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......

Sex

A while ago I was asked by a friend to write a piece for a book that she was going to create, with letters from all sorts of people, written to a young woman on the cusp of her dawning womanhood and sexuality.  

And this is what I wrote........

As you step up to your sexual life, surrounded by all the messages that have been gifted to you whether you wanted them or not, about men and women and sex, all those fairytales of princes and princesses, and the wishing and hoping that you’ve felt all your life from people around you……

There’s just one thing that I really want you to know.

Your sexuality can change.  Drastically.  And it’s up to you and how deep you’re willing to dive into yourself and your authentic reality, and get to know and love yourself, as to how deep you’ll dive into a sexual relationship.   So many people think that their sexuality is just something they’re born with, and that they have to make the best of what they’ve got, but in my experience, that just isn’t the case.

I bristled into the world of sexuality at 16, with my travelling bags packed with all sorts of other peoples baggage.  The main baggage stowed away in my bags was from my mother.  A fundamentalist Christian, she informed me often that men were rabid beasts, that would rape me at the drop of a hat, ( I must admit that thought kind of excited me with the thrill of danger) and that it was up to me to stay decorus in all occasions, and make sure I didn’t egg them on.  She also told me that using a tampon was like having sex, so not to use them till after I was married.  I was so disappointed when I used my first tampon off in the bush, borrowed from a friends mum, and embarrassedly tried to ‘get it in’. 

In order to get over that, I had to fuck a lot of people.  I also started off the sexual game with absolutely no self esteem or sense of boundaries, so my experiences were a mix of pretty foul and surprisingly sexy to start off with.  Peppered with the odd spray of a delightful and respectful experience with a random man or woman.  I would valiantly attempt to have sex with just about anyone that suggested it.  After an emotionally cold and physically frigid childhood, any attention at all was cause for gratitude in me.  But despite my utmost attempts…….my cunt was clamped shut.  I’ve only ever heard about this condition occurring in old women, and called something to do with walnuts, but I know it’s possible, cause it happened to me.  I had many a man dedicatedly try to enter my centre of sex, and be totally unsuccessful.  They weren’t just half hearted attempts either.  One gentle man even bathed me and massaged me all over, but I was barred to all access.  I travelled round Europe for a year, going home with all sorts of men, some even just rolling round on the grass in the dark in a park, and never managed to have proper sex.  They all came around the general region, but they never penetrated my warm castle. 

Because I was so easy, I was treated as one that you liked to sleep with but not bring home to mother.  It took poetry and cards and flowers from a gentle man with a small penis, to finally enter my barricades.  And then no holds were barred, as I launched out into sexploration. 

I did just about everything.  Men, Women, Threesomes, Orgies, Affairs, One Night Stands, Oral, Anal, Holy Whoring………and I never really felt a thing.  My cunt may have been opened but my heart wasn’t.  Everything was experienced through my head.  It was like my body was numb, and I lived it through my thoughts.  I learnt how to fake orgasms and make like a porn star.  And even more, I learnt how to become an extremely fine lover, so as my lovers were so gone on bliss, that they wouldn’t notice my absence.  Some moments really hit through the gaffa tape wrapped round my body, like the first time I was fisted, and some moments of pure love.  I treasured them close.  But some moments were totally awful, and I experienced rape (by women no less), to heap on top of having body memories of childhood abuse.

Alongside sex, I was unpeeling the wraps of my childhood and cultural clutches, and trying to work out who the hell I really was beyond what I’d been moulded to.  I spent many years undoing things.  My patterns and conditioning.  My need to keep busy.  I tensed myself into relaxing.  I made myself sit and do nothing.  I tried to listen to my instinct buried deep beneath entrenched dogma.  I learnt from everything and everyone around me.  I found treasures in the dark.

And I started to really learn about myself.  About my own way of doing things.  About my heart.  More to the point, I started to really like who I was.  Like how my survival instincts had led me, even when I found it hard to hear them.  Like the stories that made me who I was.

