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.





Trust birth? Well mostly..........

A little while ago on Facebook, when I was talking about the search for a home, a midwife, and a doula, a woman asked me why I wasn’t considering freebirthing.  As she pointed out, I’ve got more experience in birthing than a lot of other folks around, and have thought very deeply about it all, so why do I feel the need to have a midwife?  The question really sat with me, and I wondered why myself.  I’ve always had a tremendous respect for women and families that freebirth, and for the last 4 births Currawong and I have tossed around the possibility of freebirthing……..but it never really materialised into a realistic proposition for me.  But I’m really glad the question was asked, as ever since it’s been sitting at the back of my brain pan, tumbling around with all my other thoughts, and it’s been an interesting journey following all the threads that come from it. 

In my toolkit of experiences, I’ve had a few run in’s with homebirthing midwives that were less than empowering, and a few with doctors and hospitals as well.  I’ve read books from the Christian fundamentalist right wing about unassisted birth, and how midwives, doctors and all other birth workers just get in the way of what should naturally be a magical experience shared by the mum and dad alone.  And I really related to what was written.  When the books drew attention to the observation that many women focused their oxytocic love, thanks and bonding on the midwife, rather than their mate, I could really see what they were talking about.  There’s so many birth stories I’ve read, where women talk in loving and glowing terms about their midwives, and all their other family members kinda take a back seat to the show.  And there’s a lot of intervention that some midwives get into that is totally unnecessary and just gets in the way, like giving internals, and cutting cords quickly, and catching the baby and ‘giving’ it to the mamma.  And after having a less than positive experience with homebirthing midwives, I really got into this way of looking at midwife led births for a while…….only to get pregnant again, cleanse a lot of my negative juju about midwives by meeting one who listened to me rant and agreed with me, and then was present at our birth in the most unobtrusive way possible, and gave me the gift of ‘catching’ my own baby.  I then went on to become a bit of a homebirthing and midwife advocate, till Balthazar came a long and introduced me to the blessings of western medicine.  And of course in my most recent and publicised birth of twins, Lisa was an integral, necessary, and much loved part of the process, and I definitely had a lot to say about her in my writings.

And while I know the statistics of caesareans in hospitals is incredibly alarming, and I get the whole interventionist dance that often leads to caesareans, as well as the scare mongering that happens from doctor folks when homebirth or natural birth is suggested…..I’ve had some really empowering, respectful, and peaceful births in hospitals too.  My main beef with hospitals has been their overwhelming attitude that birth is fraught with danger, and that birth belongs in the same corridors as deathly illnesses, physical trauma, great sickness and slow death.  I’ve got a bit of a problem too, with how the trend in hospitals at the moment is to separate mamma’s and babies, and that whole invasive separation they do with cleaning, testing, jabbing needles etc.  Kinda doesn’t really aid in a gentle welcome, compassion for a little being who’s been living in a controlled, peaceful and watery womb, and bonding.  Also, how it’s really hard to feel safe and cave like, and tap into a woman’s mammalian brain, in the sterile and bright environment of a hospital ward.   But then again, if a woman is really afraid of birth and what might happen, maybe for her a hospital is the safe place that she needs to be able to fully relax into the birthing process?  Afterall, even though much ado is made of interventionist practices in hospital, there are still a huge amount of women who birth naturally and without drugs in them.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think either camp has all the answers, or even all the questions, and I think that both homebirthing midwives and their supporters, and hospital birth workers and their supporters are two halves of the same whole.  Very antagonistic and despising of each other halves, but halves nonetheless.  And while they’re stuck in this anti each other and polarising dance for the soul of birth, a lot of women, children, families and individuals on both sides of the track are being overlooked, seriously neglected, and damaged in the process.  On the one side we have the birth trusting, all women have been beautifully designed to birth naturally, and by the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so hospitals and doctors should just get back in their boxes, and take their hands off birth, and leave us all to do it peacefully at home approach, that also makes a fair deal about the scaremongering of doctors and obstetricians, and how a lot of their ‘facts’ are lies.  And then on the other side we have the medical approach that points to the harm that can come to unprepared women and families facing an emergency situation at home, and perhaps a long way from a hospital, as well as some of the dangers that can be faced when there’s an un-regulated body of birth workers attending births at home.  There’s also the body of information they hold about the dangers of birth, and how fraught birth HAS been in our history.  Yes many women pushed out babes on the fields and kept going, but a lot of them experienced babies getting stuck, and dying, and cords around necks stopping them from being born, and a hundred other possibilities that can and do happen even in these days of improved diet and hygiene and birth trusting.  But unfortunately, it’s the mainstream medical model that has the weight of the government and legal practitioners behind them, willing to send the horses of the apocalypse after homebirthers, and resulting in an unfairly balanced war effort on behalf of the hospital birthing scene.    

