Monthly Archives: May 2014

Toss and Turn

31 Saturday May 2014

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glitterDear Biddy,

Did you have visitors asking you to interpret their dreams? Maybe people came to you for a potion to help with insomnia so that they could sleep soundly without being disturbed by a banchee? Tossing and turning is usually associated with being worried and maybe you are being woken up for a reason, your inner self giving you a little push or shove to wake you up?

Dream work is food for the soul revealing and inviting me to make true what the unconscious mind has already created. Tossing and turning most nights these past couple of weeks and waking up to find fragments of my dreams floating up for me to grasp a thread or two. Investigating meaning around these glimpses of my inner life (with assistance of a skilled practitioner in worldwork and acupuncture) I seem to be launching into a new phase.

Time to toss and turn – like a salad I am tossing ingredients in my bowl and creating something to get my teeth into and like turning over the compost to get all the microbes turning rubbish into nourishment – I am feeling challenged and excited about what is ahead. With a blow of a breath, perhaps the cosmic energy was blowing a kiss, I am experiencing an initiation and this tells me I have accepted the invitation, although I am still not completely sure to what!  I do know that it is both molecular and galactic.

The pilgrim tosses and turns. Tossing a coat off with a change in the weather, turning an ankle when footing is unstable or stumbling over cobblestones. Tossing in an extra pair of shoes, a few band aids, some remedial herbal treatment to address an aching foot is all part of a pilgrim’s kit. So too is the taking a turn to lead or to follow, share a prayer or light the lamp.

With a cosmic breath, being despatched into an unknown; I am setting out on an unknown course.

My pilgrim’s kit is fully equipped and my journey, while invisible to me, is set. My responsibility is to toss and turn along the way to wander in freedom.

I am travelling in the knowledge and instruction from poet, David Whyte in his poem Everything is Waiting for You. It is nearly a year since I set out on my pilgrimage that took me to a landscape that inspires him and the opportunity to sojourn for a few days in his company.  The photo of David lying on the ledge of the pool (the same one that appears in the headline for this blog) unites the poet and landscape, a holy communion.

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

— David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press

Poet's Rest

Poet’s Rest

 

 

 

Emporium Times

24 Saturday May 2014

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Dear Biddy,

This week many citizens in my country started to make more visible their dissatisfaction in a government less than a year old. (A budget has been delivered and is winging its way to the Senate for passing and new laws are meant to be ready for implementation by July 1.) In the market place, people are marching and in the market, prices are slumping and confidence is falling away. A government elected with a vision to stimulate the economy (it didn’t need to be stimulated) has instead scared consumers.

The Australian government is cloaked in an ideology of economic liberalisation. Where the primary economic unit is no longer a family (as it was in the past iteration) but the individual – further eroding the stock price of We and rising the price of I. Years ago we were reminded us that we live in a society not an economy. It feels like we are on a sinking ship and the cry has gone out “women and children first”; and indeed it will be women and children first to drown, not to survive.

I live in one of the wealthiest most stable countries on earth, and know this time will pass, and it is no more than a first world problem (after all I just missed the Thailand coup by a few weeks) at one level, but deeper in the weave of the fabric of society it is more than just our problem. The biggest cuts in the national budget were in foreign aid – almost 20% of all cuts coming from that line on the ledger – a national disgrace.

When I stood with thousands of other Australians last week who then marched around the country in protest to the budget it helped me feel part of a community again. The ideology of individualism is best countered by visible collective responses. In the stock market of compassion our shares are falling, and the marches helped me see that it is possible to get them rising again. I was marching with the richest people in Australia – rich in empathy, rich in compassion.

Empires Past and Present

Empires Past and Present

Waiting for the march to begin, I stood with thousands of others on the steps of the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, I mused at the doric columns shielding the repository of knowledge behind the concrete façade. A library is a vital organ for democracy; a place for the collection of ideas and perfect as the gathering place for this protest. A library is the emporium of the thought market.

