Baggage.....

So picture this.  We’re all standing and sitting in a massive, gi-normous airport, watching the baggage carousel slowly spinning round, watching other people picking up their baggage.  Picking up their stuff.  Their learning’s that have filtered through their family, religion, schooling, childhood, environment, culture, country of birth.  That have often come packaged with rules.   As well as all the bits of baggage that they’ve collected along the way, not to mention the invisible memory of the baggage they’ve lost. 

And we’re all watching each other, watching each other claim our baggage.  Some of it is all fancy and designer made and covered with emblems of great wealth and opulence.  Some of it is very similar and easily attainable and looks like a lot of the other baggage carriers.  Some of it is handmade and colourful and totally unique looking.  Some of it is in wild shapes and sizes that contain instruments and tools and costumes and artifacts.  Some of it is tattered and worn and sad looking.  Heavy, and offering discomfort and unhappy carrying.  Some of it is indefinably magic and mysterious and delightful looking.  Some of it looks ordinary, but for some obscure reason you get the feeling that picking it up would be a dream.  Some of it is rotten and stinking and falling apart and messy.  Some of it looks like it could come alive and savage a human easily.  Some of it has badges and symbols emblazoned on it that look surreal, or otherworldly, or evil.  Some of it bears the badges and tickets of an incredibly far and wide travelled life.  Some of it has spilled open and is leaking it’s secrets to the world.  Some of it advertises on the outside what’s within in a lurid fashion. 

And we’re watching.  We’re watching who picks up what.  Getting some surprises when forlorn looking people pick up opulent baggage.  When tiny people pick up huge instruments.  When trashy looking people pick up the baggage of a genius.  When earth mothers pick up the rigid files of a lawmaker.  When humans of great beauty and talent pick up the baggage of depression and self hate.  When the ‘perfect’ people pick up rotten stinking bags that are bursting their seams with filth. 

There’s all sorts of surprises when watching the great carousel of life, and the people who are claiming their baggage. 

A lot of the watchers are looking with judgement, and you can almost witness the invisible tallies and categories and stereotypes and lists of woes that are being added up and subtracted and multiplied within their heads and hearts.  A lot of them are not looking at each other and hoping that others will respect this and not look at them either.  There’s also a lot of them who are looking at each other with compassion, watching each other claim baggage with love in their eyes, giving each other little signs and signals of acknowledgement, acceptance, respect.  And those that make assumptions based on the appearance of the person, as to what their baggage will be.  Often they are proved right, and spend their time only with the other people that have the same baggage as them.  A lot of them making a huge song and dance about their wonderful baggage, what lovely baggage it is, and look at my baggage!!  Don’t you wish it was yours??  And a lot of them have code words and songs and statements that define them from the others, and their baggage all wears the signs of their uniforms, and they sing at each other as they claim their baggage, and then each other.   A lot of them are obviously kinda ashamed of their baggage, but they claim it nonetheless, trying their best to muster a sense of self worth and pride even before the judgemental glares of others.  And there’s a lot of people who are obviously victimised by their baggage, no matter how sweet, or innovative, or beautifully mended, or lovingly patched they may be, they are victimised nonetheless.  But most of them pick up their baggage with the unselfconsciousness of familiarity.  After all, they’ve been carrying round that baggage all their lives, they’re connected to it and consider it their second skin. 

If you look really closely, you can notice there is a lot of comparisons going on, and some people looking relieved when others pick up the more socially unacceptable baggage and cop the derision, rude noises, judgement, and approbation of the crowd.  They’re relieved cause some one else is copping it and not them this time.  Or somebody else has it worse than them. 

A huge amount of us, more than you could ever know, silently slink away from our nastier baggage, the baggage that we’re ashamed of, and covertly steal back later to claim it when nobody else is there, or only when the other people we know would understand are there……

Of course there’s also the people who send somebody else to claim their baggage.  Or get it delivered to them.  And quietly sit behind their walls, sometimes even making the most noise and opposition to a certain sort of baggage, from the afar of the internet, or other public forums, that nobody but them knows, is secretly hidden in their own closet.

Some people have learnt the clever trick of having a seemingly innocuous baggage holder on the out, hiding completely different baggage on the inside.  And some have baggage that everyone else can recognise, hiding just one or two little trinkets inside that would get them thrown out of the baggage group if anyone found out.

Some people have a completely new set of baggage carriers every time you see them, but what’s inside stays always the same.

And see, I’ve had lots of different sorts of baggage throughout my life.  I’ve traded one for the other along my voyage, depending on where I am, who else is in the airport, and what my experience has taught me.  Some very incongruous and unexpected baggage has passed through my hands in the various  byways and plane paths and highways of my life. 

