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.

Guest Posting Post Style......

This year has been a knockout.  Death has walked around me, taking many people I know and affecting on some level nearly everyone I'm in contact with.  It seems to be knocking at our doors, asking to be let in.

A few months ago it seemed that there was death all around me, and I sat often gazing off into the distance, brought to the present by a child or a need.  Thinking and thinking and thinking about it.  Trying to understand and make sense.  And when I finally wrote it out, I sent it straight away and hot off the press to the beautiful Janet Fraser, cause we'd decided to play the guest post game, and I knew that it was the piece for the job.

Janet has totally blown me away over the past couple of years.  Having some of the most intense experiences a human can endure, that could easily send a person into brokenness or bitterness, and coming through the experience exuding compassion, love, clarity, humour and joy.

I'm honoured to guest post on her blog, the name of which is Janet Fraser....Where birth and feminism intersect.

Click here to read

Future Visions

Many moons ago, we were living in a sleepy village of the Adelaide Hills, and we’d just started our market.  The war had broken out in Iraq, and we drove our old Ford with hundreds of statements of peace written on it as a mobile petition to Canberra…………  And that time was almost like a mini Summer of Love.  All sorts of folk from all the stratospheres of our culture came to our market and got loved.  It almost became a cult how loving our market was.  It was a standard of care that we had for everyone who chanced upon us on sunny or stormy Sundays, no matter who they were or how they looked. As the top of the supposed hierarchy of the market, Currawong and I had a unique opportunity to give the power to everybody.  And turn it into a circle, where everyone was loved and appreciated no matter how obnoxious they were.  People came and attacked us, and died with us, and sneered at us, and fought in front of us, and generally brought some of their worst behaviours to the commons, and we all just loved them and us and it, and did our best to treat everyone as equals.  People also came with their best and their most eccentric and generous and trippy and vulnerable behaviours and we loved them even more.  And I’d love to keep going as I’m sure you can tell, but the market is not really part of the story I want to tell.  It was an amazing time and I’ll write about that another day, but for the purposes of this story, there was a particular event that really changed and challenged my perception of the world. 

There was this fella who’d been a hermit for about 15 years.  And he chose the market as the place to come out and play with people again, and he decided to organise a meeting for peace.  Because he’d been a hermit for 15 years he really didn’t have a huge social network, and as it was a small town, not many people turned up.  So there we were early one evening, Currawong and I, the ex-hermit and another friend, sitting in a chilly hall to talk about peace.  The first thing he asked was what peace was.  And we very quickly realised that all we knew about peace, was what was absent from it. We knew all the things that peace wasn’t, and when there weren’t any of them around, then that would have to be peace.  We were looking at the photo negatives of peace, rather than looking at the colour photo. And then we started wondering……..if we didn’t know what peace WAS…….then how the hell could we create it?  And how much have we collectively created all our own hell and strife, with our focus on all the things that peace isn’t, so that we can have it?

So many of us spend our precious creative energy on all the things that are wrong with the world, and each other, and the government, and corporations, and Monsanto, and our modern day diets, and the list is endless of all the things that we’re trying to stop for the good of us, and the planet, and those poor children, and the people over there, and if we all just do the right things and stop doing the wrong things, then it will all get better and we’ll all be happy……………..  In fact we’re so focused on educating ourselves and each other about all the wrong things with the world, that we’ve forgotten that we’re creating it all with our thoughts, and forgotten too, that maybe one of the most liberating, enlightened, revolutionary and loving acts we can ever perform, is that of creating magic with our thoughts and our minds, and in the creative energy of dreaming a positive, peaceful, respectful, honourable, honest and healthy future.  And present reality. 

Now I really got into the more creative aspect as environmental activism, after watching The Secret, and feeling despairing and disempowered after watching An Inconvenient Truth.  I came up with all sorts of ideas to create a more positive focus for our collective futures.  Planting hemp along the roads, and in any spare place, to soak up carbon dioxide and be turned into paper, neo plastic, and all the gazillions of things hemp can be made into.  Creating public focus walls, with folk and groups and schools doing tiles of all the wonderful things they wanted in the future world. When we were school shopping years ago, we spent time at a Maharishi school, where they had a whole wall dedicated to what the kids wanted to see more of in the world, and they meditated on it every morning.  There was more rain, reforestation, safe biosphere, and all the other sorts of things that make a person feel good thinking about.  I also wanted to try and write about it, and create a positive future vision rather than the more easily available apocalyptic horror stories, that are put about in mainstream media as possible futures. 