I wonder Biddy how the contest of ideas played out for you? Your commitment to give without charging for your services would have challenged the local economy and the way other healers had their services compensated. The gifts of whisky, produce and protection from the law were their own reward! Transactions beyond economics will hold us together. The book purchased and delivered as a by-product of a dinner date; the pink champagne consumed as result of a learning encounter; the conversation that yielded empathy and a deeper layer of friendship … all everyday non-economically driven transactions that counteract the idea that it is every man for himself. We are in this together.

These are emporium times – times where us merchants of change and custodians of the idea of the collective are journeying together. And there we all were in front of the State Library of Victoria. No longer is the library a static place, it is on the move in mobile devices, digital search engines and twitter led revolutions. This pilgrim walks a path that others have trod and walks with others on that journey.

Emporium: from Latin, from Greek emporion, from emporos merchant, from poros a journey

 

 

May the Kindness

17 Saturday May 2014

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Dear Biddy,

Apparently Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that kindness and love are the “most curative herbs and agents in human intercourse”. Kindness is not a random act, it is a deliberate one. An act that reflects who we are and is an invitation to healing and wholeness. In all the great religions there are stories of the gurus acts of kindness that enable all around the individual act to be bathed in the glow of the encounter. Jesus welcoming the child, the leper, the widow, the sinner in counter-culture to the norms of the day, Buddha soothing the angry elephant springs to mind too. Biddy in your world, kindness from the mystical realm finds it was from the heavens and the underworld on the breath of the wind and the faery dust. Cruelty is the antonym of kindness – the harsh word, the ruthless hand, heartlessness – that brings shadow and darkness. The saying it only takes a candle to light the darkness has always been a favourite of mine, and I think this is the role kindness can play when cruelty starts to make its home and works its way to bring darkness.

Leunig - Kindness

Leunig – Kindness

This week, my country has experienced deep and deliberate acts of cruelty in an ideologically driven economic agenda in public policy. It is heart breaking. The anti-dote is kindness and it must start with me, in the simplest acts. With each act we can build our gross national kindness and light up all the corners until our individual candles overwhelm the darkness causing cruelty to be extinguished.

I had a flu injection this week to protect me agains the disease of winter. Each act of kindness can effectively inoculate against this dreadful season of cruelty I find my country in right now. To be cruel to be kind has no currency for me – there is never a time when cruelty is an act of kindness – and this maxim is a deception and must be resisted!

Every little act of kindness is a gift, a giving away of a droplet of love and like love,  giving kindness away makes the kindness grow. The gifted act is a deposit in the national (and international) Bank of Kindness. It will keep the wolf of cruelty from the door followed swiftly by bankruptcy (which is where my country is dangerously close to being).

So here is an invitation: Take up the noble cause of kindness, it is one of the virtues of chivalry. Our Prime Minister’s re-introduction of knights and dames while an anathema to my republican spirit, if it means that the noble values of the knights are honoured by that same PM that would be a blessing for us all! Then, kindness might find a home on the Hill in Canberra. Instead of waiting for that day to arrive, I will deliberately make deposits into the Kindness Bank for my own well-being in the first instance and, if by chance, an occasional angry elephant is tamed, all the better.

May the Kindness is one of the most beautiful of all the Celtic blessings and I am sure you Biddy would have granted and received this blessing on many occasions. This is a blessing for you the reader and for my country and for all those who has suffering with a dose of cruelty may we all be blessed to give and receive kindness.

 

 

Pas de Deux Pilgrim

10 Saturday May 2014

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Dear Biddy,

The benefits of rain on our dry land are always appreciated where I live. Unlike your Emerald Isle, the colour wheel of ochre from rusty reds through to glowing yellows and warm oranges lie in wait to have their cup overflowing with the primary ingredient of life. The landscape somehow still finds a way to be alive. And the colours contrast with one another – I love how they are brought to life on the canvas of the desert and the canvasses in the desert! The Aboriginal artists who share their dreaming and stories in paintings provide some guidance to me to see that is in the landscape that they see – the plants, the animals and the stars.   This week a friend is working on a film in the outback deep in the heart of red sand territory and each day she is treating us with beautiful photos of smiling faces, broken down cars, blue skies and lots of red. She has been sharing the young and old working at their bushcraft and art and through her lens letting us peek into the fullness of creation that the landscape reveals.