I’ve learnt it’s our baggage that defines us.  Or maybe more to the point what we do with our baggage.  What we’ve learnt from the places it has taken us.   How we’ve mended the holes, and the scars, and the rips.  And when we’re really on good terms with our baggage, when we can own it, and claim it, and be completely sure about it’s worth, and teachings and tools……then all the watching and judging baggage holders and avoiders, can just keep going about their business, cause you’ve got your baggage sorted. 

And it’s also our baggage that divides us.  And unites us if we let it. 

If we all decided to just camp out in the airport for a while, and unpack our baggage, and show each other our dirty undies and secret compartments and hidden treasures……..I can almost guarantee you that you’d be surprised about who really had what baggage, deep inside their outsides.  And you’d realise that we share far more baggage than we let ourselves know. 

So now picture this.  I’m walking into the airport with all my favourite clothes on.  My harem style pants with the velvet waist band that I made from some real Indian silk, fresh from a stock creating trip, that was given to me on the first day I brought Lilith to our market after she was born, and has been through many incarnations.  The diamond cut hippy skirt with the applied crochet circle, that I traded for a crocheted creation with that cool chick with dreadlocks, who pretended I didn’t exist anymore, after she heard some stories about my baggage that she judged as worthy of blocking me out.  That purple top I made out of a tube of stretchy purple that I zigzagged through the middle, leaving me a shipwrecked look for a top and a pair of pants.  Made me look like a great purple pirate when I wore them together.   My hairs up in the style for which I crafted it, with long healthy slightly curled hair streaming out, beneath the dreadlocked horns that I’ve sculpted with a strip of wool wrapped wire plaited through my dreads.  I’m wearing jewellery for once, the big lapis lazuli and coral laced chunky necklace I traded a beautiful mantle for, with that awesome woman in Eumundi, who was inspired to never use soap again, after I left a residue of my scent on the top of her shoulder after hugging.   My favourite rings, the diamante studded spider and the copper scarab.  And I’ve got on my handmade felted boots that I stomped courage, strength, compassion, empathy, love, peace, respect and freedom into, through different coloured felt stamped onto my sole by a muddy earth.  

And I’m walking into the airport, and before all the different eyes, standing in my power and proud of who I am, and willing to recognise myself in all the optic nerves connected to memories eyeballing me.  Wrapt with what I’ve learnt from my life and my travels and the baggage I’ve carried, but most of all totally in love with the baggage I carry now, all the nice bags and darker bags and secret bags and life long bags and messy bags and nasty bags……….all of them are embroidered with gold and yarns, and encrusted with gems, and have features that may or may not fit, but make some sort of sense in the end, and in the interim, and in all the bits that went before. 

And there’s some parts of my baggage that I’d like to share with you.  Not all of it though, cause that would take a really long time, but there are some precious bits of my baggage that I’d like to unpack with you.  Cause I’m not ashamed of any of it.  I’ve got some baggage that has parcels in it that are severely judged, and some that are in the public discourse at the moment, as people stridently take sides, offer statements of ‘How could they do that!’ and the like, trying to convince themselves and others that there’s only one right way.   I suspect that there’s some folk who have made assumptions and judgements about me, based on my mother earth kinda appearance, and that’s just not healthy for anyone.    And I’m  noticing more and more that there’s a growing movement of people just wanting themselves and everyone else to be who they are, and get over the judgement. 

But maybe more to the point, after travelling through a childhood and picking up various baggage and parcels that often contained lies, hypocrisy, betrayal, duplicity, and hurt, I’ve spent my adult life creating a collection of comfortable, claimable baggage, that carries things with honesty, trust, authenticity, and my personal truths.   

So I’m walking up to that great carousel in one of the many airports of life, and the first bag I’m claiming is my baggage of rules.  It’s full of zippers and compartments, and made out of sandpaper with soft edgings and handles.   And has an enormous amount of pockets that are full of information sheets, and lengthy lists that have boxes in which to write ticks and crosses.  There’s some clandestine pockets hiding other people’s score sheets and test results, and secret judgements I’ve made, that I pull out occasionally to make myself feel better or worse with.  And there’s also a tool bag made out of leather, where I keep the tools of the lessons I’ve learned from rules and unlearning rules.  

So let’s sit down in a comfortable seat for a while, cause I’d like to show you a few of the tools I’ve sculpted along the way, but first I want to give you a glimpse of my external/internal rule sheet. 

