The Fear Of Death

You don't have to look very far back in history to find cultures that celebrated and walked eagerly towards death.  Mostly due to a full bodied belief in an afterlife and continued evolution after death which is also a birth.  And if they weren't walking eagerly towards it, they at least were at peace with it, many cultures around the world practicing a laying out period after death so community and family members could say goodbye, with death being a lot more present and visible in every day life.

Just off the top of my head, I remember reading about Thai monks who laid their dead peers in huts to decay slowly, while they meditated on the process of decomposition.  There are so many elaborate and ritualistic burials, from Tibetan sky burials to Indian funeral pyres to Egyptian pyramids to Celtic cairns and mounds to massive Chinese monuments to Viking burials in longboats to the Mexican Day Of The Dead to the Indonesian tribe that enbalm their dead and bring them out for festivals to sea burials practiced by sea folk all over the world to Roman mausoleums and catacombs to Tribal cannibalism...............we've collectively dealt with death in a myriad of ways.

In terms of actively seeking death most especially through battle, we've got the Kamikaze, the Bezerkers, the Celts, the Aztecs, and the Mongols, just to name a few.  All diving into the afterlife with strong ideas about the bountiful lands, rewards and loved ones to reconnect with on the other side.

And in our modern day, we have widespread Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and New Ageism, all with their differing theories on death and the afterlife making up a large part of their focus, which gives their faithful peace around death and where they are going.  

At least you would hope so!

But is this the case in our pandemic fear filled days?  I can't speak for the non western religions, but as for Christianity and New Ageism in our western world, I'm not seeing a lot of peace around death and the afterlife.  I'm seeing a panic and terror leading people to take strong and rigid stances on one side of the fence or the other, and allowing a yawning chasm of a divide to stand between friends, family and communities.  

In recent years, we've been led down an angry and divisive path, led by a mainstream media that's tightening their ownership, stranglehold and censorship on the world wide web, and every other form of media they can lay their hands on.  We were taken in baby steps, through Climate Change, then the Yes vote, then the Me Too movement, then the Transgender movement, then Black Lives Matter........taking a brief interlude for wildfires to ravage the world, both physically with brutal fires in the Amazon, Australia, America, and many other places you would never think it could happen, and spiritually, with protests happening in just about every country, gaining in strength and momentum, which led to Time magazine proclaiming 2019 the Year Of The Protest........till we arrived at the Pandemic.

All of these movements - Climate Change, Yes vote, Me too, Transgender, Black Lives Matter and Pandemic - are explosively divisive and full of anger, fear and projection.  All of them can sometimes feel like the only conversations being had, no matter where you are in the western world, and often result in statements like "If you don't agree with me, you're a total waste of space and breath and unfriend me right now."  All create extreme polarity between view points, being either the mainstream belief or 'the other'.  Alternative beliefs or Mainstream beliefs that have quickly became lumped in with everything else associated with them,  to form an amorphous blob of either Conspiracist or Sheeple.  

And whichever of the two you choose to identify with, you are choosing your stance based on loving your family and wanting the best for them, and making the very best decision you can based on your life experience and knowledge.   Both sides believe equally they are thinking of the good of other people and trying to save the world.  And both sides being completely terrified about the mega scale death they are convinced will ensue, if the other side doesn't listen to 'The Truth'.  Which everyone seems to know these days. 

Personally, as an adept of Newtons Third Law, of every action having an equal and opposite reaction, as well as of Heraclitus, who proclaimed that every pair of opposites is a unity, as it's the dynamic interplay between the two that sparks evolution and growth........I'm firmly entrenched in the middle ground.  From my life experience, most recently bumping into  Leukaemia as an organic off grid dweller, I've found that paradox really is the nature of the universe, and truth lays in neither but both extremes being true.  The extreme polar ends are both right and wrong, and in acknowledging that, I can take what makes sense to me from both of them to fashion a path forward.  I know from experience, that as shit as it gets is also as great as it gets, and that is always going on. 

Which of course doesn't mean that I don't get filled with fear and worry and overwhelm at the state of the planet, but coming back to the point I was trying to make at the start, at least I'm not terrified of death.  And I'm getting quite good at finding the equal and opposite to it.

I've decided for myself that the best thing I can do in a world that can seem at times overrun with destruction, is to create.  So in the spirit of that, here is my visual and word manifesto on Birth, Sex and Death.