The rains sweep away the season and herald the winter and the heaters are on, an extra layer of clothes and the first soups have been made and eaten. A time to turn inwards. Yet all the photos I been seeing from the centre are on the outside, under the sky and the twinkle of the stars are echoed in the gleam of the eyes of the young and old. This is my country – it is an inside outside job and an outside inside one too! To retreat inside is to go outside and let the trees and the moon and the creatures that abound to soak into you. To retreat outside is an inner journey. Both paths the pilgrimage.

Holding the inner and the outer together is a pas de deux for a solo dancer. Unpicking each of the steps that are being taken and watching where I put my feet and my gaze is a journey all of its own. Looking to the sounds of the landscape to provide a melody and to the seasons to provide the rhythm can be fun in the rain as I dash to the car to avoid getting wet or equally walk slowly to have an experience of being saturated. The physical experience of a sore back is invitational equity; to move in a certain way to feel more or less pain will bring a lesson nevertheless.

Alice Springs

Alice Springs

Both the desert and the plain, the winter and the warm, invite and delight.

Repent

03 Saturday May 2014

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Turning away from your values can happen in tiny, almost invisible ways – you consume a 5gram chocolate Easter egg that you later discover was produced by slave labour. It can happen in big and obvious ways – driving your car to a fast food outlet where minimum wages are paid and where farmers have lost their homes and land to the ‘big boys’ because they couldn’t produce for the economies of scale and when you consume you are adding to your own health woes as well as making money for a shareholder that doesn’t live within 10,000kms.

Listening to Joel Salatin this morning at the Willunga Farmers Market was a treat, a call to repent in the best of evangelical traditions. A call to turn back, to wake up and for the our mother earth to be celebrated as the one place we can all call home regardless of our species or our place in the food chain.

Repentance is under done in my life. I do sincerely regret and have remorse for many of my sins (but not quite yet ready to be sorry for all of them). I make occasional acts of turning back and set my sights on the natural default position of the Universe – it is indeed a default position of health, well being, happiness and positivity. Yet the being in the dark and staying asleep seduces me often and I fail to be wise and make choices that reflect my values. Being mindful and consistently so, is a discipline that takes a lifetime before mastery (if indeed mastery is possible). There are choices that seek to bring us closer to alignment …. or lead us away, from that lining up of all the planets, of our vision for ourselves, our communities, families and our planet.

Produce, Willunga Famer

Produce, Willunga Famers Market

My country has a government spiralling to the lowest denominator in what it means to be humane and trades in the currency of fear. The rhetoric from Canberra is that we all have to contribute and pitch in to help out on what is being touted as a budget emergency. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and one of the lowest taxed. There is no budget emergency, what we have is an empathy emergency. Salatin reminded the gathered faithful, that we don’t need a legislator or a tax or a regulation of any kind to make choices for health and well being. Supporting local producers, committing to the shortest possible pathway from farm to table is a good way to start. I came home to take the still warm eggs from our two girls nest and thanked them for their gift. Generosity is offered around every corner and we have a nest to nurture and cherish that will replenish our hearts, hearths and health.

Rhonda and Julia

Rhonda and Julia

Its time for me to repent that is true, and it is time to repent Australia. Turn back to our default position as a nation of generous, compassionate communities that as our national anthem says :

Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.

I have always loved the words of this hymn that Stephen Schwartz vamped up brilliantly in Godspell. Time to give it another whirl, and forswear our foolish ways; time to repent and with gratitude celebrate the joys that will come as a consequence!

Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways. Old now is earth, and none may count her days. Yet thou, her child, whose head is crowned with flame,Still wilt not hear thine inner God proclaim, Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways.

Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise. Age after age their tragic empires rise, Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep: Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep, Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise.

Earth shall be fair, and all her people one: Nor till that hour shall God’s whole will be done. Now, even now, once more from earth to sky,Peals forth in joy man’s old undaunted cry—Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!