Growing up in an apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, I’ve been thinking about ‘the end days’ for most of my life.  Even after leaving my childhood religion, I came across channellers, and mystics, and talk about the ‘great wave of consciousness’ and all the 2012 conspiracies.  And now we’re here.  And the most curious thing has happened!  I’ve always contemplated a future after ‘the shit hit the fan’ as being mostly agrarian based.  Primitive.  No electricity or technology.  Hard work.  And Currawong’s been having this love affair with science, and in the last couple of months, for the first time ever in my life, I’ve been dreaming of a future after whatever shift is on it’s way has happened, with science and technology and a quasi mystical science, that creates things based on cohesion and harmony with the environment rather than money.  Sustainability rather than greed. 

And I wrote this thing years ago in the period I was just talking about, and revisited it lately, and found myself adding technical bits to it, and it felt goodJ  I want to keep having my internet love affairs after ‘the shift’.  I want to keep being able to travel in freedom.  I want abundance and gardens and flying machines and funky earthship style homes and little pockets of communities where anything that people can dream up as a lifestyle can be lived respectfully.

So here’s what I wrote years ago with some added bits……

The earth is me.  Microcosm’s of macrocosm’s abound.  Remember that model in the 60’s who asphyxiated slowly to death when they painted her skin?  We were doing that to the earth before.  Before we realised that we’d created it through our fear and pain that we really were seperated from all that we saw.  Before we realised that we were creating it all, and could simply take our attention away from our complete and total destruction, and instead create a happy, joyful, peaceful, greatfull reality with our thoughts.  Pull up the concrete and the hard building scabs on our skin and let our skin breathe.  Isn’t it funny that most of the most watered and fertile land on the planet was covered with concrete and bitumen.  Before we realised.  Before we pulled it up and travelled back along the yarn to the times when we moved around a lot, owned few and well loved things, took care of the earths skin like our own.  Before we realised that all the gentle metaphors the many prophets, seers and poetesses had given us were literal advice stories and instructions to living a better life.  Isn’t it wonderous and lushsome that we all collectively got it.  Got our oneness. 

Flowmads made their artistic ways throughout the countryside and cityscape, pulling some of the scabs off our skin, letting the white and shriveled parts of our flesh see the sunlight again, breathe the blue skies, grow weeds then flowers then fruits in our flesh again.  Wherever they went they left green ground and tent sites, sunbreathing shelters and coloured flags, lush gardens and freebreathing trees.  They also left life enhancing sculptures and weavings and sounding pieces that aged along with everything else. 

When all the human animals remembered their animal selves and stopped being tamed lions pacing round their cages, they took up the artistic, shamanic, and percussive arts, telling stories and leaving inspirations.  They all started pulling up the scabs in whichever ways they could.  Peeling back the hard encrusted beliefs and bitumens and crumbling ways. 

They started birthing in colourful tents and underground grottoes, cool river pools and warm salty baths.  Their births became ecstatic and orgasmic, private moments of a families deep connection and love for each other.  Babies were welcomed into the world gently and quietly, being left to acclimatise in whatever way they needed and their families felt drawn to.  A soft lit, easy slide into life and awareness outside the womb.  A simple instruction into the arts of birthing human animals. And safe and respectful medicines and procedures sat quietly in the wings, in case they were needed.

Their sexuality was allowed to express the myriad of ways and paths imagined by the unique collective consciousness, and understood as ways that the universe had found to express itself.  Everyone’s sexual journey was seen as increasing and improving compassion and empathy for the vast sea of possibility that is sex. 

Death became far less traumatic, as we made it more part of life.  We formed elaborate and soulful rituals around letting go, washing and dressing the body, singing and playing music and telling final stories.  Carrying the dead around the places at home they liked best, and then burying them in the gentle folds of the earth, and planting tree’s on them, so we could always eat fruit from the tree and know that we were eating of the essence of our loved ones. 

