AUTUMN CROWNS THE CRONE

Flatter than sullen, dull, earthen reds, torn, streaming cascades of dreary amber, in bitter strips from our mother’s tongue flutter down in awesome, rusted anger

Shimmering in a loose-knit, mad mettle, chained by the stiffly stalking shrug of age time drifts dirty upon every lustrous queen in the shadowed threshold of her creaking gait

Suffering, bloodless hours, winding down days, ritual over, the candle flicks in rhythmic strokes as power trembles in shifting sands of heaving loss piercing smooth allure, our eyes deepen as wisdom cloaks

Purchased up to darkened strands of shivering wisp swiftly at the crone’s pyre, wielding that servant’s blade we are powdered twisters in poisonous rampaging towers. Stand well sisters! Autumn summons us all to flame.

HIBERNIA

Her story flies, cradled by shadows, caught on the winds of south-westering storms. Lamplit, through windows, in whispers where lilting, sweet murmurs of legends were borne. Called into form, out of tribal desire from the spirits of women, to her place at the fire for their unspoken passion and secretive pain, she brought herbal and tincture, so deeply ingrained. oh Laela,  oh lallee caer lean. Those wild craggy faces, of the blood of our line, I saw you dance, you were fearless this time.

Climbing out of her past, she flew out of her mind, as sure as  a daughter with heroes to find, crying out for a reason, a country, a name, that a mother, or priestess could passionately claim. She smiled in my face with a star from her mouth, I saw rivers cascading, and I was allowed to run behind in her powerful stride, I lagged behind to beg for dreams and to read all the signs. oh Laela, oh lallee caer lean. Those wild craggy faces formed the bones of our spine I watched her dance, she was fearless this time.

Tides of bold oceans, of voyages made, with the waves of her journeys went rolling away. To the mountain she flew on her watery  wings, like a Goddess who knows what the festival brings. She’s in my sight, I’m of her skin. Who knows the sound of peace within? Her wisdom’s grown from breathing in, a heart at home, she is my kin. Hibernia.

BOLD COLOUR

My daughter is a bird with silver clouds in her blue eyes. Some days she makes a golden sound, some days she gives me signs.

I feel her soar above me, then suddenly she’ll dive, and fly so fast towards me,with ribbons all alive.

She burns,  metallic Winter-sun, small mirror, in laughter and tears, calling her over the curve in the road, pushing her on through the years

I yearn to watch her drift and turn, fragility in the wild, impassioned, storm of  images, and singing as a child.

She wanders in her candle-light, weaving magic with eyes and wings, promised before her hopes were born, & dreams were perfect fairy rings

Tormented by the cut of words; of bullied names that call her, yet, Life, she knows, is shining here, in a rainbow of such Bold Colour

ELEVENTH HOUR

After a long and sweaty game of social persuasion, I reluctantly climbed into the highly polished four wheel drive that was packed with class two mothers, bound for a Christmas get together at the local Leagues Club.

I was horribly underdressed, under-coiffed and totally unprepared.

I was the new girl.

Not from  around here……

“Did you see those terrible riots in Seattle? Those hippies should be locked up, it was disgraceful.” a nodding bob recruited.

I cleared my throat nervously from the back seat of the Nissan Patrol. These women were exactly strange to me.

Their clothes and hair reeked of positively-ionised white goods culture, and my blood began thinning and rolling in a slow, bubbling simmer.

“I know”, said another one, “they all need a bloody good hiding” she smugged.

“Those people ahhh, well, they actually represent you.” I said.

Dead silence. Seven blonde bobs turned to me. It wasn’t really a “blonde” thing, it was just their freshly applied holiday highlights glinting.

“Some of those marchers are farmers that are only being paid a few cents for a truck load of the crops that we have to pay twenty dollars a kilo to eat, and some of those people marching are the wives whose farms have been foreclosed on by the banks, people who now have nowhere to go, and some of those marching hippies are just people who want to have a say about how much we can really afford to spend on food, and some of those people marching are small businesses and family companies that have gone broke from multi-national takeovers and enterprise bargaining decisions that are made in WTO board rooms without consultation or care about us, you know, the consumers. Oh yeah, and some of those people marching really want to talk about the diminishing GMO regulations that might jeopardise world food crops everywhere….. Monsanto,  y’know..?.”

