Post Phyber Philosophy

Okay.  So life and extremities have been intense lately, as it always is, and I've got to confess that the mindworm of haters, has made it hard for my desire to yearn towards blogging of late.  And I had a big experience that I'd like to express on here, but am a bit loathe to all at the same time.  So I'm dragging my heels.  And the result is that I haven't even told you that I've very nearly finished writing the book that I've been writing and living for the last 13 years.  Post Phyber Philosophy.  

I was asked to launch it as an Ebook at Sustainability Alley at the Nimbin Show this coming saturday and sunday, so I am.  I've been working on it for months, but kinda stalled at the last minute, a bit of fear of success taking me for a spin for a while.  But with a deadline I'm grooving it, and it's all coming together beautifully.  

I've been a bit stunned and elated, that the passionate crafting, that sees me tempting Currawong into watching in depth media for the night, so I can avidly hook with a head torch, to see what happens next, has come back.  After a very long hiatus, which I realise now, was the lack of an audience.  I don't know about other artists, but for me, an audience is a very important aspect of what I do.  To have people that 'get' it, and love what I do, who are curious and interested, and waiting with bated breath to see what I do next, and appreciative, and lovely, and the main reason why I do this, cause I'm a show off.  And honest :)  

So knowing that there's a bunch of people I know, who I really like, and who really like me, and that they're going to be at the Nimbin Market at least once a month, and I'm going to be there too, and they're going to ask what I've been up to this month, and cause I'm a show off, I've been slipping making into every spare second, and feeling the fire and spirit of the visiting genie, and turning mistakes into features, and alive with it all!

Whereas blogging has turned into watching lots of haters traipse silently through my blog, and a few brilliant comments that make up for so much, but the audience isn't very visible or vocal you know?  I've been really missing the direct interactions with live people who laugh, and giggle, and share oxytocin and ideas.  And I've realised how massive a motivation that audience is for me and how I create.

I've been mourning the lack of passion in my craft since the light dimmed in me!  Which was....ooooo.......the last time that we regularly visited markets and festivals :)  Whether it's doing workshops, or festivals, or markets, or book launches or anything like that........having an interactive audience is just awesome.  And community forming.  And bonding.  And oxytocic.  And was the missing ingredient to my passion.  There just didn't seem to be that much point to it, once I'd made all the things I wanted for our family, unless there were people to appreciate it.

So I've got this little corner of the kitchen, and I've realised that it's my studio and practical shrine and altar to creativity and passion.

And it's where you'll find me as often as I can, often first thing in the morning, and late at night.  The photo below is from before I spunked it up a bit.  Crafting hard with Spiral, making the Slats (sleeves/legwarmers/hats) pattern.

Or sitting right next to my studio/altar/bed, and doing the spinning meditation.  Just lately there's been a big deal going on, like I alluded to before, and it's been a bit of a nail biting experience for large chunks of it, and there's been a lot of physical endurances, and some worry, and a few other emotions thrown in.  And I've found that more and more, rather than turn to many of my other traditionally healthy and unhealthy avoidances, using spinning as a meditation to shut off my babbling brain, and sink into my subconscious and just be for a while.........has been just divine.  I can slip into and out of it easily with my spinning wheel.  And still be present for all the younglings and animals that we're shepherding.  The best thing is, that the beautiful meditation has the result of a ball of yarn.  Something practical that is useful!  And it's made our house colourful with skeins.....

So when there's a spare moment, or when I'm really stressed, or when inspiration strikes and the family allows, I sit and create.

I've been writing patterns for the first time.  And quite successfully too.  At least I hope.  I tried to get some folk to make the Slats pattern on facebook, and lots said they would but no one got back to me, so  I'm just gonna have to go with the flow on that one.  I think it's fairly straightforward!  I've combined photos with explanations, and some of the terms I use are the same used in traditional crochet patterns, so I'm pretty pleased with the result.  

