Dear Biddy,

It’s early morning in Sydney town, where the legacy of the currency of rum continues to play out in commissions of corruption. Irish rebels find themselves reincarnated as victims and advocates with names by Ryan and O’Brien and sitting on the bench ancestral DNA presents in a big and gown … Yet the city faces the Pacific and in the street the Middle East and Asia look back at you and still not quite enough yet to undo the foundations of the colony. The custodians must just shake their heads in utter bemusement and grieve us foreigners don’t appreciate this privilege we have of being on this piece of planet.

Nothing could be worse than being invaded – dispossessed. But it has got me thinking about all the other types of invasion and in its turn liberation.

Goolwa markets

Invasion can take many forms, a virus, disease, new idea, new technology, a new person in your life, such as the everyday invasions, some more debilitating than others. The invasion of fear, anxiety or greed, may ambush us. Finding a way to protect ourselves, to be inoculated against an invasion if the flu is a lot easier than holding fear at bay; and putting anti virus software on a computer is a walk in the park, compared to securing the borders of the heart.

And what about being one of those invaders? The scene of a little fishing village that has you and thousands of others each summer season, comes to mind. We recently had our annual invasion of ants in the kitchen. I find it hard to get motivated about pest control, their arrival a kind of reminder about my place in the food chain and despite all my efforts, they still keep coming, so many working out cohabitation and a truce might be a better plan than a search and destroy with chemical warfare. Finding a way to coexist is a challenge of invaders and invadees.

When disease invades a body, finding a way to coexist may not be a strategy we are drawn too, preferring toxic chemicals to go and search and destroy with precision. What ever method we deal with invaders, tangible and intangible, we all have the first instinct to reject and repel. Building resilience comes in many forms and I wonder Biddy if you had a repellant potion to help keep “baddies” at bay?

Liberation comes to me through remembering to breathe, by calling on who I am and all the generations who have gone before me to enable me to be here this day and embracing who I am in the here and yet to come. Song, story, beauty and my inheritance help too. Looking into the skies and seeing the bluest of skies and the stars twinkling back at me are a constant reminder of the fundamental truth I am a child of the UniVerse and that helps the most on days when the invaders might be getting the best of me.