I entered a short story competition with a barn owl theme. I didn't win, but I do love the story that birthed here, about a girl, an owl, and an unusual transformation. 

​There was a girl. She was an odd thing. While other girls traded barbies and cruelty, she collected feathers and fallen nests. Boys made more sense, but they weren’t interested in her, so she climbed trees to talk to the magpies, who were.

The girl loved the moon.

She loved it when it was a sharp curved sliver slicing the night. She loved it when it was half a glowing eye, like someone had split it down the middle and stolen the other half. She loved it when it peeked over the horizon all huge and orange and round as a coin, chasing the sun, which it could never catch. She loved the way moonlight scooped up all things familiar and painted them eerie and magical. Her red dressing gown lost its colour and the silver in her father’s beard turned blue. The beach rang like glass struck with a spoon. Insects shouted and animals scuffled and the world felt like a puzzle only she could solve.

One night when the moon sang loud as loneliness in her ears, she slipped into the night on a waft of seabreeze and a dim restless hunger for something nameless, something wild-drenched and shivery.

Her bare feet took her to the forest. She wandered in her red dressing gown that wasn’t red, and sat with her back to the huge spotty-gum that had cradled her yearnings for years, and turned her senses to the night.

Cicadas screamed their release from seven years trapped in the earth. Waves tumbled against the shore and a curlew screeched at nothing. The willie wagtail chattered as it always did, all night. Something rustled in the scrub, and then a pointy nose poked into a patch of moonlight, followed by a long body and tail.

Her breath stilled. She’d never seen a bandicoot before, digging into the dirt with its funny nose, leaving little perfect holes behind. Strange hops, scruffly hands pulling at roots. The sudden crunch of a beetle snack.

Oh, she whispered in her mind. Hello, you beautiful thing.

Maybe she’d whispered out loud, because the bandicoot suddenly froze, ears twitching.

‘It’s ok’, whispered the girl. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
The bandicoot’s nose wrinkled. It hunched its back.
‘Are you pretending to be a rock?’

And then something impossible thumped onto the creature and the bandicoot wasn’t a bandicoot any more, it was a thrashing frenzy of fur and feathers and claws and a single shrill squeak cut off like a twisted tap.

The girl dared not even breathe. A winged wraith so pale it glowed as blue as the moon glared at her as the bandicoot twitched and jerked. Its face was a heart and its eyes opened to forever. The owl shifted its grip on the bandicoot, which gradually stopped thrashing, until after an eon, or perhaps a couple of minutes, the creature was still. The bird turned its whirling eyes to the girl. For a moment she saw herself in them, reflected, a curved girl floating in discs of black glass. And then the owl was gone as if it had never been there at all. It was only much later she realised that she never once heard it make a sound.

I didn’t know any of this, of course, when I first came to myself. I was only a line of ink on skin and a buzzing sound and the smell of antiseptic and a trickle of hot blood, quickly wiped away. Can we know ourselves from the first line of the sketch of who we will be? When all we are is an idea, yet to be animated? A dream of purpose, of forked paths and possible futures, of all the ways we will change the lives around us, simply by being? We can’t. I couldn’t, anyway. In the beginning there was only sensation, with no real sense of the substrate into which I was being called.

That took time, and more lines, many of them. I had plenty of space to wonder, because wonder was all I was. I had no true form yet, so I could not know myself. But gradually, my lines joined together.

Shape defines story. Mine had wings cleverly drawn, overlapping intricate scales of feather stretching across a beach of skin, one on each shoulder of a girl, now a woman, calling me into life. Calling me to dance with her until the end of her days.

Over time, my story seeped in, and it was hers, a jumbled mishmash of pain and grief and love and confusion and kindness and cruelty, tumbled like stones in a river until the only way she could let her story out was to carve it on her skin until the world made sense. She was a magician, conjuring the phantom barn owl from her childhood, the bird that had wrapped her heart in its claws and stolen a piece of her soul until now, here, with blood and suffering and a joy as fierce as hunger, she let it all the way through and birthed me in blood and ink.

So began my life with the woman.

Her name was Estelle. She was tiny, small boned, pale as milk, wiry as a snake. When the last lines of me were finally etched onto her shoulders she fair burst with pride. Her friends oohed and aahed and strangers stopped her in the street to admire her wings.

Her story seeped in to me, but mine also seeped in to her. Magic runs both ways. All the owls who have ever been live in the idea of owl. Now they lived in me. And I lived in her.

She took to wandering at night as she had done as a child, away from her boyfriend with his long tanned arm thrown over her waist, who snored in light whuffles and farted when they’d had ice cream for dessert. She slid his arm off her bony hip, padded to the door and slipped into the beckoning warm arms of darkness as the siren moon called us both to life.

I lent her my sight and my smell and she followed the paths I nudged her along. Here, now. This way. Foraging creatures went quiet as we glided along trackless paths. Insects wheezed and creaked and sometimes the light patter of rain sounded like the bush had a thousand feet and was dancing just for us. I felt the cracks in her heart start to mend. New ones opened up in their place, faultlines leading to the molten heart of the world, to deep caves painted with ochre, to skies raining stars in different orbits. Her dreams were of flying, and hunting, and moonlight, and the warm embrace of firesmoke, and the plucking fingers of wind.

Estelle began to drift. She slept first on the front porch, and then in the yard. Her boyfriend didn’t understand and she couldn’t explain. One day he wasn’t there any more and there was nothing to hold her inside where the light fizzed and hummed and the walls were too white and straight. The last time she left she locked the door carefully and did not look back.

She made a shelter of sticks and leaves against a tree that reminded her of the old spotty-gum she’d leaned into as a little girl. Her first traps were clumsy and crude, but she got better, deadfalls and snares and cunning baskets to catch fat pigeons she cooked on the fire.