Pause…………pause, pause, pause,  pause……

“How’s Simon’s new tennis coach, isn’t he utterly hot?”

“Oh, well actually I’ve started playing comps on Tuesdays….”

I spent the rest of the evening staring into the laminated tabletop of the Arana Leagues Club dining room and continued to breathe in, and breathe out.

I’m a white, middle-aged, middle-class wife and mother, and those women looked at me as if  I was on drugs, recently released from a psychiatric facility and recovering from a long stint within the criminal justice system and all I did was speak up that I think differently from the line they were taking.

Why is it weird to care about horses and forests and oceans and not give a shit about ironing or Tupperware? I don’t know how to launder towels with that fabric stuff that other women just seem to know about. Where did they learn it? Where the hell was I that day? Thank you, my life for letting me be somewhere else (something else, anything else…).

I know everyone’s talking. Their sales-pitched idioms rise in a radioactive steeple of unabated sound, fathomless with need and rampant sanctimony.

How can one more human voice be heard, chortling and mashing in the pantheon of all these roaring souls, amassed so awkwardly among the philanthropic jaws of our tenuous and frail anxieties? In how many more complex ways can we say “Give me your money”?

“Welcome to the Age of Aquarius, the virtual utopia,… take the philosopher’s megaphone. Speak now, or forever…….”

I stand back, (I always stood back), bending and jerking to let the hardarses grab and scuffle into where I was just standing. Standing further back, I wrestle with my resentment and pretend to let  it go.

“Here have mine….”   and they always do.

Itching with arrogance, berating my own worth with caustic apathies, I charge my glass to “selective exclusivism”. Modern materialist nihilist? No, no, I am a proud whimsician of an ironically self-deprecating guile.

Perhaps I am a gentle scar, billowing through the remorse of my perceived ugly burdens, the predictable and fearful expectations of others, that of the failed, fallen and fucked up.

“Sorry, I don’t own it, I only rent it”.

My car is a sad man, a liver of the past, halcyon, hardy and heroic in the reminiscences of receding automotive moments, squealing and grunting with the realisation that hills just seem to be more demanding now than ever, and that time waits for no chassis.

I see the resemblance. I recognise the analogy. My strength is tarnished with time. My abilities, wrought with leaks and losses, plot my direction so much more certainly behind, than in front. I just love the histories. There is an old child, here, inside me, grown swollen with impulsive repression, the self-inflicted silences of absorbed hurts. My hurts, the hurts of others and any ol’ hurts, that belonged, just as any connoisseur of fine tears knows, in me.

My anger is vast, a tidal expanse, infinitely intimate with the swirling mass of my raging pain and grief, I am, at long, long, last lucidly emerging from a depressed/anti-depressed submission, to clear a mist from my mind, a potently hypnotic blue-blanket that has obscured my view of reality.

As I stretch, I am reacquainted with socially parasitic complacency and it’s host, the ever-consuming white culture, an obesely subterranean world where the slumbering spirit of pioneering human determination did drown.

I am fiercely awake and haunted now, by all the eyes that ever trusted and were deceived….

I  have, it seems, willingly and for centuries, slavishly subscribed into a sanitised, Christianised, raped, broken, battered, burned, veiled, tormented, tortured, stifled and slain game of power-over.

Are we not culturally empowered to assist those that are hungry, helpless and hurt? Have we become spiritual husks, drugged by our own rarefied economic comfort zones and  stupefied by our privileged social self-obsession? Surely the hoarding of so much wealth,  the stockpiling of our multitudinous gifts and resources is literally choking us to death. Physically and figuratively.

Certainly our fears have reached a critical mass.

How did our precious planetary resources become such weapons of greed and mass destruction? How has the glossy, fat, white westerner that I’ve become, been so willing to comply with the simplistic media politics that muster us endlessly into even more shallow superficiality?

