Emerging from the long dark winter

I've come to that bit after a long, hard and confusing journey, where I get it all. I understand why it happened and what I needed to learn. It makes sense.

We're still in the dregs of the end of whooping cough in our two small children, and I realised from that whole trip that it was about love. I could write pages and pages on cures and tinctures and how we dealt with it, but early on in the process I read a doctor's comment that whooping cough is mostly unaffected by medicines, and will just run until it's over ( the 100 day cough ), and that if you lived a healthy lifestyle and had breastfed babies they'd manage allright. All you can really do is stay warm and calm, eat well and keep quiet (which was EXTREMELY challenging for my mob!) and most importantly, LOVE one another. That literally was the most important thing for us to remember. You see, whooping cough found us in the middle of one of the most protracted and nasty inter-relationship periods we'd ever gone through. I had post natal depression, and the energy that I'd had for years to float around certain behaviours and keep our relation-ship sailing just dried up. I no longer had time or energy for certain ways and attitudes that I'd side stepped for years, and it took my lover some time to catch up and work out why things he'd done for ages were no longer acceptable. Of course he was a mite defensive, and I was a tad pissed off and demanding that he change instantly, and our little cherubs were in the middle wondering what the hell was going on.

Enter whooping cough stage left. For the first couple of months we were just in survival, and so afraid of our children coming to serious harm that we just over rode the personal hassles we were having and loved our kids cause we were scared. Later in the process we tried to rekindle some arguments, and noticed very quickly that the minute we let our nastier sides come to the fore, our kids would have coughing fits and get worse commensurate with our moods. So no matter how much we wanted to keep fighting our points, our kids were more important so we just let it go. And lo and behold, as we let it go and focused on love, the issues seemed to evaporate, and crystalise into a few simple issues that seemed a lot easier to deal with. We both came to some important realisations about our patterns and how they had formed and interconnected, and we all collectively started to heal. At this point, I've also got to say that living on a community helped the whole situation - our fights were by the nature of living so close to others very public, so we also had public input and compassion, and well as other people keeping stock of the progress we were making.

Long and scary illnesses have a way of putting things into perspective. We now have a benchmark by which to judge things. And fundamentally we realised that our family and our way of life was worth fighting for and keeping together. You know that statement 'fake it till you make it'? It works......

Reasessing my Reality

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So. I'm back at that point I always get to about the internet - that I'd far rather have a personal experience of meeting the next part of my creations yarns, than sell a 'product' over the world wide web to a person that I certainly can meet in many ways, but not in the ways that I prefer. I keep being reminded that the very best part of making the things I make that suprise me almost more than the average punter, is seeing where they end up, and who is attracted to the individual creation enough to part with money or energy to take it home, and begin to imprint themselves on the continuation of the 'yarn'.

I need to say again that the best bit about Tribal Fibres was that everyone who was there who had bought something from me in the past, brought their creation with them. At one point in the hall, there was a large amount of my 'yarns' from past and present sitting in the space. All those things coming together again with me - and what they'd become since leaving.

It's a trip.

And the best part about selling things to my immediate community is being able to see my yarns after they've gone as part of my everyday life. See how they're wearing, how the colour stays vibrant.... And I check on my creations, and the people who have bought them think I've forgotten them, but I've never forgotten anyone that I've sent a yarn away with. And I get to hear the stories about what's happened since the new yarn started. I loved hearing from that very suave woman that her and her family called her yarn 'the creature'. I love that people seem to really feel and honour the life in the creation.

And it seems that since trying to flog my wares on the internet, the thing I've managed to do best is to sell the stuff I listed on Etsy in person at the markets and festivals I've turned up at. I seem to have reached the critical mass point of having been heard about in Adelaide and it's surrounds, to be sending out lots of yarns everytime I go out.

Nothing quite like doing it in person....

Following (or preceeding - I'm never quite sure in this blog...) are some photo's of people who had really interesting yarns about coming together with one of my creations....that remind me to keep remembering that the personal yarns are very much one of the big reasons why I do what I do.

Tribal Fibres as well

There's just so much going on in my life at the moment - and it's one of those cases where if anyone asked me what I was up to I'd be hard pushed to describe it as busy as it feels, but all I know is that it seems like there's a lot on my plate and I'm always busy!! 

Currawong and I are having a 'men are from mars, women are from venus' elongated moment, trying to work out how to communicate so that I can express my feelings without him feeling like I'm hurling accusations at him and telling him he's not good enough.....can other women relate to that one? 

Keep meaning to put more pictures of things for sale on Etsy, but typing minutes, and writing legal letters, and shopping, and giving advice, and listening, and networking and little/big things like that take up vast amounts of time that don't get spent on my passion at the moment. Still. I keep reminding myself how incredibly lucky I am to be able to spend all my time either playing with my kiddies, being part of a community, or plying my passion as it is! 

How incredibly greatful and fortunate I am that I've chosen a life without compromise, so I don't have to do what the majority of folk have to do - mortgage and compromise their souls to pay their mortgage.... I was trying to explain that to Griffyn this morning. Again, I felt so blessed that I've got to explain to him that a huge amount of people in our country have to come up with huge amounts of money just to live in houses, and in order to make that money, they often have to work in jobs they don't really like. I love that it's a strange concept to him and us. 

We live in a community, and pay a minimal rent to live on 86 glorious acres with people we love, no compromise necessary. And because we live on these glorious acres with people we love, we can go on trips when we please, cause we're not working for other people in jobs we don't like, and the people we love will look after our space while we're away. I may be repeating myself, but sometimes I still feel like I gotta pinch myself to see if it's really true! 

And we may be having more opportunity to go travelling soon, because we're not really digging the school thing.......unfortunately it seems that the only thing my Griffy is learning at school is how to get punched in the head, how to recite nasty little rhymes, how to tease people different to him and who are differently mentally abled, and how to get teased constantly. I'm not really up for it. My kids are full on and loud and probably know more things about big concepts than some people think fit, but they're still basically pretty honest and innocent. And I like that. I like them being fairly sheltered from the big mad world. 

And I reckon we can do a lot better a job of teaching them than their school at the moment. Speaking about teaching them - they're so inspired to stay at home at home at the moment that they've pulled out their homeschooling books and I'm helping them as I write this! In answer to my questions about the physical violence and teasing, I'm being told that 'that's just what kids do' and I don't agree. I think that's 'what kids just do' because that's what we allow them to do, instead of taking the opportunity to change those behaviours, say that it's not allright, and teach ourselves and each other how to do conflict differently. 

Cause when you look at the big world stage, it's hard not to notice the big bullies and teasing that's running the world at the moment, and I don't know about you, but I'm not okay with that at all. 

And if I consider that I'm living in the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, then it's up to me to learn and teach within my micro world how to do things differently, respectfully, and for the good of all!! 

Anyway, enough of a rant. I'll keep writing about all this though, because it's what's happening in my life at the moment. 

Here are some more photo's of Tribal Fibres, taken by the beautiful Sienna.