Every night we wandered further into the forest. One night a pack of dingoes ran with us. They appeared without a sound, brushing her legs with wiry fur, loping through the bush like wary ghosts. Their leader looked to her, to us, and we led them to where the kangaroos were bedded down. When the pack had made their kill they stopped and waited, until she had sliced off some meat with her small curved dagger. She made a fire, rolling slices of meat in hot ash and throwing them to the dogs, who tugged at long ropes of intestines and snarled at each other over the best bits. When she ate the kangaroo’s heart, her eyes glowed the same colour as the moon.

Transformation hurts. Newborns cry when they meet the light, emerging from dark and watery wombs into noise and light like embers on flesh that has never seen the sun. Snakes split their skins, crabs shuck their shells, larvae hatch into winged monsters. Everything changes into something else, it is the way of things.

I didn’t know this. All I knew was that I burned. Every filament of ink screamed and bled. Estelle thrashed and picked at the scabs, which wept and oozed. Her fever lasted days, days I cannot remember. I was in such agony I had no sense of time. An endless haze of fire and smoke and pain to sunder trees with lightning and burn them to ash. Even the moon did not help, she gazed uncaring on our struggle as Estelle moaned and I pulled against the prison chaining me to torment.

And then it happened. One feather pulled away from her skin, tearing loose, and with it relief like ice on a burn. I was in a fury, could not stop, and I pulled again, which tore another feather loose. And another, and another. Estelle howled as I set myself against her, tugging and yanking and thrashing like a mouse under the claws of an owl, ripping myself free, first one wing, then the other. Her wail of grief was unearthly.

I flopped on the ground, just a series of glowing lines, pathetic in the dirt. Estelle’s eyes were pure madness. I had never seen her from the outside and now I did. Hair the colour of dirty white straw, a wide, heart shaped face with huge dark eyes. She huddled and shivered, blood streaming down her shoulders.
Just then, the moon shifted to glaze the glade with possibility. As the light touched me, I began to…. fill. Between my wings new lines scribbled, faster and faster. A downy chest, long strong talons, a wide back, round head, wicked curved beak, sharp as defiance. Estelle grew quiet, her huge eyes even wider.

I hopped on my new feet and spread my wings for balance. Cocked my head, clattered my beak.

‘Are you… real?’ she said, reaching out her hand. I nibbled her finger.

‘Ohhhhhh. You’re real.’

My lines kept filling in, from mystery to matter. I felt the moment my heart started to beat. I felt the moment air moved in my lungs. I felt the moment true hunger sang in my bones.

And then I spread my wings and launched into the dark, away from the bereft shriek chasing me into the forest until I'd flown so far all I could hear was the thundering silence of my wings slicing the night into silk.

There is no way to describe flight. If you have never flown, you can never know. To guide your glide with a thought. To understand the landscape of air, mountains and valleys of it, lifting you this way, dropping you that, because the spaces in your bones show you how. All the owls that had ever been flew with my wings as I knew for the very first time what it was to be utterly myself.

I hunted. The taste of raw flesh filled my cells with ecstasy. I was a spectre in the moonlight, with wings of velvet and the air was honey and the part of me that was still human wished to be able to cry but the bird could not. And so I flew, and I hunted, and I feasted until I was fat and heavy and tired and then I finally circled back to her.

She was empty, listless, curled into the earth like a brown dry leaf, and she would not wake when I pecked at her hands. I pecked harder, nipping her skin until she stirred, turning her pale, heart shaped face to me in abject misery.

‘What will I do?’ she whispered. ‘What will I do now you have left me?’

The moon rose in my blood and I knew. I hopped onto her arm and pressed my beak to her mouth. She tasted of salt and despair. I breathed, blood and fur and the wild scent of the night. She took it all in, and then she breathed back, into me.

I grabbed her spirit with my strong sharp beak, and pulled it hard. She screamed and twisted but I am an owl and owls know how to pin a squirming thing. I dragged it out of her, a limp wet mass. And then I ate it.

She woke inside me as I had woken inside her. Confused, curious, in a haze of wonder.

‘What am I?’ she said.
‘You are me. I am you.’
‘Oh,’ she sighed. Then.
‘Can we fly?’

The moon’s pale song was so loud it drowned out everything but the beating of our heart. Music trembled and spun through the leaves, through branches reaching to claw at the indigo sky, through myriad creatures woven into the filigree silver web of night. Music wove and rose and soared and throbbed with a thousand thousand voices: come, come, come.
​
We flew.

Eight years ago today, she flew. Every year at this time I feel the bittersweet kiss of Spring. Life explodes in clouds of feathers, fur and fang, and the pungent soundscapes of creatures in rut. Bulbs burst, flowers pulse, pollen wafts on warming breezes. Fledgelings wheeze, joeys scramble, young snakes eel like oil through the grass. Life puts on a show everywhere but where she should be: that scrap of life I called mine, grown from my cells, is gone. There is a hole cut out of the world, and with it a piece of my heart.

I climbed a mountain today, for her. Took myself up and up, off the path, up a sheer watercourse, scrambling over rocks and vines to the escarpment, thick heath scratching my legs to pieces, which I liked, the pain reminding me I am here, still alive to feel it. It stings even now, as I write. Good.

She would be eleven, long-limbed and lithe, titian curls cascading, or perhaps rebellious, shaved it off at a friend’s house, do you like it, mama?

I met a tiger snake on the steep forest path, we were polite to each other. I gave way, bare feet and all. It watched me with a bright eye, tongue flick-licking the taste of me from the air. Found a burrow of some creature, I hope it’s a quoll. There were wildflowers everywhere, pink and purple, her favourites. The sky was so huge I thought it would swallow me. Part of me wanted it to. She would have loved it all; snake, sky, scramble. I had to love it twice as much, for her. It wasn’t hard. Doing it without her was, though.

It was a hard climb today, steep in places, and still she would have been big enough to make it with me. Scampering ahead to explore, waiting for me to haul myself up the cliff. A couple of stretches I might have had to boost her up toothy rocks, but not many. I almost saw her a couple of times, my shadow playing tricks like she used to, hiding behind trees to jump out, surprise, did I scare you, mama?

