Self Organisation

I reckon my childhood was specially designed to create a strong urge and desire towards self organisation. And my first great experience in how the dark has lessons, those who hurt you teach you far more than the hurt, and how relinquishing control can be so liberating when coming from total control.  

 

In the debutante ball on emerging from my childhood I wore rags.  My confidence had been completely stripped from me, the rug of my entire existence ripped out from underneath me a few times already, fears of everything and loathing for myself had been instilled deeply.  I knew I knew nothing.  And I'd had every minute of my day controlled and scheduled for so long, that just the absence of a routine or schedule felt like a holiday.  

 

Working for other people hurt me.  I couldn't understand the easy way they took out their shit on me, and felt like they could just because they were paying me.  All the facts I'd been taught had bored me into blanking out or going misty eyed when faced with science, maths, or any form of standardised learning.  

 

All the religion I'd had thrust on me had taught me to run a mile at the sniff of it.  All the pain in my family ensured that I kept my secrets at arms length to everyone.  And my family had sternly informed me that the best I could ever hope for was to be a good wife and mother, cause I didn't have much chance at 'making it' any other way.  So of course I steered as far away from that as I could as well.  

So wearing my rags to the debutante ball, I emerged into my real life, and the life of my own directing, with only one realisation to guide me.  The realisation I came to standing at the gate of my life stretched before me, when I left everything that had gone on before behind.  The gate where I realised that nearly everything that had been taught me was a lie or a sadness. And I got that the only ultimate truth was that there was no ultimate truth.  And set sail with abandon into self organisation, even though that wasn't what I would have called it at the time.  

 

Knowing that I knew nothing, and was ugly and a bit stupid to boot, I felt from the start that I had no right to infringe myself or ideas on anyone.  No right to even demur when a fella decided he would fuck me.  I'd had no control or power my whole life to that point, so why try to start getting it now?  

 

I felt I had no life experience to make any kind of educated decisions, and obviously no imagination, or I wouldn't have been aimlessly bumbling from one situation, person, or idea to another as flakily as I was.  No internal fortitude, or I would have finished something, like I was always being told to.  And absolutely no ability to change myself, be better, be disciplined, enforce routine, or create the ability to refuse to give in to my indulgent desires. 

 

Afraid of everything cause I didn't understand it.  Inferior to everyone cause they kept telling me I was.  

In other words, I was primed for gratitude.  It wasn't hard to feel deeply greatfull for any kind word or deed that came my way after the desert of my childhood.  It was also easy to contact great enthusiasm for just about anything positive or enlightening.  And because I was so….well…..nothing, it was easy for me to learn from and appreciate and accept just about anybody.  

 

Some of my favourite people I learnt from, were the people that I'd been warned the most about in my childhood.  Drunks, sex addicts, homeless folk, bikers, drug users and abusers, witches, occultists, goths, punks, the queer community, people of other cultures, new agers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, activists, environmentalists……..just about everyone seemed liberated, and interesting, and intriguing, after a childhood of such banality.  

I was also primed for self organisation.  Almost as soon as I got a bit of control over my own time, on leaving home and school and all those other trials, I just let time ooze all around me, tried my earnest best to not think, and not do, and not feel a need to fill it with stuff, but let time be what it wanted to be. 

 

And learnt very quickly that the things that happened spontaneously, the times that I ended up at the pub dressed in my shabbies having an awesome improvised time, or when a friend let me drift in their wake, while they went on adventures through places and people, or when I just let life and events pick me up like a piece of flotsam on the ocean of possibility……..were some of the most magic moments in my life.

At 18 I backpacked around Europe for a year, with no fixed destinations, no plans, no travel mate, and no fixed goal beyond meeting the rich man of my dreams and spending the rest of my life swanning around on the Riviera.  

 

From the moment I landed in London with my money having experienced a hitch, and deciding to not turn up till a week after I got there, with no friends or family, a hotel room booked for two nights only, and a rising sense of panic…….I started to learn in depth about the miraculous ordered potential of chaos.  

 

Or the beauty of self organisation.  

 

I may not have done it as stylishly as this couple, but I did it on my own.  With only a backpack for a travel buddy, and barely anything in it beyond my sleeping bag and a warm coat, I set off into the seas of self organisation, and began the scientific experiment of my adult life.  

 

My first night in London after getting of the plane, I spent the night in Soho, got my moles read by an Asian restauranteur, had a large black man offer to rid me of my virginity, and picked up a fellow Australian dude who I took back to my shared room with another Aussie chick and her man that she was reuniting with.  

