Confessions of a Drug Addict

Over this last weekend, events happened that have led me to realise that I have to finally acknowledge a long time drug habit, that I'm totally addicted to.  I am a complete junkie, to this drug created naturally in our systems, and dispensed to us as a reward for behaving evolutionarily, or in a way that our evolution has adapted us to expect to act to survive.  I hunt for experiences in my life so I can feel my high, and get a hit of my most favourite drug.  A large part of our surrender to birth and babies and the amount of children we have, was so that we could get our fix of it.  In generous doses while engaging in the intimate and connected sex we created that created our babies, and during the pregnancy when all our hormones and bodily parts and odours were changing as a reflection of the life growing.  In birth with the massive doses of our favourite ever drug that we share together, co-dependent in the hugest degree.  The bonding that washes over us all afterwards.  The connections we feel because of it.  The closeness and empathy we have for each other because of our closeness.  The dawning and enlightening conversations we all have as well.  And then that extension from our family into our close community and heart family, and then further into Nimbin and the market that we're playing with there. This drug that we love is most likely a palpable bubble around us most of the time, after we've loved or bonded, or understood and transformed, or had intense and deep interactions with complete strangers, or gone into a potentially non-friendly situation and left with warm hugs and a whole circuit of new friends.  From all the births that we've shared, and the travels and connections and relationships we've had, no matter how brief.  We are all total slaves to our addiction to our entire families drug of choice.

Oxytocin.

Since reading this article by Michel Odent, I've really been sitting with oxytocin.  I've always associated oxytocin with birth, and knew that my natural ones were much better, and a necessary part of birth, often needing quiet and dark undisturbed places to unfold, and that they were pumping through my body when birthing, and most strongly just after.  I've joked about how midwives are drug addicts, addicted to that energy of birth.  I've known that there are oxytocins associated with sex, and with breast feeding, and with holding your newborn close, but I always kinda considered them almost half arse, piss weak drugs, when it comes to comparing them to other drugs and the drug taking methods of  ganga for example, or eating halluciongenic mushrooms, or reports of ayahusca, and shamanic drug rituals we have in our collective consciousness.  They somehow seem more real and formal 'drugs', because they're the result of an external item that you ingest in some way, and have an easily defined reaction.  A drug that is made inside you and released naturally in moments of sex, birth, bonding, great connection, spiritual connection, conscious death, hugging, unconditional love, realisation, empathy, compassion, a strong sense of identity, and feelings of spontaneous love and community..........can't be that potent and mindblowing really can it?

Well maybe it can.  And maybe the point isn't a mindblowing experience, but a carrot given as a reward to expressions of love, bonding, family, and empathy, cause if you were getting that little carrot, you were well on the way to forming tribe, helping each other, caring for each other, and surviving.  Maybe the point was that in all those little carrots, if you kept following the trail, you would blend on the path with other hunters of the carrot, who would keep eating those carrots with you when you helped each other on the path, becoming a stream of a family around you, and then a river of community around you, that washed you in the waves of oxytocin regularly, co-creating survival as a bonded and harmonious feeling of drug induced love and community, so that it did indeed create mindblowing internal and interconnected drug induced situations on a grand scale, to dwarf the potential of any external drug induced ecstasy.  Because it comes from us and the love and community that we create together.  And instead of draining us or leaving us weak it feeds us.  Gives us the experience of that effortless ease that you can have in a conversation, that connects the dots between you, and traces a shared moment of enlightenment.  That sense of timelessness and complete interaction and love with your whole present experience.  That dropping away of the world 'out there' that impinges on so many freedoms and tentacles of connection.  That incredible lightness of blossoming completely into who you really are with witnesses around you, who totally adore the spark of the authentic you, they can see as a reflection of themselves.  