Yes, love, you did. You can stop now. Joke’s over. Come out and let me see you.
My beautiful ghost, my one precious cub.

Eight years. What a marvel.

In the beginning, grief was bright as arterial blood, the pain so enormous there was no room for anything else, like an amputated finger, all the nerve endings howling with shocking intensity. Just grab the ragged stump and wait for the white hot wave to crest, to taper, please god, hanging on, barely, thrust utterly into the now of this breath and this one, stitching together a cloak of tears.

I almost miss it. Those early days brought me into presence in a way I had never experienced. I was inescapably here, alive, every sense acute, there was no respite from the constant fiery shock of realising she was gone, and in that I found a rhythm. Grief became the dirt under my feet, the oxygen in my lungs, the water in my mouth. Whatever I thought life would hold for me, this was not it, but all the other doors slammed closed, all at once. Sometimes life is like that. It has immutable plans and now there are no do-overs, just pain, all of it, forever branding me a wanderer, without her.

Eight years later the blood isn’t bright any more, it’s dark as ink and sluggish and has soaked into bedrock, deep as the Australian desert, its heartbeat so slow and ancient you have to press your ear to the ground and go still as a stone to catch the vibration. Ba-boom.

Long grief is old and cold as iron and ice. It’s terraformed the mud and earth of me. There’s a bone weariness in me now. Carrying my bundle of stories like firewood for a bitter winter bends my back a little. Long grief wants to make an old woman of me, and although I refuse to let it, sometimes I just want to lie down and for it to be over. Eight years is a long time to be dancing. I am a little daunted by the idea of another eight, and eight more after that.

Long grief hides. It’s so embedded, whole villages and castles and cities have been built on the bones. Children play, unaware their playground is a skeleton of some creature vast and mythical, who once roamed these hills. Their laughter an echo of hers, and sometimes I still hear her on the wind.

‘Mama, I love you this much’, her arms open so wide she topples over and laughs with her whole body, head rocking with glee, whu-whu-whu.

I miss missing her. It’s true. Part of me always will, miss her, that is, but that part isn’t in my sight most of the time. Long grief is a bit cruel like that. It’s hidden her away from me. Except for these days; her birthday midwinter, this day in spring when the jasmine sings of hospitals and dread and the clocks leap forward an hour but not hers, hers wound down and no matter how hard I listen for the lightest tick-tick all I hear is my own shadow, faithful at my heels, reminding me that for every beam of light there is its opposite, and her gift lives not in her footprints but in mine, tracking her gifts further into the world she left behind.
​
So that’s all I can do today, really. Remember her as best I can and watch these grizzled bare feet carry me up a cliff to sit at the top of forever, gazing at clotted horizons and holding a ghost girl who loved life so much my heart aches with how much of it I still carry for her.

 
​He isn’t big, or particularly athletic, so the trajectories of bigger boys wash over him like waves over weed, far above in turbulent eddies of froth and light. He feels the currents of their passing, but his world is a different one.

This boy listens. His ears stick out like autumn leaves, curled and nut brown. The boys call him Radar like it’s an insult, but he knows better. Radars are for listening to the things nobody else can hear. Radars are for mapping the underworld, for calling tiny secrets into the palm of your small and sweaty hand, smeared with stolen chocolate and the dirt from that beetle with jewels in its eyes, the beetle that crawled around looking for a crack to crawl into, and found only the warm pulse in your thumb, upon which it rested, throbbing in time to your own life’s drum.

He has a brother, one of the loud, shining boys, who is good at all the things. Cody somehow looks like he has been collected from captured sunlight, Cody of the big laugh and best games and sudden flashes of cruelty that pass like summer storms, leaving the boy bewildered and bruised, and now Cody brings a gift of his own to make up, no hard feelings eh. There is no solid ground with Cody around. The boy knows nothing but this; Cody has always been there, he was first, will always be first, always be bigger, brighter, smarter, stronger. The way through is to listen to the places where Cody isn’t, and burrow into them for mysteries. To cling to the bottom of the sea while the waves crash overhead, and in the gardens of coral and fish find other, sweeter music.

The boy loves the veggie garden full of green and growing things his mother sings to with her knobbly knees flecked with dirt and her back crooked in the sun, her hair a shimmering pale curtain trailing split ends into dirt until he doesn’t know where she ends and the garden begins. She comes here when his father is in the big black chair, reading, which is often. Words fall from the side of her mouth in burbling rivers, they trickle into the flowers and herbs, he hears them with his wide papery ears, and wishes he didn’t. His father doesn’t hear them, even though they are for him. He doesn’t hear anything from his chair, except the slow rasp of pages turning, and the clink of ice against glass.

There is a lemon tree, it’s been there as long as forever. Its blossoms shed perfume so sweet his eyes water and huge black butterflies flit and swoop over its glossy leaves, laying small eggs which hatch into speckled grubs that munch munch munch. Papilo Agaeus, his mother murmurs, ruffling his crown of salt-streaked hair, cooking under the Australian sun. He is in his favourite spot again, belly on a hot rock like a beetle on a boy’s thumb, feeling the pulse of the earth in his soft places. From here he can watch the tree and the bees and the butterflies, until the tracing patterns of their flight paths make some kind of sense, written in calligraphy he can almost understand, a hidden language of life in flight.

So it goes. Brother storms, mother garden, father pipe smoke and whisky in the big black chair, sometimes if he is quiet he is invited to share a lap and squirm against the rough scratch of whiskers on his cheek. He presses the place afterwards, wondering that one day his skin may sprout bristles like this, it seems impossible, like a Marvel hero changing from human to superhero. His father smells like places he will never really understand, but he wants to, if only the door was open. He waits, doglike, just in case there is a chink, but they don’t come often, or last long. His father smells like regret, and the absence of him sounds like the high looping contrails that take hours to dissolve, up in the sky where he can never reach.

