Post Phyber Philosophy

Okay.  So life and extremities have been intense lately, as it always is, and I've got to confess that the mindworm of haters, has made it hard for my desire to yearn towards blogging of late.  And I had a big experience that I'd like to express on here, but am a bit loathe to all at the same time.  So I'm dragging my heels.  And the result is that I haven't even told you that I've very nearly finished writing the book that I've been writing and living for the last 13 years.  Post Phyber Philosophy.  

I was asked to launch it as an Ebook at Sustainability Alley at the Nimbin Show this coming saturday and sunday, so I am.  I've been working on it for months, but kinda stalled at the last minute, a bit of fear of success taking me for a spin for a while.  But with a deadline I'm grooving it, and it's all coming together beautifully.  

I've been a bit stunned and elated, that the passionate crafting, that sees me tempting Currawong into watching in depth media for the night, so I can avidly hook with a head torch, to see what happens next, has come back.  After a very long hiatus, which I realise now, was the lack of an audience.  I don't know about other artists, but for me, an audience is a very important aspect of what I do.  To have people that 'get' it, and love what I do, who are curious and interested, and waiting with bated breath to see what I do next, and appreciative, and lovely, and the main reason why I do this, cause I'm a show off.  And honest :)  

So knowing that there's a bunch of people I know, who I really like, and who really like me, and that they're going to be at the Nimbin Market at least once a month, and I'm going to be there too, and they're going to ask what I've been up to this month, and cause I'm a show off, I've been slipping making into every spare second, and feeling the fire and spirit of the visiting genie, and turning mistakes into features, and alive with it all!

Whereas blogging has turned into watching lots of haters traipse silently through my blog, and a few brilliant comments that make up for so much, but the audience isn't very visible or vocal you know?  I've been really missing the direct interactions with live people who laugh, and giggle, and share oxytocin and ideas.  And I've realised how massive a motivation that audience is for me and how I create.

I've been mourning the lack of passion in my craft since the light dimmed in me!  Which was....ooooo.......the last time that we regularly visited markets and festivals :)  Whether it's doing workshops, or festivals, or markets, or book launches or anything like that........having an interactive audience is just awesome.  And community forming.  And bonding.  And oxytocic.  And was the missing ingredient to my passion.  There just didn't seem to be that much point to it, once I'd made all the things I wanted for our family, unless there were people to appreciate it.

So I've got this little corner of the kitchen, and I've realised that it's my studio and practical shrine and altar to creativity and passion.

And it's where you'll find me as often as I can, often first thing in the morning, and late at night.  The photo below is from before I spunked it up a bit.  Crafting hard with Spiral, making the Slats (sleeves/legwarmers/hats) pattern.

Or sitting right next to my studio/altar/bed, and doing the spinning meditation.  Just lately there's been a big deal going on, like I alluded to before, and it's been a bit of a nail biting experience for large chunks of it, and there's been a lot of physical endurances, and some worry, and a few other emotions thrown in.  And I've found that more and more, rather than turn to many of my other traditionally healthy and unhealthy avoidances, using spinning as a meditation to shut off my babbling brain, and sink into my subconscious and just be for a while.........has been just divine.  I can slip into and out of it easily with my spinning wheel.  And still be present for all the younglings and animals that we're shepherding.  The best thing is, that the beautiful meditation has the result of a ball of yarn.  Something practical that is useful!  And it's made our house colourful with skeins.....

So when there's a spare moment, or when I'm really stressed, or when inspiration strikes and the family allows, I sit and create.

I've been writing patterns for the first time.  And quite successfully too.  At least I hope.  I tried to get some folk to make the Slats pattern on facebook, and lots said they would but no one got back to me, so  I'm just gonna have to go with the flow on that one.  I think it's fairly straightforward!  I've combined photos with explanations, and some of the terms I use are the same used in traditional crochet patterns, so I'm pretty pleased with the result.  

So I'm presently taking photos....

And writing notes......

And collecting photos of my pallette and tools and methods and materials.....

And coming up with kooky creations inspired by appreciation....

These are Pentapusses.  So named, cause they look like octopuses and definitely sea creatures, but they've only got 5 tentacles, and like I described the process on my Hellena Post Creatrix page on fb.....