Then I bumped into my soul mate.  Sitting on a barstool, with his blue blue eyes that I fell into, and couldn’t get out of.  We had a long one night fling, and I thought it was all she wrote, but on getting home he haunted me.  Quite a worldy wise sexual professional at that point, he’d been the first to treat me with such utmost respect, chivalry, and acceptance.  I wrote a book inspired by the experience, and then on meeting up again, all the things I’d written had come to pass.  We have an amazing meeting story, but what’s even more important to my point right now, is that our hearts met as well as our sex, and after all of those journeys that I’ve told you about, I went from being a sexually rapacious ice queen, to feeling sex and love and bliss and warmth through my whole soul and  body. 

We fuck like a god and goddess taking a break from their day jobs and moonlighting as porn stars. 

But it wasn’t an easy journey.  It wasn’t all hearts and roses and knights on stallions, and once we met it wasn’t happy ever after.  We both had shitty childhoods we were recovering from, massive trust issues, and dark paths that we’d travelled to get to each other.  We put each other through the wringer, and tested each other over and over, and all the time I thought I’d ‘lowered’ myself to his vibration and was healing him, I was actually letting him heal me equally.  He took 5 years to believe that I really loved him and was going to stay.  I reckon I took about the same. 

We’re noisy and we argue, and we make love and war equally passionately, and most important to both of us……….we have absolutely no secrets from each other.  We tell each other the absolute truth.  After childhoods full of hypocrisy, duplicity, and lies, we’re totally allergic to all of it.  We got into so much trouble before we found each other with the world out there, cause we refused to lie.  To ourselves or anyone else.  No matter how uncomfortable that may have made life around us. 

Right in the beginning, in our torrid and explosive implosion into each other, a woman from my childhood religion came to visit, who’d known me since I was a baby.  And she spent the day with us hearing stories and mutually falling in love.  And right near the end she said, “When you come across those seemingly unsurpassable brick walls in your relationship, the ones that other people say you should just give up on……don’t.  Find some way to get under it, or over it, or around it, or knock it down, cause I guarantee you, that when you get over the other side, the love and trust and gifts that it will bring will be worth it.”

And she was right.

Even though we’ve waited till it was extremely unpopular till we did it, me and my man have been together for over 14 years now, and apart from a few little tests at the beginning, have been completely, lustfully, and explicitly monogamous.  The crystalline and multifaceted glittering creation that we’ve crafted between us and around us, is built from all our tests and trials in the beginning, and our coming togethers, and our fights, and our sexuality, and our births, and the amazing sexual fests that created our babies, and our bodies and the way they smell and look and age, and our complete and total honesty with ourselves and each other, and our growing mutual and self love………and our sex life all these years and babies down the track is simply epic. 

After starting my sexual journey as a maiden novice, clamped and numbed shut, I’ve matured through the mother and sexual phase into a goddess alongside my god.  I thought our sexual climate was pretty rare and fine before we got to this volcanic region of the Northern Rivers, but since coming here, we birthed our seventh baby together that was as my midwife described, ‘The epitome of the sexual birthing divine feminine’, and birthed an ectopic pregnancy together a year and a half later that was equally powerful, and find ourselves in a golden age that just keeps getting better.  I have multiple orgasms and women’s ejaculations and we regularly say to each other ‘wow…..never did that before!’.  Despite realistic expectations, our sex life keeps getting better. 

Your sexual journey as a woman, is a journey, not a destination.  And you can always change it.  Take it from me.  I know.

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.

An Ode To Body Hair And The Great Unwashed

Now if you've studied history, and the tales of the conquerors and colonialists, there are two parts to colonising a culture and territory.  It's only the first part where there's a big war and killing with death machines, and after that comes the real strategy of utmost import, if the land conquered is to remain so.  Which is large scale divide and conquer, on every level, through every strata of the society or culture to remain colonised.  The disease of separation spread like a virus, through families, communities and peoples, based on age, belief, body type, look, profession, possessions, you name it, it can be categorised into a million different splinter groups, unlikely to ever form again into a glorious whole of connected, acknowledged, diverse and conscious parts. 