A butterfly lays her eggs in the lemon tree one day, taking her time, her wings fluttering with every hunched deposit, and when she is done she simply vanishes like she was never there, but the green-yellow pearls remain, and they grow hard, and they hatch. He watches the tiny mottled fingerling grubs eat their way across the leaves like spiky aliens, and squeals when his mother pinches them between her fingers in a sticky smear.
-It’s the way it is, love. But don’t worry, I can’t get them all. Just you watch. There will be more butterflies from this batch.-

He doesn’t just watch, he listens with his fluted translucent ears that catch the sounds of hidden hieroglyphics; swallows swooping all electric in the big blue bowl of sky, small cracklings of bark expanding in the heat, the sound of his mother’s teeth grinding as she stares at the black chair and its silent occupant, the inexorable tearing turn of pages, each one a ragged blade to cut his heart to bloodless slices, the book is more interesting than he will ever be. He listens with all of his ears, fed by warm and branching capillaries, a kiss of seabreeze fanning the tiny hairs at their borders like small furry antennae. 

The lemon tree is a universe and he turns his ears toward it, scanning its constellations. He listens until he can hear the crunch of jaws working through cellulose. He listens until he can hear the deep crack of root through rock. He listens until he can hear the moon calling all the water in his body up to ring in his ears and eyes. And one day he hears the delicate thunder of huge fat grub, and he finds it, no longer mottled, but sleek and emerald green, shaped like a spaceship or a train that hovers on magnets, and he knows that something amazing is about to happen.

It stops moving one day over hours, slowing down like his father’s watch when he forgot to wind it, and now the grub’s squishy skin goes hard until it is lacquered and immutable, hanging from a stem like a piece of frozen fruit. He takes it gently, carrying it attached to its piece of stick, and shows his father. 
-Look, Pa, it’s going to hatch into a butterfly.-
His father is just home from work and has forgotten something important, it is not in his briefcase or his pockets, which he pats over and over, as if patting them will bring it back. He looks at the grub, not seeing the incandescent verdant majesty of its sweeping lines, not understanding that inside the carapace a miracle is taking place. Flesh is dissolving and reforming and at its essence it is becoming an angel.
His father’s gaze falls on the miracle and glances off again. He pats his pockets for the umpteenth, scowling.
-Take it to your room, love,- says his mother, so he does, hanging the stem and its three leaves near the light, so it will be warm.
-It’s not a chicken egg, silly- says Cody. -You don’t have to bake it.-

He is torn between bringing the pupae to school or leaving it. One one hand, if he brings it, he will be there to see it hatch. On the other, any number of tragedies could strike on the school bus, or in the carnival zoo of school chaos. He decides to leave it, and frets all day, his ears turning for home long before he gets there. His first stop is to check on it, but all that happens is the shell gets harder and darker and the sense of something sleeping grows stronger. Days crawl by like sleepy ants. After a while he thinks it is dead after all. It is so still and solid he can’t hear anything at all, not even a faint tickle of breath in the last hour before dawn. Nothing.

When he wakes and checks from habit, it takes a moment to understand what he sees. For a second his brain can’t make sense of the shape of it, but then it clicks into place and he gets it, all at once. There’s a split growing down the back of the glassy monster and a soft black creature scrabbling to escape, but the halves of the shell are tight and it can’t get out. He watches, entranced, cheering it on with breathy sighs.
-You can do it, Rosie,- he says. She turns her furry face to him as if she hears, then scrabbles some more. After an hour he grows worried. Is she stuck? He reaches out with fat fingers and pries the shell apart. The butterfly slides her abdomen out in a smooth curve and sits gently moving on the corpse of her past life, and he realises that he is seeing her breathe life into her wings.

They are crumpled bits of paper, curled twists of vine, useless and deformed, but as she breathes they start to plump and unfold, so thin he can see through them. In pops and starts they unroll, flattening out until they glow with some inner fire and he sees that they are made of dust and light and vitality. Veins track and trace along their surface, and tiles of colour interlace to create patterns of incredible beauty, in white and blue and red and black. They are impossible. Nobody could make them up and yet here they are. She flicks and flutters them, whirring. It sounds like tiny propellors.
There is something wrong though. One wing is partly bent and will not straighten.
-You did that when you tried to help,- says Cody, flashing through like some dark comet on his way to big boy mischief. -Look, you can see the place where your finger bent the cocoon. It will never fly now.-

He is right. There is a dent in the carapace right over the place where the wing was. The butterfly rolls and unrolls her proboscis, tracing it along the brittle shell of her grubself, whirring her wings. The boy is horrified, that she has come through so much, grown these beautiful wings and now she cannot fly. His heart howls and heaves in his chest like a living creature, and he wonders if it will burst from its cage like the butterfly burst from the cocoon. 

-I’m sorry, Rosie,- he whispers, but sorry is not enough, her whole purpose is to fly and he has stolen that from her, broken her in his desire to help. He feels like he might die for shame. The butterfly whirrs and whirrs, but she cannot take off. After a few more attempts she starts wandering, trying out her feet, bent at their tips like little question marks. He puts out his finger and she stops. She unrolls her long proboscis, probing his finger in tiny velvet dabs, then steps on. She is so light he can barely feel her. And then she mimics the beetle from long ago and simply rests on him, her thousand eyes seeing whatever a butterfly sees as he carries her to his mother, she will know what to do.

-Her wing won’t work,- he declares, and she puts on her glasses, the ones that perch on the end of her nose like a teacher and she tuts and regards the butterfly.
-You’ll need to feed her then. She needs nectar, from flowers. Honey water will do.-
He mixes some up, licking the spoon for good measure, then spills a drop onto his finger. She sticks her proboscis into it and then rolls it up, over and over.
-She’s drinking,- he cries, and his mother smiles, though his father rattles his book in that way he does when the house is too boisterous.
After she has drunk, she wanders up his sleeve and sits on his shoulder like she means it, like she wants to be there, and he pretends he is a pirate and she is his parrot.