Which has a whole heap of rules that I inherited by being born, right at the beginning of my sprawling parchment made from my skin. That have been slowly crossed out, or have arrows pointing to later realisations.  And there’s a big line about a tenth of the way down that has THE ONLY ULTIMATE TRUTH IS THAT THERE IS NO ULTIMATE TRUTH written, with lots of underlines, and everything going before it squared off.  This is the epiphany I wrought through eating cheese and playing solitaire for two weeks, after leaving my home, family, friends, school, religion, horse, cat, cello, piano, and area, under police escort, to go and live with my sister at the age of 16.    Everything was gone.  My carpet had well and truly been ripped.  And this was the best sense I could make of the void, that the disappearance of so many rules and regulations had left.  The rest of my rule sheet is full of diverse rules, beliefs, stereotypes and judgements that I’ve felt variously oppressed and esteemed by through different stages of my life journey.  The other main rules that really stand out in their scattered places around my sheet is the one that says WE’RE ALL CONNECTED,  written in blood, and the calligraphy of THOUGHT CREATES REALITY that I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve quipped.  There’s a woolly kind of fibre that’s a cross between carefully crafted yarn and freeform wildness tucked in an envelope that sits in a pocket on a far flung reach of the parchment.  And with the fibre, nestle small pages full of all the wool rules I took on, and the rules I crossed out, and rules that I deliberately broke.  With little addendums of all the rules I didn’t even know existed, that I broke anyway.  And somewhere over here is the one I saw time and time again on my travels, YOU BECOME WHAT YOU HATE (OR FOCUS ON), and over there on the right is another rule that I’ve had to learn time and time again, that EVERYTHING IS PERFECT…….no matter how imperfect it may have been at the time.  And these are the main rules that I really took on, to steer me through my journey, and that I learnt from my own experience, so I know they’re true for me.      

And scattered through the whole bag, are scrunched up bits of paper that have rules that I’ve totally abandoned, and in some pockets, the scrunched up papers have been neatly flattened out with realisations written on them.    

But look at some of these tools! This flamboyantly coloured pair of glasses that when you put on, makes you see only two old men, is the one I made when I was a baby dyke going to my first ever Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.  There was all this talk and discussion and energy about Fred Nile, a fanatic and dogmatic religious dude, who had organised a pray for rain meeting, so he could rain on our parade.  In the weeks following it, there was an article in a gay and lesbian magazine that described a journalist going undercover to the pray for rain meeting.  Equipped with a wig, mobile phone, conservative clothes and a beeper, she strode into the meeting………..to find two old men.  All that fuss about two old men.  It started me wondering about those two old men.  Maybe they were the same two old men who I called ‘them’, and who I expected to judge me, as I walked around in my shaved head, black leather splendour.  And maybe only being two of ‘them’ explained why I’d never actually encountered any homophobia.  Maybe my world wasn’t so surrounded with judgement as I thought.  Mind you, I had friends that suffered endless homophobia, and here are the talismans I have of them, and I know and understand that my experience isn’t everyone’s, but this is my bag afterall.  And I’ve used these glasses often, anytime I’m tempted to feel oppressed by rules or a moral majority or a bunch of ‘them’, whoever they may be.

And this tool that looks remarkably like a headdress, with big scooping ears to listen, and a great hat that assisted in standing in the shadows, and dark glasses that hide microscopes, and a big soft drapey scarfey thing that hangs in a loving hug to feel my heart……..is the disguise I wore for many many years, whilst trying to unlearn dogma, conditioning, fears, superiorities and insecurities…….and rules.  All I knew was that along with there being no ultimate truth, I knew absolutely nothing about most of the things I was interested in.  So I lurked, and I listened, and I observed with every faculty I knew how to use……and I learnt. 

And all these beautifully coloured glass bottles held safely in satin pockets, contain the essences of those lessons.   Here, have a whiff of that charge I got when I found a twin soul in an unexpected incarnation.  And have a feel of this satiny liquid that pours through my body in those moments I have of complete and total oneness with everyone and thing in the universe.  If I open this cork,  you can hear the yip of joy I let out when I get something totally and completely right…..for me.  And have a sniff of the odourous stench I get in my nostrils when I’ve done something that I really wished I hadn’t.  And search my head for ways that I can both acknowledge and transform that part of me.  Have a taste of the bittersweet tang I get on my  tongue, when I have to admit that I’ve been totally wrong, and it’s time to backtrack and find a more authentic path. 

And this tool, this gem encrusted mirror, is the one that I learnt about how you get what you expect, or focus on.  I made this one when I was comparing photo’s with that awesome German woman in Tubingen, in her student loft, of our times in Belfast at nearly exactly the same time, 6 months before.   We’d even stayed in the same youth hostel.  Her photos were full of tanks, armed men, steel clad police stations, huge and aggressive murals on bombed walls.  And mine were of pleasantly pissed and thoroughly pleasant Belfastians in pubs, taking me out to dinner, driving me to the Giant’s Causeway, and generally sightseeing.  She was a student political activist, and I was a frequently pissed tourist.  And we both got what we were looking for.

