Sometimes It Feels Like I'm Living In Narnia

Anyone who's tried community living in Australia, whether it be formal or informal communities, like we have for our entire relationship……..knows that there's usually some form of rules on every single one of them about animals, and what sort are allowed there.  Cats and dogs are usually forbidden, for the damage they do to the environment, and other animals are negotiable.  Even on the informal communities we've lived on, there have been other folk who owned it or had been there before us, who had their own animals, and requirements for what sort did and didn't come.  So we've been pretty animal free for years.  We had a cat called Fuzznut who ended up getting old and really over babies, and let us know that she chose to retire to my mothers and daughters house, and a dog called Scratch who couldn't be with kids after she broke her pelvis and retired to my mothers too, till she died.  Little Scratch came everywhere and got snuck into places she wasn't meant to be, cause she was so small and inoffensive.  

But for 7 years pretty solidly now, we've had no pets except for the rats that we got at Billen.  And we've dreamed about getting others, but been on communities up here in the Rainbow Region that wouldn't allow them.

So in moving here to our (mostly) private rental, we decided that the time was now.  It was starting to break my heart, that Griffyn, who'd wanted a cat all his life, was 12 years old without ever having his own animal.  I figured it was just time to let some animals in our lives, and that the relationships you can only form with other animals was a really important part of childhood that my kids were missing out on.  Not to say that they weren't finding and connecting with as many wild species as they could……they find creatures in the weirdest places, and hang out with them as long as is safe, and then let them go.  Lilly who loves all animals had a hard time getting to love leeches, but all of them have quite a large respect for leeches now, and will let them feed till they drop off.  We're usually asked to take photos of the creatures we come across, and here's just a few, but there's lots more of them peppered through our photos.

I so love how Lilly manages to pick up bugs with stings at the front and the back gently, without hurting them, and then releasing them after she's admired them….

We even had a wild duck follow us home and hang out for a night.  She hung out in the house for the afternoon, and at night she sat on the lounge next to me, moving step by step closer until she was sitting on my lap. In the morning she went on her way, but we loved her visit….

But what really got us started on the animal collecting, was when our neighbours were away, and their rabbit had been ripped apart by a goanna, and had left 5 little babies that were too young to survive really.  It pulled on all our heartstrings and maternal instincts, and we did our best to save them.  I even crocheted them a handspun rabbit fleece blanket to lay on.  But they died one by one, and we buried them with many tears.

And then 'stuff it!' I thought.  It was time for us to invite animals into our lives.  The first animal that came along was a beautiful rabbit called Nimue, or Nim. And in the process of meeting Nim, we also met the gorgeous Rhea and John of R&J Pets and Aquariums in Lismore, who have totally impressed us with their love for all animals as well as people, and their true integrity and compassion in how they run their pet shop.  The first time we went in there, I was in the small animal room, and there was a bunch of younguns talking over the rats, and one of the girls was talking about how they wanted a big fat one, so they could see it in the belly, and I realised they were gonna feed one of these little hand raised rats to a snake.  Rhea came in, and they picked their rat, and they all filed out and it was just Rhea and me for a minute.  I told her what I'd overheard, and she walked out, coming back a few minutes later with a triumphant smile, and released the rat back in with his brothers, saying 'they're not feeding one of my hand raised rats to a snake!'  I was so impressed.  And just a wee while ago, John told a story on Facebook, about how an elderly lady was there one morning as he opened his shop, asking him to find her budgie another home, as she wouldn't be able to feed herself with the new budget, let alone her beloved budgie.  His answer was to give her a stack of feed, and to publicly tell folks that pensioners now had 20% off all animal food to help out.  I love those two.  We find any excuse we can at all to go in and hang out and swap stories.  

But back to Nim,  Griff and her really loved each other.  We'd never had a bunny before, so we tried to let her be a house living bunny, but that didn't work out.  So we made her a big enclosure, and had a cosy bunny house for night, and all fell in mutual love with each other. 

And cause we found R&J's, it was a great excuse to fulfil a bit of a life long dream for Currawong, as well as a huge desire of Mr B's, to get an aquarium full of fish.  We knew we'd found the right people to advise us on it too.  For example, I didn't know until John told me, that goldfish need a huge amount more room than most people give them.  He won't sell goldfish unless you have a massive tank or pond.  Cause if they don't have the space, their internal organs keep growing to the size their meant to be, even though their body can't grow any more, and they end up getting suffocated by their own organs.  He created an underwater garden for us, and gave us incredible information and advice, and our little boys (and the rest of us) are totally mesmerised….