Why have we allowed ourselves to be motivated by self-servitude and low-range thinking?  When did we agree to become a cattle of consumer-producing strategies that cost so many their lives, their freedom, their children and their basic human rights?

“Larry, I’m in desperate need of some chocolate”, (and I’m in desperate need to find my three children who were kidnapped two years ago to pick cocoa beans as slave labourers until they died of starvation, torture and disease).

Where are the compassionate, intelligent leaders of our next revolution for social change? 

“I’m sorry ma’am, I can hardly recognise you since your rhinoplasty…”

Where does an unmarried, deaf woman in East Timor learn to give birth safely, or just live simply with dignity and self-sufficiency? How does an orphaned African AIDS baby overcome his terror of the dark?

“Sir, where do we stack all the unclaimed, unidentifiable bodies sir?

How can we continue to support our so-called democracy when our elected leaders continue to condone and perpetuate such untold suffering? Surely we are gifted and blessed with the power to reach out and evolve, to unify in kindness now.

Are we just-not-quite-yet-privileged and powerful enough in our white, male dominated  cultural wasteland to end starvation, to stop pedophilia and child pornography, to eradicate nuclear arms trade, defy global thuggery or even begin to recognise the futile stupidity and horror of war?

Can we even see our own sightlessness? Our self-serving gluttony? Our emptiness, no matter how much money and luxury we accumulate? Who will acknowledge the toxic implications and look beyond the media distortion and it’s profit-driven party line?

This is the time for humanity to rise and claim it’s right to express human goodness, to know our freedoms and exercise dignified choice.

Now is the time to awaken from our silence, our ignorance, our backs turned on each other, our unending greed. We must stand up and own the mess we have made now.

Contemporary women’s culture?  I look for signs and in my own hands I find borrowed icons from our destroyed indigenous cultures;  drum, clap stick, feather & smudge.

I read the propaganda of the new age “abundance” consciousness & I feel castrated from my truest visceral female instincts, the deep instincts of recognising and flowing with our natural life-cycles, the planting times, the nurturing way, the gathering and celebrating of harvest and the deep wintering to rest and dream.

We have become unreasonably demanding of our mother’s bounty. We have stolen our religious rituals from ancestors who stepped lightly upon the earth, respectfully honouring our great and ecstatic Mother’s love and we have twisted her gifts until she has all but perished.

I smell the stench of artifice from pharmaceutically-controlled advertising monopolies that profit in dictating the one acceptable human shape, age, colour, size and social choices, and I feel trapped and outnumbered by a hostile misogynistica. Nature is an explosion of diversity, and we have shrunk backwards into a fearful duality life. Chicken or Beef? It’s all the same crap.

I choose to spend some time with my exquisite ugliness and it’s child, the angry pain, to draw and paint it,  to write it, sing it, drum it, dance it, wail it, wear it, share it, speak it and spear it into the hearts of all those still standing silently closed, quivering and gutless in infinite greed.

I am afraid of the struggle, unnerved by the path I have set for myself and yet I know it to be a freedom path, a path of material challenge and contrary motion.

I know now, that I have always walked this path of difference. I was born to it.

The DIVINE HAND

The Mantra of my bliss was discovered in learning to enter a silent and egoless union with an eternal flame that illuminated the path until their sweet and radiant faces emerged from the temple, fluffy with joy and burbling in their spiritual bellies.

The intensity of light from their eyes matched the fire in their hearts, freshly lauded and lovingly refreshed by the just-revealed teaching.

Aroused by the direct messages and intoxicated with certain sacred knowledge, the yogis blossomed onto the road, physically committed to the Truth and to walking the path that surely, clearly, led them directly to the most fragrant purpose for being gathered here, one pure and devoted garden of God’s most elite and spiritually gifted children…..

Each and every petal of God’s glorious flowers had received divine instruction to imbue their whole lives with a constant challenge to purify and to uplift the whole of humanity, bolstered by a deep and internal awareness of the privilege and the power invested in each devotee, particularly to get out there and make more friends…

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…

…the more they change?

The following ideas emerged from a desire to explore the processes of change.