So yesterday, driving home from a our first official day as a family of co-conspirators of community and markets, after having such a long break between drinks, of that particular oxytocic drug rush in particular, it just hit me like a train.  We spent the day in complete chaotic harmony of time, surrender and love.  Max and Merlin were with Shen, and had a totally adorable day and didn't miss us once, which meant we could actually have conversations without having to dash off every couple of seconds after a twin.  We stepped into an incredible communal oxytocic rush of interactions, people stating passions, obscure stories, deep moments, everything happening in the right time and place with no control needed, serendipitous meetings and realisations of connection, shared stories, tears, hugs, enlightenments, networks, musicians turning up and playing little miracles, kids flowing round in a river of kid world safely boundaried by adults, problems raised and solved, and immovable objects flowed around, while sparkles and bubbles and great gooey globules of oxytocin were puffing thier way gently all around us.  

And it was more the afterglow than the glow itself that I first noticed most.  The talking and hooking up of stories and people and amazing events that we were all tumbling over each other to relate.  Trying to soak around in it and lush it up while the glow was slowly receding.  Trying to witness our stories to ourselves and each other to pin it up in the winds of time as a noticeable event of connection.  That slightly exhausted feeling being over-ridden by joy and smiling and afterglow.  Of all the moments when we felt so incredibly real, and seen, and heard, and loved.  And now there's more kids in this new market experience, and more stories to relate, I noticed very clearly this oxytocic afterglow, and recognised the amounts of times I've felt that afterglow before.  I've been lucky enough to have experienced a lot more sex, birth, intimacy with strangers, deep spiritual belief and connection with others, and family bonding than a lot of other people I know.  And I see the echoes that come from all of them, as the echoes of the great drug I adore......oxytocin.

Another thing that's emerged really strongly from the article I mentioned in the beginning about Michel Odent, was a huge sadness that the conversation can even exist about 'getting men out' of birth altogether.  For the very same reason, and to the very same purpose as this whole thing I'm talking about here - oxytocin.  For the bonding that he spoke so strongly of, that I loved to read in anothers words so much, I personally believe that everyone in the family needs to be involved.  For that oxytocic rush, and for the love and care afterwards, it's essential that fathers (when the situation forms naturally that way) and mothers and all the other siblings are there for that magical oxytocic soaked moment of birth.  To connect, imprint, and bond their binds to each other, that will carry them through life, and through care, empathy, and relationship with each other, to survive and thrive in a world of family and community.  I wrote a statement in passionate avowal and honouring to the importance of my man in our births and lives and family, that my Currawong has wanted and needed to hear for a long time.  And I'd really like to share it here.

 I just feel so sad, in all this talk about men getting out of birth, that there aren't more experiences represented in our consciousness of men like Currawong.  We've birthed 7 babies together, and from the very start, I NEEDED Currawong there, especially for transition and what came after.  There was no preference or thought about it, it was a PRIMAL AND URGENT NEED!  He and I both knew when the act of love that we'd started months ago was being born, and he was always there in whatever way I needed him, without question or thought.  Behind me in the bath, or above me and holding me with his arms as I pulled down on him, staring into his eyes, or crying into mine when I was telling him I loved him, as Spiral was being born, or his countless hours of carting water and making sure it stayed clean and warm, or of keeping people out of my space with Spirals birth and telling them very clearly to let me go into my primal space and not talk to me or touch me or bring me out of my feelings, or crying in-between contractions when he knew that we were going to have to go to hospital to have Balthazar by caesarean, but drying his tears before I saw him cry, and holding all his fear at bay to get me to the hospital, and staying strong and loving by my side while it happened, and then staying awake in the hospital, almost as exhausted as me, so he could watch Balthazar and keep him from the nursery while I slept, and then coming home and cleaning my wound, and wiping my arse, and dealing with my shit, and holding all the kids and keeping them clean and fed even while I went through Post Natal insanity, and nursing our babies when even I was afraid during whooping cough, and staying strong in the love of me and our children, and keeping up the slack, and HE was the warrior who turned our twin birth around, talking me strongly into how this was TWO births, and everyone was fine, and he knew I could do it, and then he cleaned out the bath while we all slept and it was HE the birth warrior who shifted that energy and bouyed our spirits and kept us all going, and it was he who bottle fed the twins when I was so nipple sore and kept people away from me and rode my waves of overwhelm, and HE who gave me love and faith and strength.  And he who showed me how sexual and primal and ribald and goddamn sexy birth could be through the birth of Zarrathustra.  He who gives me power and the wings to self acceptance on the complete love and adoration he gives me and us and him for our connected journeys that have opened into bonding and a sexual journey that I keep trying to get the flavour of to convey to a world that hasn't experienced anything like it.......I stake my claim and fly our flags on the timelines of evolution, as one of the first Post Modern, Fully Bonded, Sovereign Families I know of.  And to me, and our loin fruit, and my man, all of us are as integral to the whole as each other.