So I'm presently taking photos....

And writing notes......

And collecting photos of my pallette and tools and methods and materials.....

And coming up with kooky creations inspired by appreciation....

These are Pentapusses.  So named, cause they look like octopuses and definitely sea creatures, but they've only got 5 tentacles, and like I described the process on my Hellena Post Creatrix page on fb.....

"Made a hat that had dangly carroty things hanging out the top, and my fingers wanted to go into it, so I thought I'd try and make a puppet for my hand, (which I've threatened to do for a long time), and started out making a long bit for a leg, and then I started an arm - even had a hand with five fingers and everything on it - and played with it to see if it would work. The hand dangled in a way that wasn't very attractive, and to work as a movable hand would need some wire, which would stop it from moving at all, so I pulled the hand apart, and turned it into another leg, and made them all legs, which turned into tentacles, and then when I let it sit on my hand to see what my hand wanted to do........it wanted to move around in a poi like fashion, and swing figure eights, and fly through the air with the greatest of ease, so that's how it turned out. And then I wanted it to be an octopus, but I couldn't work out how to get another 3 legs on, and having them dangle from my palm wouldn't move in the same directed way, so I decided to leave it at five hanging off fingers and leave it at that. And then playing with them with Currawong, he said it needed eyes, so then the eyes came. And then flinging the ends round, I realised that beads or bells would be lethal, so tassles were the way to not turn it into a weapon."

It's also got me and Currawong back into photographing each other and the family, and all the things we do more often.  And Currawong gets to slip photos like this in, when taking photos of me hooking first thing in the morning.  Funny how a lot of his photos end up as cleavage shots :)

I've gotta mention too, that this is all going on as we're going about our daily lives, caught here in a photo by a beloved friend, walking the main street of our home town Nimbin.  And incidentally, with me wearing the moth wing cape that I've made a pattern for, that's in my PPP  Ebook.  By the way, being photographed under the Happy High Herbs sign was totally incidental.....and funny :)

And it's also going on while we've been having one of our busiest times with visitors, and people staying for extended periods, and crafting around them and sometimes onto them, or at least onto their dreads :)  There was a veritable rush on dread cosies and hair extensions for a while there!

But overall.....it's been a tremendously exciting experience as well.  I've been totally blissed out that I feel like my computer skills, software, hardware, photos, and the ibooks author template, have all come together in an alchemical magical act.  Had a minor freakout, when I thought yesterday that the ibooks author program was going to only let me publish through ibooks, and charge 30% on all my books!  Thought for a minute I was going to have to copy and paste the whole bloody lot to a free program.  but I got my genius IT expert daughter Jess onto it, and she worked out that it was all fine, as long as I kept my book as a PDF, which I was going to do anyway.  I'm absolutely over the moon with how it came together.  I'm still finishing it off as we speak, but I'm gonna make it on time for Nimbin Show, even if I have to pull off an all nighter.  Might even try and get some wine and nibbles for my little one hour launch :)  Here's the first page to show you how it looks.

And all 70 plus (haven't quite finished it yet!) pages, of photos and stories and patterns, will be available as a PDF file on my Etsy site, and you can also email me (address in my list of places on the right further down).  So you can download my book, or buy it in a crocheted necklace pouch, that also doubles up as a finger puppet.  $20 for the PDF download, and $25 for the crocheted pouch and usb stick.  I"ll keep you posted :)

P.S.  So it's been a little while since my launch now, and I'll post a link to my Etsy page now, just in case you want to go over and check it all out.  

Enter Etsy here

I

The Truth

As a natural born scientist, I’ve been experimenting with my life for many years now.  Diagnosing, postulating and theorising, based on the empirical evidence of my life experiences, and the results of the experiments run to prove or disprove my theories. 