And the result of this antagonistic polarising dance in my opinion anyway, is causing many a casualty in the self esteem and bonding of families and birthing women across the board.  Unsuprisingly, with the amount of kids bounding around us every time we’re in public, a lot of my conversations with people we come across revolve around birth and kids.  And I’m really saddened that a lot of women respond to my stories with half ashamed accounts of how they weren’t brave enough to try birthing at home, or they tried and just couldn’t cut it, or they used every drug they possibly could because they were so afraid, or they didn’t have any option because their pelvis was too small, or they had health complications, or they had a natural birth and it traumatised them, or they suffered post natal depression, or a million other reasons why they didn’t give birth in either the wholistic, alternative accepted manner, or the hospital, mainstream accepted manner.  And these women all take it onto themselves, as their own fault, as their own body failing them in birth, as their inability to birth ‘properly’ being all their own doing, as an experience that happened to them that was less than they hoped, the result of which, can put some serious bricks in the wall of their lack of self esteem and body confidence, which then leeches from their parenting confidence, and sense of connection with their families, and becomes part of the general body of stories around birth that go unacknowledged from either side of the polarised fence, as it doesn’t fit appropriately into their accepted picture of what birth is.

I see so many women and families in pain around their birthing experiences, that I’ve taken to saying something like this to them….. 

“Ya know what darlin?  There is no ‘perfect’ birth, birth just is what it is.  Every one is different, and every birth is perfect if you let it be, no matter whether it was at home or in the hospital.  And we haven’t been designed perfectly to give birth, cause we CHANGED OUR DESIGN!!  When we decided to grow our frontal lobes and walk upright we changed our design from the less problematic mammalian birth canals that were straight, and we turned them into this twisty birth canal that can really cause problems.    And babies had to be born a year premature, which meant they couldn’t walk like all the other mammal babies, so mother nature had to create a tricksy system of oxytocic rewards if we held them to us and fed them when they were hungry, so they weren’t eaten by dogs or stolen by other tribes.  You just need to be true to yourself and do what feels good for you, cause that’s all that counts really.  Trying to birth or parent in any kind of way because that’s what you’ve been told is ‘right’ is never gonna work, cause it doesn’t carry the weight of your belief and life experience.  Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, and listen to yourself and your new baby whose instincts haven’t been convinced otherwise yet, and all will be fine…”

Or something like that anyway. 

Cause the biggest casualty in the war over birth is birth itself.  And it is a war, and quite a vicious one at times.  Nastiness and personal attacks are hurled by both sides, personalities especially associated with either camp singled out for horrific attention, and it seems that no-one’s getting the law of attraction proven by quantum physics, that you get more of what you focus on!  And my own personal experience that you become what you hate is also coming into this equation.  No one is winning anything, except for long drawn out battle plans being enacted, and a lot of energy being spent on the fight.  And a whole lot of people are losing, their integrity, their passions, their experiences being validated, and their sense of self worth.  Sometimes it seems to me that the fight just takes up too much space.

In an ideal world, both halves of birth would come together and hold hands instead.  Doctors and obstetricians would study their own sciences, especially that of Ethnopaediatrics and the beautiful works of Dr Sarah Buckley, Leboyer, Michel Odent, and all the others who’ve championed gentle and welcoming births, and provide birthing centres all over the world that allowed lesser and greater influences of homebirth and hospital birth depending on the blend required by the families that use them.  And homebirthing midwives who feel drawn to the trade, will work co-operatively with them in partnership and backup, so that all the potentialities of birth can be dealt with effectively and cohesively.  And the women and families entering the mysterious world of birth will have equal access to all the different perspectives and possibilities available, and have free access to whatever option works for them, based on their life experience and deeply held beliefs.  And imagine what we could do with all the energy focused on this war if the war dissolved!!  If the polarity that exists melted into a whole, there would be no ‘taboo’ subjects left anymore, so women walking into birth for the first time could explore the possibilities of natural caesareans for example, and alternative forms of pain relief, and maybe, just maybe, we could also focus our attention on what happens AFTER birth, a largely ignored realm in many birthing circles.  We focus on the conception, the pregnancy, the hormones, the birth and all it’s possibilities, but what happens after?  What about the importance of bonding?  The exhaustion many women feel after entertaining family hours after birthing? How to fold cloth nappies?  How to deal with sibling rivalry?  How to deal with the issues of step parenting?  How to address problems that occurred during the birth and set up patterns that aren’t life enhancing?  How to ‘unlearn’ survival skills that we’ve been taught by our parents that don’t help us survive, and in fact may be really stuffing us up?  I can think of worlds that we could be spending our collective energy on that would be far more rewarding than the argy bargy between hospital and home birthing.

