Here’s the
next instalment of my book. Currawong’s
very concerned that people who don’t know my blog well, will come along and
read the story in the wrong order, so I should tell you now, that if you haven’t already started
reading the book that I’m posting on this blog, then you’ve got to go back a
post and start at Chapter 1.
That being
said, here’s the next bit. It’s
funny. I’m finding that I’m really
sensitive about this book! It’s such a
part of me, and I guess after having gone through the process I described last
time of birthing it, I’m as protective of it as I am of my children. I was sure that nobody liked it after I
posted it for a whole hour and didn’t get any gorgeous comments….(ha!) But then feedback started to come in, and I
got over my jitters. The urge to let it
out into the world is proving stronger than the urge to be a wus J
So like I
said before, I’d left the Blue Mountains and emigrated to South Australia, and
had been in SA for about 6 months when I decided to go back to the mountains
for a visit, met Currawong, and then went back home to write this book. And I left the mountains cause it was all
just too confusing. In my time in the
mountains I’d been a fundamentalist church goer, a very unpopular school girl
with braces and glasses and knee high socks and below knee skirts and a head
taller than all the boys, a dropout, and I disappeared for 3 years after I left
home at 15 under police escort and lived with my sister in Bathurst for a
while, then went overseas to Europe for a year to do the famous Aussie
backpacker tour, then came back briefly to the mountains to be a Council postal
clerk by day, and an RSL root rat by night, then went down to the North Shore
in Sydney and sold Life Insurance, got pregnant and moved back to the mountains
to become a single mother, then a goddess worshipping guided meditator, then a
bisexual activist, then an almost separatist lesbian, lived with my girlfriend
and our daughters and wrote for the local lesbian magazine, then left her and
had a relationship with an eccentric man who worshipped the goddess Kali, at
the same time as with a woman who wanted to look after me and take me to
Holland………got too confused by everything and ran into a relationship with a
young punk fella who had a very iconic name and a sweet heart, started a
business in the main street of Katoomba and had some very big and grandiose
dreams come to nothing, and then found it all too much and decided to move with
my punk fella to Adelaide.
Pulling silly faces with my best mate at school.....after losing the braces and not wearing the glasses for the shot....
Living in Bathurst with my sister
Sitting on King Arthurs seat in Edinburgh
Selling life insurance on the North Shore in Sydney.....
Being a single mother with a daughter
Being a lesbian at the beautiful Avalon restaurant in Katoomba
At the end of
my time in the mountains, I could walk down the street and meet someone from
church, then someone from the lesbian community, then a council worker who
remembered my time there, then someone I’d slept with from the RSL, then a
client from the business I was co-operating, then one of my single mother
friends, then a fellow goddess circle member……..and it was just all too much. I decided it was time to go somewhere and
start fresh, without all the baggage of my past. And Adelaide was about as far away as I was
prepared to go. The punk with the iconic name and I didn’t
last long, so there I was in a new state (literally), on my own with my
daughter, and trying to work out who the hell I really was after all.
One of the
first things I noticed was how I didn’t have any healthy relationships with men
in my life. So I spent some rather
intense months trawling singles sites and having phone sex and talking to men
on the internet to the point that I couldn’t talk to people in real life
anymore. So I cut all that out, and
tried to make friends in real life, and my next big realisation was that I didn’t
know how to fit in and be ‘normal’. After
sticking out so much my whole life, it had become my comfort zone, and I
freaked out as much about being ‘normal’, as a lot of normal folk would freak
out about being ‘different’.
So I decided
to go undercover, don some ‘normal’ clothes, get a ‘normal’ haircut, try and
slide into the reality of the majority of the people around me, and enrolled in
Community Services at TAFE. I gossiped, I
talked about boring shit, I didn’t tell any stories about my life, and blended
in quite nicely. And all was going well,
and the strain of being ‘normal’ wasn’t too bad, and I was getting great marks…….till
two strong personalities in my class started pushing my boundaries. One of the girls who was verging on being a
bit of a bully came out with her homophobia, about how she thought AIDS was a
good thing, and the class clown decided to come out with his racist dislike of
our indigenous folk, and I just couldn’t hold my tongue. I literally stood up in the class with the
girl speaking homophobia, and bore witness to my experiences and why I thought
she was wrong. And I also spoke very
deeply about the racist fella’s opinions and what else I thought he should
know.
My cover was
blown.
And would you
believe it, they both thought I was awesome for it and all of a sudden I was
the most popular girl around!! Sitting
next to me became a privilege, I started clubbing with the more open minded
ex-homophobe, and the ex racist fella did an essay on the indignities suffered
by black fella’s! Since there was no
point pretending to be normal anymore, I just moved towards wearing clothes
that were comfortable for me, and celebrated getting over my normalphobia by
just being me. And people loved me for
it. And I wasn’t reacting anymore. And I started feeling really good about who I
was. And decided it was about time to go
back to the Blue Mountains and catch up with old friends and let them know how
successful I was being in my new life.