 

And on the second day I got a job.  I soon realised that I may not have travelled with a partner, but they were there nonetheless, even though their face and name changed often.  I always had company when I needed it, always got rescued when I needed it, met the most insane amount of people, including 6 aunts, 5 uncles, and 25 cousins that I didn't even know I had, always had somewhere to sleep, even if it was the church pew on the verandah of a stone cathedral in the snow, cuddled up in my mega sleeping bag.  

 

A travel guide couldn't have led me better, and an agent couldn't have even imagined booking the journey that I had.  A night with gypsies, and a tour by a retired Scottish schoolteacher, and a week on the floor of a French Canadian student flat in Strassbourg, being part of an exhibition in a disused factory that I still tell stories about.  Landing in Berlin to stay with a schoolteacher (and taking her english class of fellow 18 year olds for a day), just a few days before the Berlin Wall came down.....was an incredible experience.  

 

Being there and around at the time, I learnt so much from all the news coming out, and the secrets that were released the minute the wall came down, and was around many conversations about how it would impact West Germans.  

 

Meeting up with an American girl, we got sidetracked by one of her friends into going to Belfast, (which I certainly hadn't planned), and had the most outrageously good time imaginable.  Locals were so stoked that tourists would visit despite the negative media, that we got shouted drinks and meals everywhere we went, visited just about every pub in town and got involved in healthy celebrations in all of them, and got chauffeured up to the Giant's Causeway,  with a stop for a gorgeous cooked lunch by the parents of one of the dudes we were staying with. 

 

When I ran out of money again in Belgium, a kind Chinese professor took me back to his home in Cambridge, where I cleaned and cooked for him and his flatmates till I got another job.  

 

Self organising travelling kicks arse.  

I learnt that if I just jumped, even not knowing what I was jumping into, I always got caught. It was like crowd surfing reality.  I learnt to trust that I'd always land somewhere safe.  Even if it may not have looked safe to an onlooker.  

 

I also learnt that there were worlds and worlds beyond what I'd been taught was real and safe.  

 

Worlds and worlds with cracks of gold to be explored.  

 

Worlds and worlds to be hacked into and journeyed with.  

I started to establish some theories or philosophies to live by.  Some goals that I wanted to work towards.  I wanted to be myself.  Whatever that was.  And I wanted to be honest.  To not lie and be hypocritical like those who'd surrounded my childhood.  

 

I noticed that people projected their shit onto other people, and then yelled at themselves through someone else.  I observed that people only objected to the things in other people that they didn't like in themselves.  

 

And I wanted to learn how to think.  To learn full stop.  I'd also learnt that life had a far better way of teaching, than me trying to chase down courses or gurus.   

Since then I've journeyed through parenthood, and hacked out my own worlds and realisations.  Through birth in particular, I've learnt more than anything the art of surrender.  

 

Our family is in the process of hack schooling our way into self organised harmony and thinking, and I notice more and more as I learn about the fractal nature of self organisation, that this process is actually living and evolving consciousness. 

I'm so greatfull that I was primed by so much control, suppression, isolation and denial, to be especially enamoured with the wonders of playing within self organising ecosystems of people, groups, ideas, and life itself.  I couldn't have been prepared better if I'd tried.  

Self organisation is what happens when a German town takes away all the road rules, except for give way to the left, and drive slowly.  And they drive far safer and have no accidents in a spot where there was controlled chaos resulting in many accidents for years.

Self organisation is what's been happening in Iceland for the last 5 years, and how they're working out fairer ways of governance using the internet as a medium.  

Self organisation is what happens when you move interstate to a place where you know no-one when you're 7 months pregnant, and it all works out perfectly and just in time to birth with the perfect midwife and support people, in the perfect place.

Self organisation is what happened at our market in Macclesfield, and what's happening right now at our market in Nimbin.  

Self organisation is what's happening in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.  This woman didn't actually ride her bike around the exclusion zone, she took a tour like everyone else, but the pictures and stories in this blog are nonetheless true…..and quite incredible.  There's also a documentary about all the wild and endangered species that are thriving in the exclusion zone that's become a wildlife sanctuary. 

 

Not to mention the fact that self organisation, or the miraculous creation of harmony from chaos, is the fractal and evolutionary force of balance that created the radiation eating mushrooms that have grown inside the derelict reactor.  