We also got some chookies, but they were very young too, and one died a few days after we got her, and the other one ate something under the house and choked.  So we had just the one chook for quite a while, and we called her Storm Chookie.  

Being the only chook for a while led to some rather…..interesting……behaviours.  Cause she thought she was one of us.  She fast became one of my favourite friends.  And comes inside to visit us, and threatens me with laying her eggs on my printer, unless I provide an adequate roost for her.  There's lots of Chookie stories that I've told on Facebook, but to get to all the animals, I'm going to have to keep it concise.  Enough to say that I love my Chookie.

And we got a cat for Griffyn called Dreamer.  You can see her on the chair in front of Storm Chookie.  They tend to hang out together.  She was a kitten who was born into love at a friends of ours home, and raised with the utmost bonding and respect.  And she's quite unique.  Currawong and I were both a bit dubious about how other animal friendly she'd be, and were prepared to build her a large cat cage off the house if she proved to be a killer.  I've had cats all my life, and know that they usually disappear off for a while every day, and who knows how much they kill in that time.  But Dreamer is different.  

She was given her name by our friend from her birth, and we all assumed we'd change it when we got to know her, but ended up realising that the name suits her completely, cause she spends most of her time sleeping.  We always know where she is, every moment of the day, cause she's always within sight of us, and she cuddles with Griffyn every night, and gets the shits if he sleeps away too long.  She puts up with the little boy pack being rough with her, and laying on her, and carrying her around (we do our best to minimalise it) and seems to just love all of us.  The kids the most though…..

But the most amazing thing about Dreamer is her love for the other animals.  Like I said before, the relationship between Storm Chookie and Dreamer is quite cute.  Dreamer spent a lot of still and silent time winning Chookie over.  Convincing her that she was a friend.  And we quite often see them hang out together.

And then came Pixel.  Lilly's been wanting a dog for ever so long, and another dear friend had puppies that needed homes, and we brought a little boy pup home the night before christmas incidentally, and it didn't take long till he chose Lilly as his person.  We call him Pixel.  And if he gets fat when he's old, we can call him Mega Pixel :)

And like Dreamer, Pixel loves all the other animals, and they all get along.  He was only 6 weeks old when we got him, and his mother got sick and her milk dried up, so he was just a baby when he came to us.  And we attachment parented him, not out of any ideology, but because we couldn't leave him on his own, and there was always so much going on around him.  So now Pixie is convinced he's one of the kids.  He's a cheeky and sweet little thing.  

So we were in pet heaven for about 3 months I reckon, and everything was sweet, and we learnt all sorts of things about the animals we have, and how best to look after them.  And then Death came to town.  Our neighbour has a habit of leaving her rabbits out of their cages, though most of them have met untimely deaths that way.  And even though we asked her if she could put her male bunny away while we were trying to housetrain Nim, she refused.  Inevitably, they got together, and we didn't realise it at the time, but that meeting was fatal.  The male was far too big for Dwarf bunny Nim, and when she went into labour, a baby got stuck (it was never going to be able to get out), and we took her to the vet hoping a caesarean or something could help her, and were devastated to hear that rabbits really don't do anaesthetic well, and the chances of her surviving were minimal, and very expensive.  I was in tears, and prepared to get a loan to pay for it, and had to ring Griff up on the phone and break the heartbreaking news to him, and in the end the best solution for everyone was to put our dear Nim down.  

It was horrendous from top to bottom.  My eldest daughter had come for a visit the day before, and it was a shock for all of us that such a tragedy had happened.  Jess was awesome in helping and comforting, and we were all glad she was there.  On the night after she died, Griff went to bed and cried and cried and cried, and it totally broke my heart that my firstborn son was going through his first big heart break.  Dreamer cuddled so close to his face that we knew she was totally tuned in.  And I got very angry at our neighbour.  Threw a lot of judgement at her.  And the very next day, after changing the procedure for the rats, trying to be extra careful that they got more shade on a hot day…….I quite stupidly put them in a place where they got full sun if we were away for too long, and in the process of that mistake, Lilly's favourite rat Snuggles died in the heat. We managed to save the others, even though they were thoroughly heat stressed, and Jess was amazing again in her calmness and assistance.  

We were beyond distraught, and I wailed and said sorry over and over, and instantly thought that my judgement had come back to bite me on the bum.  It seemed a harsh lesson for us all to learn.  And was so very very sad.  We all cried a lot.  And built some graves for our loved animals.  