One of my first experiments was to come up with a theory by which to enter into an uncertain future at the age of 16, when I’d left home under police escort to live with my sister in Bathurst, leaving behind my mountain home, family, friends, school, childhood religion, cat, dog, horse, piano, cello and at moments I thought my sanity.  For two weeks I played solitaire with a deck of cards wherever I sat, and ate cheese compulsively.  Grieving, pining, wondering what it was all about, letting go.  At the end of those weeks, and in the complete vacuum left by the absence of a religion which had an answer for everything…………from over the other side of a seemingly impassable void, inbetween where I stood, turned out from my religion, schooling and family KNOWING that I was stupid, ugly, knew nothing of importance and never would, and that everyone and everything was better than me…………..and the rest of the world that looked to me, as a sweet young thing, to be so incredibly clever, and beautiful, and witty and wild.  Especially surrounded as I was by passionate and creative university students in a hybrid uni-farming town, in the days before university fees, when young folks went there while they worked out what they REALLY wanted to do when they grew up.  Plays and performances and spontaneous music and beat poetry glittered in amongst the wild haircuts and clothes and crazy underground uni student homes, spread out through a picturesque countryside.   I very quickly realized that I’d been brought up as very white and middle class,  and was racist, sexist, and homophobic. So after my cheese eating solitaire obsessing binge, and after realizing all of that, and letting it all sink into the void, from across the other side came a very simple…..

The only truth is that there is no ultimate truth.

It worked for me.  And I set about trying to learn from each and every single thing that happened to me, and from everyone I came into contact with, especially the people that made me feel uneasy……cause lets face it, at that point in my life just about everyone made me feel uneasy.  My childhood had been pretty shit in general really.  Lots of unhappiness and loneliness.  Interspersed with moments of pure gold and gorgeous friendships of course, cause there’s always a seam of bright to the smudge, but it was about as crap as I’d want to experience anyway.  Dad died when I was 7 in the Granville train crash, blah blah, there’s a lot of blah there, but that’s not part of this story. 

I’ve done lots of things since then, and learnt from so many many people along the way, who have taught me all sorts of lessons and given me insights to so many theories, that I took along with me to experiment with on the way.  I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with a list of theories I’ve experimented with, but they’re so incredibly numerous, and I realize that what I’m trying to say is about all those other experiments, but mostly about the big theory I’m playing with right now, especially as I’ve gone to such trouble to outline the first very big theory, that I started what I consider my adult life with. 

Because it’s come full circle.  After thinking that I knew ‘the truth’ as  bequeathed by my childhood religion, I left it and came to ‘the only truth is that there is no ultimate truth’ and travelled for a long and lovely time through all sorts of panoramas and cultures and ecosystems and tribes, till I come to right here and now, where I’m going to tell you that I actually am onto ‘the truth’ again. 

That’s right.  I’m telling you that I know The Truth.  The Big One.  The Great Kahuna.  The Almighty And Omnipresent Truth Of Truthness.

And if you’re anything like everyone else that I’ve said this to since I’ve been experimenting with this concept, you’re rolling your eyes, or getting instantly distracted, and trying to work out how you can politely tell me that my truth is very cute, but it’s only MY truth afterall, or shuffling your feet and suddenly feeling an intense interest in the condition of your fingernails, or the other routines you go through when you come across another person trying to tell you what ‘the truth’ is again……..   

And I’ll even put in a little preamble, and tell you that this ‘truth’ comes to you via a million different reflections in a million different mirrors and truths and versions of truths, and self organizing symmetry, and the fractal nature of reality, and smidgins of shards of religion and spirituality, and lessons to be learned from the light and dark paths of enlightenment………

Are you curious yet?  Have you stopped the shuffle?  Are you ready for me to tell you THE TRUTH?