Although possibilities for change are ever-present,  it seems that our abilities to define our own key resources, to facilitate significant change are often loaded with anxieties about the consequences and the emotional impacts of change.

Why?

It’s often the most negative consequences of change that we focus upon and fear, and the ensuing uncertainty in our own ability to develop effective strategies and coping mechanisms for surviving change that cause us to avoid it.

The prospect of change, emotionally, conceptually and culturally, can bring with it some acknowledged form of struggle, accomplishment, and/or even loss. The following introduction explores the nature of change from a personal, physiological and cultural perspective.

What is change?

In order to form an opinion about the abstract nature of change I decided to gather some information about the bio-chemistry of change and to question what it physically means to change. To begin to understand the organic nature of change, I sought to understand it by breaking the process down unto it’s most fundamental form. Cell division.

To focus upon our most basic unit of life is to perceptually view ourselves albeit momentarily, as separate particles, as cells, and yet retain the awareness that we are infinitely grouped into super-categories of belonging.

We are comprised of sub-atomic particles, grouped into living cell units, which form tissue, organs, anatomical systems or structures which combine to create complete and living organisms, which collect into families, communities, ethnic groups, inter-ethnic societies, nations, inter-nations, species etc.

We are, therefore, (and simplistically described as), sub-atomic particles, grouped into greater consistently held patterns of interactive capacity. We consume energy, function to regenerate and die. Beyond that, our scientific evidence remains inconclusive.

Philosophically, we have identified ourselves as units of individual identity, gathered around a structure of union that seeks meaning in a collective identity. So what, then, specifically is the mind and body connection? I have often wondered about our constant, systemic and natural process of organic change, and how it actually occurs within us, physically, emotionally, mentally and abstractly. What triggers cellular change?

I have learned from reading about current genetic theory, that from a recent identification and observation of telomeres, (strings of nucleotides that operate as patterned or sequenced enzymatic) protectors of our chromosomes, (the blueprint patterns for DNA replication) we are thought to be programmed, according to the notion of a telomere clock, to be viable for a finite or pre-determined number of cell divisions.

Beyond that number, my cells will encounter a pattern corruption known as cellular ageing, resulting from a “falling off” of the sequenced codes that pack around the chromosomes, whereby the telomeres lose their protective capacity which eventually leads to cellular dysfunction, and beyond that process, I will not survive, biologically, at any rate. What continues to remain unclear within our most current general cell theory, is the definitive identification and understanding of the mechanism that triggers mitosis (cell division).

Naturally it poses the question, what recognises now as the moment for each mother cell to produce a daughter? This apparent frontier in our scientific understanding of the biological process of regeneration, and our diverse genetic capacity, powerfully engages my curiosity to question “what consciousness decides me?”

Given that what we are is constantly changing, I have reflected (as have so many others) that there is, in fact, no such concrete state as change. It may therefore be appropriate to suggest that “constant change” is a useful way of expressing the inherently patterned process of living.  We are, at our most basic unit of life, simply continuing to exist in an ongoing process of decay and renewal.

Why then, are we so often afraid of our most fundamentally organic nature, the constant and on-going process of change? The life quotient is, after all, the essence of our being, the very base binomial factor that underpins our deepest core model of duality consciousness, “to be or not to……” .

We are, it seems, constructed of complex biological patterns, selected from a myriad of the organic expression of every possible variable, formed upon the template of carbon-based life, cognate from the simplest perspective of expressing the determining label of “animate or inanimate”.

Are we organisms whose opportunity for life rests in the duration of our individual ability to replicate DNA pattern congruity? How do we measure, quantify, categorise our ability to choose to change? What exactly generates choice and a recognition of the ever-present life-changing moment?

If humans have not yet engineered instrumentation capable of scientific study beyond the witness platform of nuclear physics, this opportunity exists as a power-window of learning, enabling us to make our own subtle distinctions. Quantum physicists are expounding theories around quanta, units of light described as the flash-points of our molecular atomic nature, and that the ability to observe the spaces between the electrical discharges has afforded us the chance to identify doorways into alternate quantum realities. Quantum choices.