But the next morning, after we'd lost two of our most loved animals over two horrible days, Lilly and I sat and talked on the verandah.  She said that in a horrible way, she was getting used to death, and to the grief and loss, and that maybe in a way, that was actually a good thing, as we knew we were going to love lots of animals in our lives.  She was also the first to notice in the following days, that there was a change in me.  Up until these traumatic events, I'd been nice at arms length to Lilly's rats, and really didn't realise how much I'd come to love Nim.  And it cracked my heart open to such a degree, that I felt like I pushed through that arms length approach, and reverted back to the full hearted love I had for animals when I was younger.  I vowed to honour the demise of our loved ones by being a better animal carer.  And went into full sook mode with Lilly.  As much as it was awful, it also helped us appreciate the animals that are left in our circle even more.  I took on the remaining rats with Lilly, and fell head over heels in love with Dusty, who is in the photograph with me and Storm Chookie up above as well.  

And even though Griff didn't want to replace Nim, and knew that it would never be the same as it was with his first love, he fell for a bunny in R&J's again, and helped by Jess, who so wanted to help him heal, and bought him a beautiful bunny habitat, we ended up bringing Fleur home.  She's not the same as Nim of course, but she's delightful.  And very cuddly.

Zarra and the other little boys love her to bits, and visit her first thing every morning to feed her and pat her.  She loves a pat more than any other rabbit I've met, apart from Nim.  And she loves to lick their hands and faces.  He can't resist getting in for a visit sometimes. 

In fact…..lots of critters love to steal into Fleur's cage and hang out with her.  Between her little home here and the big bunny cage outside that she's busy creating an underground home in, she has a pretty busy and loved life.  Her and Storm Chookie were even timesharing her little night home for a while.  Chookie decided for a bit that the bunny cage was the only place she was going to lay an egg.

With all the equals and opposites and ups and downs I must admit to being utterly thrilled by having all these animals in our lives.  It does help us get used to death, and work out how to deal with it.  And it also helps all of us to develop relationships with species that aren't only our own.  There's so much we learn from all of it in fact, that we're always on the plan for more.  But the best thing is the love.  The huge amount of love given and received by us all.  Not to mention the relationships between all the animals and how they all inter relate and get on!  Sometimes I feel like Fern in Charlotte's Web, sitting outside just to watch and observe the interactions all around me.  Not to mention the wild animals that come into and around the edges of our existence.

So much to learn.  So much to love.  So glad that we finally got to this place where we can explore this most important dimension, of the truly deep and human love and need for animal friendship.

Love story

13 years ago Currawong and I began our journey together.  We’d seen each other around before that, and casually wondered about each other from a safe distance, but 13 years ago is when I was back visiting the Blue Mountains -  after having emigrated to South Australia a year earlier in search of change and adventure – and we clapped eyes on each other for the first time…….

And it was a serious event.  The full stereotypical catching of eyes from across a crowded pub, and neither of us could look away.  I’ve never, by the way, done such a thing with anyone else……..a moment of recognition, and spark, and melting into deep blue oceans, and time…..just…..stopped.  Only with my bird man have I felt like there was a body sized magnet within me that dragged me towards him whether I wanted to or not. 

It was the beginning of a long and winding path towards each other, through trust, and hurts, and pain, and fear, and all the other feelings a human often feels when taking up the challenge of merging into another human.  Into and around and under and behind and through.  After this initial meeting it took us over a year to actually start living together, and about 5 years before we really started to see each other for who we truly were. 

But after that first meeting, I went back to the Adelaide Hills and decided I needed to write what had happened, and remember it.  Because truth be known, I’ve been a bit of a wild thang in my youth, and decided the best way to get over the sexual repression of my fundamentalist upbringing was to root my way out of it.  So I did with massively happy abandon for quite a large percentage of my 20’s, which resulted in me realising quite clearly that there is a dearth of women role models in our culture apart from the Madonna or the Whore.  

Towards the end of my sexual exploration of the world, I’d reclaimed the title of whore in the old matrifocal sense of the world, and had proclaimed myself a ‘Holy Whore’.  And with this came a certain expectation of stereotype from the people around me.  I was fun, but not the sort of girl who got brought home to meet the parents.  Never taken seriously as I was ‘too easy’.  Or strong, whichever definition you prefer.  Anyway.  Currawong was the first man I’d ever come across who treated me with complete and total respect, and without ever alluding in a sideways manner to my sexual past.  And I wanted to remember it.   

So I started to write.