And here are the words spoken......

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, 

imbibing their foods and drinks, thoughts and conversations, 

fears and intense life events.

On the inside, cocooned in warm, salty liquid that cushions us from extremes.

The sense of connection with every event, 

sitting sleepy inside, gently bouncing round.

But we are born.

Squeezed by the biggest organ of a woman's body, 

her womb, 

into the world.

In all different ways, all over the planet, 

we die to the womb as we are born to the world.

How our birth unfolds, the conditions around us, 

and the welcome or lack of it that we feel in our first moments,

are the foundation stones on which we build our lives and self esteem.

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 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.

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.  

We try to clean up our emotions, our needs, our feelings, 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,

with our seasons, our life cycles, our relationships, our families,

our ideas, our cultures, our religions.

A process of pregnancy or seed planting,

then inner growth and building,

to the great pause and extremity of transition,

before the birth of a person or thought.

Then the vital life of interconnection,

and the intense moment 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......

A fascination with this sacred trinity persists,

even in the face of cultural taboos,

in 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,

and manifests too often as young women with shaved bodies, 

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 practices,

that they will either go away and bother someone else,

or wont impinge on our important life,

of work and cars and mortgages and hobbies and homes

and clothes and holidays and acquisitions.

How did we get so far removed from our instinctual, animal,

spiritual, eternally cyclic, ancient 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 regular occurrence on our screens,

while being horribly scared and avoidant 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 only?

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 to our 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 instead resulted in numbing to it,

being afraid of it,

and detaching from it even more instead.

But in a very real way, our sense of connection,

our oneness, and our source, is where it's always been.

At our fingertips.  Entangled through bonding.

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, 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.

And then there is 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.

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.

We are the ones that we've been waiting for,

and the time for us to awaken 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 and bonding love.

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......

TUFT (Temporary Utopian Fibre Temple) presents Metamorphostick

People have been calling me an artist for years, but it was only last year that I actually felt like one.  I'm definitely a craftsperson, and have certainly passed through my initiation and apprenticeship in my self taught guild, and moved through practitioner to Mistress of my chosen craft.  

But deep down I always kinda thought of myself as a talented crafts person, who created techniques and creations that were certainly artistic, but easily replicatable, thereby more fitting with the crafts person persona.  

Even so, I rarely made the same thing twice, and found orders and commissions odious, so I could see the two - craftsperson and artist - coexisting in a harmonious way.

But the year after Merlin got sick,  I got caught up in an art rash, that could only be itched by creating the ideas coming through me, and following the simple path before me, of a crystaline concept that was the outcome, with convoluted stepping stones along the way. Inspiration just grabbed me and made me follow without asking questions.  The visiting muse or genie was strong felt around me, working through my fingers and dancing as visions.  I used all the skills I'd learnt to craft me a palette, from crochet hooks to wooden weaving needles, 

 

 

to the hand dyed fleeces created by my man, 

 

 

to the spinning and translating of what the yarn wanted to become. 

 

Paradoxically, this was also a year of great and deep sadness and constant worry, as my Merlin was in the process of losing his hair and undergoing treatment for Leukaemia.   

I was coming to terms with my upturned beliefs about western medicine, and searching out an integrated path with alternative medicine, and it was a stark and bright lit new world that felt like I'd never get used to it.  

There were so many rivers of tears and fears washing over me regularly.  What were the rules in this new world?  What would be left of my old one?  

The floor had dropped out from beneath me, and I'd had to stare death in the face.  Death as powerful and significant as Birth.  One of our collectives greatest fears and taboos.  

It very much felt like the art rash upon me, was very definitely the equal and opposite of the great sadness that almost swallowed me. 

And the making and following the genie process, was definitely the meditation and self therapy I needed at the time to calm and center myself, and keep being strong and enabling the biggest cure for my Merlin, alongside his integrated medicines, which was simply being as happy as we could all help him to be, and to laugh lots.  

So the first 'artwork' to emerge, where I stayed up late at night, and crept down first thing in the morning, in an almost urgent desire to see the idea that had visited my mind, was the Metamorphostick.  A large and magnificent stick that had fallen in our suburban back yard beckoned to me from over by the fence, until I finally brought it out the front of my studio on the grass, and whittled back the bark and the knots to see the skeleton underneath.  