Just like that he has a pet. He cuts blossoms from the lemon tree and places the leafy sprays above his bed and she rests there until he fetches her. He doesn’t take her to school, she is too fragile. When he gets home he has to hunt around to find her somewhere in his room. In the afternoons he takes her to the garden and lets her visit all the plants with flowers. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He forgets to watch for Cody’s moods. When it comes, the attack is merciless and quick. One minute he is talking to Rosie about a possible walk to the beach, the next she is a crumpled shape on the floor, one wing in tatters, the other bent in half. Her legs still kick but her body is squashed.
-Stupid butterfly, can’t even fly. Best to put it out of its misery,- says Cody, his eyes glittering, the pupils so big and black no light can find the bottom. He shoulders the boy hard, knocking him over, then thunders off to shout at their mother.

The boy cradles the butterfly as her legs kick, her multifaceted eyes reflecting light like rainbows. He has read about resuscitation, and he blows air to her face, just in case she needs it. It ruffles her black fur. Dust from her broken wings smears his hands, his face, catching on his wet cheeks. He can hear himself with his big wide ears, hear his whu-whu-whu sounds as the sobs that come shake his chest to breaking. His hand feels so hot, he hopes he isn’t burning her, but it’s past that for the butterfly, the kicks become more sporadic and then her body convulses in one spasmodic arc, and she moves no more.

She is gone. Whoever was in there, whatever Rosie was, she is not any more. He moves her body around his hands, and more dust falls from her wings, which aren’t bright any more but ratty where the colour has rubbed away. Her eyes see nothing. He takes her out to the lemon tree and places her high in its top branches, but the wind just knocks her out and she tumbles to the ground. He can’t see through the tears and snot. He picks her up and this time places her into a crook, but the ants find her and he can’t bear to see them carry her away. He takes her back inside, and wraps her in tissue paper and puts her in an envelope, which he labels ROSIE in texta that smears and runs when his hand presses on it.

He falls asleep, rubbing dust from her wings into his eyes and nose. And then he dreams. He dreams that he has the most perfect wings, they stretch out on either side of him in glittering magnificence, and when they beat, his feet lift from the floor and he flies. There’s a voice in the dark, singing some song that fizzes in his blood, and the ache inside him is so huge he splits in two, and falls and falls, and then the dream goes somewhere else and he can’t follow himself any more.

His heart breaks many times in his life, but this is the first rending, apart from the slow cold cracks that spider along the glaze of him in the lap of his father, and the deeper pain as his mother turns from the earthy richness of the garden to rows of shiny plastic flowers from the chemist, the small bottles that promise a kind of numbness, when she tends this garden her eyes go empty, and after a while she doesn’t go outside any more. Cody flies away to drag races and binge nights, he gets a girl pregnant and leaves her after a year, but the boy loves to play with the little one, and babysits whenever he is asked, and tells her stories of butterflies and lemon trees.

Older now, his girlfriends tend to be blonde and fine, but they all have a cold veil somewhere deep, and a strand of cruelty like a streak of stinging venom, it seems he needs to walk into the wall over and over, to feel the pain of it, to know he is somehow alive. His heart grows layers of grit, like an oyster, until it no longer breathes and dances, and he can’t quite remember what it felt like to listen to the wind. Over years he stops listening, because if he listens he can hear that whirr and flutter of broken wings, and he knows that just like Rosie, there is something wrong with him, and he will never fly.

The man isn’t big, or particularly athletic, and his ears stick out like jug handles. She notices him the first time when she sees him sitting on a rock, looking at clouds while all around him lunchtime workers scoff sandwiches and talk about mundane things. The park is strewn with humans bathing in the sun like seals. He isn’t, though. He’s watching something and she strains to see what it is. And then she does. It’s an azure butterfly, dancing in erratic arcs across the council flowers.

She sees him the next week, and the next. In her mind she makes up stories about him and his funny ears. She wonders what it would be like to trace their edges with her fingertips, or even her lips. She wonders why he looks so sad, and whether she could make him laugh, just once. In all the weeks she never sees him talk to anyone, although his lips move sometimes, like he’s singing a song only he can hear.

He’s sitting on the rock again, and her heart hammers, because she knows she is going to do it. Her skirt is long and made of strips of silk in many colours. When the wind swirls it flutters around her like wings. Her hair is out, dark as coal and shiny because she washed it this morning, just in case she found the courage today. She kicks off her sandals and clambers up the rock. It’s sandstone, and rough under her heels. He doesn’t look up, but she could swear his ears twitch.
-I reckon you have the best seat in the house- she says, all breezy and casual, though her heart hammers and her knees feel strange. She sits before she falls off and makes a total fool of herself.
He turns to her then, and his face is ordinary but there is something in his eyes, some breath of wind from a far land, and she keeps talking, her words tumbling over each other like water.
-I’ve seen you up here a lot. I work in the bank, just there, you can see it. It’s nice here in the sun, isn’t it. And these flowers, the butterflies just love them, Look, there’s one there.-
He startles like a cat flicked with water, and his head jerks to watch, and yes, there is a butterfly, a small white one, looking for all the world like a piece of tissue paper pulled on an invisible string. It lands on the rock near his hand, its wings flexing. The corners of his mouth turn up and he stretches out a finger, so gently it’s like he’s moving through honey. The butterfly steps onto it, for a moment, then launches skyward again. His face turns to follow it like it’s the sun.

She loses her nerve. -You must think I’m such an idiot. I’m sorry for bothering you. I’ll leave you in peace.-

The wind gusts, sending her skirt into a frenzy of flight. She tries to trap stray panels, but they’re everywhere in a cloud of blue and white and black. Something lights in his eyes and he cocks his head, like he’s listening to her heart beat, but not in her chest, in her bones, in the spaces between her cells. Like the moon has fallen into her and he’s listening to its tides.

-What’s your name?- he asks as the gust falls and her skirt behaves itself, for now. His voice is gentle and deep, richer than she would have imagined. The sound of it causes her heart to flutter.