So as Australians, conquered how many times removed now?  From the Romans, to the Roman Catholics, to the English, to the prison colonies on supposed Terra Nullis…….we've been collectively divided and conquered within an inch of our long and tangled ancestral paths.  Split into billions of divisions and separations, some of the worst being within the splinters of the splinter groups, that fight each other for moral worth.  Divided and separated from our families, our bonding in our family groups, our connection to our larger communities, and extended families, our food, our water, our lifestyles, our works, our art, our clothes, our music, our homes, our animals, our authenticity, our bodies, our birthing, our body hair, our sexuality, our mammalian selves, and our smells.  

As a result of my birth, family life, religion and schooling, I was turned out into the world a bit disgusted by my own body and its emissions, and entirely grossed out by the thought of anyone else's.  I shaved and waxed and make upped and permed and wore dozens of products all over my body.  On my skin.  The most sensitive and large organ we have on our bodies.  I had sprays for my female bits, and sprays for my underarms, and shame for wherever my hair was that it wasn't 'meant' to be.  I had soaps and special face scrubs, and shampoos and conditioners, and body creams and scented panty liners, and a rigorous body hygiene that saw any body juice or smell, as something to be cleaned up and away, and the appropriate 'better' smell applied.  

Till I hit the lesbian world that is, where womens bodies were a representation of the goddess, and divine, and perfect as they were, and make up and shaving and all those other things were CHOSEN to be done, or not done at all…..PROUDLY!  I started to chill on my rigorous hygiene, and started to relax into some body smells and juices.  There were some women who had turned their back entirely on 'the system', and had amazing body smells, as they eschewed all corporations.  And then when I left that world for the other places where rare humans dwelt, I found quite a few scenes with a love for the human body in it's natural form.  Activists, anarchists, punks to be precise, are often members of the 'great unwashed', who have pushed off from the shore of chemicalised smells and shaved hair, into love and lust of the hairy, smelly, juice creating bodies we were born with.  

But my Currawong was the port where I set sail into my body in its natural form, so intoxicated I was by the sheer smell and feel and hairiness of him.  I'd reduced my money spent on corporate beauty products by a lot by the time we met, but still held onto aluminium free roll on deodorant under my arms, and a jolly good soaping and washing on a regular basis.  If I went for a few days without washing I'd start to smell in a way I didn't like.  And if I did sweaty work or sex, I'd often smell a little bit rancid after, and race off to the shower as soon as I could.  I'd become one with my bleeding, and the various smells that come with that time, but I was still seeing my body odour and flora as something to be tamed.  

And he hit my senses like a tidal wave.  An olfactorial wash that made me want to dive into him again and again.  His clothes, his bedding, his body…….the sweatier and sexier the better.  A totally intoxicating mix of musk and skin and warmth and hair and himness.  That can never be replicated or turned into a product, because it's his unique signature scent.  When we were first courting interstate, I slept on the sheets and pillows we'd slept in for weeks, wallowing in the remnant smells of him.  15 years down the track I still find his scent the most delightful aroma in the world.  

You know how all the other mammals smell each others noses, and bums, and bodies?  Sniff them all  over?  From dogs and cats to horses and elephants, us mammals know that there's a lot to be learnt from smell.  How a creature is feeling, when it's sick, when it's stressed, when it's fertile, when it's turned on, when it's angry, all of these things can be smelt.  And are translated through our signature smells.  The smells that identify us.  The smells that are our birth right, inherited in our bodies.  

