26 January 2018

Survival Day



I no longer judge anyone who chooses to celebrate Australia day.

we don't feel what we don't feel.

AND we can't heal what we don't feel.

I won't be shaming anyone who chooses to celebrate, each to their own.

Perhaps the nausea I feel about all those Australian flags is my own undigested grief.


It's been a longtime on this song-line.

I yearn for resilience and solidarity - I'm tired of the division and polarities. 

This is an epic country. I just can't stomach the nationalism thing...

#integration #healing #unity #diversity

If we look at humanity and the planet as a collective whole, then we've got some serious internal conflict that needs tending..

within each of us, individually.

together, collectively.

I'm learning to own and face my pain - and call home my projections. 

cleaning up my own river, my own songlines.

no more blame. no more judgement. no more victims.

LEST WE FORGET.

Let's just Forget?

Rest and Reset.

In truth, I really want to celebrate Australia day - I want to feel that feeling, a sense of pride. proudness. togetherness. solidarity.

To be proud of my country, many diverse cultures interwoven, I want in on that. I want my children's children in on that. 

I do feel a connection to country (land) - and I'm grateful for this gift and it's my wish that everyone felt it.

looking up at the southern cross, the milky way, people been doing that on these old lands for 60,000 years plus 

I know it in my bones that my celtic ancestors were also traumatically colonised - their Earth connection was severed by a monotheistic desert religion. 

Whether we feel it or not, there is widespread inter-generational trauma within all of our interwoven lineages.

26th of January 1788 was the day that Captain Cook landed in Australia and claimed this land for the British Empire.

An unlawful occupation on the false basis of 'Terra Nulias' meaning "nobody's land" 

It has become known by many as invasion day and others as survival day.

This date not only marks the beginning of widespread genocide and cultural devastation, but also  massive ecological destruction, with the highest mammalian extinction rate on the planet.

An extractive ideology, and a worldview that saw humanity as above and beyond natural lore.

It was not uncommon for men to gather after Church service on Sunday to go out and shoot Aboriginals.

Massacre sites are dotted across the country.

Some of the stories are horrific. 

The intergenerational trauma is real.

For me the 26th of January is no day to celebrate Australia.

For many the 26th of January is a day of deep grief. 

And of resilience, culture resurgence and re-integration.

And now there is a campaign to change the date which is gaining traction.

May we move forward together in solidarity and togetherness, in collective healing.

Listen more than we speak. 

Two ears. 

One mouth. 

A Third Eye.

Our hearts.

True listening. Curiosity. 

Deep listening.

Dadirri. 

Inner, quiet, still awareness.

Forgiveness and compassion in liberal doses please.

Just keep applying. just keep tending.

keep crying. keep mending.

keep sending.

Love.

Openness. receiving. grieving.

re-weaving. 

believing. 

this is 

the Dreaming. 

24 January 2018

Be the Longing | Belonging


Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.

- John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes

22 January 2018

Will we learn to collaborate?

In the end it comes down to asking ourselves: will we continue to strive to out-compete each other and in the process unravel the thread that all life depends upon? Or will we learn to collaborate in the healing of the whole through transformative innovation and regenerative design creating vibrant cultures and thriving communities for all?

17 January 2018

My Ancestry DNA results came in.



My Ancestry DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.
There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn't get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother's tears.
You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader,
I was the chain.
Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden,
like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, black and salty,
like mine, like mine.
You have secrets silently singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.
Don't pretend that earth is not one family.
Don't pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don't pretend we don't ripen on each other's breath.
Don't pretend we didn't come here to forgive.
- Fred LaMotte  ❤️

12 January 2018

Speak Your Deepest Truth

...In 2018, may you speak your deepest truth, follow nothing and nobody but your own unique path with some kind of crazy conviction and an ancient courage that emanates from beyond mind, be willing to stumble sometimes, to fail, to fall, to not know, to sometimes walk blindly into the night, to love without fear and to love fear if and when it arises... and most of all, to be HERE, to always remember your own ground, the place where you stand, the place where we truly meet, with and without all of these words... - Jeff Foster


9 January 2018

The Promise

...so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened, and long ago and in the dwelling place
in which you lived before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise,
that first set you off and then drew you on, and that:
you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach..
- David Whyte