In a world where birth is so incredibly focused on individual elements, in one way or another, I just think there is a place to stake a claim on birth for the family.  For the whole.  Father, Mother, Child trinity.  And for what they can all become when they bond with each other, strive to protect, respect, and accept each other, and bring all their valued threads to the whole rope of a family bond, that can grow to embrace the whole world, and go beyond the importance of any single thread to what can be created in the singularity.  That can indeed feed the thread more fully than any internal individual process.  And can help the singularity of the rope of oxytocic connection from our families throughout our communities, and to even greater global connection with each other.  

Our family is a strong singularity of a whole, with threads that pull out and go to all different places with other people, but pull back into the singularity of our family more regularly than not.  Every single one of us has equal importance to our singularity, but extra special qualities that are just us.  And in that singularity, our kids always have either their tribe or their parents nearby.  Most of the time.  When something disconcerting happens, or they're hurt, or afraid, they know that we're only a stones throw away, and are always gonna have their backs.  We'll listen to them, take them seriously, take action if it needs to be taken, and defend them if they need it.  There's really no gender distinctions in jobs around the house, or general survival work that needs to be done, so to all our little younglings, we're known as MumanDad.  Cause it doesn't really matter which one of us responds, either one of us will do, and are usually always available.  We feel connection and sanction often.  See ourselves reflected in each other.  Have the opportunity to work through issues together because of our love.  

That bonded connection relies on introspection, self honesty and evaluation, and appreciation.  And when practiced regularly, it becomes easier and easier to practice self and other acceptance all the time. And when practiced often at home, it becomes easier to practice with broader community, and market community, and regions, and environments and histories.  Our kids roam the world with freedom, and connect with who they will, and are supported in their connections by us, as we also connect with those who do with our kids.  They're used to bouncing round in a relative and respectful world, full of loving mentors, oxytocic soaked events, and interested new folk.  

To live this experience makes it impossible to not notice all the anti-bonding moments encouraged between us, especially between adults and children.  All the potentially oxytocic moments that are crushed by judgement, control, separation, rules or cultural fads.  Not to mention that the foods we eat, our anti-bonding practices, and the possibility that synthetic oxytocin (made from pig sperm) actually suppresses natural oxytocin, and could result in lower production levels of it.  What's the opposite of oxytocin?   Adrenaline?  Hate?  Fear?  Suspicion? Could it be that our oxytocic supressions have resulted in our alienated families and communities? With all the disruptions placed between us and potential bonding with our children, and our parents, and our extended families, and work mates, and communities?  How much importance is placed on cohesion and community love?  Acceptance?  Respect?  Connection??

And what could you do to increase your share of oxytocin in your own life?  

What gives you an oxytocic rush?

Have you ever thought of oxytocin this way?

Birth, Sex and Death

I hope I'm not messing with any blogging protocols, but I was reading through my blog to answer comments, and got to my guest post on Janet Frasers blog, and noticed there were no comments to answer.  So I went off and had a read again, and I just love what I wrote.  It really sums up last year for me.  And for what a lot of other people around me were going through too.  And I'm not convinced that you mob went off to have a read of it, cause it was all a bit different.  And I also really want to have it in all it's glory on my blog.  So I'm going to repost it as a post on my blog.  Have a read again even if you did before, maybe you'll get something new out of it.  I know I just did.....