She holds out her hand, brushing hair out of her eyes, knowing she’s blushing but she can’t stop, he’s so peculiar.
-Really? Yes. I'm, oh, hi. I’m Rose.-

His eyes widen just a little, like an earthquake has gone off deep in the mighty earth of him. He cocks his head again. She realises he’s tilting those huge ears toward her breath, although that can’t be right. 

-Rose,- he says, tasting her name in his mouth, taking her hand with a tenderness that makes her want to cry. And then he smiles, so brilliantly it’s like he’s swallowed the sun and the shadow in his eyes retreats to some cave she can’t reach and he’s seeing her entire now, taking her in.

-Rose,- he says again, shaking his head as if to clear it of dew. She feels bewitched, like she has been sucked through the looking glass and the whole world is upside down, but it all makes sense somehow. Everything is going to be alright.

He releases her hand, but his eyes don’t leave hers, and his ears glow backlit like beacons. Above him, the white butterfly whirls. It really is a beautiful day.

-Hello, Rose.-

 

This is a re-post from three years ago. Still current today :)

I just had sex with someone I would normally never get into bed with.
And it was one of the sweetest experiences I have had.

Internet dating. It’s still a whole new world for me.

We met for a date after a week of banter and as soon as I saw him I had that ‘o-shit’ feeling of realising that he was catastrophically awkward and nervous.
I guard against that these days by going straight to phone calls after the initial internet contact. For me chemistry is not in the text messages. Chemistry is in voice and energy. Chemistry is live and cannot be faked or pushed. My body just knows, yes or no, usually when I hear someone’s voice, definitely when I first see them.

We’d had some great conversations, easy and funny and there was something odd about him but I am a strangeling myself and underneath his oddness was a super intelligent, witty man with whom conversation flowed. So I said yes to dinner and in my head was planning to take him home. Because it’s been a while and I am not looking for happily ever after at this point, and I am a sex bomb with a body built for sin and I know how to drive it. Like I stole it. No shame in here. And it’s been a while and I was antsy. Kinda climbing the walls.

So.

He walks into the restaurant and I immediately think oh well, that’s it, it’ll be a nice dinner. He’s terrified and frozen and almost stuttering so I talk a lot and he asks all the right questions and gradually relaxes and I find myself chuckling inside because I like him, he’s honest and curious. He’s a gigantically big-brained nerd and he’s turned his attention to spirituality and found a way to reconcile science and spirit, has found buddhism and meditation and now he wants to find out everything, he’s open to all the possibilities. He doesn’t judge, is fascinated by everything I say, not as artifice or manipulation. Genuinely fascinated.

Which it turns out, is sexy.

I started wondering what his kisses would be like. At that moment he kissed me, tiny little bird pecks so soft I could hardly feel them.

O dear, I thought. There was no passion, no fire, no heat. Nothing to fan the flames of my desire.

But my rightness wouldn’t let it go. I could feel the tiger locked inside him. So I took him home and encouraged him to unleash and o boy was it worth the effort. For me, making love is an art form and I am an artist, we all are, inside somewhere, it’s just a matter of coaxing that part out.

I introduced him to some things and he was a quick study. Still awkward, but gorgeous with it. I told him exactly what I needed, hands, mouth, all of it; what pressure, what angle, what speed, how and when and where. He paid attention, to our mutual satisfaction. I probably had about ten orgasms, though I lost count after three or four.

Turns out the last time he had had sex with someone new was 20 years ago. Afterwards he said, kind-of hesitantly… ‘So… are you more sexual than other women?’

I laughed and said ‘There are more of us out there.’

‘I’ve never had sex like that, ever. I didn’t know women could have orgasms like that. I didn’t know you could communicate and talk during sex. You just told me what to do. I didn’t know women could do that either.’

He’s mid 40s, and just had great sex for the first time in his life.

He’s gone on his way now all fired up about learning about sacred sex, and I reckon he’s going to be doing some workshops and exploring a whole new universe of the body and bringing bliss to women along the way .

It got me thinking, which is why I’m writing this post, about women’s sexualities.
Back in my late 20s to late 30s I went through a period where I identified as gay. I had sex with lots of women. I have also had sex with lots of men. So I have accumulated a bit of experience, and I speak from that place. I’m not saying any this is true for you, but it’s true for me.

When it comes to sex, women tend to be a combination lock. Our emotional state factors in hugely; are we angry or sad or frustrated or needy or feeling unseen or unloved? Have the kids been hanging off us all day like baby birds with their mouths endlessly open? Is the moon in pisces have I got the promotion does my bum look big in these jeans? Are the lights horrible is there music what if I don’t get wet and he notices and I haven't had a shower do I… you know… smell? Is he going to want to stick it in my bum?

And then there is the physical, mechanical stuff. Some like it up and down, some like round and round. Some like a pointy tongue tip, others need flat pressure. Some like their clits sucked, for others it means immediate desensitising. Hood on or hood off? Fingers hooked in to the g spot or fingers thrusting or no fingers at all? And that’s before we even get to penetration… tip or shaft, deep or shallow? Tease or fierce?

What about that moment when we are done, we have had enough, we want to stop, and feel obligated to keep going even if it now hurts or we are silently gritting our teeth and bearing it?

The pressure to have an orgasm very often kills any chance of it actually happening. Sometimes it is easier to just give up on the whole thing, or fake it to bring the whole sordid act to an end.

How on earth are men expected to figure all of this out if we don’t tell them? Seriously, how? I feel for men, the pressure must be huge as they go in; either they become bloodhounds on the scent, alert for every subtle change in body language, every sigh and moan, or they give up and just pound their way to their own pleasure, cos frankly it’s all too hard to figure out and we aren't telling them.

We aren't telling them.

Last night, my lover was so so grateful for a small act; me simply telling and showing him what I needed, and as soon as he strayed from what worked, gently correcting; ‘not like that, please, like this.’ He was an eager and attentive student of my body. What’s not to love about that?!