So to get back to the original question, I guess that on deep contemplation, I’d have to say that I trust birth implicitly metaphysically, but not completely physically.  I’m aware of the things that can go wrong, and that HAVE gone sideways for me in my experiences, and when I’m in that intensely vulnerable and ‘elsewhere’ state of engaging in the age old dance of birth, I really like someone around to hold my hand, and who I know will cover my back.  Someone who isn’t Currawong and my family, who are caught up with their own experience, but who is there to just focus on me and the baby inside me coming out safely.  Someone who knows enough about the intricacies of birth to be able to fix any solvable problems at home, and also to get us the hell out of there and to a hospital on time if that’s what is needed.  And I’m so greatful for the folk that spend years in university learning how to help me and others when we really need them in hospitals, as well as the midwives who dig into the past to find old ways of birthing, as well as making alternative information available as well.  I’m greatful for all birthworkers really, and see the value in all their work and ideas.  I just wish it was something that they and others could see mutually and in themselves as well.

But that’s just my perception of birth, and the best way to do it, and when it comes down to it, I’d argue for anyone else’s perceptions till I’m blue in the face, cause that’s what it’s all about to me.  The combination of all our experiences and perceptions are equally valid and enhancing if taken that way, to the whole.  And if we put em all together and respect them all, we have a really healthy blueprint for the evolution of us all and our consciousness so we can USE those frontal lobes we traded easier births for, to help our planet and ourselves move beyond this warring and fighting over who’s right and wrong that happens in every sector, and move into an evolution of love, respect, peace and freedom for every single thing in the universe.  I’ll keep dreaming it up………

After Birth.......

In having 7 children, and births, I've learnt stuff from each birth that not that many women experience anymore.... With Jess' birth I learnt about the Goddess and feminism and sexuality, with Griffyn's birth I learnt how easy birth can be - even in a hospital - and how easily I could attempt a homebirth.  Lilly's birth taught me how nicely the journey can be taken at home and how important the post natal period is for bonding and setting up healthy family relationships. Spiral-Moon's birth taught me how incredibly blissful a home, water and lotus birth can be, how incredible it is to catch your own baby, and how a post natal period done well can change the vibration of your entire family. Balthazar's birth taught me about judgement, (mine towards women that had caesareans and western medicine in general), the fully medicalised birth, and also about post natal depression and healing from it. And during the period between Balthazar's birth, and as a result of my twins births, I reckon I've got a real handle on my 'big picture' of birth.

For a start I found out about 'Ethnopaediatrics', which is the marriage of child development research, anthropology, psychology, and pediatrics, and goes a long way towards explaining the science behind a lot of the conclusions reached by Jean Liedloff in 'The Continuum Concept'. I thought I knew a lot about birth, but it only really came together with this new information.

To put it in a nutshell, when we decided as a species to think and walk, we altered the course of our births from the relatively easy journey that we still see today in all the other mammals, to the tricksy process it can be today. Our pelvises could only get so big or we wouldn't be able to keep walking, and our heads grew as we thought more and developed our frontal lobes, and the result was that our babies began being born earlier than was preferable. If we hadn't of made these changes, our babies would be more like other mammal babies, and born when they could walk relatively soon after birth, more like a year old baby than our modern day newborns. And we would have kept the straight birth canal that other mammals enjoy. As it is, our birth canal's have become a twisty journey to the outside world, and we birth babies that are all virtually premature.

Nature had to help us adapt........

And did so beautifully, by setting up an intricate rewards system, that made sure that we'd keep our babies close to us and nurture them, to ensure the survival of our species. And a delicate cocktail of hormones and oxytocins to be released during specific periods of the birthing time, as well as infancy, to keep us following the carrot of baby care that people call now 'attachment parenting'. Sarah J Buckley writes eloquently on these hormonal cocktails, and how they are released and can be interrupted by medical intervention.

It really came home to me about a week after my twins were born. I was experiencing extreme sore nipples and nipple trauma for the first time ever, and finding it all a bit difficult and hard to cope with. Lisa came to visit and found me teary and overwhelmed, and told me I needed to get my clothes off, rest as much as I could, and hold my babies on my skin and close to my chest as much as I could. And as she explained, during the times that followed after we changed our evolutionary path, if I'd left my babies on a bed or ground as far away from me as they were at that moment, they would have been eaten by a predator or stolen by another tribe. If I kept my babies on my bare chest as much as possible, I'd trigger off the happy hormones as the reward for me keeping my babies alive and safe.

I tried it and it worked beautifully. And I realised I still had a lot to learn.

The night my 4th baby was born, my midwife Rosey was on the phone to me being gorgeous, and as my mum was there, she asked me to ask mum how she'd given birth to me - in which position.  I asked, and was surprised when I found that she'd birthed in exactly the same position as I always do.  Rosey told me that a huge percentage of the women she'd birthed with, (and that's a lot in over 30 years as a midwife) birthed in the same positions as their mothers.