Little did I
know that I was about to meet my soul mate……..
CHAPTER 3 - That first glimpse.........
She’d briefly seen Balthazar that age before when she’d been walking
the street with her young male lover.
Her Adonis, young and strong, full of testosterone and laughs, smooth of
skin, hung like Pan. She’d glimpsed him
a few times and watched her Adonis grow in battle of preen to outshine
him. They were similar, these two
men. Similar in style and cover and
show.
She saw his eyes and felt consumed by them instantly to the past
they’d shared, the wealth of love, the tangling images one upon the other
flickered inside, and she felt drawn into the whirlpool. She’d seen him, known him, loved him, feared
him, felt him, taught him, learnt him, burnt him, claimed him sometime
before....but not in this lifetime. She wrapped
him around her like a warm cloak of sanity and peace and the dark......and knew
they’d meet again.
...........
He’d seen her strength and soul but couldn’t look, as he was not
quite ready to see her yet. There were a
few resolutions just made that he needed to put into practice before meeting
her. He had some patterns to clear, some
habits to destroy, some judgements to challenge, some thoughts to stretch. After a history of enslavement and fear and
bloodshed, there were some wounds to heal.
Some salve to supply.
He started heeding that voice from across the gulf when it whispered
to him. Started seeing other selves
within. The strength and bones of his
being. He traversed the gulf and began
building bridges. And finally
acknowledged the mother.
He looked around him and surveyed the damage he’d wrought in his
battle lust. He mourned the dead, begged
forgiveness from the wounded, and set about paying recompense. And looked to the mother to see truly
within. All she’d ever asked was that he
see her in himself. See her and love her
part in him. This was all she’d wanted
all that time when he’d bullied and railed against her to tell him her
secrets. And even though he thought he’d
destroyed her, she existed still in every separated particle, for each particle
had once been part of her.
He wept at the waste and bloodshed caused, and the information he
could have gained, insights grown, had he only asked respectfully for what he
hungered.
And he knew that this time he’d hold her hand. Respect and love her. Treat her as divinity. Share knowledge and support and growth and learning. Revel in her power and sex and
intellect. Roar with her humour and
passion and anger. And he recognised her
as Nimue. He knew he’d see her soon.
CHAPTER 4 - One year later......
She shed her young male lover, and her hatred of mankind. Shed the skin of who she’d been. Traversed the underground and died to
herself, then rebirthed into who was within.
Shed her childhood, her rape, her lost innocence, her wounds, and grew
into her whole self. Her arching sweetly
sexual side. Her dreaming shadowed
passionate side. Her amazon leather
bound worldly side. Her darkly
despairing alone side. Her philosophical
truth searching theory side. Her strong
joking tough side. All were her, all
were loved, all were divine. She was
Goddess incarnate and spent time on herself and her senses.
She created ritual and body scent, inner clothes and outer clothes,
stories and experiences, mind stretches and style. She shed her past and stepped in the flow and
decided it was time to return to the street.
To bring with her the new clothes she’d fashioned in the hills. The new tools she’d learned to wield. To marry her worlds and heal her past.
So she’d come to the street, to bounce energy down the sidewalk, and
enthral with her raptures. Willing and
able to engage in life around her, and draw in a partner, wrapped to the soul
in hunger for learning and life. She
knew her partner would be a man.
And then she saw Balthazar.
.........
He’d walked through fire and found his own insides, his poet and
dancer, his singer and wit. He’d mapped
the depths of the empty hole his anger had nestled in, and drawn up plans for
it’s renovations. But he was still
moored to his past in the form of a girlfriend.
A ‘you’ll do for now cause I’d rather not be alone’ companion who had
come to him in shared desolation. They’d
huddled together against the storm of the wild around them, and now when he
stepped out she told him to close the door against the wind. But the outside to him was full of
wonder. Bright with promise and new
faces and inner insight. The harsh
jarring of his two lives was stringing him tight, tuning his bow. But he didn’t know where to aim yet so he
awaited the sign.
And then he saw Nimue.
.........
It was in the local pub, inured against the cold with warm clothes
and a mellow joint, cold beer by the fire.
She walked round to the back room to sit with her friends and saw
Balthazar sitting there, perched on a stool.
Waves of emotion washed her and she went to strike up conversation. Told him how her young lover had been
intimidated by him. Laughed about the
young male pride, gazed in each others eyes.
Communicated without words or mouths or moving. Balthazar sat with Nimue and their worlds
began to collide.
And then another day, on the busy street, they’d chanced to pass,
and stopped and enticed, and went for a coffee.
Lazily conversed on spirituality and horses, sex and iniquity....and
sent out fine tendrils of lust and promise.
That night at the pub again, inured against the cold by sexual hunger,
they’d chatted, then sitted, then glittered their way to a hotel room to shed
the clothing of outside.