And this little photo-memory book contains all the reminders I’ve got in my yarns about how worthwhile turning around to face fears is.  All the pretty moments when I was so overwhelmed with fear, but decided to jump anyway, and realised that hulking great dragon chasing me was really a Pekinese yapping at my heels.  

But that’s enough of my baggage of rules now, let’s zip it back up and place it on my trolley.  I’m walking back to the carousel again, for another part of my collection.  But this is enough of my baggage sharing.  I gotta get back to the family now, and get on with my journey, but we’ll catch each other at another airport carousel soon………






And no Baltazar and Nimue this time, instead I'm going to leave you with a song that I was obsessed with for a while.  I used to play it over and over as I sat in my little house and gazed out the window or at my little stained glass candle holder, and wished and wished for Currawong to leave where he was and come and be with me. I think it worked! And on borrowing Northern Exposure from the library I was reunited with it, so I had to share.....

And check out the words!! Quite a song for our times.....

I am the crow of desperation
I need no fact or validation
I span relentless variation
I scramble in the dust of a failing nation
I was concealed
Now I am stirring
And I have waited for this time.

I am the termite of temptation
I multiply and find my population
I am the wheel
I am the turning
And I will lay my love around you.

I am the sea of permutation
I live beyond interpretation
I scramble all the names and the Combinations
I penetrate the walls of explanation
I am the will
I am the burning
And I will lay my love around you.

I am the will
I am the yearning
And I will lay my love around you.

  

Women's Day

I really love women.  And not just because I am one......I've been through many fluctuations in my feelings about us, and had many bitter things to say about young, middle aged and old women throughout all my different stages, but above and beyond everything..................women are just wonderful.  Full of wonder, to bleed without being injured, to create life within us, to nurture little humans for as long as we do.  And even the women who choose not to mother, nurture their own forms of children into the world.  We are such incredible reflections of the greater cycles around us of birth, life, and death or rebirth.  With our personal monthly cycles we reflect the seasonal cycles, and the lifetime cycles, and the cycles of ideas and relationships that can be born, live, die, and then be reborn again in a different guise.  From my learnings over the years, I see that most of our collective problems come from our resistance and fear of, or attempts to control these cycles, or to try and arrest them into eternal life, so no pain has to be felt, and this is often to the detriment of ourselves and the world around us. 

But us women in our fibre and cells are attuned to these cycles, and reminded of them every month when we bleed, that a part of us that we carried inside us in our mothers wombs........is dying.  And this occurs to us metaphysically, and also literally.  Our bleeding can be the death of a dream of concieving new life, or a painful process that reminds us that we're not always in control.  The letting go of relationships and ideas, or a monthly purge of pent up emotions as we erupt with hormones.  A brief hiatus in a busy schedule, even if our bodies have to bully us into it with pain, or a reminder about how much we have to supress our wild natures to be a truly domesticated human animal woman....... 

In my experience anyway, us women are just a touch more connected to the great mysteries of life, the learnings to be obtained from the underground, and the great beauty there can be in death.......  Conversant with the great and swallowing pain that is the echo of complete and unconditional love.

And I can say right here and now that I love deeply every woman in my life.  Even the ones who have jarringly hurt me are loved for the lessons they taught.  I can't speak for the famous women and the icons and the movie stars, for I have no personal experience of them.  But instead when I think of woman, I think of all the women who have touched my life, and each and every one of them is beautiful.  I've learnt harsh lessons about my own mothering, about my mother, about how I've mothered my oldest and first born daughter, and they all lead me to reflections of myself.  And I believe that if I can heal them in myself, I can heal with them, and help others to as well, and  ultimately the world is a better place.  And beyond my personal family relationships, women in my life have taught me how to love, to hug, to giggle, to feel safe, and so many other things.  I've always had a special woman in my life in particular, who was there for me as a friend, sister, and sometimes lover, as well as a larger circle of amazing, talented and passionate women around me, and we all reflect, mirror, and beam on each other our particular brands of light. 

Women smell good, and feel good, and I always feel wholesome when I think of how nice it must be for a baby to lounge on my curvaceous body built for comfort not speed.  To sleep on my big and generous breasts.  To sit on my soft and accomodating lap.  Women by the nature of our bodies have a spiritual recess, that leads into us.  A deep that can't always be dived into.  An intimate inner part of us that needs a respectful request to gain acceptance.  We have parts of us that have to be dug for.

On my journeys through the interconnected world wide web, I've met some incredible women, some on the other side of the world, who have shared stories and birthing journeys and inspirations and advice and love and learning.......and I'm greatful for you all, and I'm happy and sad all at the same time that you're too numerous to mention by name, and for me to tell you little stories about what you mean to me, and how I hold a flame for you in my heart.   