The Great And Ultimate Truth Is The Synthesis Of Every Single One Of Us Being Who We Are Born To Be.   In being true to our authentic human selves, and living our own truth, no matter what that may be, we are actually BEING ‘the truth’.  Living our part of the great and universal truth that is the combination and synthesis of us all and everything there is, and all of our experiences, and beliefs, and truths, and hearts.  Because it has to be.  Any great truth, or god, or spirituality, or science or belief has to hold us all.  Has to hold us all with the unconditional love that we all deserve and respond to.  Between all of us is The Truth.  And the best way to get there is to follow the paths and the fractals within us, being led by our desires and loves and passions.  And learning from our pains and griefs and tortures.  Equally from both.  The Pleasurable and the Painful.  Pleasure and joy are easy to learn from, but it takes the true dedication of a scientist to elicit lessons, opportunities and gifts from the Painful experiments of life.  Our Shadows are parts of ourselves that we pull away from ourselves in order to externalize and attempt to understand.   Blame, Fear and Denial keep your Shadow at bay, but eating it back into yourself brings the seeds of enlightenment at the heart of your shadow within you. 

Just like Ashoka, the rough young king that came into power in India, towards the end of the apparently Dark Ages, that was only Dark in fact around the Roman Catholic Church, we could really get, that to pick one way or truth or belief or god as supreme overall, is a bit insulting to others and their truths really, and bound to cause conflict and warring.  And instead we could all create Universe Cities within our minds, where all the beliefs and truths and experiences could come together as equals, and have a great rap about what they’ve got in common, and we take the bits that resonate, and respect the equal truth of the rest, and go on our merry own paths. 

And whether you call it God, or Great Spirit, or Buddha, or Self Organisation, or Chaos, or Creation, or Evolution, or Consciousness, or Allah, or Goddess, or Anarchy, or The Law Of Every Action Having An Equal And Opposite Reaction……..it seems that they’re all actually the same thing.  It’s that bit that happens in your life that defies all expectations of coincidence, serendipity, and random occurrences.  That bit that makes you inherently aware that there’s a great design or purpose to the things that happen around you, and they’re all leading you to a logical conclusion.  The bit where you realize that you often get what you need, instead of what you want, and that all the things you get are actually as good or bad as each other, when you see them as lessons, opportunities, and gifts.  The bit where you know in your very being and soul that you’re not alone, but are surrounded by a host of guardian angels, or in connection with DNA and the energy that’s constantly moving round in our universe and remembering where it’s been, or with The Ancestors, or with entities and deities and devas all around us, or the particles that make up the 4 billions parts of information that our eyes see every second, and that we only consciously recognize 2 thousands parts of.  The bit that helps you to see everything else as kin and connected, and that what you give out, is what you get back.  The bit that encourages you to empathise, be compassionate, and do to other people what you’d like done to yourself.

The Great And Ultimate Truth Is All Of It.  All our lessons and learnings and pains and joys and wars and peace and truths and denials and fears and trust and realizations and knowings and feelings and doings.  The synthesis of all of our trials and inner knowledge and traumas and love.  The Truth within us, is the same as The Truth without us.  And we are all an integral part of it. 

Take it for a test run at least, and then let me know what you think of The Truth.

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.

Women's Day

I really love women.  And not just because I am one......I've been through many fluctuations in my feelings about us, and had many bitter things to say about young, middle aged and old women throughout all my different stages, but above and beyond everything..................women are just wonderful.  Full of wonder, to bleed without being injured, to create life within us, to nurture little humans for as long as we do.  And even the women who choose not to mother, nurture their own forms of children into the world.  We are such incredible reflections of the greater cycles around us of birth, life, and death or rebirth.  With our personal monthly cycles we reflect the seasonal cycles, and the lifetime cycles, and the cycles of ideas and relationships that can be born, live, die, and then be reborn again in a different guise.  From my learnings over the years, I see that most of our collective problems come from our resistance and fear of, or attempts to control these cycles, or to try and arrest them into eternal life, so no pain has to be felt, and this is often to the detriment of ourselves and the world around us. 