So when we first got together, Currawong and I, a bit of fuss was made about his body smell.  More heady than any cologne or aftershave that had ever wafted past my nose.  Even the scent of our intermixed loving was an olfactorial orgasm.  And I was curious about his superior smell, and why I didn't have one of my own.  He told me to stop washing under my arms with soap.  And to stop using all deodorants and products of any kind.  And when I said that I'd tried that before, but I always ended up smelling rank, he said that was because the soap knocked out the ability of my underarms to regulate it's own microflora.  And to just stop soaping and wait a while.  Shower with whatever regularity I wanted, and keep soap for bits if it was really necessary, but just leave the rest alone.  Wash with our pure rainwater only, rubbing and washing my skin with the roughness of my finger pads.  

And blow me over with a feather he was right.  After a few weeks of no soap under my arms, I started to smell like me.  A signature scent that to this day, I can stick my nose in my armpit, and happily offer it to anyone to smell, with great pride and pleasure.  I smell hot.  I smell earthy and ripe and musky and sweet and it's all mine.  A result of the foods I eat, and the emotions I feel, and the sex we set sail in, and the things I do.  I've learnt that just like mens balls, when my underarms or boobs are constricted, or wrapped in polyester or plastic, they smell quite intense.  They like to be free and be connected to the breeze so my underarm hair can do it's job of regulating and spreading the scent.  So I wear clothes with no sleeves, or wide armpit holders, so there's no conqueror in my armpit.  Cause underarm hair is a large part of the smell.  Sometimes there's naturally formed salt crystals on them, and they just intensify the smell.  And underarm hair, like boobs, and pubes, can definitely be completely left alone.  To waft and move and jiggle and groove as they choose.  Like many of our ancestors from time immemorial.  

Not just communication, and not just sexual, our natural body odours are also great aides in bonding.  And comfort.  And creating a sense and smell of home wherever you go.  I've had more than one child who has buried their head into my armpit when they're upset.  And more than one person on whom I've casually left my scent in a hug, who has told me how good I smell.  We had one friend who told us we were the strongest smelling humans she knew, and that it was a really good thing.  We had friends who said they could smell us as soon as they entered a supermarket in Mt Barker, above all the air ducted smells, and they sniffed us out till they found us.  We spent a night in a perfumed bed, and Spiral-Moon baby cried and cried and cried until we went out to the bus, got our sheets, and remade the bed with our bedding.  Only then did she finally sleep.  And at markets back in Maccy a bit down the olfactorial track, when more than a few had sniffed our whiff, we'd meet up early in the pre market dawn, and give each other a snuffle of our pits.  Many a friend has vowed to stop using soap on their underarms, and told us later they were delighted with the results.  Most of our birthing experiences have revolved around bonding, and wanting our baby to be born into the smells and feelings of home.  To stay quietly with me and be welcomed to the world slowly and gently.  To soak up the heady perfume of birth, that once you've smelt it you'll never forget.  To bond closely, skin to skin, heart beat to heart beat, with no bras and deodorants and factory farmed smells intruding.  If you look into early human practices, there was a time when we licked the perineum of our babies after they were born, like the other mammals.  And the smells of birth were considered an integral part of a bonded birth.

Because to be totally honest…..after spending so many years with real smelling humans, doing all the communicating and hugging and sniffing that we do, the cloy of a factory farmed scent is quite offensive to my nostrils.  There's been so much fuss over the years, that some folk have even fronted me on, about the offensive smell of B.O.  So many mainstream people seem assured that the best thing to do in the face of an authentic human animal smell is to disinfect it and cover over the scent with the same smell as a million others.  At least.  To hide it.  Smother it.  Get rid of it quick.  I remember one night, in the height of our summer of love at the market, when there was a circus tent full of opera goers on the oval beneath our hippy camp.  We walked down to check it out, and were assaulted by a tsunami of chemically toxic perfumes and colognes.  I ended up holding my breath.  Grieving for the olfactory sensation I'd been robbed of, had I been able to swim through an ocean of signature smelling humans.  And Currawong and I both fondly talk about the events that we've been to full of human smelling humans.  On summer evenings, with sweat drenched bodies singing their aromas to the wind, many moments of connection and bonding occurred.  Our sex life revolves massively around our body odours.  We communicate so much with the way we smell.  One day I met Currawong at the door after a hot day away armpit first.  And it made him melt to the point of almost collapsing.  His knees instantly went from beneath him. And all the different zones on him, and how they smell, never cease to entrance me and stir me from stupor.  He's my Pied Piper, and I'll follow his scent to the ends of the earth.  