Birth, Sex and Death

From the moment we're born, we want to go back.  Back to the womb.  Back to our source.  Back to that complete and total feeling of oneness.  Back to the experience of being inside someone else's skin, with them everywhere they go, hearing the noises they hear, the temperatures and environments, the foods and drinks, the thoughts and conversations, the fears and intense life events.......on the inside, cocooned in a warm, salty liquid that cushions us from extremes.  The sense of connection with every event, sitting sleepy inside, gently bouncing round, the completeness of your being sparking off the surrounding world.  

The critical experiential time at the beginning of the journey of life, from which we all come, and to which we all wish to return.  Young children and babies remember well the complete melting of two become one.  Or three become one.  And more are possible.  Serious little Spiral-Moon sitting next to me as a three year old, asking me all about how they cut my belly, and where they cut to get Balthazar out.  All the details of the amount of time it took, and how many layers there was between my belly and the world, and how they'd sewn me up again, and how both of us were allright now.  Till her questions had been answered, and she seriously pronounced that if they could cut him out, they could cut her back in, and it was time for her to go back into my belly now....

And just the other week, as we sat around some time during the day, we were talking about the urge to go back to the womb, and even Griff the nerf gun toting 10 year old who loves to watch scary movies, had a kinda coy smile and could recognise that feeling.  And Balthazar has quite sternly told me that he needs to go back to my belly a few times now, since Zarrathustra has been born.  Unfortunately, the desire to go back to the womb can sometimes be associated with a bit of terseness with the newborn baby, that's stolen the role of baby from the recently grown and moved over one.  Which is maybe similar to the terseness we feel as adults, when someone or something is standing in the way of us and something or someone with which we feel connected.  

The main reason we opted for a lotus birth with Spiral-Moon and Balthazar, was something more than the increased blood that the new born has access to with their cord and placenta intact, and the other physical and metaphysical benefits.  It was due more to the realisation that from the moment the egg and sperm meet, the union splits into two, and half becomes the baby, while the other half becomes the placenta.  The placenta and cord sit as twin to even babies that are solitary in the womb.  As provider, protector, pillow, plaything.  And when it was pointed out that many adults miss their placenta friend, that was so quickly whisked way to die alone, and replace it with purses, glasses,  bags, water bottle holders........anything that's a desirable object at the end of a cord........it kinda worked for me.  I've got a water bottle and crocheted holder that I get slightly panicky about going missing.  It comes with me everywhere.

It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.  Being escorted through the sac, the umbilical cord, and the placenta, and how it would have all sat inside me, and around her after Spiral-Moons birth.  Our escort being the amazing Rosey midwife, who'd known when Spiral was going to be born, and had travelled most of the 250km trip in her birthing packed car, before we even called.  And then over the next couple of days, watching the literal balance shifting between a baby who kep her eyes closed longer than any other baby I've had, slowly coming into waking, as the placenta she was attached to slowly died.  And the moment it all detached, she woke up completely to the world, ready to completely engage.

And her birth as my fourth child, was the first time I'd ever met one of my placenta's, or the sac, or the umbilical cord.  They'd been whipped away quickly and the mess all cleaned up, by the time I'd come down from my birthing high, in my two hospital births with Jess and Griff, or my homebirth with Lilly.  I'd always been curious about them.

Funny how we like to quickly clean up after the great events of life.  Cut that cord and get rid of the placenta, wash up all the blood, wash the woman, wash the baby, wash the sheets and wraps and blankets and pillows and cushions that were birthed on.  Clean away all the smells and colours and textural remembers of birth.  And we clean up after sex, the milky substances left behind on sheets, and on our thighs, and the sweat and sex smell that permeates our skin, and then get nicely deodorised and sanitised before hitting the public again.  And we clean up after death, with the blood and bodily functions that have spilled and left the body just like the spirit, the breath, and the vitality of life have left.

