Humanimal Evolution And Liberation Through Harmony....or the HEALTH Manifesto

Since we moved away from our earliest families and set out to explore the earth as it was going through its constant evolution, we’ve found a myriad of ways to be different to each other, in our dress, skin and insides.  Boundaries and territories and theologies have carved battle and the knitting together of close hierarchical groups to survive onto our souls.  We mirror the other mammals in how we’ve reacted to limited resources and land – we’ve formed bullying hierarchies that advance territory, and see ‘the other’ as dehumanised, thereby justifying our warfare.  We’ve also managed to become hoarders to defy any other hoarding animal – taking it to outrageous extremes.

Since we first made that deal with the grass called wheat that we used as a tool to settle, (or perhaps, the wheat that used us for colonisation) we’ve been working out how to over-ride our instincts towards peaceful living, to create warriors and distinctions so we could keep acquiring the land we needed to perform agriculture.  The Spartans threw their babies to the ground and buried placentas on battlefiels, the Mayans separated their boys early from their families, and we western humans in particular, have come up with multitudinous forms of bonding interruption and layers of seperation to create warriors, to keep advancing our civilized bulldozing of the world. 

But in Humanimals early evolution, we traded our easy births and more independent babies for walking and a bigger brain to think with.  And we believe the time has come for Humanimals to use those brains we traded up for, and consciously evolve beyond the need for warfare, hoarding, hierarchies and bullying tactics.  Because we stand on the brink of mass extinctions that threaten not only us but every other animal, landscape and seascape on the planet.   It’s time for us to get together on this, be the change we want to see in the world, and take personal responsibility for the time we occupy on this planet.

The earth herself has shown that no matter what she endures…….she will go on.   And we wish to go on in HEALTH with her.

We believe that it is time for us to emerge from our waking sleep, as slaves in a civilised society, that treats us like children, and informs us that we wouldn’t learn without being forced, and we wouldn’t be ‘good’ without limiting rules, and we wouldn’t co-operate unless we were made to.  Our societal structures have revolved around guilt and fear, punishment and revenge, judgement, rules and hierarchies.  While indigenous societies all over the world have quietly shown, from the time we started forming tribes, how Humanimals can coexist peacefully with the other animals and ecosystems through experiencing a connection with everything, and accepting everything as an integral part of the Healthy Whole. 

In a great and delicious irony, in all our learning and civilising, we’ve searched and searched for truths until we’ve found them, in the lap of Science and Quantum Physics, and on the shoulders of Chaos, that we’ve had the universe contained within us allways, all the answers we’d ever need are locked in our DNA, and what the indigenous nations were saying all along about everything being connected was true.  We live in a conscious universe, and it’s safe  to trust that consciousness, and relinquish our grasp of control, to start exploring what an interconnected universe is really all about.  Everything that we’ve done to the world ‘out there’, we’ve actually done to ourselves. 

And no matter what other distinctions you may be able to lay upon the collective Humanimal soul, we are all reflected by Mother, Father and Child, as the realities of our species, and we are all Born, we Live and have Sex, and Die, just like all the other species.  These are the things that every Humanimal either does or has the potential to do within them.  The realities of our existence that connect us no matter what other categories we can create.

I think any reasonable Humanimal would be hard pressed to find many examples of our societies working healthily.  Threats, bullying, standardised birthing and education, governments, corporations, dogmatic religion, wage slaving, hierarchies and punishment haven’t really worked have they.  To try and trace back and untangle the threads that we’ve woven as dominators of the planet is hard work and obtuse, and reinvigorates old arguments. 

Instead, we identify the areas of Birthing, Living, Travelling, Sex, Water, Food, Home and Death to be our sovereign Humanimal birthrights, and sacred occupations in which the search for betterment and understanding for all of us and the rest of our planet, is to be encouraged and supported in the striving of our species evolution. 

It’s time to create a Conscious way forward into a HEALTHy future for everything…….  To create the future we’re wishing for and step into it.

Humanimal Evolution And Liberation Through Harmony 

 HEALTH Manifesto

FIRST - We claim the right to embrace our Human experience and liberate our DNA connected, sovereign, and autonomous human natures, and to consciously evolve, as our ancestors have done for millions of years.  And we embrace our religion as the living of our lives.

SECOND - We’ve learnt and felt that the entire universe is a conscious ocean of connection, and the drop goes into the ocean, but the ocean also goes into the drop.  Every single Humanimal is born with a purpose and destiny, and the most sacred profession we can engage in is to truly know and be ourselves.