We realised we were all one literally with the cosmos, our planet, other animals, each other, and ourselves.  Everything we did, we did to ourselves.  And we created it all with our thoughts.  We started creating a beautiful, unified, loving, greatful, diverse, respectful wholeness.  A healing for us all as a planet and everything.  Letting the waters and ourselves flow.

Because we’re all made up of mostly water, and we drink it, swim in it, bathe in it, eat it, use it and love it, as it carries memories of all the places it’s been. Water and energy, that moves and flows constantly.  For whom stagnation is death.  Water and energy that is affected, changed by, and remembers thoughts and where it’s been.    Water and energy that’s melted into our atmosphere from interstellar journeys, bringing knowledge and memories and connectings with us and our water already flowing.  Water and energy that travels an 8 million year cycle of plunging into the depths of our earths heart, and then floating up to the seabed again through hydrothermic vents.  Water and energy that remember being locked in rooms to make bargain goodies.  Water and energy that are a constant flow of stories and memories and learnings to be heard whenever we want.  Water and energy that contain the ingredients for everything.  And who respond most of all to love and gratitude. 

We became flowmads and caretakers, and whatever else we wanted, and we lost all the baggage that politer religions suggested we leave behind, as we started living the reality that everything around us is us.  What constructions did we like on our skin?  What elements did we want in our water and blood?  What did we want to do with our fertile valleys and shores that begged to have food grown from them?  How did we thank and love the other animals, our brothers and sisters and diverse parts of self, who provided so much for us? 

We told ourselves the truth about how our ownership had become a burden, and we relinquished our burdens for the flow.  We strived to retrieve our animal natures, our noble sovereign natures, and placed ourselves back in the wheel of equals.  We set up Human Animal Wildlife Sanctuaries…….where human animals can just be.  Can remember what it feels, looks, sounds and tastes like when life is lived in bliss, being simply who we are.  Putting love, thanks and respect into our food, our clothing, our habitats, our water, our families, our lovers, our children.  All of us animals living cohesively, respectfully, co-operatively, lovingly together. 

And then we met together with all the other animals and traded, and played, and danced, and sung, and created community together.  Created the magic of community that gave form to our glimmering dreams of sharing tasks and learnings.  Community where there was room for everyone, and everyone was loved and thanked for the unique magic they brought to the whole.  Where we understand that what we focused on we got more of.  And the best and most fertile ground for this community to grow in was the bed of a market.  Spontaneous, fertile markets that erupted from daily living and life around the areas we cohabitated, or on the trails of flowmads. 

Technology exploded into radical places when we got rid of the money god from our psyches and explored and invented for the good of all.  We searched the depths of the deep deep seas and found the secrets down below.  We sent off crafts to the outer reaches of our galaxy and beyond, exploring our neighbouring life forms.  Sky craft became our motorized mode of travel, avoiding the need for highways, cutting out completely the toll of dead animals taken by roads, and freeing up our means of travel.    Run on water and built with hemp and recycled parts, they revolutionized the way we move.  Solar, wind and water power became the standard, and our esteemed spiritual scientists worked out myriad ways of cleaning up the messes our ancestors created.  Our homes became far more natural, nestled into hills for insulation, passively solar and well placed for growing gardens within, on top, and without.  

And we collectively grew up, married the matrifocal mother to the patrifocal father and welcomed their learnings from the lengths and breadths of where we’d been in our evolution.  We all woke up from our self induced coma, and recognised that the time for change was now, and we really were the ones that we were waiting for all along.  We’ve explored the far reaches of human potential, and now it’s time to meet up again, take notes, and put it all into perspective as we evolve into an age of enlightenment, love, thanks, and consciousness.  We all knew the toll, deep down, that our greed and hungry culture has taken on ourselves and our earth.  And we made the changes necessary to make it a whole lot easier not only for ourselves, but for all of our brothers and sisters. We take responsibility for shaping the world as we want it and need it to be for a long, healthy and happy future for us and many many generations to come. 

The baby that came bearing gifts - Part 2

So I've made a bit of an executive decision........due to flooding and my crappy satellite connection, getting it together to upload photos is proving too tricky.  And I know there's people itching for the rest of the story, ( and there's no photos of this birth anyway, just the afterwards ) soooooo, I'm gonna post the rest of the story, and then when I get near a computer that uploads again, I'll post a stack of photos.  Happy with that?  Good. 