 

And there's many more examples of self organised rescuers to the disasters we've visited on the planet in this article too.

Self organisation is what happened and was realised by a journalist trying to interview the Occupy movement, who found that there was no-one to really interview.  It wasn't a hierarchy like so many of our organised structures are, but a collection of self formed circular based cells of equals, who just happened to have a lot in common with each other - enough to form a massive group of similar cells that between them all were much greater than the sum of their parts.  

And this very self organisation of activists, is the only path for survival that these scientists can scry through their magical observation of mathematical probabilities.

Self organisation is what's going to happen to our oceans now that we've made them dangerous to us with radiation, and thereby finally safe from our ocean eating never ending hunger for fish. 

Self organisation ripples through our realities like the veins in leaves, the tributaries of rivers, the branches of trees, the veins in a placenta, and will endlessly create order, balance, and harmony from all the raw chaotic substance and mucky blood of existence.  

 

It's what happens on a day when you make no plans, and get whirled up in an adventure that you wouldn't have been able to imagine before it happened.  It's what happens when you practice Idle Parenting, and let events unfold how they will.

It's what happened in this Ethiopian village, where the kids taught themselves english and programming in 4 months.  It's what happens with the computers in holes in the walls in slums in India, where Sugata Mitra showed the learning potentials inherent in every human.  With this teacher in Mexico who uncovered genius.  With the choreographer of Cats in this talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  

Self organisation is what happens when a family with 7 children get chased out of their house in the middle of winter, and through different people and places unexpected, find themselves being held and loved and looked after.  

It's what created all these amazing cultures, rituals, costumes, and lifestyles, so perfectly reflecting their needs and environments.  It's what can happen when we reclaim death into our spheres.  It's what indigenous people all over the world were practicing, and it's the reason why 80% of our worlds diversity exists in the 24% of indigenous lands.  It's how this Ojibway community fixed their town hall roof.  

It's already a part of everything.  It's a major part of our evolution, adaptation, and growth.  It's all the micro balances that keep our biosphere together.  All the intricate relationships between animals and environment.  

 

It's letting natural relationships form around your children, rather than the enforced friendships of playgroups and schools.  

 

It's what happens when you approach a craft with an open mind, finding your own way, and hacking out a new reality, rather than being taught how to do it the same as everyone else.

In Nimbin I feel as if I'm as close to a self organised community as I can get in this society. There's a free pool owned and maintained by the community, the best skate park in the country naturally organised by those that love and sail in her, and every single building in town is owned by a local or committee, galvanised by keeping Nimbin local.  

 

The community services are the most comprehensive, compassionate and resourceful I've ever known, funded and staffed largely by community donations and voluntary self generated time.  

The communities that satellite around Nimbin seem to have largely realised through time that there is always the 'negative' or shadow wherever we go, and rather than try and eradicate them, they need to be dealt with in the micro of the macro and largely left alone and accepted for their difference…..unless violence or cruelty is performed, and then the required parts of the community step in to enforce self organised boundaries.  

 

All the cells of communities form a larger and more extended community that thrives in Nimbin town itself, where respect and sovereignty are experienced more than in any other place I've known.  The town self organises compassionate and loving responses to mental health issues and folk, and looks after the individuals in trauma with love and acceptance.  

 

There are people who volunteer on their own volition to pick up rubbish, and recycle, and paint around potholes so folk can make a decision about them.  All of this cohesion has formed naturally, as the external view of Nimbin being full of rat bag hippies and ferals and drug addicts has nicely turned the backs of beaureacrats and council services - leaving the local community to take responsibility for itself, and heal it's own wounds.  

 

All sorts of micro-balances exist, in the cohesion formed between a whole mob of people who refuse to be told how to be and what to do.  And insist on doing things their own way.

When we self organise as humans, we get to experience what the other animals experience with their self organised consciousness, when they fly in formation, and swim in shoals. Fitting into numerous other shoals and groups and needs and destinies.

In my experience, coming from such strong leanings towards self organisation, and then creating a family with an anarchist already primed for hacking out alternative realities, full of alive and abundantly self created little people, has highlighted the very few requirements needed for chaotically harmonious self organisation to flourish.  

 

Which is an absence of rules and hierarchy, and a supported surge towards people simply being who they truly are, both inside and out.  In order for self organisation to flourish, as the equal and opposite to the absence of rules and hierarchy, we can practice acceptance and appreciation of people for who they actually are, like the grannies in the SOLE Granny Cloud Project.  