"Made a hat that had dangly carroty things hanging out the top, and my fingers wanted to go into it, so I thought I'd try and make a puppet for my hand, (which I've threatened to do for a long time), and started out making a long bit for a leg, and then I started an arm - even had a hand with five fingers and everything on it - and played with it to see if it would work. The hand dangled in a way that wasn't very attractive, and to work as a movable hand would need some wire, which would stop it from moving at all, so I pulled the hand apart, and turned it into another leg, and made them all legs, which turned into tentacles, and then when I let it sit on my hand to see what my hand wanted to do........it wanted to move around in a poi like fashion, and swing figure eights, and fly through the air with the greatest of ease, so that's how it turned out. And then I wanted it to be an octopus, but I couldn't work out how to get another 3 legs on, and having them dangle from my palm wouldn't move in the same directed way, so I decided to leave it at five hanging off fingers and leave it at that. And then playing with them with Currawong, he said it needed eyes, so then the eyes came. And then flinging the ends round, I realised that beads or bells would be lethal, so tassles were the way to not turn it into a weapon."

It's also got me and Currawong back into photographing each other and the family, and all the things we do more often.  And Currawong gets to slip photos like this in, when taking photos of me hooking first thing in the morning.  Funny how a lot of his photos end up as cleavage shots :)

I've gotta mention too, that this is all going on as we're going about our daily lives, caught here in a photo by a beloved friend, walking the main street of our home town Nimbin.  And incidentally, with me wearing the moth wing cape that I've made a pattern for, that's in my PPP  Ebook.  By the way, being photographed under the Happy High Herbs sign was totally incidental.....and funny :)

And it's also going on while we've been having one of our busiest times with visitors, and people staying for extended periods, and crafting around them and sometimes onto them, or at least onto their dreads :)  There was a veritable rush on dread cosies and hair extensions for a while there!

But overall.....it's been a tremendously exciting experience as well.  I've been totally blissed out that I feel like my computer skills, software, hardware, photos, and the ibooks author template, have all come together in an alchemical magical act.  Had a minor freakout, when I thought yesterday that the ibooks author program was going to only let me publish through ibooks, and charge 30% on all my books!  Thought for a minute I was going to have to copy and paste the whole bloody lot to a free program.  but I got my genius IT expert daughter Jess onto it, and she worked out that it was all fine, as long as I kept my book as a PDF, which I was going to do anyway.  I'm absolutely over the moon with how it came together.  I'm still finishing it off as we speak, but I'm gonna make it on time for Nimbin Show, even if I have to pull off an all nighter.  Might even try and get some wine and nibbles for my little one hour launch :)  Here's the first page to show you how it looks.

And all 70 plus (haven't quite finished it yet!) pages, of photos and stories and patterns, will be available as a PDF file on my Etsy site, and you can also email me (address in my list of places on the right further down).  So you can download my book, or buy it in a crocheted necklace pouch, that also doubles up as a finger puppet.  $20 for the PDF download, and $25 for the crocheted pouch and usb stick.  I"ll keep you posted :)

P.S.  So it's been a little while since my launch now, and I'll post a link to my Etsy page now, just in case you want to go over and check it all out.  

Enter Etsy here

I

Chaotic Self Organisation

I've written a lot about chaotic harmony, or the conscious balance inherent in everything for a while now, and apart from about a million different stories from our market experience and from living near Nimbin, there's a really good explanation of how it works in 'Seven Life Lessons of Chaos - Timeless Wisdom from the Science of Change', by John Briggs and F. David Peat.  And I've been telling it to people for ages now, so I thought it was time to share it with you.  I'm just gonna quote verbatim from the 3rd Chapter, which is called 'Going with the Flow - Lesson about collective creativity and renewal'........

Wilfred Pelletier, a Native American from an Ojibway community north of Lake huron, says his people aren't into organisation, there's no need for it "because that community is organic."  Pelletier gives an illustration of how his unorganised people nevertheless get things done.  