Then the sanding and oiling, and it was brought inside and hung from the rafters where I started off applying wire prosthetic branches and twigs.  

It got a curled possum tail and wool pods and flowers, and has raw alpaca peeking from the wrapping at either side, suggesting a fibre metamorphosis of the wood, the fibre changing the branch with its touch.  

I made a big ceremonial wrap out of a few different dye pots of green processed tops, that were gifted from the beautiful Faith, who with her daughter Amber brought us earth magic in the first weeks of our hospital stay.  It seemed the perfect energy to hang from my transforming stick.

 

It was the first time I truly felt like I was using my handspun yarns as a palette, shading the twigs and branches, and like I was applying the skills I'd taught myself in a Mistress like manner.  Mistressing my craft.  
 

And I liked it so much I kept going, and my fibre muse very kindly kept visiting, and the next creation to birth was the Labyrinth.  An idea that had been tempting me for a while, but which finally actuated in a glorious way.  



TO BE CONTINUED.........

Merlin's Quest

I keep moving away from this blog, and then coming back, realising that this blog here is about the closest thing I've got to an actual audience these days.  I did have a few blog posts that I put up on my web page, but like a lot of my fabulous ideas, just creating stuff is only half of the creative process.  Getting that stuff 'out there' to an audience, is a completely different matter!  And not something I'm fantastic at.  So rather than leave a few isolated posts over there where nobody looks, I'm bringing them back home to my blog here.  They do represent a most intense part of my life, so they belong here.  

And when I've finished updating here, I've got some stories to tell about my creative journey over the last couple of years.....

But for now, this is a post that I published elsewhere on February the 6th, 2017, called 'Merlin's Quest'.

Merlin's Quest - Feb 6 2017

2016 was a huge year for the Little Big Mob.  After finally getting away from either being pregnant or breastfeeding for the first time in over a decade, I was going nuts with my creativity especially in its aspect of meditation and therapy, and making wood, wire, raw fleece and spun yarn sculptures of trees and snails and horses and puppy dogs, getting heavily involved in the Weave And Mend Festival out at Djanbung Gardens, and starting up a Stitch And Enrich every Saturday morning at Blue Knob Farmers market.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Wednesday while Currawong was managing the Nimbin Farmers market in the afternoon, I was post hole digging and building garden beds in Mingle Park with whoever from the community chose to turn up and help me create a self organised Community Garden.   I also made some sculptures and a Labyrinth.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A beautiful and talented photo journalist Michelle Eabry, was taking photos of me spinning and weaving, to do a  piece and possible exhibition and web directory, of local and sustainable fibre talent in our region.  I was in the middle of bringing together a stunningly talented group of women to form Nimbins own Spinners and Weavers Guild, and we were planning gardens of a rare cotton breed we're propogating, along with other natural animal and plant fibres, also with plans of getting a mill to process it all, and creating a local Cottage Industry.   

 

 

For a long time now our family has operated under the philosophy of living simply so that others can simply live, and greatfully accepting government payments so that our family can stay together, rather than having to break ourselves up to earn money elsewhere.  In return we give as much of our time as we can to our broader community.  I liked to say we were Market Schooling, being involved in three weekly Farmers Markets as well as our Nimbin Monthly Market.  

 

 

 

 

Currawong was also picking up the food for Nimbin Co-op from Lismore Farmers Market every Tuesday, and at all these markets our kids were forming relationships with other homeschoolers, farmers, artists, and passionate community members.  I also like to call us Hippy Wombles, making good use of what other people leave behind, and we fully Wombled out living next to Blue Knob Gallery and Cafe in a mostly furnished house, and affordable long term rent with labour exchange thrown in.  It was a fully beautiful house too.

 

 

 

Virtually all our clothing was handmade or handed down from local families who loved us, and knew there was a lot of us to clothe.  And just about all our food was local and sustainable, we knew where it came from, and it was extremely affordable, as it was boosted by our labour and stallholders giving the Little Big Mob their produce that they'd rather give away, than take home at the end of the day.  Our kids barely owned shoes, hardly ever saw doctors, and we were non vaccinating, alternative medicine seeking, close to the earth living, old fashioned Earth Punk Hippies.  All the big kids were in the process of going to a Rewild earth knowledge course on the weekends, at the same place where the yearly homeschool camps were happening, and we were in contact with a large and thriving homeschooling community.