 

This is the random soup of potentials that is all that is needed for the conscious and naturally self organising urge of the entire universe to perform it's complicated and simple magic.

And every single individual or institution that tells you that you have to or shouldn't, and need to and mustn't do anything, be it meditation, or abstinence, or discipline, or a healthy lifestyle, or particular mental habits…..is letting you know quite clearly, that they have the path for themselves worked out, but they're misled about their path being the only one.  

 

Because it takes all of us, with our particular selves, and our equal and opposite reactions, and interplay between shadow and light, simply being ourselves…….to let the mighty and miraculous surge behind evolution and self organising systems all over the universe work it's miracles.   

 

We've all got to find our own ways.

All we have to do, to take part in the miraculous harmony created out of chaos………is to truly be ourselves, and to surrender to our personal flow into self organised and organising systems and ecosystems.

Looking forward to seeing you there…... 

Washing Post

As you can probably imagine, how and where to do our laundry with 7 children, is a topic we have a fair amount of knowledge and conversations about.  We've done our washing predominantly in laundromats for our 13 years and 7 children together, and I've been very proud of how we've managed our dirty laundry.  For 6 of those years with our babies, we only used cloth nappies, and when we were travelling we'd string them out like prayer flags near our camp.  

We've visited a lot of laundromats in the country.....

And we've come up with many and various ways to hang up and dry washing as we go.  My personal favourite was hanging the washing in our van as we were travelling up here, and with the windows open it worked a treat.

We've also become dab hands at making washing lines wherever we go, and using whatever is at hand in true Womble style.

And up here in the tropics.....where it rains very often......and randomly........it makes sense to hang your clothes under cover.  Our last house had a rather gorgeous verandah that lent itself to being a washing line, as well as an outdoor one.  And as ever,  Currawong being gorgeous makes all household chores fun.  Not to say that it always is, but it is more often than not.

And years ago in our old community we hung our clothes inside for the same reason....and also because laundry left outside had a tendancy to go wandering.  

But here......here at Hippy, Womble, Big Bamboo City Central.....I feel like I've come to my penultimate clothes hanging mecca.  We've got a range of experiences to call on, and we've learnt a huge amount of respect for water over our years of living in the driest state in the country.  And now that we're living off the grid, we're learning a huge amount of respect for solar power.  So we've found the Nirvana of laundromats in Lismore......with a beautiful helpful couple who are always around to give you coins, and the best cleaning machines that we've ever used, that uses at least partial rainwater collected in tanks and solar power to wash our washing.  And we've got into the habit of storing up our washing, till we run out of clothes, and then doing a huge load of it all in big cycles.

Now you may think this is a mundane subject, and why the hell am I talking about washing, but as always, there's a point.  Ever since I read that anarchist piece that I posted in inspiration, and then went on to read more from that mob, I've been really sitting with how when I make something beautiful, I think about how I can sell it, and how other peoples lives, and images, and movies always seemed better than mine, and about how much of my creative energy I gave to the world and not myself and my family.....

So Currawong and I have been consciously trying to occupy our lives, and make our lives our artwork, and turning our mundane tasks into magic and sacred ritual.  Doing jobs that would be boring in four known walls can be an adventure when you're doing them somewhere else.  And rethinking ways of doing things that have to be done every day, so that you can own them, and make them fun, and turn them into something beyond the ordinary......isn't that what we've tried to collectively do since we decided to walk on two legs?  To find ways and means to transcend our mortal and earthly binds and find something else?  Something exciting?  New?  Walking parallel to the dreary existence?

But perhaps it doesn't have to be taking mushrooms and trance trips and all the other indigenous intoxicants, or gods or deities or big universal cycles.  Maybe it can just be through unweaving and reweaving the ways that we do things, and finding those magics and metaphors in even the simplest tasks.  Realising that every single chore, and odorous task, and misfortune, and simple detail can be unravelled and twisted and turned into just about any kind of creation that you could think of.  With metaphors and multi meanings and layers to explore.

Take washing dishes for example.  Nobody really loves doing dishes, except for my mother who's a masochist.  And even though she says she does, she doesn't deep down.  Some people have made a resigned deal with dishes, and they know they have to be done and take pride in the fact they can do it without hassle, but most of us find something about the chore onerous.   I have had moments in my life when I've made a connection with dishes before, like in this piece ( It's in the excerpt from 'Balthazar and Nimue - A Love Story' at the end) I wrote years ago, but I have to say there's been no major love lost between me and the doing of dishes.