THIRD - We acknowledge that there are infinite ways to express divinity, spirituality, God, creativity, and faith, and paths that have formed around the Humanimal instincts of searching out Love, Respect, Peace and Freedom.  And we believe that when you reduce all the worlds religions and spiritualities down to their synthesis, they are all striving to be the best they can be, to do no harm, and to work towards love and compassion.  So we claim the right to express our personal beliefs, spiritualities, truths, and philosophies in our individual ways, and have them accepted and supported as equally valid as any other. From journeying with organised religion to worshipping a guitar…….everything is relative and a matter of perspective, and valuable to the HEALTHy whole. 

FOURTH - We insist on taking personal responsibility for how we birth, live, learn, engage in consensual sex, travel, and die, and own these sacred traditions as an essential part of searching out our deep Humanimal natures and identities, engaging in all these traditions that are as old as our Humanimal bodies.  All of these areas have been shrouded in dogma, control, hierarchies, and rules for longer than we care to remember, and we believe it’s time for us to search through them with a fresh perspective.  To find ways of performing them that reflect our stage of conscious evolution. 

FIFTH - To all the sacred trinities that have been revered throughout our spiritual evolution, we add two more.  The first being –

That of Mother, Father, Child, as a representation of who we all come from, the cycle we can all experience, and the possibilities of who we can be.   While we have known the age of the Mother, and that of the Father, we believe that this is the age of the Child.  Because they are the ones who will remind us of who we have always been.

And…..

That of Birth, Sex and Death, as the inextricably linked trinity that is the reflection of all the great cycles within and without us, from whence we all come and to where we all go. 

SIXTH - We share solidarity with all the indigenous people of the earth,  the scientists and techno wizards, the philosophers and (R)evolutionary thinkers, and the eco-warriors and fringedwellers, who have all carved evolutionary thinking and hacked out free realities to express the Humanimal potentials in living respectfully and sustainably.  And we declare that compassionate searching into our indigenous and ancestral roots, alongside our search for how to create HEALTHy alternatives, are important elements of forming identity and community.  Learning our languages, songs, traditional dress, stories, heritage, ancient lores and histories.  At the same time as developing new ones, that explore ways of bringing spiritual and religious significance to everything we do. 

SEVENTH - Whilst living as perpetual children in a master slave society, we’ve actually oppressed our own children, and tried to force them to become like us.  They have often been the unspoken but understood possessions, slaves, powerless victims and lab rats of our cultural fads.  We believe that rather than teach them to be like us, we could instead learn from them, and let them remind us of the awe, curiosity, fascination, honesty, unconditional love and boundless enthusiasm with which we’re born into life, when born into love.  To see ourselves and magic in the simple and magnificent miracles of our personal worlds and universe.  And liberate the children within and without us.

EIGHTH - We claim our Humanimal birthright as being reflections of a chaotically harmonious universe, to honour the inherent consciousness of ecosystems and balance, and form our communities, self and community governance and regulation, collective endeavours, monetary systems,  trade and commerce, on the model of a wheel or circle. Where every person/idea/trade/spoke of the wheel is equally needed, appreciated, valid and essential to the whole.  And everybody feels empowered and appreciated in their role of collective self governance. 

NINTH - We encourage every single Humanimal to find the occupation, trade, or life path that makes them sing, and then to set sail on a never ending quest to find different and unique ways of doing…….everything.  We honour the long lineage of self taught Masters and Mistresses of their fields who created whole new vistas to explore from pursuing their passions.  And we celebrate the magnificence and brilliance of the human spirit, that has continued to create beauty, art, evolving thought, innovation, love, compassion and forgiveness, despite the cages and dark places that we’ve visited through oppressive and narrow paradigms. 

TENTH - We spread like a virus the love of learning, and encourage Humanimals to explore concepts like Pantheism, Animism, Humanism, The Gaia Theory, Chaos Theory, Anarchy, Gifting Economies, Community Supported Agriculture, The Farmers Market Movement, the Zapatistas, Evolution, Natural History, Ethnopaediatrics, Biomimicry, Alternative Technology, Birthing practices, Bonding, The Peace Movement, Indigenous spiritualities, a Wide and Broad World History, the Community Movement, Sexual histories, Attachment Parenting, historical dwellings, Nomadic cultures and the modern Protest movement, and all the different ways we’ve survived……  And take it all in, and sit with it, and then make up their own minds based on comparison and their personal life experience.  Disregard the bits that don’t work for them, and take the bits that do, and create their own webwork of understanding, and then help to continue the evolution of thought.  Whilst having a greater appreciation of all the diverse ways of understanding and enlightenment we can take.