A bit of a recap…

After a day long but empowering trip to the hospital, to find out that my dating of the birth had given us the gift of two extra weeks when we thought our baby was premature, then flying emancipated from the hospital back home, birth was progressing all stately and graceful towards a conclusion, then stalled completely.  After another empowering act of creating the birth space that I needed surrounded by the people I needed to be there, a deep spell of sex magic with my Currawong, and another serious chat with my birth helper Annetta, I headed into the second night of this birthing drama slightly oppressed with worries about future possibilities, but feeling like I at least had a clearer idea about what was going on.  I climbed into bed and cuddled up with Currawong, glad that I could finally sleep.   

And then woke up again at quarter to 12 that night.  Yes, this was a good time to start labouring I thought, as I had an intense contraction.  I went out into the lounge and gently cleaned the space between tightenings, and lit some candles, and thought they were coming closer.  I woke Currawong, who was in an intensely grumpy mood having been woken after so little sleep, and we sat and grumped at each other about how little sleep we’d had and how grumpy and unready we were, as the contractions slowed down again…..  Then we both pulled each other back on track, and shook off our grumpiness, and decided that if the time was now then of course it was perfect!  Till we were sitting in a lovely, dusky, candle lit room, with nothing happening again, and decided we’d go back to bed and sleep while we could.  The rest of the night was a strange world where I had strong uterine contractions every hour or so, and would jump out of bed to stand knees bent, in the position that I’d worked out relieved them, while Currawong jumped up equally quick and rubbed my lower back.  Surprisingly enough we woke up well rested, and I at last had made up for my sleep deficit over the past few days, and was feeling unexpectedly fresh and optimistic.

A sleepy Annetta, and a Currawong expecting the worst but trying to be positive, both looked at me to see what the mood was, and maybe both were thinking that now was the time for the dreaded talk about transferring into hospital again, to see what was going on.  And I surprised both them and me, with a Pollyanna-esque proclamation about how regardless of what else was going on and happening around me, I couldn’t help but think that there was nothing wrong with me or my baby, and that it was a normal birth, though strung out over a few more days than is usually expected, and the time just wasn’t right for my body and baby to engage in the birthing dance, and I really wanted to give them the opportunity to get there in their own time.  Any drugs that they gave me in hospital most likely wouldn’t work, as they are designed for healthy women giving ‘normal’ birth and to quicken the process up, not at all likely to work well on a ‘grand multiparous’ woman (which means a woman who’s birthed more than 5 times) whose uterus needed a bit of a help to contract enough to birth, or to create that unidentifiable spark from a baby that triggers off the birthing process from within.  I would be likely to be unresponsive to intervention, and maybe even become part of that cascade of intervention drama that folk talk about.  Again it’s likely that most roads in hospital would have led to another caesarean, considering the ‘risks’ that surrounded me, and I would probably have been best off to just request a caesarean straight off, rather than mess around getting tired again.  And I was fully prepared for all of this, and had thought my way and approach through it, and would be totally into engaging that path………..if I could have shaken the feeling that this was a normal, healthy birth that was drawn out because of the plug leaving a bit early, and having an overwhelming and compelling feeling that I really wanted to give my body and this baby every chance to come into birth in their own timing…………..and that it would all be allright.

“Fine! fine….” Said Annetta, and Currawong had a look of delighted surprise on his face, as we all felt this birth swing along a positive road again, and we could all leave behind the dire possibilities and worries for a little bit longer.  “If that’s how you feel, then that’s what we do, and if you’re feeling okay with it and the baby’s doing well, we can take a week if you need to!”  Bless her heart, and her intuition, and her experience, our Annetta was totally into acknowledging how I felt and regarding that as important, and heading down the groove we were laying out.  She asked me if I’d be into going to see an acupuncturist friend of hers who was known for helping birth along, and who did home visits, but we could also go and see her if all was well.  I jumped at the idea, greatful for any external stimuli that could help us along.  So we organised for Currawong to take all the kids into Nimbin for supplies, while Annetta and I went to visit Ingrid in her home on a community. 

