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......

Urban Paradise

One of the very best equal and opposite parts, of the trauma of finding out that one of our children has Leukaemia,  has been the fibre arting that's come out of me, through my personal process of making as meditation and therapy.  Along with so many other things and people of course, but this bit has been my favourite part of the physical and metaphysical ramifications of Newtons Third Law.  I've made a hand spun, three dimensional, three circuit Labyrinth hung from two juxtaposed 7 pointed stars.......

The Metamorphostick......

 
The Spiderweb Spiral Shower......

And the Willy Pilly.  Inspired while watching a documentary about the Bespoke movement in Australia, where a woman at a market was making 'cunt cushions', and had just sold them all to a busload of lesbians.   When asked about why she made them, she mentioned something like "Well you couldn't make cushions out of PENISES!" with a look of disdain and distaste on her face.  And in my head I was like, 'Game ON!', and a few months later the idea came together while talking to a beloved friend at West End Markets.  It's my love letter to the cock, most especially the one belonging to the love and lust of my life, Currawong.  This is it in the process of becoming.....

 Now in all my 16 years of self taught fibre crafting and traveling and arting, I've had some rather negative experiences (interspersed with great ones) with other artists and galleries and the art scene in general.  Which have led to extraordinary epiphanies as the equal and opposite to them, but have left me tending to create my own scene, rather than jump into any established one, and hang out at markets instead.  

Until the other month, when we were parking near our hospital, and noticed that the building I'd driven past multiple times dreaming about what a groovy art gallery it would make, had indeed become an art gallery.   Called Urban Paradise.

 We decided to go and have a look, and were welcomed and given cups of tea by the delightful Fred Berjot, director of the 'not for profit, artists run initiative serving the "outsider artists"'.  A warmer welcome I'd not had into any gallery.  And a better description of this Friesian anarchist I couldn't even hope for.

I got the paperwork to join the community, and on driving past at a later date, I realised what a perfect place the gallery inhabited, as it's just around the corner from Lady Cilento Children's Hospital, where we spend so much time, and where most of the people we know in Brisbane hang out.  So we went back the other day and I joined.

I'd been thinking I was joining to set a date for my first solo exhibition, to give me a deadline to work towards, which happens to be the best way for me to work.  Up to and around a deadline or theme, and off I go.  But I hadn't expected that part of the commitment was going to be sitting the gallery a day a week, and bringing in some art to hang as well.  

I had more ideas in my head than I'd actually created, so I went into a bit of a flurry of arting.  Incidentally, every time I say the word 'arting', I think of it as with a silent (Fffff)arting, as inspired by Matthew Silver and his love farts, and if you don't know who Matthew Silver is, he's definitely worth investigating.....

After fits and starts of work happening in my studio, I took myself down and started whittling a stick, and then sanding it and making another wearable and wallable artwork.   This time with crochet tubes over twigs and then wrapped, and a hanging fringe like a lash to an eye in the middle with beads.  

I'd also been making jellyfish as a move towards an exhibition too, and finished the Willy Pilly, so I brought them along, with a suitcase full of pusses and creatures as well for show and tell, and a spinning wheel and some fleece just in case.

And was totally caught by surprise by the amazing buzz, intriguing artists, and community feel of the whole place.  Folk dropping in and out all the time, attracted for the vibe, and artists who are renting studios painting in the sun.  

Dived in almost instantly to deep metaphysical conversations about the nature of the universe, and met a whole bunch of delightfully quirky and unique folk, ready to talk about everything.  The Little Big Mob boy pack led by dad came to visit a few times, and all were absorbed into deep talk and laughing. 

And then before I knew it this happened.....

 I was taken a bit by surprise and on the hop, as my show and tell creations that are part of the family, and a bit worn by travel, were embraced as art!  A few things went up that aren't for sale, and I'm fired and inspired to replace those with 'real' artworks, that I've been dreaming of lately, and am prepared to let go of.

Can't wait to go back. Urban Paradise is at 52 - 64 Annerley Road. I'll be there every Thursday for the forseeable future if you want to come and tell yarns, or learn to make rope.....