Then Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, or ALL found us.

When Leukaemia knocked on our door, we thought we were in the middle of treating an intense reaction to the two ticks that had bitten our 6 year old Merlin, one of the twins, within two weeks.  We were treating it alternatively with natural remedies and reflexology, and he'd pick up hugely after treatments, but go back down again too.  One night his heart hurt from palpitations, so we took him to Nimbin Medical Centre, where we were sent straight to Lismore Hospital - I've never seen emergency staff move so quick - and diagnosed quite quickly on the 10th of the 10th 2016.  I'll never forget that date.  As it was explained to me, if a body needed 100% of red and white blood cells, along with platelets.......he was at 5% for all of them.  Coming very close to organ failure most likely.  Not ticks at all.  It took me a little while for that first huge paradigm shift to sink in.  In a funny kind of way the ticks did us a favour, by getting him sick and in hospital at a favourable time for the type he had.

We were raced up to Brisbane after two transfusions, lights flashing, straight to Lady Cilento Children's Hospital, and from the amazing and dedicated staff at Lismore, to the two women ambulance drivers, to each and every one of the staff I came across at Lady Cilentos, I noticed this earnest tendancy in all of them, once they'd noted my alternativeness, and newbie status in Cancer Land, to tell me everything in their power that they could think of, to prepare me for what was coming.  The empathy and compassion of folk that seek out these healing modalities, or work closely to support them, are some of the most amazing people that I've ever met.  They were so gentle with me.  

  

Currawong had to stay with the rest of the children which was an equally intense journey, but from the start, it was me and Merlin, and I realised quickly that it was up to me to make this extreme path we were on as good as I could.  And very quickly I came to think that I'd had as much judgement about who got cancer and why, and how I would react to that situation, as I'd had about caesareans, and who got them and why, which were judgements that I'd had to face, challenge and humble within myself, when I had my 5th birth as a caesarean.  

 

From life experience, mainly from the intense bits and births, I knew the best way to ride this roller coaster was to be greatfull for the gentle earth angels placed along our road, indeed to everyone for their time and energy, and to surrender.  There was nothing I could do about what we were given to deal with, but everything I could do about how I handled it, for Merlins sake.  

Nonetheless, it was a massive paradigm shift on every level as you may appreciate.  In many ways I felt like Daniel going into the Lions Den of Big Pharma.  And had to very quickly wrap my head around what was going on, and how to approach it.  The first few days were spent getting his blood counts back up to somewhere near normal, as well as his platelettes, and getting a port-a-cath put in just under his shoulder bone, close to his heart, so as not to burn out his veins with chemotherapy.  And his first Lumbar Puncture and spinal chemotherapy were given within three days of the start date.  The night before his first chemo was the longest and darkest night of my soul in my living memory, and after talking long and deep to Currawong, I messaged everyone I knew and trusted, my beloved facebook Brain Hive, from Ayurvedic Masseurs, to Osteopaths, to Naturopaths, to Acupuncturists, to just about every alternative path you can imagine, as well as Oncology Nurses, and Western Medicine Practitioners as well, and asked them if there was any alternative.  

 

And at 5.30 in the morning, at that incredibly alone moment, my accupuncturist asked me to please ring her, feeling how freaked out I was.  In response to my pleas for an alternative, she said "Darling, there's no other cure for leukaemia in children, maybe for different things, but not for this, and you are in the very best place you could be to heal your child.  There is magic all around us sweetheart, and modern western medicine is magic in it's own way when it's needed, and this is certainly one of those times."  I was sobbing to her, "But we're going to destroy the immune system that I grew in my body, and that I fed with my breastmilk" and she replied very directly with "And the immune system that is going to kill him......."  There was no reply to that one.  How could there be really?  She said all the things I needed to hear, from someone who I trusted deeply from my own physical experience, and she helped me deal with my reality.  And I'm incredibly fortunate in that all the people I trust and asked for advice on this journey from my alternative world, echoed this opinion, and supported us in the path we took.  Along with advice about bits and pieces from natural medicine and alternative energetic work that didn't impede the progress of destroying the leukaemia cells in his body.  We collectively came up with the metaphor of hitting the reset button on his immune system.  Destroying it so we could build a better one.   