And as I write this taking moments to gaze into my bonny baby's face and smile with him........I've got to express that I'm profoundly greatful for being a woman, and for the spiritual path that my feet tread as a result of birthing all the babies I have.  The humbling lessons they've taught me, and the unique personalities with which they instruct.  And helping me to get to that amazing place where I know a lot from my life experience, and it all goes to show me how incredibly much more there is to learn. 

So as a gift to whoever wants it on this International Women's Day, I'd like to keep with the theme but break the sequence, by posting two chapters from far off in the future in my book that I've been serialising here....Balthazar and Nimue.   One is, I guess, my ideal of womaness, and the other is a song that I wrote many years ago.  I love women :)  Hope you enjoy these two gifts to the goddess......

  

Chapter 18 - Nimue writes.....

     

Once there was a woman who brought everything around her to life.  Not just the people she met, and the trees and plants around her she touched, but the cars which she drove, the dishes she washed at the sink, the tiles she walked on to the bath, the cloth she draped over her skin.

If you had the gift of sight, of being able to see the energies that move around a person or a plant or an object, and you had been able to watch her, to hang back to a point of observation in which you could view the reaction of energies to her passage through them, you would have noticed a visible hum of life at her approach in all of the atmosphere around her.  Which would build into a buzzing at her imminent presence, vivid greens and purples and reds and blues and yellows swirling round her, threading out to vibrate through the very air circling her, melting into everything in its wake, and then at her departure the rapture slowed, faded, and a miserable ache of loss at the realisation that all was as it had been before, no more freed of it's inanimate incarnation, then the slow numbness of forgetfulness..........

She hadn't been this way all of her life.  She'd spread out luscious amounts of her time and love onto everyone, animal or cause that grabbed her at that moment, and spent her earlier years like an ant, scrabbling out scraps and lessons, and storing them underground, letting it build up till she knew what she wanted to do with it all.  Till a curious phase hugged her to it, breathing in her ears a warm, fragrant, sea breeze tune, that lured her closer, till she forgot to remember she was dreaming, and let it become reality. 

Every single moment of her life felt sacred, her room became a temple, her existence became filled with ritual, clothing herself became dressing the goddess.  She bought herself sweet oils and incense, velvet and satin, sweet treats and dope, herbs and fruit juice.  She looked at the stars and bled into velvet, then rinsed them in water and spread the bloodied water on her plants.  She bought sea salt and rose bath salt, sandalwood oil and candles, and made her room into time warping peace.  Melodies lilting, scents wafting, timeless, buzzing, soft bright peace.......

At first she just bathed in her own reactions and senses, feelings and smells, touches and caresses, and languished in the waves of herself.  But a little further down the path, at the end of a living green tunnel, she found herself aware of every particle around her.  She ran herself a bath, walking over the cool tiles, spread rose petals and scented salt through the rising bubbles and burbles of water.  Lay outstretched at first, feeling her skin, then she felt a rose petal brush by her and found herself in moist soil, feeling her roots into the ground, and her sturdy thorned stalks, and the soft, velveteen roses of deep blood red petals.  Felt the sun beating a soft heart path to her leaves and the bright bright sky spread above her............back again to feeling her body.  Then a grain of sea salt nudged her soft thigh, and she was hurled in a spiral through the deep dark sea, brushing by fish and anemones and being drawn toward the surface, and the melting of dark sea into purples and sea greens and white blues.....back again to feeling her body.  Then she touched the bath and shocked into knowing the rock and stones, ore's and oxides, landscapes and caverns, and hands of many people that all of these particles went through to become a bath.  And the room became very crowded. 

She brushed her teeth and her gaze strayed out the window to the lurid patterns the grass was weaving, with sprinkles of white belled flowers and deep pink buds, then clothed herself, feeling the vista of sunswept paddocks of cotton plants, with their soft white balls of fluff waiting to be picked, and woven, and patterned, and shaped, into clothes.  Doing the dishes she felt all the particles in every plate and cup and container she washed, gently, and placed with reverence in the rainbow bubbled water and then dishrack.  Every journey made, every hand that touched, every paint drop pressed in it's surface.

And she knew herself part of a bigger circle, larger life.  Countlessly relaying and passing and feeling information, and conversation, and content, and life, onto others and through others, and round the spiral of life, to the great mass of creation and knowledge, that hangs round the circumference of everything that was and is and will be.......