I got to have a drive in the 4WD home on wheels, and chatted with Annetta, as we drove up to a tranquil garden, with tropical plants looking loved, and a small wooden studio with pot plants, garden, artworks, and raw wooden beams spilling round.  One of the first things Ingrid said when told about how many births and babies I had, was how she thought the world was overpopulated. I really love that kind of honesty.  Gave me the opportunity to try out some of the justifications that sit in my head as a result of copping criticism in the past, and she laughed when I told her my kids were here to help wake us all up so we could share and respect our planet again, as there’s more than enough for all of us if we lose our greed and materialism and stop spending all our resources on war.  And then the three of us proceeded to spend a divine time together, chatting about art, and life journeys and children.  I could feel the needles working on the energy in my body, and then she hooked up these little electrodes to make them ‘zing’.  And at one point, as I lay there with these two gorgeous, vital, compassionate and loving, wise German women on either side of me, chatting about this little baby inside me, and Annetta telling Ingrid how she’d noticed that when she laid a palm on my belly, the little one inside kicked her hand to let her know it was there, and the wonderful warm smiles on their faces as they indulged in a moment about the wonder of birth with their hands on my belly………I felt like the luckiest woman in the world.   When Annetta and I told Ingrid how we thought this baby was a girl, and that she’d be called Batsheva, the little one inside kicked Ingrid’s hand, and we all took that as another positive sign, and an acceptance of the name.  ( HA! )  The treatment over, Ingrid invited us into her haven, and we sat drinking herbal tea and eating German sweet breads.  All around was an orderly, organic, sweet scented arbour of grape vines and plants and a large indoor outdoor deck.  Artworks and amazing gifts from nature displayed on warm wooden walls and a sweet little kitchen sat at the back with the sitting room and bedroom, as the only walled rooms in this gorgeous home.  I felt like I’d been plucked out of a busy and noisy existence to spend a sacred and precious little rip in the time space continuum with these two stunning and graceful women, and a bit like the kid who’s been allowed to stay up late all on their own, to sip tea with the grown ups.  We chatted, and snacked, and I was full to overbrimming with love for the creativity around me that keeps throwing such beautiful moments at me, and my extreme fortune with the wondrous people that keep coming into my life. 

And it came to me.  With a bit of help by Annetta and the conversation and the period of grace in the middle of our birthing proceedings.  I felt like I understood why it had all happened this way.  As an excuse and reason for empowering events first up, but also, as a chance for me to finally be pregnant……for a moment.  What with dealing with our collective past, and then fleeing to the warmer climes of the sub-tropical north, and then finding a home and setting it up and then getting visitors……I hadn’t even had a moment to really sit in myself, and with my body, and say ‘yes, we’re pregnant again aren’t we.  And who do we have inside?  And which particular fears are we going to face this time?  And how is this baby going to come into our lives, and what are the stories going to be around this birth?’  Hadn’t quite caught my breath again since the plug came away either.  Hadn’t really got to the point of knowing that the time was NOW!  Annetta drove me a large bit of the way home, while we continued to talk, and I was blown away by the big heart of this amazing woman.  Over the last two days she’d observed, and asked perceptive questions, and was piecing us all together in a rather intricate amount of depth.  She was telling me all the pertinent stories she had in her birthing tool box, and suggested I go home, clear myself a birthing space, and just focus on me and who was in my belly for as long as I could when I got home.  Lock all the kids out for a bit, and just really sit in my experience. 

