I see you, Fury, my much maligned mistress, lascivious and lean, hungry as a panther, stalking from the shadows with your rings carved from old bones.

Waking in your embrace brings the blood to my face, the heat to my eyes. I loose like some dark arrow into this painted day with its glorious gilded waterfalls of light limning wave and hair alike. I long to snap these beams into shards of wicked razor and with them, carve myself to the core, but I cannot, so instead I dance, my breath hot and red in my mouth, and with each step I fall deeper into the inky velvet cave of your heart; Fury, my mistress, my lover.

Why are we so afraid of you? I know why, because you’ll burn the whole house down and laugh as you flick the match. Reason has no hold on you, you can’t be talked from the ledge once your bare feet slice along its arrogant blade.

When you dance with me, I do not feel the cuts.
I feel only the power of the crimson river, melting the lead from my limbs into mercury and light. You are the wings at my heels, stretching my stride. You chew away dead and dying swamp-rot so from the jagged black stumps of frostbitten bone something new may grow.

Or not, and I’ll be playing the piano with one less finger.

But you don’t care, because either way there is change, either way I have to learn some new dance step, and that is your job, to fling me from my trajectory, from the silk-safe bosom of complacency. Do or die, you whisper in my ear like some fell angel, and your fire in my veins reminds me that I love life with a deep and devoted passion, your tigress tongue rips my cheek with a fetid kiss and spurs me on and in and through.

You demand that I move, and so move I must, carried by the wave of you, the cresting, hideous wall of greasy green that pulls back from wet sand and black-toothed rock, curling me up and over until I finally spear down into the dark and the full crushing force of you drives all the air from my lungs, snapping limbs, tearing flesh, piling tonnes of weight until I drown in the delicious tide, you fill my lungs, my heart, my belly.

You sanctify all my tears.

When the wave of you subsides I am a puling mess, all my strivings crushed to dust, all dignity gone, curled like a cicada’s discarded husk on a beach awash with weed, trembling and weak and grateful to move at all.

You stand over me, salt-perfumed, careless, akimbo, silhouetted against the sun. I see each individual grain of sand on your feet, reflecting light like tiny diamonds.

And then you leave as suddenly as you arrived, slinging over your shoulder all my drunken tales, taking out the trash, leaving me spent and bereft and draped in wonder. My skin is soft and new and my eyes fill with a timeless sunshine that does not burn, but simply sighs that this day, at least, right now,
​
I am alive.

 
​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.-

Trigger warning. This is a candid and honest reflection on life, including recreational drug use, in the Sydney club scene in the 90's. If you're feeling like getting judgy, do yourself a favour and don't read it. 

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.

​In the last two days, I've spent time with two of my oldest friends, my nearest and dearest.
You know the ones... if you're my age, they're the folk with whom you don't measure time in hours or days or even years, you measure in the whale-deep roll of decades. The wobbling flip of life cycles. Numbers of marriages, qualities of deaths. The friends who are woven into the rich tapestry of your history, where that history in itself is a tangible container, one you drink from together, holding the glass to the light and admiring kaleidoscopic colours as they refract around the warm room of your life. The people who have held your skins as you've shed them, have kissed the new flesh as it emerged, and you've all survived, you're still in it together. Those friends. The ones you tell the truth to, all the way through, because there is no other way with you.

As is the way with these meetings, we cover a lot of ground. Slowdance our way through echoing chasms of silence, the easy kind, shoulders touching, nothing needing to be said, the warmth of body contact says it all. Much laughter. Some tears. HiStory. HerStory.

And of course we wander from the personal to the global. Both of them ask me pretty much the same question.

'What do you think is going on in the world right now? What's your take?'
Ah. That.

There are so many layers to this. Tragic, amazing, terrible, wonderful layers. And as always, I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that it is true for me.
For me, this is about Capital R reality. The reality that you know, deep in your guts. The voice that whispers that you should cross the road now, there's something hinky down that alley. The creature flick eared in your belly who urges, now, here, no, yes.