Chapter 28 - Always out at sea

Well I’ve been always out at sea

Nobodies ever rescued me

Drag myself towards the shore

Every stroke is hurting more

Is this the price for liberty

Constant drowning out at sea

See the flags fly on the sand

Distant drumming from the land

Chorus-

Maiden Mother Crone your story unfolds

And to you my sisters call

Feel the power rise within

Break the binds of christian sin

Oh mother can’t you see me here

Does my crying reach your ears

Seen your face so many times

Bruised and worn believing lies

You face misogyny and fear

Been beaten down so many years

Kept from knowing your own worth

Sacred mother of the earth

Chorus

Looking back on all my years

See the root of all my fears

Recognise the constant grind

To domesticate my mind

No amount of worldly gain

Can ever ease the pain

Separated from my birth

To the mother and the earth

Chorus

But my mother never dies

She is there beneath the lies

Steady drumming from the ground

Can you hear the ancient sound

Till her children hear her call

Stop this dance with death’s thrall

I think I’d rather be

Always drowning out at sea

Every good relationship needs lots of time for personal space doesn't it?

 

After all, there’s so much accepted wisdom from so many different camps about how parents, lovers, children, even pets, need some time to themselves, to spend some ‘me’ time, to work on the individuals goals, spirituality, hobbies, meditate or whatever.  An ex girlfriend of mine gave me a beautiful piece of writing, about how every great love relationship needs some time for the ‘winds of heaven to dance between them’.  Currawong and I have been told by so many people, from so many different paths and spiritualities, and in so many different ways, that we should spend some time apart.  Have some space.  Get some perspective.  Give each other room.  And that’s not all, the same goes for our relationship with our kids.  They all need more space and time away, and we should be sending them off to all the other mandatory and standardized forms of child care that other people do, and inflict many other children of their same age on them, whether they like each other or not, but that’s what we all have to get used to, because you’re always gonna come across people you don’t like at work, and you have to start working out how to get along with them as soon as possible.  Infancy in fact.  

In being so obviously different to mainstream society, as well as being a big family that does everything together in a very ‘life as art’ way, we tend to bump into a vast amount of varied people who want to let us know that they get us or they don’t, or ask us how we do it, or say “Didn’t your lot die out in the 70’s?” and the like, and there are some common things we get as feedback from a lot-a-lot of people.  Like I’ve mentioned before, many people feel inspired by our smiles and love and colourful selves, but in the conversations, a lot of people want to justify their own choices in life, or why they don’t live a life more similar to ours even though they wish they could.  And some of the things we commonly hear are things like “I’d go crazy if he didn’t work and was underfoot in my house all day”, and “I’d love to be the sort of mum who could do homeschooling, but spending every day with my kids would drive us ALL mad” and “Do you ever get some time to yourself?” and “I’d love to stay home with my woman and my kids all day and do what they do, but SOMEBODY has to pay for it all” and “I don’t know how you stay sane with all those kids” and “I’d homeschool too but I’m on my own, and it’s not something that one person can do solo” and the like.  And sadly for me, a lot of women mainly, and men, make the judgement that I’m a domineering, bossy, pussy whipping, harridan, who has Currawong firmly tied to my apron strings (if I wore an apron that is), because there’s NO WAY a man left to his own devices would choose to spend time with his lover and family doing domestic things.  No way at all.  Surely he’d rather be off watching sports, or down at the front bar, or doing blokey things with other blokes, and busily suppressing his emotions like all (Australian in particular) men do.  He needs to be off hunting and gathering, and being a warrior, and bringing home the bacon and the eggs and everything else too, to fulfill his male, lion-like pride.  And me, I should be fine cause I’m a woman afterall, and as a lot of people have decided, also a bit of an ‘earth mother’, so I’ll be okay, but what about poor Currawong?  How is he going to fulfill himself apart from all this ‘women’s business’ he’s trapped in, by my deadly spider like ways and arts??  (Is there a bit of bitterness starting to seep in at this point do you think?  Maybe I should get to the uplifting bit sooner rather than later….)  But just before I move on, there’s been some funny times as well in all this.  Especially when other men have tried to ‘rescue’ Currawong to go and do something ‘manly’, and not noticed his panic stricken face behind them as he mouths to me ‘rescue me!’ Or the time when a big alpha male was talking to me at the market we ran about how there were womens’ places and men’s places, and he thought Currawong needed to come along to his men’s group.  I was just in the process of telling him that we didn’t really do gender roles in our house, and if we did, Currawong performed many of the more traditionally female roles, and I could definitely sometimes be described as wearing the pants in the house.  We were in the middle of talking about this, when Currawong walked up to us and had a huge hissy fit about something or another, then stalked off with the Alpha male looking a bit bewildered, and quick as a whip I turned to him and said….”His time of the month”, with a shrug of the shoulder, and he went from bewildered to totally confused.  HA!  It may be a result of our early sexualisation, or our same sex relationships from the past, but we prove to each other that men and women aren’t so very different after all.  I like to call Currawong my ‘chick with a dick’, and he truly enjoys hanging out with all my women friends, you just try and stop him!