I'm only writing this, cause I was set to think by an article about underarm hair sent to me by a friend.  It really tripped me out that, like the fella said…

Mr Hopper sees his project as a 'type of protest' against the beauty industry.

'Although armpit hair is a natural state it has become a statement. Why is that?' he writes.  'For almost a century we have been brainwashed by the beauty industry, encouraging hair removal. Natural Beauty could be classified as a type of protest. 

'By creating a contrast between common "fashionable" female beauty and the raw unconventional look of female armpit hair, thoughts are intrigued and a discussion is made,' he explains.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2600074/Body-hair-natural-NOT-gross-Striking-images-women-unshaven-underarms-protest-conventional-standards-beauty.html#ixzz2zUurRJyT
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It really is quite bizarre that we find the natural state of our bodies that we were born with…..abhorrent.  One of the models even pulled out of the project, cause she was so 'grossed out' by her body hair.  I just don't get it.  In a society ruled by many religions and spiritualities, collective in their belief that we are made in the image of God/ess, in whichever form that takes…….how have we got so far from loving ourselves exactly as we are?  Aren't we meant to be a reflection of perfection?  It doesn't occur to me much to talk about, as it's so completely and intrinsically part of who we are, but when I read this article I thought I should post out a view from one of the many alternatives to the beauty industry.  Cause I know when I was enthralled with it, I never stopped to think that there was any other way.  It's a great big arsed multinational corporation regime that has many dancing to the beat of its drum.  

I love my underarm hair.  And I don't have to be part of a project to do so.  It's one of the sexiest things about me I think.  Currawong concurs.  And there is the odd human around who has kept a love for natural smells despite the mainstream.  I remember once Hairy Dave back in Maccy, telling Currawong rather sheepishly that he wasn't trying to cut his lunch, but he saw me lift my arm, and the sweat glistening on my armpit hairs was glinting in the sunlight, and he couldn't help it mate, but he barred up!  All said with a big grin and laugh of course.  Love it.  And I love every inch of hair on my man.  Incidentally, I don't think I've ever shared mine and Currawong's theme song with you on here.  I knew it from my lesbian days, and thought it was a hoot, and never expected that the song would go on to prove quite prophetic……except we obviously missed out a bit on the birth control :)  But here it is nonetheless.  Our theme song.  'I spent my last $10 on birth control and beer' by Two Nice Girls.

And I can't talk about body hair without a specific mention of pubic hair.  It's another amazing part of our bodies, that doesn't necessarily need taming.  And a rather special part in my experience.  One thing I particularly love about my pubic hair is that with every pregnancy I've experienced, it's grown really long.  Like a hairy protective measure to keep what's inside safe.  It also can perform a rather miraculous alchemical role in the collection of juices that can happen around there.  And I've only ever shaved it off completely once, and by gawd it hurt and was itchy and scratchy when it started to grow back.  How do you all go through that?  And of course…..if I'm talking about pubic hair, I'm going to have to share with you Amanda Palmer's song 'Map Of Tasmania', cause when I saw it I really fell in love with her.  Both the cheekiness and creativity of the whole clip and song about the map of Tasmania, but also her complete abandon for flashing her hairy pits.

Currawong and I totally agree, that the only humans that ever really enter our attraction radars, are totally hairy and smelling like themselves :)  Let your hair and body be what they're meant to be!  And at least run an experiment, to see whether there isn't a sexy smell lurking on your body, once it's had the chance to regain it's natural ecosystem…….