I was living in a blue slate mansion surrounded by cliffs with my mother and daughter, and studying Behavioural Science at Flinders University, but somehow I sank into a complete parallel reality, and for 3 months I disappeared into my room, and stayed up till 4 every morning writing, and slept in till 2 in the afternoon.  And went out on mad dashes into the city to have a few drinks and remember I was part of a bigger world.  And received visitors at the strangest times.  And through a kaleidoscope of other men, experienced a complete trip as I was writing, where I didn’t know if I was writing the book or the book was writing me.  Misty otherworldly snippets and people and stories coursed through my body, and I felt like I was channelling a whole other reality, and what came out in the early grey light of dawn, through my fingers tapping on my computer………was quite amazing.  I’d read it and think ‘who wrote that?!’ and get just as surprised at the outcomes, as I would if I was reading someone else’s book.  It went from being an account of our meeting, to becoming an autobiography, self help manual, science fiction fantasy, and visualisation of what I wanted to manifest.  And after a few chapters, these ancestors turned up……….

And when it was written, I bundled it up, with a bunch of crystals and velvet and candles and sacred objects and clothes and a tent and jumped in my little Holden Gemini of 1984…….and drove off into the sunset of the Australian desert in the peak of summer, playing and driving through temperatures  of over 50 degrees, and decided I was going to face all my fears, and run into the arms of my Saturn Return, burning my book at the beginning to release it all to the universe, let it go, and call in my future. 

Which is a whole other story.

But on the way home, I stopped in at the Blue Mountains again, after not having seen him after our movie stare and first meeting for a year, and just as I was about to leave and drive back to the Adelaide Hills, he walked into the pub I was sitting in, and where we’d first met, and our eyes caught each other again.

I’d written a book about him, and he’d written a song about me, and everything that I’d written about in my book had happened.  And when eventually we got together and continued our journey leading us to where we are now, we started off by completing all the other things I wrote about in the book, and fulfilling the manifest destiny that was written on the wall the moment we met. 

Now that book has been largely buried for the last 12 years, and I think it’s time it came out.  Just after I wrote it, I showed it to lots of people, and read it to folk all the way through my desert journey, and I had incredible reactions to it.  One amazing man, who was a very hard man with a very soft centre, and who I met in Alice Springs had tears in his eyes after I read him the second chapter about Balthazar. He couldn’t believe that I was a woman, and I’d written so clearly what happened in his head.  How did I know how to write like a man?  Some people said it was one of the best books they’d read.  And only last year, a woman I hadn’t seen in 10 years and I bumped into each other, and the first thing she said to me was ‘have you got that book published yet?’  No I didn’t.  But it keeps jumping around at the back of my head and reminding me of it’s existence, and this idea just keeps playing hopscotch in my mind of serialising the story here for a part of the book………and then selling it complete on a memory stick in a cute little crocheted pouch for anyone who wants to know what happens. 

And all you gorgeous people who are reading my blog now, might do me the favour of giving me some feedback about it………and maybe it will finally get published, even if I have to self publish it, which I suppose I am in a way really.  It occurred to me only the other week, that this blog is truly a living book.  A book that’s being written as I live it, and stories coming hot off the press of my reality. 

So here goes.  I called the book

“Balthazar and Nimue – A Love Story”

CHAPTER 1 - She Wakes

Once there was a woman who’d lived many lives, and her name was Nimue. 

She tumbled from lifestyle to definition to attitude to face, amazing herself at her flexibility.  Then one day she noticed that she never quite finished anything, or stayed anywhere long enough, or knew anyone deeply enough to actually let anything or anyone in......realised she’d danced through life as a shadow, miming the actions and staying cold as ice inside.

 Then she got pregnant from a one night stand and had herself a baby girl.  Discovered her woman power, found her witch self, and startled onto knowledge of women’s hidden past, shunted from their glory by a jealous, angry, one god.  Roared at the injustices and suppression railed against her kind.  Went through a time of near separatist lesbianism, rattled feminist theory, women’s literature, and her mother’s hidden faces.  Tried the multitudinous forms of alternative therapy and scourged many demons from her past.  New realisations began to emerge. 

She started looking.  Peeling pieces off her skin and examining what lay beneath. 

Scratched at old wounds and picked at old scars and started to dive beneath the surface of the emotional stability she’d set anchor in.  She examined anew the multitudes of one night stands and sexual encounters and serious relationships and friendships she’d set up through her life.  Realised the stories and fabrics and lies and deceptions she’d been fed.  Stepped from the front of the mirror of the reality she’d looked at all her life and saw the great worlds beyond.

She’d been spawned by denial, grown on guilt and fear, and weaned early on a diet of loneliness and self hate, managing her shackles as well as able, shrugging her baggage on her back.  She’d begun life alone, kept from social circles by her glimpses of hidden knowledge.  Knowing that somewhere, somehow, it had to be different.  It took her a while to find where to look.  She delved into her childhood and discovered some ghosts. Some hidden evil deadly ghosts.  Some give you nightmares ghosts.  Some wreak havoc and ruin in your relationships ghosts.  Some nasty, never live men ghosts.  She recognised the underworld of her fathers and brothers sexual fantasies.  And she finally remembered her earlier entanglement and childhood rape.  All the denial and suppression and energy and passion it had taken to keep these memories from her were unleashed.  She felt emotions she’d never before felt, shocked into feeling the world around her.  Stepped from the wrap she’d been held in, numb to her power and life.