Just like we try to clean up our emotions, and our needs, and our feelings, and our wants, and our complete and total inner desire to feel that oneness again.  The oneness of birth.  The oneness of sex.  The oneness of death.  Our cultural taboos, and yet the very events that shape us.  Connect us.  Remind us of the great oneness that existed before we were born, that exists when we connect with each other inside our skins through sex, and that we go back to when we die.  A reminder of the big cycles that echo constantly around us.  A process we see through the universe, through our seasons, through our life cycles, through our relationships, through our families, through our ideas, through our cultures, through our religions.  A process of pregnancy or seed planting, and then inner growth and building, and then the great pause and extremity of transition, before the birth of a person or thought, and then the vital life of interconnection, and the intense moments of sexual communication, and spiritual realisations, and the equally intense moments of great illness or mindsets, through the cycle to the death of the person or idea or group or period, into the uterine depths of seed planting and pregnancy or rebirth again.  

A theme mirrored in the water that courses our bodies, and the fire of sex or spirituality that connects us, and the planetary bodies that dance their spiral dances, and the breath of conversations that take us on word journeys.......

So a fascination with it persists, even in the face of cultural taboos, and our great and enlightened culture that seems to thrive on separation.  But in an atmosphere of repression of our great connecting life mysteries, birth becomes a fraught event, be it in hospital or home, and fears come clinging to it like young children afraid of the initiation.  Sex becomes a possibly deadly affair that can leave you with fatal or uncomfortable diseases, and manifests instead as blond young women with shaved body hair, bouncing merrily on assorted phalli, making a cacophony of unnatural noises and imprinting unrealistic and shallow messages on wistful hearts.  Or a tool used in hate and revenge.  Or to capture a person and keep them caged.  And death is a trauma, a wailing, a shudder of darkness at our shoulders, threatening to drag us into its eternally dark maw.

All events that we clean up after, and sanitise, and deodorise, and create polite conversations around.  Talk in metaphors and simplicities, about the complexities that we don't know how to express.  Hoping that if we follow the right rules, prescribe to the 'true' belief systems, and engage in the correct spiritual and metaphysical practices, that they will either go away and bother someone else, or wont impinge of our important life, of work and cars and mortgages and hobbies and homes and clothes and holidays and leisure and acquisitions.  

How did we get so far removed from our instinctual, animal, spiritual, eternally cyclic, and deeply symbolic selves?  How have we journeyed so far, that we can stand to see birth as a routine event, and death as an equally routine and regular occurrence on our televisions and media, while being horribly scared and avoiding of them in our real lives?  How can we bear to watch zombie after woman after man after animal being killed on our screens in horrific ways, and in our books and our stories, while we stumble all unknowing into the actual presence of death, stuttering and unsure.  How are we happy to vaguely allude to sex or only talk about it in extremes, and voyeuristically watch or read about other people doing it in spectacular fashions, while we sneak home to bed with our familiar partner, hiding our real feelings, and wishing there was a movie star next to us instead?  How can we be truly alive without the full stop and renewal of death as the accent and boundary that makes it all the sweeter?  And how can we fully embrace birth as the gentle sundering of the oneness, and journey into multiplicity, when it's been packaged and parcelled as a scientific and potentially dangerous event that needs to be dealt with by professionals?

I think it's been a natural process, as natural as a tiny baby growing to a huge human, and as a toddler testing the boundaries of those who care for it, and a horse checking the perimeter of it's paddock, and millions of fine tuned balances within nature, without which life wouldn't exist.  A process of expansion to the limits to find out where the end is, and then a making of sense of all that's in between.