Our sub-atomic units, our molecular selves are choosing to compound into consistent configurations of organic matter for finite durations, and we behave as if we have important problems to solve, our human responsibilities, karma, life-chaos. What is the purpose for all those particles to group together and remember where we put our keys? Survival yes, but for what purpose?

I have also observed that our social development and cultural emergence from old patterned behaviours is often embraced and identified as occurring tribally. Contemporary social groupings still maintain an observed version of hierarchical structure that endures, regardless of the sophistication and technological capacity for an individuated lifestyle.

Encountering therapeutic meaning around groups of people who collectively resonate with stress symptom similarities, whether mainstream medically modelled or profoundly maverick, I have observed the adherence to social and cultural deference based on the recognition of unconscious triggers, power projection structures, the unconscious delivery of social placement inferences and, that often people create networks to support each other through intense periods of cyclic endings and beginnings.

Culturally, we continue to gather around the circles of our moon tides, our seasons, festivals and honourings, consistent in our human need for expressing and participating in ritual and ceremony.

Such cultural references have always offered us concrete markers for self-contemplation, for structural healing to occur (grieving, reconciliation, confrontation), and our festivals have offered us the accepted place for emotional acknowledgment, reunion, completion and personal reflection to occur.

Our festivals may have engaged with our archetypal responses, our cultural values and definitions, and the socially permitted holidays have allowed us the accepted time to journey within and out.

Our spiritual and religious festivals historically usurped each pre-existing layer of cultural tradition, superimposing, embroidering the seasonal and archetypal significances into an overlaid religious and cultural template,  and, as a by-product of gathering the people’s support, these new layerings often caught up the threads of previously honoured ritual traditions.

Christmas, once celebrated as the immaculate birth of Horus from Isis and Osiris, occurred when the people of Ancient Egypt, observing the sky at sunset from Alexandria at  5 h 54 GMT  witnessed the Heliacal rising of the bright star Sirius in the east on the 25th December c.3,300BC, celestially heralded one hour previously (at 10 degrees higher in the sky)  by the three stars of Orion’s belt. (We three kings of Orion’s star….)

This divine birth celebration has survived many cultural and tribally contextual traditions, – Winter Solstice – Yule – Candlemas – Christmas.

The powerful symbolism of “divine birth” acknowledges the miracle of the unknowable, the cosmic entry of every being into the wheel of life. The emergence of that which was made in the darkness, created within a miraculous void of our conscious understanding, each new life delivered unto our earthly landscape of human drama, every new life delivered unto the inexorable journey that we all make from birth into life and onwards towards death. We arrive from the void only to return to it. We grip and grasp onto life and each of us wonders….. up and into the sky.

Religious festivals have sought to provide guidelines, rules, structure for aligning with the archetypes of that mysterious journey, and to create for us a comforting sense of meaning that most of us seek to find out. Find out? Why not find in?

“What am I?”

The apparent fragility of our human consciousness has always, it seems, sought for divine, cosmic and external conditions to provide scriptural guidance and life-answers.

It is as if our encapsulated sense of self, and our experiences of perceived self limitation and self-loathing have caused us to believe that the most important life-answers must be forthcoming from beyond, higher and wider than our own intuition, enrolling us into a belief system that decries our cultural responsibilities to lie in the higher powers, in some cosmic force,  divine father, virginal mother, superior intelligence, master, guru, leader, elder.

“Heavenly father, please help me for I am so afraid… so powerless.”

Many of us have gathered profound meaning in the connection we feel and experience with an infinite intelligence that travels to us from beyond our rational understanding, and yet so easily do we discard our own voices of reason, our own sense of truths,  that we have tended to settle for less than our own potential for empowered integration would accommodate.

Consistent with the representational image of the fertilised egg, (our first physical delineation of spiritual separation, our prime experience of being contained within a “self” an identity), the Easter resurrection festival of newly ascended life, archetypically represents the protected, developing human being’s requirement for emotional resuscitation from the internal self, the assumed “limited self”.

The very notion of a divine Being dying for our sins has fostered the notion that we are spiritually immature, dirty and disabled in our own capacity for self-redemption, or even that a redemption from self was a spiritual requirement, is in fact a tenet of most religious philosophy.