I’m about to hold a workshop helping women dive into their authentic power, and it strikes me every time I run a Heart of the Huntress retreat that getting our needs met is a huge part of women being powerful in the world. And for a million reasons, many (if not most) women feel like they have no voice. It feels impossible to say anything. Whether it is in bed or in a job or a relationship. Not like that, like this. This works for me. I need. We can be paralysed in so many situations because from some young age we have been taught that it is not safe to have needs, let alone express them.

I need.

Neediness has become a swear word, where for me, needs are just that. Needs. Not optional extras, not fringe benefits. They are needs. We have bodies that need to be touched the right way, and when they are we flower and bloom into ecstasy, which our lovers will adore and want more of. If they're actual lovers, that is. We need intimacy and love and connection, we need to feel nourished and fulfilled for ourselves in our lives, not just in service to everyone else. We need to have parts of our lives just for us, where we come first.

We come first. Pun intended.

And hopefully second, third, fourth and fifth.

This didn’t come naturally to me, by the way. Speaking my needs in sex. I worked on this over decades, and it was often excruciatingly difficult. First saying one thing. Just one thing that I wanted. Then two things. It was so hard to speak for a very long time. But if you too are on that path, my fine sister (or brother), I encourage you to persevere. Sacred sexuality workshops can be a great place to explore your needs and desires in a safely held environment. (And of course, be discerning, ask for recommendations from friends, and above all trust your instincts. These can be dangerous waters.) Perservere. It’s worth the effort.

Desire is sexy. Sexual energy is life force in motion. Our bodies are designed to hold it and channel it and through this kundalini unfurling our awareness will expand into states of bliss. If we are to get the most out of this miracle of a creation we call a body, a bit of gentle guidance to the person in our bed makes all the difference.

And if you are a lover of women, and the woman you are with isn't speaking up, you can invite her to do so. Say, 'Show me how you do it. Show me how you touch yourself.'

It is such a simple thing, but it can unlock so much. Show me. It says: I am interested, I am curious, I want to know. I will pay attention. Your body is divine and special to me and I want to know how to please you. Show me. Tell me.

Sometimes women are shy at first but with encouragement they can be coaxed into revealing what works for them, especially if you keep asking... like this? Women will often deflect out of habit; don't worry about me, I'm fine, or (for many of us a secret fear)- it'll take too long. But persistence pays off and once she realises that you really do want to know, and you show her that you have heard her by doing things the way she has communicated, and that she is allowed to enjoy this too, and that you don't mind taking some time for her, everything can open up into a whole new realm of shared bliss.

So let's all speak up!
I’m sitting in a cafe with a smile on my face and a delicious humming in my body, knowing that an experience that could have been a total disaster was a beautiful dance of mutual sexual magic. I may never see him again, but I know he is going to be spreading the joy from our encounter for the rest of his life. And today, I am a well fucked woman.

PS.
I'm running a 7 day retreat exploring this and other material using 5rhythms dance meditation, archery, and a whole host of awesome tools. It's on the south coast of NSW, 8th - 14th May 2021. It's called Women, Unchained.

Here's the link to check it out on this website if you're called.
​https://www.wildheart.life/women-unchained.html

Big love
G

​Summer drops like a flat heavy hand. I'm not sure if I'm gasping from the heat or because it's just hard to push through walls right now, of any kind. Humidity a wet fist squeezing my heart.

I think I'm a wee bit depressed. Not 'can't get out of bed' or 'where's the door' or 'woe is me'... this is more of a low grade existential hum, studded with stones. I just... can't be bothered.

I'm so used to rivers of joy winding through me, no matter what is going on, that this has taken me a bit by surprise. I haven't been writing, haven't been making music. And for those of you who know me, this one's a biggie... I haven't had any lovers. Not for lack of availability... I just...
Can't be bothered.

It's like a cosmic meh has settled into the spaces between my cells. Some godlike teenager has possessed my psyche, sulky and irritable, rolling its eyes and lurking sneaky-smart, looking for the moment when mum and dad aren't watching so it can disappear into its starry room and watch mindless crap on the universal internet.

There's a gorgeous intelligence at work in humanity, dancing. I watch myself doing the things that move me out of stagnation, because in nature, anything that stagnates, dies. I know this, and my survival instincts are strong, keep me Human, but these times are so strange, it's like I'm looking through lenses and someone's switched the colour spectrum, not much, but enough to keep me off balance. The landscape is different in here now. I'm questioning everything, tracking the cluster of feelings and thoughts and sensations loosely arranged into and through a body, this phenomenon called Gina.

I've realised some things.

I'm an introvert by nature, but I constantly throw myself into the middle of groups to keep me from floating away. I use extroversion as a survival mechanism. And without the constant call to engage and meet the need of a group that comes with teaching, facilitation, running classes and retreats and workshops and camps, there hasn't been the call to arms to keep me connected to people. I've kinda... drifted. The natural introvert that I am has nothing to keep it in check. It's very very easy for me to be alone, which scares me a little, because some of the ropes tethering me to people are feeling thin. I could become a wilderness version of the crazy cat lady, a hermit living in the bush, talking to the birds and clouds.

A couple of nights ago I caught up with an ex, one with whom I can be completely vulnerable. The love is still all there, so it's hard, real-time, for both of us, but we're finding our way in friendship and part of that is that whenever we get together we dive right back into a connected, delicious relationship of honesty and vulnerability. Capital R Reality, no matter how painful. Which for me is so good it hurts.

I started talking about my experience in life right now, and in the reflection of that conversation, in the compassion of another human heart, deeply listening without judging (or managing whatever judgement was arising, he's great like that) realised how far I've floated, in this year of social distancing, and how much our human connections reaffirm our identities, and without human contact, a different shape can arise in us. I see that we constantly correct our course, mostly instinctively, choosing the people and situations around us to bring us balance. It was so good to let the strange energy of formlessness arise and be witnessed so I could trace the shape of this part of myself in the world and in that mapping, transform the edges of it. Scientists have been saying it for ever. When something is observed, it changes.