Many many moons ago, when my love Currawong and I were courting, decked out in black leather and velvet, with extreme haircuts, haunting the suburb of Brunswick in Melbourne, as we did our best to resist an irrepressible urge to surrender to each other........we went into a book shop.  Neglected in a box of books was a tome that had a huge impact on me - L. Robert Keck's "Sacred Eyes", in which he compares the evolution of our entire human span......to that of an individual.  When we were young, we were safe in the arms of the earth mother goddess, in tune with her rhythms and flows.  Then we hit adolescence, and pushed away our soft mother, and strode out of her embrace to the war gods and the fathers in the sky, who told us we were sent to domesticate and subdue all around us.  And now we've come to our collective Saturn Return.  Where we bring our mother and father together within ourselves, and without ourselves, and evolve.  It really worked for me.

Cause I feel like our whole civilisation is poised on the point of implosion.  Of collapsing back into the source of ourselves and our interconnection.  Of having reached the outer limits of our explorations into science and religion and all those outer things in trying to work ourselves out, and realising that our connection and foundation is back where we started.  The great cosmic fools journey.  Like a massive solar flare that flung itself out as far as it could go, before sinking back into the sun from which it was born.

We're currently at the extremity of our distance from our earth, from ourselves, and each other.  We've got about as far as we can go without throwing out the balance in a life exhausting way.  We've hit the zenith of total disregard for and fear of the events that shape us.  The path that we collectively struck out on, started in part by Descartes saying "I think therefore I am", and sundering all the other living things on the planet from us humans, turning them into machines that had to be pulled apart to be understood.

The view from here is quite surreal.

In our avoidance of the alchemical mysteries and oxytocic adventures of birth, sex and death, we've strung it about ourselves in unrealistic and gaudy displays like christmas lights, hoping we can wear it as a symbol rather than actually tread the subterranean worlds beyond the world that we all practically, sensibly, and scientifically agree is real.  Sex has become a circus pony that we drag out to social gatherings to slap on the arse and force to perform.  And take home in the dark to subject it to our bestial and repressed desires.  Birth has become a feared nemesis to women, stalking their carefree moments with the threat of immanent pain and a cacophony of need.  Promising a life of duty and unappreciated work to its penitents.  And death has become the diseased corruption of a twisted society spending all its time and money in an effort to defeat it.  We hope to make sense of it by inundating ourselves with it, and have resulted in numbing to it, being afraid of it, and detaching from it even more instead. 

We've suppressed our raw feelings and inner desires to the point that an unexpected outpouring of them, can create horrific events where one of us will walk into a theatre late at night and shoot weapons into an unsuspecting crowd.  We're so unused to the bittersweet pain of loss and grief, that we can do things like take the lives of ourselves and our children.  We're so bruised and maimed and still scarily hopeful about our sexuality, that we do things like force sex on innocent creatures, and children, and unwilling victims.  We're so scared of untidy emotions that we've doped most of the western world on some form of pharmaceutical of another.  We send vast swathes of humanity into combat with each other, prepared to kill other members of our species over a political or religious belief, or a commodity, or an idea.  There are so many victims of so many things that it's becoming more and more difficult to work out who suffers the most anymore.  Everyone has their cross, their secret, their shame, their pain, that they wear on their wrist as a curse.

And in a very real way, our sense of connection, our oneness, and our source is where it's always been.  At our fingertips.  Elements of it sprinkled through every interaction we have. The pregnancy and gestation of a relationship, that goes through the intense transition of hardship or fear, before birthing into a full bloomed rose of tangled and intermingled tendrils of love and hope.  And can also die, and then be reborn with another person in another time and place.  The birth of our babies, in which our sexuality plays an awesomely midwifely role in helping the baby out, through the intense transition and expulsion into life.  Which also holds a death.  The death of the family as it existed before the new babe, the death of the maiden to become the mother, the death of the ego as it learns to surrender to the demands of life.  The life that can be glimpsed from a tight knit sexual connection, that dips into the deeps of hunger and oneness, and leaves a whiff of sexuality, as a lens through which to see events with a deeper understanding.  And the death of our loved ones, that leaves us with an unconscionable urge to be ALIVE!  To drum up the spirits and the sorryness and the fears and the memories, and let them float on the rhythm of the heartbeat of life, and remind ourselves of the things that only life can see, and hear, and feel, and touch.