ELEVENTH - We claim our religious birthright, to form families, tribes and communities, as we feel drawn.  To create homes that reflect our needs, survival, and unique natures.  To travel freely in safe vehicles with homes inside them, and to meet, share, trade, work, gift, do ceremony, perform, celebrate and hang out together.  To educate ourselves according to our desires and interests and with the support of mentors.  To birth in the way that we and our babies deserve, and to engage in activities that aid in our survival, enlightenment, and evolution.  To express our Humanimal love and lust with consensual partners, and explore our natures, smells, needs, rituals, preferred environments and foods.  To evolve our own death ceremonies and burials.  To experience connection with our planet, fellow earth dwellers, food, water, home, births, sexuality, rituals, learning and death.

TWELFTH - We acknowledge suffering, grief, pain, and the underworlds of humanity as well, as parts of the whole, and that these undergrounds give us great lessons, insights, empathy, compassion, balance, forgiveness, and motivation to evolve.  We believe that every humanimal has the potential for everything within them, as a reflection of the macro in the micro, but that in owning our shadows, and sewing them back onto ourselves like Wendy did with Peter Pan, we can reclaim them from the civilised world gone crazy with shadow power, and eat them back into ourselves. 

THIRTEENTH - We dedicate ourselves to exploring new ways to make our homes, towns, farms and cities, Humanimal, Ecosystem, and Earth friendly.  Sustainable and HEALTHy. To repairing the damage that our fathers and mothers have wrought.  To keep endeavouring to know ourselves, but to also keep exploring our physical environment, and in conjunction with soaring into space, also delve the depths of our oceans and inner planet.

FOURTEENTH - We propose the creation of Humanimal Wildlife Sanctuaries, where Humanimals can live free of constriction and contract and obligation, to explore their Humanimal natures and release themselves back into the wild should they so choose.  With the freedom to help heal and nurture the wild, and assist it to renew itself from the ravages of monocultural agriculture.  In these sanctuaries we will also explore our ancestry and genetic lineages, as a means towards discovering and creating identities that fit us collectively and individually.  They could also be places for natural learning centres along the lines of Uniterra, and birthing centres removed from the sick and dying, schedules and routines, and dying centres where age is celebrated, learned from, and helped with peaceful and dignified deaths.   Community banks, insurance funds, alternate monetary systems, libraries, health centres, and centres of trade could also be created.  And we can also work out better ways to deal with those that harm others, than to torture them and lock them away.  All managed by our wheels of council.  Dealing with these matters as empathetic fellow humanimals, instead of harsh and vengeful judges, and dealing with our matters communally and locally, rather than subjugate everybody to the guilty until proven innocent clause, implemented by strangers.

FIFTEENTH – We claim our birthright, and will strive to reinvigorate Humanimals most ancient form of community, the town market.    Where we can form local networks, food and seed banks, connections of care, share ideas, and grow our local communities, food, water sources, clothing, adornment, rituals, festivals, authentic relationships,learnings, tools and skills.

SIXTEENTH – We dedicate ourselves to a process of continual conscious evolution, and state that even our beginning searchings into the formation of our communities, shall always be viewed as historical documents and incidences, and will never become dogma or worship. We will retain an adapting, changing, evolving record and representation of our search into our selves and our planet.

We are the result of thousands of generations of love, and our ancestors wish to welcome us back into their arms.

To bra or not to bra.......

I just read an awesome blog post about the usage of bras, that I highly recommend you read.  About how it's really not a funky practice for our boobs.  And the comment I wanted to leave was so huge, that I thought I'd better blog about it myself, not least because the more this kind of information is out there the better, but also because it comes down to sovereignty again.

Hot on the tail of my last post just fresh off the press about self organisation, this is so timely because the self organisation that can exist within our communities and groups, can also exist in our bodies.  Us Westerners are so into control.  Controlling our groups with heirarchies, controlling our creativity with standardised learning, controlling our animals and our children, who often have the same rights as each other, controlling our fibres that we make things with, controlling the ways that everybody does everything, and most of all, personally, and in our direct experience, we try to control our bodies.  What they look like, smell like, feel like, perform like, when they rest, when they eat, what they eat, and all the different ways that we 'manage' them into submission.  Do our best to knock all the animal edges off, so that we can prance around in our dog trotting ways emulating aliens that don't shit, stink, have hair in unsightly places, writhe with sensuality, or force us to admit our card carrying status as animals like all the others.  