 

I fell off the horse a few times, but always got back on again quick enough, helped by the extreme empathy of the staff, from Cleaners to Specialists, who accepted me for who I was, and went to great measures to offer an Integrated Approach, bringing together the best options between Alternative and Western Medicine - after discussion - so that everyone was validated for their personal values.  As well as being gently informed, that with a healing rate of 98% for the protocol we were going through, with this hospital connected with hundreds of others throughout America and Europe and their collective experiences, that if we chose to withdraw Merlin from the hospital and their healing plan, they would go to court to remove him from our care.  It almost feels disloyal saying that, given the deep and affectionate relationships that were being formed in our rapidly growing new community.  But it is the stark reality of the situation.

 

I learnt, and so did a whole bunch of other alternative friends and community round the country, that leukaemia doesn't discriminate.  It doesn't matter what you do, how you live, and what protective diets and behaviours you employ.........cancer hits everyone, regardless of all age and social distinctions.  A massive cross section of every available cultural group is represented and goes through that hospital.  A great humbling and challenge to connect despite differences.  I've met some of the most inspiring and super hero like people in there, than I've ever met before.  The Captain Starlight workers, who bring smiles to the darkest places you can imagine.  With songs about booger, grass and pineapple thickshakes.  The volunteers who work hard all day, and then come in at night to play with my sore and sad son, letting him take them on the playing journey he came to know and love involving a pop dice game and plasticene.  The nurses who listened to me at 2am in the morning pour out my anguish, questions and tears while he was asleep.  The doctors who cared as much for my little boy as they cared about their own children, and cried with us in our deepest moments of pain for what we were watching him go through.  The other parents and children, and how they cope, and weather the storms with their own communities support around them.  The caterers and cleaners who did special little things to acknowledge and love us, one even brought us in hand made sausage rolls for Merlins cravings, with ingredients from his garden.  Some of the most amazing people I've ever been priveleged to meet.

 

And our son, Mr Merlin Radbod Post, twin of Maxamillion Hercules Post, both born in such an amazing manner that it launched me into international homebirthing and blogging fame.......is the most incredible kid I've ever been honoured to care for in such a huge way.  In fact the only one.  Our first week and a half was fairly standard for standard risk Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, we even got released to Ronald McDonald house for 4 days, as we hadn't quite got organised with a house to move into close to hospital yet.  

 

 

On the 4th day out, we walked a lot, signing the lease for our house in inner suburban Brisbane 5kms from hospital, overlooking horses in a large series of paddocks and with a rainwater tank, and Merlin complained after that his leg hurt. When he woke up in the middle of the night not able to walk, I had the sinking feeling that we were going back into hospital, and I was right.  In one day he had his port-a-cath accessed by a needle for the first time, got an x-ray, ultrasound, MRI, intravenous chemotherapy, and a hip operation..........and didn't complain once, and INSISTED on moving himself slowly but surely from hospital bed to examination bed, even holding onto a wee for 40 minutes during the MRI, with a foam form resting on his bladder, and modestly waiting till privacy and a hospital bottle to finally evacuate.  I told him the complete truth from the beginning, and told him that I'd only ever force him to do something if I absolutely had to, and he met all his challenges with logic and reason, and a great and developing love of all the staff that he dealt with, as much as they came to love him.  He impressed me so much with his stoic nature, that we all agreed to change his name by Deed Poll to Merlin Stoic Radbod Post, when this whole process is over.  

 

He actually responded really well to the actual chemotherapy, with a few ulcers right in the beginning that didn't really impede his eating and cleared up quickly, but overall he got healthier the more blood, platelets, and chemotherapy he got.  It was just the side effects that were bastards.  We were admitted back into hospital with a candida infection in his hip joint, that ended up requiring three operations of hip washouts to fix, along with an intense and rare case of kidney stones that were actually sludge - the remnants of dead leukaemia cells building up and creating a huge amount of pain to pass.  To fix the kidney stones we needed to pump massive amounts of fluid through his body, which caused him to swell up almost as big as Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  And also had a really adverse reaction on the hip infection that was prone to too much fluid.   