 She shed her lesbian skin and entered the shadier waters of the bisexual realms.  She mixed through the silky liquid of ambivalence and suppleness, paradox and ambiguity.  The light above the murky waters she’d swum all her life was becoming stronger.  Her mind and instinct swam before her, leading her onwards and upwards, towards her own truth.

She remembered who she was underneath all the layers of skin that had kept her iced in self defeat.  She shed those skins and discovered magical facets inside her, privately polished to glorious shine by earlier invisibility, ready to glow to the world she created around her.

 She realised she’d never had a father, brother, uncle, male friend....she’d never let them in again after her childhood realisation that all men were fucked and would only feed you betrayal and lies.  She’d avoided any reminder that a part of her lay in her enemy, and a part of them in her. She’d worshipped the mother and ignored the consort.  She’d slept with her anger at night.

She whirled from her altered perception and fell into love and lust with a young Adonis, an unthreatening androgynous man with which to test out her new knowledge.  She used him as her escape from her home, the street which held such memories and ghosts, to run to the hills to shed more skins.  Not long after, she shed the young Adonis, and began afresh in a crystalline setting with her mother and daughter.  The trinity of womankind that rocked her through life waters.

CHAPTER 2 - He Searches

Once there was a man named Balthazar, who knew there was a flow somewhere, but everytime he thought he’d entered it’s waters it turned to mud and broken shells slicing his feet and crawling up his shins in sludge and murk.  Inside lay pure light of truth and whole that struggled to shine but instead got snuffed by the death and stupidity around him.  He tried to be his best, tried to give his best, tried to show his best, but when faced with people that let him be his worst and still adored him, he refused to unfurl.  He knew he could grasp the clarity of wholeness but saw no reason to reach it with such blindness around him.

He fucked people over and stole their hearts, and stomped on their entrails in defeat.  He shoved his knife of light into the innards and annals of the life around him and held his blade up despairingly, bloodied with fear and grief.  Searching always for the limit, the boundary, the quiet and calm ‘no’ to let him stop.

In the quiet times he curled inside to see his heart and the grief knee deep and warm.  His wound, his bloody sore, his gaping hole, his soft and lightly beating mass of ache.  He cried for his scars and the pain he inflicted, and knew somehwere that things could be different, but how?

He’d educated himself in his cruelty, knew that his culture of phallus worship was a relatively recent upstart, shattering the hold of the mother.  Knew that woman held the power of life that he held in death.  Knew that the customs and rituals he saw around him were mere shadows of what had been and could be.  Knew that somewhere he held the role of consort.  But when he’d first tried to share and show his learning’s he’d been disgusted at the meek obedience of the women around him.  Repulsed by their slavish devotions and ‘fuck me’ ways.  Horrified by their ignorance of power and how it worked, and their refusal to accept and wield responsibility and strength.  And even more sickened by the women who hated his kind, but struggled to become him.

So he kept to his ways, cheating on his women, drinking to oblivion, shattering love’s hope and grinding it to mush.  Forgetting small pleasantries, ignoring soft feelings, spitting in the eye of feminine wiles.  He created children to grow in the womb of the world and then left them crying in his wake.  He pushed and ground and kicked and stabbed and crushed and bruised and spat.  He created a religion of cock for his women, then fucked them into despair.

Till one day it stopped.  He could feel no longer.  In his rage at his world he’d destroyed even his own anger.  He suddenly saw with thumping clarity his own stupidity and fear.  Saw how he’d destroyed others in arrogance, and not realised till now how they reflected him.  Understood that even in his seeming rebellion against the way things were and could or should be, he’d actually played a part he didn’t choose.  He’d pillaged and raped his own life and become a puppet for those he despised.  And he’d let his own despair fashion him a tool of hate and given his life to it.  He was an empty shell.  The passion he could have moulded and fed and grown had been used up in death, with hooded skulls and blood.

A quiet, wry, deep voice somewhere at the back of his mind started whispering over the gulf.  Told him he was at a crossroad.  He could fill his emptiness with himself and green shoots of growth, or fill it anew with the death and gore he knew so well.  He could bed his anger or let it translate itself into passion and direction.  The choice was his......

Celtic knot picture from   http://www.spelwerx.com/celticknots.html