But us women in our fibre and cells are attuned to these cycles, and reminded of them every month when we bleed, that a part of us that we carried inside us in our mothers wombs........is dying.  And this occurs to us metaphysically, and also literally.  Our bleeding can be the death of a dream of concieving new life, or a painful process that reminds us that we're not always in control.  The letting go of relationships and ideas, or a monthly purge of pent up emotions as we erupt with hormones.  A brief hiatus in a busy schedule, even if our bodies have to bully us into it with pain, or a reminder about how much we have to supress our wild natures to be a truly domesticated human animal woman....... 

In my experience anyway, us women are just a touch more connected to the great mysteries of life, the learnings to be obtained from the underground, and the great beauty there can be in death.......  Conversant with the great and swallowing pain that is the echo of complete and unconditional love.

And I can say right here and now that I love deeply every woman in my life.  Even the ones who have jarringly hurt me are loved for the lessons they taught.  I can't speak for the famous women and the icons and the movie stars, for I have no personal experience of them.  But instead when I think of woman, I think of all the women who have touched my life, and each and every one of them is beautiful.  I've learnt harsh lessons about my own mothering, about my mother, about how I've mothered my oldest and first born daughter, and they all lead me to reflections of myself.  And I believe that if I can heal them in myself, I can heal with them, and help others to as well, and  ultimately the world is a better place.  And beyond my personal family relationships, women in my life have taught me how to love, to hug, to giggle, to feel safe, and so many other things.  I've always had a special woman in my life in particular, who was there for me as a friend, sister, and sometimes lover, as well as a larger circle of amazing, talented and passionate women around me, and we all reflect, mirror, and beam on each other our particular brands of light. 

Women smell good, and feel good, and I always feel wholesome when I think of how nice it must be for a baby to lounge on my curvaceous body built for comfort not speed.  To sleep on my big and generous breasts.  To sit on my soft and accomodating lap.  Women by the nature of our bodies have a spiritual recess, that leads into us.  A deep that can't always be dived into.  An intimate inner part of us that needs a respectful request to gain acceptance.  We have parts of us that have to be dug for.

On my journeys through the interconnected world wide web, I've met some incredible women, some on the other side of the world, who have shared stories and birthing journeys and inspirations and advice and love and learning.......and I'm greatful for you all, and I'm happy and sad all at the same time that you're too numerous to mention by name, and for me to tell you little stories about what you mean to me, and how I hold a flame for you in my heart.   

And as I write this taking moments to gaze into my bonny baby's face and smile with him........I've got to express that I'm profoundly greatful for being a woman, and for the spiritual path that my feet tread as a result of birthing all the babies I have.  The humbling lessons they've taught me, and the unique personalities with which they instruct.  And helping me to get to that amazing place where I know a lot from my life experience, and it all goes to show me how incredibly much more there is to learn. 

So as a gift to whoever wants it on this International Women's Day, I'd like to keep with the theme but break the sequence, by posting two chapters from far off in the future in my book that I've been serialising here....Balthazar and Nimue.   One is, I guess, my ideal of womaness, and the other is a song that I wrote many years ago.  I love women :)  Hope you enjoy these two gifts to the goddess......

  

Chapter 18 - Nimue writes.....

     

Once there was a woman who brought everything around her to life.  Not just the people she met, and the trees and plants around her she touched, but the cars which she drove, the dishes she washed at the sink, the tiles she walked on to the bath, the cloth she draped over her skin.

If you had the gift of sight, of being able to see the energies that move around a person or a plant or an object, and you had been able to watch her, to hang back to a point of observation in which you could view the reaction of energies to her passage through them, you would have noticed a visible hum of life at her approach in all of the atmosphere around her.  Which would build into a buzzing at her imminent presence, vivid greens and purples and reds and blues and yellows swirling round her, threading out to vibrate through the very air circling her, melting into everything in its wake, and then at her departure the rapture slowed, faded, and a miserable ache of loss at the realisation that all was as it had been before, no more freed of it's inanimate incarnation, then the slow numbness of forgetfulness..........