And now the preamble.  I’m only just starting to really get how very different us mob are in how we run our lives and our family compared to a lot of other folk.  You may laugh, but being a freak show isn’t something that’s happened over night you know!  It’s taken a long time full of baby steps for us all to get where we’re at, and it’s like I’ve all of a sudden woken up and realized that to a lot of folk, we’re radical extremists living a really different reality.  And I’m also getting that a lot more people than are brave enough to engage us on the street, are really curious about that life style.  And what it’s like on a day to day basis, and how it works, and what we do and all that stuff.  I’ve come from an extremely conservative and sheltered background, and Currawong’s come from a rough childhood partially on the streets, and identifying for most of that time as a punk, and through each other and our relationship, we’ve morphed/osmosed into colourful, homebirthing, home educating, self taught artisan hippies with a big family………………for want of a better description.  And on that journey, we’ve come across so many different lifestyles, spiritualities, approaches and the like, and we’ve met them all with respect, honoured them for what they are, and accepted other folks versions of reality for being as true as they believe they are.  And I guess I’m at the point where I want to respect, honour, and accept my own version of reality as much as I do other people’s, and give it voice as much as other folk do about their brands of reality.  Cause mine is really different.  And unique.  And largely self created from experience.  And also liable to piss a lot of people off if they take it personally, as in thinking that I’m trying to tell people what they should think or do, and judging them by my particular set of values.  I really want to stress right here and now, that everything I talk about is my experience and reality only, and I totally respect EVERYONE else’s right to their own beliefs and reality.  Sometime’s to levels that other people get all moral at me about, but that’s another story. 

Now, enter stage left my opinion, experience and viewpoint, on the whole space in relationships issue.  I’ll never forget a friend in the midst of the fallout of her long term relationship breaking up, telling me, “We gave each other so much space, that in the end space was all we had…”.  I reckon if the advice of taking space and ‘me time’ was such a good and sound and valid approach, we should be seeing something better in the state of relationships around us.  But I don’t. I see a lot of people in relationships who are busy working and playing and being themselves and bringing up kids and doing all the things you do…..with someone who they used to know and love a lot better, and there’s a kind of sad distance between people supposedly ‘in love’, who don’t have the time or resources to get back to each other.  In fact I see a whole lot of people – men, women and children – who deep down feel very alone, isolated, betrayed by their love and trust in people, and with a whole mess of deep down darks and secrets that they don’t share with anyone for fear of being disliked, and a dream of what they wanted their love to be like, and a rheam of reasons why they can’t or their partner can’t and ultimately why they feel alone in a room full of people.  I think that rather than take space from each other, we need to work out how to step closer to each other, and really let each other in, and teach each other how to truly be emotionally intimate and trusting with ourselves and our loved ones.  There’s an evolution of parenting skills that’s happening in attachment and conscious parenting circles, that I’m finding really interesting.  They suggest rather than punishments and yelling and bribing and all those other vastly outmoded ways of child taming, and even some of the more peaceful ways of trying to get your child to perform, like time out and such tactics……….that you should just hold them close.  That obnoxious, childish behavior that makes you want to rip your hair out, instead of reacting to, you should just hug them.  Hold them.  Keep them close.  Realise that often anti-social behavior comes from the behaver feeling unloved in some way, and break through all the bullshit and prickles, and just swamp em in love. And I reckon inside most of us supposed big people, is a little person in pain wanting some love, for some long ago hurt, and I suspect that deep down we’d all like to be held close, and no matter how many walls we may try to build, have someone knock em all down and give us a hug and love. 

Currawong and I spend nearly all our moments together, and miss each other like crazy when we don’t. I don’t know whether it’s cause our Friesian past connects us like glue, or our miserable childhoods, or the fact that two chameleonic fringe dwellers getting together creates great synchronicity…..but we’re inseperable.  At first we ran our relationship more like other folk – he went off to work sometimes, and went off to the pub on his own sometimes, and I did stuff without him – but it wasn’t long before we fell into wanting to spend all our time together.  We’re both big energy people, and Currawong was in particular very raw in his private inner sanctum, and it took a lot of work between us to let each other in.  We’d both been molested as children, so there were plenty of wounds to heal, and trusts to build, and we were so wrapped up in each other and plumbing each other’s depths, that we soon got into the habit of hanging out together all the time.  Currawong had never really had anyone in that deep before, my poor petal had a lot of acquaintances he thought of as friends before I came along, and I’d been in lot’s of people’s deeps, but never one quite so intricate, who I also got to play sexually with.  And it’s just kept getting closer and deeper and more amazing as we heal and peel off layers.  And now, it’s not a clingy pining thing, but when we’re apart, after an hour or so, we just quietly miss each other.  And usually ring each other to chat.  We make so much sense to each other, and we’re each other’s best mates, and we talk all the time about all sorts of wild and undomesticated things, so that when we’re apart, and when we’re hanging with other people, there’s a big empty space.  Not to mention that the common conversations to be had with acquaintances, can sometimes feel a bit empty and superficial compared to our worlds……  