And I would like to suggest, that instead we could surrender to our humanimal bodily experience, and maybe even find that our bodies, like our grass roots communities and wild environments show us, have within them an inherent consciousness, that when respected and uncontrolled, can find a harmonious balance from seeming chaos.  

I've written before about our signature smells that can be liberated through using only natural soap and water and no deodorants or cleaning products, but never really got into my proud bra free status.  I don't wear a bra.  I'm over 6 foot tall, and I've weighed between 100 and 125 kilograms for years now, especially during babies, and have big bosoms.  I've been up to a size 26H which is pretty huge, and I've breastfed 8 babies now, all for the first year of their lives, when they've naturally weaned themselves.  

Incidentally......apparently there was a test done in the 50's as to what size bra one should buy.  If your breast could hold a pencil underneath it, pinned between breast and chest, then you were a certain size. If your breast couldn't hold a pencil it was another.  Three pencils was considered a larger sized cup.  But since a very young lass, my bountiful breasts have been able to hold a whole pencil case.  A soft one of course.  I wonder what size that would have been?  Bloody Big Bra perhaps.......

When I was a young thing I was a bit of an obsessive bra wearer.  I'd wear them to sleep.  And felt awfully nude and nipple shy and vulnerable to go without one.  And then I had my first baby and discovered all sorts of things as a result, one of which was the joys of making love with women.  And a lot of women who love women are really into women.....surprisingly......in their raw, natural, authentic and real states.  So I came to really love my breasts, and their fulsome milk giving nurturance, and how they wobbled and bounced as I walked was almost a badge of honour, that I was a WILD woman, who'd howled at the moon and found her soul, and loved my body as it was.   At first it was uncomfortable and I sweated a lot, but after a time my body found it's own balance, and I got used to hanging loose.  

For a very brief time I explored complete femininity, and lacy push up bras, and fell as in love with my cleavage as all the very short men who I hugged often did.  

Then I met Currawong, but as a punk anarchist, he was every bit as into reclaiming the beauty of the untamed or uncliched body, and loved my bouncing breasts.  I convinced myself that I needed to wear maternity bras from birthing to at least 6 months down the track for only the first three of my babies, and had mastitis, and sore breasts often, and a huge mess around with bra straps and nursing pads.  But with my fourth baby I just let the whole thing go, wore latex tops that held material nursing pads in place, or just gushed into cloth nappies that stayed in place under my tank tops.  I had no problems, and my breasts were so less sore in general, and they've always been easy and comfortable since.  

I'm 42 now, and 8 babies later they droop, and my nipples point to the ground.  They're so soft and the skin is so gently stretchy that they're comfortable and warm pillows for any of my babies.  They get a bit tender coming up to bleeding, but in general I forget about them, cause they just bounce along for the ride.   Before I got to evolving into complete self love and acceptance,  I sometimes felt stared at, and uncomfortable, and exposed, and wished I could just have a body that didn't attract attention.   But what always helped me deal with that, was to remember that I was part of a sight seed of a different way of being for everyone who looked at me, for an individual who was going about their life as a natural and authentic human animal.  And for my daughters, so that when they grow they can choose which cultural fads they want to take part in, and not feel pressured into fitting into anyone else's norm.  And for my sons, to be able to appreciate women in all their glorious forms.  And for my Currawong, who has been such a huge part of my self love and appreciation, through the glowing reflection of his adoration for my body, and maybe in particular my beautiful bosoms.  

And with my complete and easy surrender to my body, and what it actually is, I find that I have such a profound gratitude for the amazing beast that it is, to have taken me this far in life, borne this many babies, enjoyed this much sex, love and bonding, had such stamina and energy for all of life's distractions, and has these amazing pillows of soft flesh and skin that can express so many sides of me.  When left to their own devices, and accepted for what they are, they come into a graceful prime.  In the cold they can shrink up almost pert like and my nipples harden in weather and in lust.  And when hot they kinda spread and hang out and try to keep as cool as they can.  They nestle and fold my loved one into me in all sorts of ways, and I wear halter tops and sheer stretchy tees and let them shake the tango along with all the other generous curves of my womans body.  

And I've got so used to it, and have so many women round me now who also walk the world braless, that sometimes I catch myself looking at women with obvious bras on, and think to myself 'Now that's just wierd.....'

Breasts are wonderful.  And a journey.  Enjoy them.