She hadn't been this way all of her life.  She'd spread out luscious amounts of her time and love onto everyone, animal or cause that grabbed her at that moment, and spent her earlier years like an ant, scrabbling out scraps and lessons, and storing them underground, letting it build up till she knew what she wanted to do with it all.  Till a curious phase hugged her to it, breathing in her ears a warm, fragrant, sea breeze tune, that lured her closer, till she forgot to remember she was dreaming, and let it become reality. 

Every single moment of her life felt sacred, her room became a temple, her existence became filled with ritual, clothing herself became dressing the goddess.  She bought herself sweet oils and incense, velvet and satin, sweet treats and dope, herbs and fruit juice.  She looked at the stars and bled into velvet, then rinsed them in water and spread the bloodied water on her plants.  She bought sea salt and rose bath salt, sandalwood oil and candles, and made her room into time warping peace.  Melodies lilting, scents wafting, timeless, buzzing, soft bright peace.......

At first she just bathed in her own reactions and senses, feelings and smells, touches and caresses, and languished in the waves of herself.  But a little further down the path, at the end of a living green tunnel, she found herself aware of every particle around her.  She ran herself a bath, walking over the cool tiles, spread rose petals and scented salt through the rising bubbles and burbles of water.  Lay outstretched at first, feeling her skin, then she felt a rose petal brush by her and found herself in moist soil, feeling her roots into the ground, and her sturdy thorned stalks, and the soft, velveteen roses of deep blood red petals.  Felt the sun beating a soft heart path to her leaves and the bright bright sky spread above her............back again to feeling her body.  Then a grain of sea salt nudged her soft thigh, and she was hurled in a spiral through the deep dark sea, brushing by fish and anemones and being drawn toward the surface, and the melting of dark sea into purples and sea greens and white blues.....back again to feeling her body.  Then she touched the bath and shocked into knowing the rock and stones, ore's and oxides, landscapes and caverns, and hands of many people that all of these particles went through to become a bath.  And the room became very crowded. 

She brushed her teeth and her gaze strayed out the window to the lurid patterns the grass was weaving, with sprinkles of white belled flowers and deep pink buds, then clothed herself, feeling the vista of sunswept paddocks of cotton plants, with their soft white balls of fluff waiting to be picked, and woven, and patterned, and shaped, into clothes.  Doing the dishes she felt all the particles in every plate and cup and container she washed, gently, and placed with reverence in the rainbow bubbled water and then dishrack.  Every journey made, every hand that touched, every paint drop pressed in it's surface.

And she knew herself part of a bigger circle, larger life.  Countlessly relaying and passing and feeling information, and conversation, and content, and life, onto others and through others, and round the spiral of life, to the great mass of creation and knowledge, that hangs round the circumference of everything that was and is and will be.......

Chapter 28 - Always out at sea

Well I’ve been always out at sea

Nobodies ever rescued me

Drag myself towards the shore

Every stroke is hurting more

Is this the price for liberty

Constant drowning out at sea

See the flags fly on the sand

Distant drumming from the land

Chorus-

Maiden Mother Crone your story unfolds

And to you my sisters call

Feel the power rise within

Break the binds of christian sin

Oh mother can’t you see me here

Does my crying reach your ears

Seen your face so many times

Bruised and worn believing lies

You face misogyny and fear

Been beaten down so many years

Kept from knowing your own worth

Sacred mother of the earth

Chorus

Looking back on all my years

See the root of all my fears

Recognise the constant grind

To domesticate my mind

No amount of worldly gain

Can ever ease the pain

Separated from my birth

To the mother and the earth

Chorus

But my mother never dies

She is there beneath the lies

Steady drumming from the ground

Can you hear the ancient sound

Till her children hear her call

Stop this dance with death’s thrall

I think I’d rather be

Always drowning out at sea