So I did.  I cleaned the room, and layed all the (all three of them!!) clothes that I’d collected for this baby out on a space in the studio, and cut up some cotton material that would work as wrapping cloths till later.  And the other blankets I could use.  And the nappies that I’d bought earlier.   And I’d been worried for a while about where this new baby was going to sleep, as the twins slept next to my side of the bed, and Balthazar slept next to Currawong’s side of the bed…..that was until we’d got our new beds, and scored a king sized bed for me and Currawong, and through serendipity and experimentation, worked out that with the crates we had, we could arrange a bed next to Currawong’s side of the bed that was the perfect height, and had room for all three little boys to lay sideways instead of longways.  So on a wooden table, and tucked in by walls and the door, I made another little bed with a stuffed alpaca mattress next to my side of the bed.  A little nest by my side for our new baby to land in.  Currawong made a bed for Max, Merlin and Balthazar in Griffyn’s room, between him and Jess on a mattress on the floor, so that if birthing did happen, I could do it undisturbed by babies in our bedroom.  It’s the most comfortable, sacred, and cave like space in the house.  I figured if babies like best coming out in the same conditions as they went in……there was no better place to birth on land than in our great big bed.  And I was going to sit in my clean bedroom baby space, with my baby altar all set up, and crochet a pair of pants to go with the vest, and the hooded sleeves that I’d made for this baby for winter.  When I was worried about where and when we were gonna find a house, and worried about dire predictions, and just worried because I was pregnant, I’d been making a vest and a cute little pair of sleeves with a hood, and it was almost like I was crocheting this baby into a healthy existence.  All that was needed to complete the outfit was a pair of pants, and I was imagining that I’d finish them, and this baby would come, but it wasn't to happen that way.  During my nesting, I’d had a few more intense uterine contractions, and then some light, moving, dancing contractions started to come, that felt completely different to the expansions I’d had before. 

And then I remembered my previous twin birth, and how after Max had come, and we were waiting for Merlin, I had a visit from Russel the Ayurvedic Masseuse and Alison to help us along.  And after Russel had left, I’d had some really intense uterine contractions, that were a case of trying to stand still and in a certain position to make bearable, and then when the uterine contractions had finished, I’d moved into birthing contractions, which were different positions and movement was needed to assist with them.  I recognised the difference, and on feeling the change, and needing to move about when they happened, I realised that birth might finally be on the way.  No time to crochet pants.....

So I danced and I moved and I breathed and a smile didn’t leave my face, and I felt like we were actually getting to the space where we’d soon be meeting our new one. (again…)   Steady as a creek heading into a river it started flowing towards the evening, till the magical time when our babies go to sleep and dark and peace descend.  It was all green lights this time, with no hitches in the proceedings, and we all knew that this time it was really going on.  Children had been well fed and peacefully went off to sleep, the three little boys in with the two biggest.  And I rang Annetta to tell her that we were on again……….and how the contractions had changed.  She got here and we all settled into the birthing space.  Stories had to be told about the artworks in our bedroom, and birth expansion stations had to be set up.  Positions tried out and suggestions given.  Instead of moving about the space between contractions and standing still to have them, I was resting between contractions and moving with them. And then it just happened.

I settled into one of the most amazing birthing places I’ve ever been in.  Dim candlelight and tranquillity sat in the background with initial panic turning into delighted knowledge in front of them.  Birth expansions out of water were fun.  I found myself in all these intensely sexual positions, totally unashamedly, as they all decreased the levels of intensity.  Stances I’d only ever seen other people do, far too self conscious to do them myself, were all of a sudden the most comfortable ways to be.  And having Currawong, or Annetta rub my lower back was just incredible.  It was stronger and more intense all at the same time as being quicker and somehow more complete.  All consuming and all internal……..juxtaposed with deep perspective and external conversations between.  So many things were making sense.  Fears were being explained, and understandings were being had.  Legs spread, and back arched, and bum out and off we went.  Currawong really loved standing behind me, getting wafts of birth, that was a smell he was really getting to know well, and rubbing my back while I rocked through contractions.  And we were kissing lots in between expansions, and all of it felt like a prolonged love making session.

Then Max woke up.  Currawong was the only one who could calm him, and he was getting progressively more pissed off the more time it took, and at how he couldn’t leave Max without him crying again.  Annetta was giving me amazing massages and catching the expansions with me, but it wasn’t the same.  I wanted my Currawong with me.  So in an inbetween moment I stormed in the other room and informed him that Max was just going to have to cry, or maybe Jess could take him for a walk, but he wasn’t missing out on this birth, and I NEEDED him with me.  Empowering moment no. 42……..  Jess got him quiet and sleeping, that also kept her occupied, which was kinda good, as it was hotting up on all sorts of levels.  And I had my Currawong back, who was delighted with how different this birth was progressing.  On all fours on the bed it really started to get intense. 