But it doesn't stop there.

I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that having twins has been one of the most challenging physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys of my life.  In fact, the birth was NOTHING compared to how these past 5 months have been as a reality.  I tried really hard to imagine what it would be like to have two babies before I birthed them......

And I wasn't even close.

And what comes with pushing yourself and your limits to the very edge?  In my experience anyway, it usually produces realisations and self awareness.  And this experience has been no exception.

I've been saying for a long time, that as we're born, we're turning around and looking at our mothers and saying to ourselves, 'Now THAT'S how to give birth, and when we're being raised we're saying, 'THAT'S how to treat children, and THAT'S what to expect from life'.  I always meant it more metaphorically than anything else, but I'm coming to understand that this learning is literal.

For mammals and animals and us to survive, the very process I've just described has to be imprinted totally and completely, along with an imperative to remember and re-enact all we soak up as babies and children.  That's how great herds of buffalo moved across the grasslands following the water, grass and seasons.  Why Emperor Penguins go to that extreme place in the freezer all those miles from the water and perform the rituals they do, rather than just pull up shop and move closer to the sea.  Why birds flock together and go on their global journeys to eat, nest, and raise their young.  How all sorts of animals remember when and where all sorts of prey are going to be, and how to best eat them.  They learnt the patterns from their parents, how to birth, feed, procreate and survive, and repeated those patterns faithfully.

And guess what.  I'm realising that we're exactly the same.  Except we think that the re-enactment of our parents patterns in our lives is because of all the other reasons under the sun, except for, we do it because that's how we were shown how to survive.  And we've faithfully replicated the patterns.  We may do it in different ways, and with different costumes or descriptions, but in my experience anyway, it's a matter of the same poo (or joy) in a different bucket.....

And it's taken the extremeties of birthing and living with twins to bring me to the realisation that even though I've been merrily tripping down the path of thinking that I was doing things differently to my parents and had transcended my childhood......  I was in denial all along.

It's a long and complicated story, and I don't want to make my eldest daughter feel in the spotlight, but suffice to say, many of the mistakes I thought I wasn't making.....I was.  Many of the things I hated about my childhood.......I did to her.  And most profound to me, how I spent my pregnancy, was a way of being that is a big part of her life now.  In a different way of course, but the essence is still the same.  This shocked the crap out of me when I saw it let me tell you now, and then I started looking at all the other elements in my life, and realised there were a lot of patterns I learnt from my childhood that I'd re-created.  Again, in different clothing, and with different props, but the basic pattern was exactly the same.

To give you an example.  My mum raised 6 children virtually on her own with an alcoholic, disaffected husband, who'd walk in the door after work, drop his hat and bag as he went straight to his room, where he'd read a book, drink a bottle of wine, and mum had to keep us all quiet.  She had no help or assistance.  And Currawong's mum was equally on her own and alone, and had to keep him well behaved so as not to get in the way.  They were both disrespected and unsupported in their lives and choices.

And we live on a community, and are surrounded by friends, and not doing it on our own but with a loving partner (man was I bummed when I realised that getting over my parents patterns, by being madly in love with the father of my children, wasn't all there was to transcend!!) - but - my mum and eldest daughter have had other business, the 6 other adults here haven't helped a jot, and friends help when they can, but the logistics of getting out to see them or vice versa is tricky.  We've also got grumpy neighbours who want us to keep our kids quiet till midday.  In fact, in all the places we've lived since we started having kids, we've done it on our own, had to keep our kids quiet a lot and controlled, and not got any outside help to speak of.  And often end up in home situations where we're disrespected and unsupported in our choices.  All of these paradigms go out the window though when we're travelling and on the road.  We didn't get any patterns to recreate around travelling, so we do it with a clean slate.  And it's divine.

Now I'm not saying this to whinge, or to shame my fellow community dwellers, (and none of you are allowed to be disillusioned about communities because of this story!!).  In fact I'm sure that even if they wanted to help, they wouldn't be able to because my love and I have a learnt imperative that we've implemented for our survival!  And those survival skills we learnt are strong! Learnt at our parents knees!  And it's not even their fault, in fact it's not really anyones....it's just us human mammals acting out our learnt skills to survive.

But the good news is, and I'll have to keep you posted, that when you realise such a pattern for what it is - a misguided survival imperative - then you can change it.  You can unschool it.  You can unlearn it. Instead of justifying, rationalising, psycho-therapising and the rest, you can just say..

"Oh.  That particular survival skill I learnt from infancy doesn't actually help me survive.  In fact it feels really crappy sometimes and I'm only doing it cause my animal brain wants to survive by repeating what it saw my parents do, but now I've been through all these changes and got myself a bigger frontal lobe, I can understand why I was doing it, see where I got that particular dysfunctional survival skill from, and simply change it for one I like better"

Or at least it should........