"Let's say the council hall in an Indian community needs a new roof.....It's been leaking here and there for quite a while and it's getting worse.  And people have been talking about it.  Nobody organises a committee or appoints a project leader." Nothing happens, in fact, until "one morning here's a guy up on the roof, tearing off the old shingles, and down on the ground there's several bundles of new, hand-split shakes - probably not enough to do the whole job, but enough to make a good start.  Then, after a while, another guy comes along and sees the first guy on the roof.  So he comes over an he doesn't say, 'What are you doing up there?' because that's obvious, but he may say, 'How's she look?  Pretty rotten, I guess.' Something like that.  Then he takes off, and pretty soon he's back with a hammer or a shingle hatchet and maybe some shingle nails or a couple of rolls of tarpaper.  By afternoon, there's a whole crew working on that roof, a pile of materials building up down there on the ground, kids taking the old shingles away - taking them home for kindling - dogs barking, women bringing cold lemonade and sandwiches.  The whole community is involved and there's a lot of fun and laughter.  Maybe the next day another guy arrives with more bundles of shakes.  In two or three days that whole job is finished, and they all end up having a big party in the 'new' council hall."

Who was responsible for deciding to put a new roof on the hall?  Was it that first guy on the roof, a single isolated individual, or was it the whole community?  "How can you tell?  No meeting was called, no committees formed, no funds raised.  There were no arguments about whether the roof should be covered with aluminium or duroid or tin or shakes and which was the cheapest and which would last the longest and all that.  There was no foreman and no one was hired and nobody questioned that guy's right to rip off the old roof.  But there must have been some kind of 'organisation' going on in all that because the job got done.  It got done a lot quicker than if you hired professionals.  And it wasn't work, it was fun."

Chaos theory would answer that the "organisation" in Pellerier's roofing project was self-organisation.  It began with chaos - all that disorganised talk beforehand about the leak.  The first guy on the roof was a bifurcation point that became amplified.  The feedback between the first fellow and the next one who came along started a cascade that coupled the community together around the project, and then the system got the job done.  

Clearly, Pelletier's Ojibway community is an open, creative, chaotic, nonlinear system.  As he put it, the people in this group "aren't into competition.  But they aren't into cooperation either - never heard of either of those words.  What they do just happens, just flows along."  Within the community's creative open system, micro self-organised systems spring up from time to time, such as the community's action to repair the roof.  Such short-term self-organisation renews the community and keeps it alive, as testified to by the big party held in the new council hall.  

Social self-organisation and collective creativity doesn't only happen in Native American communities, it happens in rural communities around the world and in informal organisations of all kinds.  In many different circumstances, people start coming together, helping out, lending a hand, throwing in their two cents.  Nobody's leading particularly, but things get done.

A high-tech example of social self-organisation is the Internet.  The Net was started back in the 1960's by the U.S. military looking for a distributed command system in the event of nuclear war so that no single centre could be knocked out.  The idea was similar to the one that conceived of the U.S. highway system as a distributed airport of landing and takeoff strips.  It occurred to the planners that computers all over the country could be linked together to create a giant system that shared its information.  But once the Net was set up, academic scientists began to use it and it was eventually made available to the public all over the world.  Relatively quickly, more and more individuals and groups joined, until by the mid-1990's an estimated 25 million people were on-line and the number was doubling every eigthteen months. 

Nobody's controlling the Net (at least not yet).  It's maintained by an open flow of users passing information around.  Within the global self-organisation of the Net and its subset, the World Wide Web, are countless mini self-organisations springing up all the time.  People come together to do creative work - everything from photographers displaying their pictures of lightning strikes to underground musicians converging on Web sites to create an audience for their work to interest groups discussing the Vietnam War or Brazilian cuisine.  For those who have access, the Net is a daily example of collective creative exuberance.  Most of the activity is carried out by people who are making things, looking for information, and exchanging ideas that simply interest them as part of who they are.  The giant, hierarchically structured, power-driven commercial organisations have so far been largely frustrated in their efforts to harness the Net to their mechanical engines of profit.  Anyone who has surfed the Net knows he has entered a chaotic, dynamic open system where "what they do just happens, just flows along."  Clearly there's order here, but it's chaotic. 

Taken together, the traditional Ojibway community and the new cyber community suggest a radically different approach to social organisation that the one currently taken by postindustrial society.

So what do you reckon?  Pretty groovy eh.  And a concept and phenomena that I can report as being incredibly easy to be part of, flow along with, and surrender to, whenever we enter the company of other sovereign humanimals, led by our natural interests and passions, in a way that acknowledges and accepts each other as equals and valid, and do anything together in a non-heirarchical kinda way.  And stuff really does have the darndest way of showing up when it's needed, and when we surrender to the greater focus and don't sweat the details.  

Really wanted to share that with you, and hope you enjoyed it.

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?