I also see that this last six months has been the balancing comedown from the incredible creative explosion of the first part of last year, when I was recording my album. When I allowed myself to fully let go of all responsibility and blaze with pure creativity, fuelled by probably the most intense sexual affair of my life, sex and music intertwined, fizzing and vital and multidimensional, tapped into what felt like the main vein of god. Drinking from it like a greedy child, alight with pure vision. Music dancing me, effortless. Energy braiding me earth to heavens, body to heart to spirit, life to poetry to music to love to comets to an ocean of intensity, electric rain in my eyes. Insights flowering minute to minute. I know I can't live there forever, and the return hurts, there's a grief in coming back to mundane consciousness. I know why creatives can go a little (or a lot) insane. It's pretty big out there, and there are lots of stars.

The human heart thinks in metaphors. I see elegant patterns everywhere. It's like watching a seabird lifted by invisible eddies around high ocean cliffs. If you stare long enough, you can see the shape of the wind, traced by the wings of the bird.

Watching, noticing. Patterns. Chaos, upheaval, a change in perceived freedom. Last year, the many years before... I skipped through a life of travel, facilitation, running classes and workshops, adventures... all the hubris and privilege of a first world existence. The privilege of resources, enough to enable me to follow my desires. What they were is irrelevant. I danced my passions because I've been born in a healthy body in a wealthy nation to a family who love me, where all my needs are met. Riches.

And now, the cosmic teenager in me is having a tantrum, because I can't do those things any more in that way. And around me, the world of humans is struggling the way species do when their environment is under pressure. When their resources are under pressure. It's all very well to be in love in peacetime. Holiday affairs are blissful things, because they aren't real. It isn't until you get home and the every day reality of 'who takes out the garbage' and 'who has to work to pay the rent' and 'how do we manage this illness' and 'I feel like you're not listening' and 'why can't you meet me' kicks in that you either find the will to do the work or you bail.

Our culture, our modern first world existence, has given us a million opportunities to bail, when something feels hard. And now those options have dwindled, and we're faced globally with the capital R Reality of the realisation that holy shit, there is nowhere to hide, and we have to do the work. We can't leave this relationship, because it's with ourselves, with our planet, all the places we've distracted ourselves so as not to feel.

I love the genius of this. It feels kinda horrible at times but how amazing, it's like big mama Gaia has just sent us all to our rooms to have a good long think about things. And much as we can point the finger and throw blame around like dogshit into a fan, we can't change some fundamental truths and they hurt and are scary and we have to find ways to deal with them.

So although I'm a bit depressed, I'm not worried about myself. Curious, perhaps. I'm watching, and consciously putting myself back into situations where I have to reach through, find my humanity, engage. This is the first thing I've written in months and I feel rusty and awkward but I can see where the words are hiding and begin to coax them out. I'm facilitating Survival Quests and Vision Quests. I met with Tank a week ago to talk about launching the Gigi and Lovetank album, and I'm excited, we've got a precisely calendared schedule of staggered releases of singles, online performances, video clips... he's mentoring me through the whole thing with the benefit of a couple of decades in the music biz. I'm super grateful. I've just had a romp with a new lover, and it's like slipping into a delicious warm bath, remembering that dance, skin to lips to fire. I'm choosing vitality. Eating better. Waking up again. Choosing to move.

I'm remembering how to be alive.

And I'm naming all this because there's a thread running through the conversations I am having. Many of my friends are struggling in ways they never have before. So if that's you, if you're feeling a little lost or hopeless or flat or the cosmic teenager with the bad haircut and ripped tshirt with MEH plastered across the front has taken up residence somewhere in your emotional house, I see you.

I see you, and I love you.

I read once of a whale, a hybrid between a blue whale and a fin whale. It was dubbed the loneliest whale in the world because it swims the oceans, singing into the deep indigo wilds, and no other whale answers because no other whale has the vocal chords to produce the same song. It’s the only one of its kind.
​
Whenever I tell this story it seems that whale’s song strikes some tuning fork inside a human heart, underneath our masks and myths, to the place where we relate, we relate. We call it the loneliest whale in the world because on some level it is how so many people feel. Endlessly calling, never met.

I think that many (most) people have a sense of being so different they can never be understood, not truly. The feeling of separation is inevitable; if I have a body, there is a me and a you, and there is space in between, the ocean between us. We are consciousness wrapped in flesh, swimming together, singing our songs with brash courage, with shy hope, with tender affection, with cataclysmic rage. Singing all our colours in the yearning hope that another will sing back, the one who shouts in recognition… It’s you! I’ve been looking for you! Here you are! Daring to hope that there is one who mirrors our sweet music. But of course no-one can, not really, we can only sing our own liquid notes, our own perfect melody, unique and terrible. So at a deep level we relate to the loneliness of that whale, the only one of its kind. Perhaps that whale isn’t lonely at all, but to us, this seems impossible, so perfectly do our own hearts echo its music.

And I wonder.

What if this miracle of a planet, our home, is another huge creature, swimming through space? What if we are cells in the vast body of a being so huge we cannot begin to comprehend the interconnection of life that we take for granted, life that supports us: oxygen to nutrients to muscle to water to life to death to decomposition to regeneration. What if we are fleas on the back of an elephant, making meaning of the hairs we see, calling them trees and thinking we are kings of all creation because we can hop through the forest like rampant gods.

And I wonder.

Does Gaia, an entire living creature hanging in space, call out into the abyss like that whale, never to hear anything back from the void? It is such an anathema, to our human psyches, for there to be only one of any life form. We live and sing and dance and kill and take and share and create and war and destroy and build and construct citadels of beauty and devastation on the back of this incredible creature, but how often do we see that she is truly alive? Does she sing, this living blue spaceship, hurtling through time and the endless breath of velvet dark? Does she sing for a mate who will never come?

And I wonder.

Does she also sing to us constantly, crooning her eternal love song, those endless infinite murmurings that show a newborn how to suckle, a spider to spin, a bird to weave a nest, a nestling to launch for the first time from a high branch, opening cunning hollow-boned wings designed to trap the breeze and call it tamed? All living things bar us listen. All living things bar us know their place in Her.