How can one truly express the intense land that is transition?  And what would a more human friendly term for it be?  The world between worlds where I'm shocked out of and into my body all at the same time.  No room exists for anything else to be happening, heard, seen, felt or any other bloody thing at all, to have any sense of solidity or reality.  A place where if I could turn my torso one way, and my legs another to escape the crunch I would.  A place where what’s happening in my body is so incredibly huge and real and full on, that if I could climb out of my body  I would.  A place where I feel like every nerve ending is being pushed to its extreme limits of coping.  A place where I say ‘oh my gawd, we’re HERE again, and how did I knowingly as a mother make a conscious decision that would bring me HERE again, didn’t I remember how it was last time, and how I didn’t think I could cope anymore when I was HERE again???’  It’s not exactly painful in an ‘ow I’m hurt right here and the rest of me is okay’ kind of ache, as in a whole body calling on all it’s resources to manage and sustain and survive.  But also a place where I can feel like a viking valkerie, or a screaming banshee in the wind, or any other mythical goddess or woman role model I care to create for myself.  Standing on the otherworldly battleground in an ancient tryst for my soul, and the continuation of the flow of evolution towards a magical future.  And a place that I've got to know quite well having lottsa babies.  The pinnacle of the experience, is also the breaking of the wave, as I've learnt that HERE is also when it’s nearly over……….

Or at least should be, if you don’t have something like a lip of your cervix, just holding back a little on the head, and just enough to keep that head behind skin……..which I had.  And that little lip was just enough to stall the whole show at that intense transitionary, initiatory space.  'Oh fuckitall' I thought, I remembered that feeling when birthing Merlin, and how it went on for hours, and was the hardest and loneliest work I’ve ever done in my whole life.  ’Ohshit, not here again’.   I rolled over on my back and Annetta just knew what was going on.  ‘I think  you have a lip…..would you like me to move it?’  she asked.  I couldn’t believe it, and I straight away said yes, and I lay on my back for a moment, and she moved her fingers into me as I had a contraction.  She warned me it might hurt, but it didn’t, and within seconds I had to get off my back and turn around onto all fours again on the bed.  One almighty push and his head was moving towards the world, opening me in that gorgeous vulvic, yoni like, curved and angled oval shape of a head coming outside.        Annetta grabbed Currawong’s hand and put it over me, and over the soft soft head of our baby coming through.  And for weeks after, and to this day if he ever tells that story he cries…..and notes it as one of the most amazing moments in our birthing together. 

Two more pushes and our baby was out at five minutes to one in the morning, and Annetta guided Currawong’s hand again, as they both swooshed the little person under me, Annetta saying ‘here is your baby girl!’  ‘Are you sure?’ I drawled, as I moved the umbilical cord away to see a little penis and testicles…….got the gender wrong againJ  I sat up and hugged him to me, and Currawong laughed, and even though now we didn’t have any clue of a name, I didn’t feel disappointed for one second.  Instead I got a rush of a rememberance of sitting with my 4 big strong brothers either side of me at church, and looking at them all and being so proud of my  beautiful brothers.  And realised that one day I’d be standing looking at my big strong and beautiful sons, and hopefully in a functional enough relationship with them all, that I’d get to be with them for life!  And share their lives and loves and experiences, and be with them through their trials, and for the births of their babies if that’s what they want.  How could I be disappointed when this little boy had given me such an easy pregnancy, given me the impression that if we just let him be, and come into the world, he wouldn’t be any problem…..’promise!’.  Had given me a real rush when I laid my hands on my belly, like he was charging me up from an incredibly strong internal battery.  Had lain inside so quiet and peacefull…… And had just come out in the quickest, most sexual birth I’ve ever had.   A few days afterwards, Annetta said that I was ‘the epitome of the volutptuous, sexual, birthing feminine’………and you know what?  It really felt that way from my perspective as wellJ  And Currawong’s……….

