Together they were strong, but alone they were easily broken.

As you may have noticed, I have a tremendous amount to say about all of this, and would be more than happy to elucidate on any of the points I've raised. Hope this is usefull!!