 

And the whole time he was virtually the picture perfect patient, loving of and loved by the staff, and the teachers from the Lady Cilentos school, and the visitors that came, from loved Nimbin community, to old church friends, to new Brisbane friends, to an amazing 80 year old Buddhist Monk and his entourage who continues to this day to blow our minds, to all the other amazing people that showed up in our lives as the Equal and Opposite to the dramatic turn that our life had taken.  And then when we were just about ready to go to our new home in the inner city, our eldest son Griffyn got chicken pox, and went into quarantine under the house in his basement man cave, and we had to wait 21 days to see if he had passed it onto the other kids or not.  Merlin and I were put in isolation too, as we definitely couldn't be exposed to it or expose other people - it was almost very fortunate that we'd been in hospital when it hit - and it looked for a little while like not even Currawong and I could see each other.  We were devestated.  We missed each other already so much, after never having been parted more than a few days in our entire 17 years of hot blooded love.  As we both had natural immunity from getting measles as children, after a few days isolation we at least could see each other again, but our fractured family was feeling anxious.

All in all, from the moment we walked out of our old house on the 10th of the 10th 2016, till we finally got to move into our new home and be reunited with the rest of the Little Big Mob, was 7 weeks and 2 days.  The weirdest part about that, was moving into a house full of my family and donated possessions, and feeling like a complete stranger to it.  While we were in hospital the rest of the mob had been taken under the wing of the local Catholic community through St Vinnies being contacted, and asked to help out with furniture.  A local volunteer for Vinnies was coming round regularly to bring furniture, clothes vouchers, bags of Bakers Delights seconds, and anything else she could think of to help.  We got out just in time for Christmas, and to everyones delight, we were gifted a Christmas tree and decorations, along with splendidly wrapped presents for everyone including 'mother' and 'father', and the cats and dog!!  Also food vouchers and gift vouchers, and presents so good that you would have thought we'd all been interviewed to assess the perfect gift for the individuals.  All from generous patrons of St Vinnies and its extended community.  Another large amount of judgements faced, challenged and humbled.  

 

 

And in a kinda delicious irony, Senior Constable David Henderson, who some of our friends back in Nimbin are on the alleged wrong side of, took a personal interest in our families story after reading about it on facebook, and felt touched by it as a father of 5 himself, and sent us up an awesome present for Merlin wrapped in Christmas paper and Police bunting, along with some other pressies for the rest of the mob, a lovely card and letter, and some groovy police paraphenalia.  I reckon we must have been the only hippies from Nimbin around, with a present from a Senior Constable wrapped in police bunting under our tree :)  More judgements gone.  All our family agreed it was our best Christmas ever.

 

So with our amazing Christmas, with presents wrapped in actual paper instead of the pillowslips I normally 'wrap' them in, along with the school attached to the hospital that our kids are really loving attending, (and we are too, as it's the perfect halfway mark between homeschooling and school, with incredibly compassionate and flexible staff), and our lovely old Queenslander house, overlooking horses in paddocks, and with a lovely big pool as part of our rent, where we can have our cats and dog as well, and all the amazing people who have turned up, it's been a massive and tumultuous Roller Coaster of a ride.  And at the moment anyway, is well and truly achieving our goal of making this experience as positive as we can for everyone in our family.  We're aiming for having this time in our memories as a largely positive experience, despite the tradgedy of leukaemia in one so young.  

 

 

 

 

 

Not only leukaemia hit us, but two of our dear personal friends also died during this time, one of them an old friend from South Australia who was running our Nimbin Market music stage, and another the mother of 4 of the most gorgeous children we've ever met.  That hit hard.   

 

 

  

And then supposed 'friends' of ours decided they'd move into our house while we were away, moved everything around, chucked a whole heap out, took what they wanted and shoved the rest under the house or stacked badly on my studio things, and bluffed their way through making a total mess of the place for a few months.  I've also been perimenopausal the whole time.  Lucky me.  And there's been a lot of adjusting to do with family relationships both in our inner family and our extended biological family.  Unfortunately old family dramas reared their ugly heads at the worst possible time with my biological family, triggering nasty old patterns, and proving tricky to overcome, but we're starting to get used to big downs to the ups.  