Meanwhile, I was losing a lot of blood.  One of the risks for which the doctor suggested I stay in hospital for.  There is a tendancy for a woman to bleed a lot after having had twins, especially a ‘grand multiparous’ woman like me.  Annetta quickly helped me push the placenta out, to aid the uterus in contracting to control my bleeding, and Currawong cut the cord, as we’d all decided this time, with the newness and the weather and the cuddling factor, that this time we’d forgo the lotus birthing……which was just as well now looking back on it.  Cause a lot of bleeding was a full on thing for my body to cope with, without having to deal with washing and salting a placenta as well.  As it was, when I’d tried feeding our beautiful little boy, and then sat up, I was feeling a bit woozy, and all the family were awake now, as they all realised that our newest member of the clan had arrived.  They all gathered round to oooh and aaaah, and stroke his little head, and giggle about how another boy had been born.  Griffyn smilingly admitted that he’d never really thought it was going to be another boy, but had been saying it the whole way through the pregnancy just to be different to everyone else.  But he was glad nonetheless.  Annetta pulled out a turquoise blue cloth, and weighed him – seven and a half pounds of baby flesh.  We all sniffed and watched him up, and I was surrounded by eight bodies that had all come out of my belly.  Always trips me out when I have those moments of realisation!

And then Max spewed all over the boys bed.  Which made sense of why he’d been so awake and unsettled earlier in the night.  Poor little cherub had a sore belly.  So Currawong and Annetta cleaned up, and Currawong went off for a shower to clean it off him and Max, and in the process realised he had a paralysis tick in his groin.  Swearing lilted from the bathroom, and he removed the little parasite, whilst still cleaning him and Max.  Meanwhile, it was important for me to get off to the shower, and I found myself very dizzy on the walk there.  I had to stop halfway and have a lay down on the lounge, with my new baby nestled into me, and as I heard a buzzing in my ears that wasn’t the vociferous nearby frogs, and my vision started to blur, I thought ‘oh no, don’t make me have to go to hospital after all this!!’, but didn’t faint.  Laid for a bit and ate some toast and had a drink, and then Currawong held our new baby while I crawled to the shower. 

First thing when I got in there was a big release of blood clots, and then an instant feeling of getting better.  My uterus had contracted down nicely, (Annetta said later it contracted back into place as good as a twenty year olds!) and the worst was over.  I got clean, and felt more human, and rather than over exert, I got to kneel on a rug and get a magic carpet ride back to the bedroom, as Annetta and Jess pulled and pushed me down the hallway.  I got my baby back and snuggled him between me and Currawong, all the other babies were back asleep, everything was cleaned up and orderly, and we all went off to blissful sleep, while Annetta went off to her magical 4WD home outside the house, so she’d be there as soon as we woke up. 

And now a little aside.  I’ve been rather vocal in the past about the need for internals, of which I was positive there wasn’t any.  One of the only things that freaked Jess out in her witness of all the births I had after her, was me being given internals.  Despite the blood, and the yells and screams, she had a big problem with someone putting their fingers inside me.  And I agreed with her.  It had never felt nice, and always a bit odd, and like the information gained from it wasn’t really necessary either, if you were just gonna take the birth path and trust the timing, rather than over-medicalising your experience anyway.  Other midwives I’d birthed with had to be almost begged to check me out internally, as they really didn’t like to interfere in any way, an approach that I was completely in approval of.  But I’m here to tell you sisters and brothers, that a sensitively performed internal, from an empathetic birth helper, is a whole other kettle of fish.  A birth helper with midwife skills, who can do such a thing as push a lip back so your babe can be born in minutes rather than hours…….can be a real gift. 

Morning came and we all awoke to being well rested, with a new family member, and me feeling tremendously better after my blood loss situation. But I stayed indoors and quiet with my new baby boy for 2 weeks just to make sure that his entry to the world stayed healthy and wholesome.  And to keep him safe from the twins.  Max’s welcome was an attempted gouge to the eyes, while Merlin just wanted to cover him with kisses and pat his head.  A bit later on the day he was born, our guest with two girls who’d been staying elsewhere came to pick up the rest of her stuff, and delivered a few packages from the women of Nimbin.  When I’d gone to hospital I rang the dear friend who put up our guest so we could have our birth space, and she’d asked me if there was anything I needed.  I told her that I had no clothes or wraps or anything like that for a new baby yet, and unbeknownst to me, while all my other birthing events were evolving, she’d sent an email around to her friends, and was busy picking up donations from all around the area.  Touched and feeling special doesn’t do the awareness justice, when I realised how family like our new home was. 

And there’s more to tell, but that can come a bit later.  This is the bare bones of the story of the birth of Zarathustra Cyrus Wildcat.  Born on the 19^th of December 2011, at 5 minutes to 1 in the morning.  The baby that came bearing gifts……..