In the great cycle of our civilisation, we're straining in the throes of transition collectively.  Many of the constructs and political, spiritual and community ideals are crumbling in decay, and we're struggling to birth the love and connection that's whispering to us through the decay.  Great and terrible tides are sweeping our collective conscious, and everyone I know is being affected by them.  Strong and archetypal constellations are lining up in a grand procession in the sky, heralding change, the death of old ways, and healing of old wounds.  The largest peaceful protests that the world has ever seen are happening right now, and we're being blinkered from it.  The war against our natural spaces has just stepped up to a level of global insanity, as mining companies strive to destroy some of the most magical places on our planet.  People all over the world are performing horrendous crimes against innocents and fringe dwellers.  It feels like everything has been magnified.  My capacity to feel joy and love is increased magnificently, while my aptitude to sink into worry, fear and dismay is likewise fuelled.  I can feel like a high soaring prophetess and a low slung layabout within the same day.  Events that I could previously walk by unaffected, can pierce me with pain to my hear that totally stops me.

We've just got to hang in there, and keep focusing on the birth that we're all trying to create, and in feeling this great pain and the seemingly endless array of anti-life around us, must know that we're almost there.  This is as bad as it's going to get.  We've reached the limit of the invisible cord that keeps us connected to life.  And we're rebounding back into love.  Collectively.  All together even.  Back into a world where we can start making sense of ourselves and what we see around us.  Back into a world where the heart and the head and all our other senses are on great speaking terms.  Where we see all the countless reflections around us that mirror our internal cycles, and can feel at home once again.

It's time for us to stop and really look at each other and ourselves.  To tell each other our experiences as they really are, rather than sanitised versions that keep all our real juice and gristle hidden.  To treat each other as if we really were parts of each other, until our combined experiences show us that truth.  To pull apart our life knowings and plumb the depths of our authentic experiences till we can really dance and gaze at the realities of birth, life, sex and death.

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There's a group of Thai monks that meditate on death.  When one of their order dies, they'll go and lay them out in a room, and sit with them as they meditate on the decaying of a human body they loved.  In Mexico they hold a day for the dead, when they celebrate the people who have gone on ahead.  There's certain people who have made their study sex, and the positions, attitudes, and worlds that are accessible through it.  And there's whole cults to passionate love, and what that can mean in our world.  There's also those that study birth, and the implications of it, and what that can teach us about ourselves.  Let's search these taboos, and our learnings about them, and the stories that stretch between them all, to show us parts of ourselves.  Let's tell each other our stories without censoring the bits that we think other people might judge or not like.  Let's help each other to realise how similar we are, by telling our authentic truths.  Let's learn from everything how one we are.

And there's an amazing book by A.A. Attanasio, called 'The Sword and The Dragon', and the basic premise of the story, is that everything in our universe was in the intensely dense and impacted oneness of a black hole, that had been sucking in vast tracts of space for eons.  And at it's zenith, the black hole exploded into the universe that we inhabit now, and as it erupted, angels and demons were flung from the singularity.  The angels try to get back to the oneness through crafting belief systems and cosmic machines that may eventually take them back to the singularity, or the womb.  And the demons are so distraught at being severed from the one, birthed into a cold and dark universe, that they petulantly destroy as much as they can, devastated that they can't get back to the source, and willingly destroying what they can with their tantrums.

Which could easily be a metaphor for us all.  Flung from the singularity and desperate to get back.

We are the ones that we've been waiting for, and the time for us to awake to our connection is now.  We can get back into the womb of oneness through empathy, compassion, love and respect.  Through seeing the mirrors of oneness in all of creation.  Through the peace we create when we accept all the parts of ourselves.  Through the harmony of love, respect, peace and freedom, that we can learn from our families.  Through the melting and surrender that we visit in birthing, great sex, intense life experiences and death.

The time is now.  And you are the microcosm of the macrocosm.  Explore yourself with abandon, and set sail on the sea of connection........