 

As you might imagine, all of this has led to a great Questioning of Everything.  Landing us deeply in the world of Ultimate Paradox.  Everything Known has become Unknown.  Everything up for Renewed Assessment.  A curious side effect for me personally, has been a massive triggering of my Complex PTSD.  The complex bit is the extremely creative imagination that I've been using all my life really, to whitewash my often ghastly reality growing up especially, with a complete renovation of my external world, turning shit things into something good.  A handy and necessary survival skill in essence, that I've employed heavily throughout my life.  But with this extreme life experience, all my skills and limited supply of whitewash are needed for this journey with Merlin, and there's just not enough for the rest of the world, and a lot of my whitewash has faded, leaving the skeletons of some fairly dysfunctional relationships bare, and with not enough left to refresh the coat.  I was going to go to psychotherapy to help me sort the fabricated from the real reality, and there's no need now.  Without my whitewash it's clear.  Our lives have forever changed.

So we've got to stay close to Lady Cilentos for at least the next 3 months, as we were told we must for the first 6 months, and most intensive parts of his chemotherapy treatment.  But for the next three years all up of his leukaemia healing process, we have to be close to a major hospital for his normal chemo, and visiting Lady Cilentos in Brisbane every month or so, and if any complications happen again, we'll be sent straight back up here.  After the first 2 months of chemotherapy, all the leukaemia cells left his body, and the rest of the protocol is making sure it stays away.  It's like the first few months destroyed the weeds, and now we're spraying regularly to keep them gone.  He's not to swim in public pools, only private ones or the sea or running creeks or rivers, and he has to stay out of the sun, maybe for the rest of his life, so we've become adept at juggling rainbow umbrellas around him everywhere we go, as a family sport.  

 

 

We have to do our best to protect him from all viruses, funguses, and bacterial infections as we destroy his immune system to build him a better one, so going out in crowded public places, where he can be coughed or sneezed on, is to be avoided.  We've also made a massive paradigm shift in matters of shoe wearing and personal hygeine, as he can't touch the soil for the next three years, and we now have cupboards stocked full of cleaning products, and I've been known to chase him round with water free hand sanitiser, along with the rest of the mob.  He can't eat takeaways unless they've been made fresh, he can't go near cut flowers, and all in all the changes in our lives have been massive and absolute.

 

You may appreciate that being away from all those markets and our networks, not to mention our affordable rental situation, has taken us away from existing happily and sustainably to overextending ourselves a huge amount.  There are many support networks like the Red Kite Foundation, and the Starlight Foundation, and social workers within the hospital helping us out hugely, but the price of feeding our mob from supermarkets for a start, including buying water as we're all used to living on rainwater, not to mention the cost of accessing alternative treatments, as well as paying what we can for the chemotherapy along the way, is a challenge.   We've also had to take out a loan and buy a car to drive around the city in, as our daily driver back home - the massive pink, red and purple camoflague painted Toyota Coaster - just wasn't going to be practical for driving round the city in.  

 

Rent is double what we were paying back home, but we're so greatful for the pool in this heat.  A dear friend raised money in the beginning as a fundraiser, and our local community back in Nimbin has been, and continues, to give through a series of jars in shops for local donations, created by our beloved friend.  And another dear friend is thinking up everything she can to raise money, like a dinner out together with friends and a cover charge as the fundraiser.

All this has helped us out so much, but we've still got a long way to go, and are getting a bit daunted by finances as we come up to car registration time.  We explained to the guy we bought it off sight unseen what our situation was, and he promised there were no surprises, but unfortunately he was dishonest, and there was.  A lot of the clothes that were handed down to us back home, are just not really appropriate for city life and going to school, so we're having to source new clothes and shoes.  I'm pulling out all the stops I can to try and turn my meditation and therapy of spinning and weaving into an online business, and in the process of writing out this story in more detail as a book to help with fundraising, but we could use some help.  If you have it that is.  We're also reinvigorating our old and hardy dream of starting up a Studio/Gallery and Fibre Retail shop, anywhere in the zones where we can easily access our hospital.

 

 

 

 

Our entire lives have just been picked up, spun around quite a few dizzying times, and then put down again, facing which direction we're not completely sure of yet.  All we know is that we're alive, with a good chance of us all staying that way, and together. And that old Law of the Equal and Opposite reaction is dancing a merry dance in our lives at this time in particular.  In such extremities, the only acronym I can come up with that truly describes how we're traveling, is Everything's Fucked And Fantastic.  EFAF. 

And in equal measures.