The belief that there is inherently something wrong with us is a foundation of a wide range of religious doctrines that have unfortunately caused and perpetuated the raping and pillaging of most of the world’s tribal peoples and their sacred lands and resources.

The earlier forms of this ‘egg’ festival honoured the oestre, the feminine constructor or Creatrix, and paid homage to the Babylonian Goddess of war and fertile sex, Astarte.

That women could be powerful, fertile and sexual was obviously unacceptable to the men-folk, for a while at any rate.

This white western folk’s adopted religion/trance of the assumption of sin and self-limitation has purposefully served to anchor a collectively-conscious identity adherence to the quality of ego vulnerability (particularly within contemporary feminine culture) which has caused us to seek outside of the egg for meaning, for reassurance, acceptance, absolution, e.g. through therapy, counselling, religion, marriage, educative frameworks and the desire for acquisition of more material comfort, hypnotising us into an endless and costly search for an externally assisted reconciliation with our past choices, the search for freedom from self-harm patterns and emotionally charged conditions of regret, remorse, guilt, a yearning for what may have been.

These culturally symbolic rebirth references may have served as keys into the doorways of other possibilities, and yet the references continue to hold heavy emotional and spiritual consequences instead of the creative potential that has always been available. That is the way in which our quantum choice-points have been reconciled, largely as the tools of religious manipulation and power-over structures.

In seeking the open path towards self-transformation I have trudged under the canopy of diverse spiritual teachings largely available to humans at this time. I wanted to know the truth. It seemed that everybody just wanted to sell me their product.

I have endeavoured to taste a little of Christianity,(mainstream Anglicanism, Christian fundamentalism, Catholicism, Baptistism, Essenic Gnosticism, Spiritualistism) enrolled in studies of Judaism, attended classes in Buddhism, read up on a confusing array of the diverse and many-armed aspects of Hinduism, practiced some Esotericism, Paganism, Wicca, entered the deep trance of Raja Yoga, explored Tribal Shamanism, New Ageism, Reiki, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Atheism, Agnosticism, Ascensionism, Economic Rationalism and of course did my bit for the Holy Church of Human Greed and Suffering.

Thus far I have experienced only one ancient path towards liberation and one class that provided a profound sense of care for every aspect of my organic being.

The mind-body-spirit connection. Breathing in and out with consciousness, relaxation, stretching, thoughtfulness-movement. Learning about the body and training the mind. Breathing in and breathing out with clarity and mindfulness.

My personal studies on change have helped me to reflect and emotionally reconcile that this is a time for reunion with the wholesex being, to recognise that we have arrived at an opportunity for humanity to find within it’s core, the male-female joiner, the expression pathways for both roles to be eased into a peaceful condition, mirroring a state of integrated union with that perfect blending of our mother and father within.

So how can I make change in the world? What can I do about the suffering that I see? The wars, the global and environmental problems? The next door neighbours, my own despair and pain?

Feeling powerless to take charge in life was the first symptom of an awakening process that acknowledged it was no longer OK to give my choices away, or to accept that I had no right to make my way in a safe and loving world.

Awakening is a delicate and vulnerable process. Paying attention to the influences around me, I learned to ask “Are they supportive of me? Do I feel the freedom to express and question the structures in which I exist?” If I expressed the ideas that I know to be true, that I am divinely protected, encouraged, supported and acknowledged, would my words be filled with meaningful experiences?

Being present with all that is happening in life right now has become an opportunity to discover more about our strengths and abilities. Many people experience awakening through upheaval, difficulty, disaster and suffering, and although trouble isn’t a necessary dynamic of awakening, it’s just that so many of us are so deeply asleep that the initial gentle stirrings are ignored as we roll over and dream on…

I experienced awakening through emotional trauma. My story is not extraordinary, it’s just my story and I’m grateful for those experiences now, as they have led me through a maze of mystery, fear, transformation and joy. I have been blessed through my own life struggles and been rewarded with the abilities that have allowed me to support myself and others through their own process of change.

We have a huge job to do…. let’s start on planet Earth.