Which leads me to the question……..which comes first?  The inseperableness or the great relationship?  I’m sure everyone’s heard the stories about dream relationships of people who love each other madly and spend all their time together and spend a lifetime in great love – I know I have – and I never dreamed that I would get to experience it.  And maybe they’re so great because the partners ARE inseperable?  Because they hold each other consciously in their day to day lives and deal with their stuff as it happens?  If attitudes sent towards Currawong and I show a collective attitude towards closeness in relationships, maybe folk are too scared of being consumed by someone else and becoming ‘co-dependant’ (which incidentally is a totally inappropriate term to apply to close relationships, as the term was originally coined to describe the partners of drug addicts who helped their partners to get their fix) to really experience great love. 

To be blunt, I believe our society is so full of ‘space’ between lovers, parents and children, and families in general, that we accept and expect emotional distance as the norm, which allows a lot of us to get away with a whole heap of emotional deceits, inaccuracies, and masks. To hide from ourselves and each other, and just avoid situations that ask for too much emotional authenticity.  There’s all these different compartments – home, school, work, playtime, hobbies, ‘me time’, church and the like, where people can be totally inauthentic.  One person at work, another at home, another at church, another at the pub, another at football, and all the time playing the polite dance of chit chat and social expectations, and declarations of loyalty and honesty, that are all shrugged off as easily as being put on. Situations occur where people build each other up, and almost dare each other into honesty and intimacy, and their dreams and hearts start flying till BANG! One of them changes, or gets scared, or drops the mask, or disappears, or works too hard, and the other is left holding the broken bits and telling themselves that to trust and hope equals pain.  Or they experience great love till they buy into the great western dream of a job and a mortgage and a house and a child or two and all of a sudden that’s all there is.   And there’s no consistent person/observer who is watching us through all the compartments of our lives, and asking us why we said this and meant that, and why we were so different with that person than the other, and how we could live with our lies and hypocrisy, especially to ourselves. 

Except in our family.  And a lot of others too, I know.  We consciously hold each other and our children and our emotional authenticity together all day every day.  We notice when one of us is hiding an emotion, or in need of some extra love, or being inauthentic to who they really are, or doing something amazing that they’re learning.  And it’s not all love and roses, we have humdinger fights that explode all over the place, and we all yell and scream, but we’re always picking over the carcass later on, and apologizing or working out why that happened, and working out how we can do it better afterwards.  And learning from each event that happens and building on what we know and love about each other.  Currawong and I have no secrets from each other.  None at all.  After childhoods filled with secrets, it’s one of the most important elements in our lives to have no secrets at all.  And our kids have followed that tradition, and give us astonishing honesty that we handle with care.   

And I need to take a moment here to speak about money.  We’ve consciously chosen love and family and togetherness over money.  And it’s not all that easy, but is tremendously so all at the same time.  Because we haven’t bought into the mortgage paradigm, or the working one, it’s meant living in other people’s spaces, or travelling a lot, or living in cheap housing which comes with all it’s own compromises.  It’s meant not having enough money for all those entertainment devices that I’m really not sorry we don’t have.  It’s meant living on a lot less than most people in our society are used to having.  And though this paradigm does have it’s challenges, it’s one I can recommend.  A lot of what we can’t afford we wouldn’t want anyway, and our adaptations have made us resourcefull and skilled.  We find joy in the ordinary and each other, and maybe with more money we would have developed more expensive tastes.  It’s funny how often you need a stack of money to make money – to pay for the childcare, clothing, vehicles, entertainments, and foods needed to provide an income. 

And we don’t find it suffocating, or soul squashing in any way.  There’s a huge amount of love between us, and none of it is forced.  When the kids go away for sleepovers we all miss each other, and phone each other to say good morning.  When they get back, the siblings that missed them will tell them, and there’ll be hugs all round.  They’re surrounded by a big family of people that love them best, and are with them through most situations to hold them consciously and look out for each other.  And we’re also all very different and unique, and supported in being ourselves by all of us, and enjoy our social interactions with everyone, knowing that if it ever gets intense, scary, or intimidating, that there’s a bubble of family to escape to and debrief with.

I’m going to stop now, cause I think I’ve made my point, but I’m only realizing now how very much more I have to say about all this, and maybe I’ll just have to save all that for my book.  And other writings that are going to be available for you to buy soon on a stick in their own little crocheted pouches.  I’ll get there soon……

 And by the way......I know a lot of the photo's don't really make sense compared to the writings, but I just loaded a whole heap of photo's on a removable drive, and have kinda been using only them in this period of using the library internet...photo's will get relevant again soon:)