And I never would have thought that I'd be telling you I love doing them now.  But I do.  We've built a washing station that is cute and bamboo and made by us, and in true Womble fashion.  We've picked up a lot of good ideas in our travels around the traps, and we finally got a chance to explore them.  There's bamboo holders for the cutlery.  And enough racks and storage around where the dishes are done, that nobody ever has to dry or put away a dish ever again.  Unless they want to of course.  

We're still draining the sink into buckets that we empty, and we're working on the fridge (you're gonna love that one), but we're well on the way.  But beyond that, I love doing the dishes now.  I've never liked drying and putting away, or finding places to stack clean dishes, and now with my little washing station it's actually a joy.  Everything has it's place.  And it's like doing a great big puzzle with groovy places to put the pieces.  Dirty dishes enter the sink and bubbling water, and exit onto wrapped wire around a bamboo pole, and dishracks, and handmade wire hooks for the frypans and saucepans, and places where everything can go, to dry in its own time, and be easily reached by short arms.  I even got myself a range of plastic gloves, from orange scented to sustainable rubber, and a dish mop (always wanted one for some reason), and special scourers and cloths and brushes.  That are all placed in the hollow ends of bamboo poles or strung about in some kind of creative way.  I've got 'plans' (I always think of Lister talking about his 'plans' for Fiji on Red Dwarf when I say that) for the kitchen, that largely rely on it drying first, and then wrapping it, but I want to add some more little shelves, and turn the twisted wire for the cups into really solid cup dryers, where the cups can sit upside down, and then wrap the wire with green wool and maybe even add some leaves to turn it into the cup vine.  

Our life is the canvas, and we choose to paint and dream and play and turn everything into learning and a game like the kids do.  They have far more to teach us than we could ever teach them.  And they're very impressed with me for solving the dish dilemma that we've all been having for years.  Some of you will have a good idea about how many ways washing, drying and putting away can be turned into a million different degrees and arguments and discussions and bargains and aversions. 

But back to my washing, which is the point of this post afterall.  Yesterday I dealt with the mother lode.  With my Ectopic experience, and the ramifications of my last post about our market in SA resulting in an offer to help out with the Nimbin Market, and starting the religion that we've been talking about for years, as a means to empower ourselves as home learners, and create a movement for social change, equality between belief systems, and Humanimal sovereignty, using the vehicle of religion so as to protect it in it's birth..............we've kind of let the washing get on top of us.  There were not one, or two, or even four or five, but SEVEN LARGE LOADS OF WASHING that needed to be hung up.  And I nailed them.

And like many other hunters of one kind or another, I got a photo taken with my trophy.  Cause I've got to tell you now, that this amount of washing would have really overwhelmed me until recently.  And I would have been really grumpy while I was doing it.  I had to really use my combined skills and experiences to let it be a journey.  To hunt for the deeper experience. To face overwhelm with love.

But this whole thing I'm talking about.  This taking of the jobs and tasks that make up family life, and observing them, and streamlining them, and playing with them, and seeing them for the sacred tasks they are to clothe us in love, and feed us and our souls, and make our life interesting and full of potential lessons to learn.  It doesn't always work that way, and I still have a yell at times and growl and frown and wish I wasn't doing it, but sometimes it's actually a joy.  A yarn.  A story.  A metaphor.  And I can't help but think that these are the things that we are here to do.  These are the tasks and journeys and routines and requirements for our lives to run smoothly and comfortably.  We've been doing them for millenia in all sorts of different ways, using different materials and procedures......but they're still the things that run along in our lives, alongside the huge stories and life events and cataclysmic fates, they're the cogs that keep our wheels running.

So I spent the day in gentle washing contemplation, with the mother lode of full baskets, and I used all the little ways I've worked out since building our verandah, to dry out all our clothes.  I even had to rig up some other lines, to fit it all and still leave room for some view.

Nicely hidden behind the drums so as not to obscure the view......

And I even got Currawong to take some photos in a 'hail the conquering heroine' kinda way.  With my washing.  That I enjoyed sorting out into pants and tops and the rest of it, and setting out in ways that we could walk around and still get views, and using all my tools at hand to get a nice and family friendly spread.

If there was ever an award for hanging masses of washing happily and creatively....I reckon I should get it.  Or maybe I just made it by creating this post?