Our animal instincts are attuned to currents we cannot see, the currents of wind and wave, and we are all connected, so we tap into the human currents like a faint radio station we nearly tune out, but the static crackles uneasily through our dreams and we make shapes in the mist, dismiss them in the light, but deep down we know, we know. We know the thing we are avoiding. We know its shape in our bones. And it is too awful to contemplate, so we find a million distractions, skitter off the skin of the thing.

What I see is that for a very rare time in human history, an entire species is facing the same thing, all at once, and has the awareness to know it, track it, map it, make meaning of it... as it happens. This is incredible. Because the thing we are facing is ultimately immutable.

Death.

The death of everything we have come to take for granted. Existing political structures, economic structures, social structures, medical models, ways of life. The death of our comfortable relationship with this blue jewel of a planet; our home. Death in the oceans, death of ecosystems. Death of food supply chains, of the cleanliness of water. Death of our privilege. Death of comfort. Death of hope, if hope is measured by the idea that we can continue to blithely travel along leaving seared footprints of ash and bone, not changing our attitudes as the mother of all hurricanes comes to sweep a wall of water over our petty structures of hubris and control. Clinging to habits and ideologies, arguing over whether we are being manipulated by shadowy forces, whether a microbe was engineered, what's the agenda, who's to blame, oh my.

These are ripples on the surface.

Capital R Reality, for me, is the ocean itself.

Capital R Reality.
There are over 7 billion of us on a planet that can viably support half that number, living the way we do. It took 123 years to grow from 1 billion to 2 billion, and only 33 years to get to three.
For me, Capital R Reality is that everything that we take for granted is ending. There are too many of us. The movement toward homeostasis is a constant force in biology and chemistry. A closed system will always equalise. Our planet is a closed system. The pressures we are placing on it have now moved to the point where we are in wild exponential curves, chaos equations, tipping points and cascade reactions. And when this happens., the fractures and faultlines open up, often all at once. Events change very fast. Tomorrow is no longer like today.

Tomorrow is no longer like today.

Whether it's floods or bushfires, despots or democrats, social movements or conspiracies, it's irrelevant whether some human force did or did not do a thing that resulted in a catalyst for mass upheaval. We are all the catalyst. There are too many of us. And while our attention is swept into the latest soundbytes of disaster, we are caught once again in the crosschop on the surface, in the drama, in the illusion of control, and we miss the siren song of the ocean within which we swim.

There are simply too many of us, consuming out of balance.

The thing that I'm seeing and feeling in the conversations I'm having is that deep down, we know. The wolf is howling through the forests of our hearts. We mourn. We know our comfortable lives are ending. The tracks have switched and there aren’t any road signs apart from an unhelpful dashboard flashing with warning lights.

We’re scratchy and irritable and anxious and depressed at the latest restriction, urgently scrolling the newsfeeds, imbibing daily cocktails of fear with no release, wondering why we aren't coping. Grief demands to be felt and the size of this truth is so huge our consciousness bounces and ricochets off it, finding tiny externals to fixate on, be outraged by.

And yet, way down in the roots and earth of us, the wolf howls that the forest is ending.

For those of us who have lived lives of privilege, we are seeing those gilded pages tarnish and tear. It's sinking in. The old world is dying. And we have no idea what the new one will look like.

We all have our ways of processing, of making sense of fundamentally terrifying times. All of these movements can be seen as flailing against the dark. Which is beautiful, the ways we face the one thing we cannot evade or escape, Death, our shadow dance partner, waltzing just behind us with a rose between his teeth.

How do we move from despair to hope? How do we not drown in that ocean?
How do I face the unfaceable? Speak the unspeakable? How do I dance with death?

To do this, I need skills to feel what is going on in my body. Tools to process and digest the waves of feeling. I need to move my body, consciously, with presence. Find a language for grief, find people with whom to grieve, to be held, to bare my soul as I face the shadow on the wall, my oldest friend, my newest one. The one with the dark face. The black night. The welcoming abyss. The void from which we all come and to which we return. The breath before the thought. The delicate edge of the first fingerprint.

For me it's extra personal. Having my three year old daughter die in my arms pressed me right into Death's skeletal embrace. I've been tangoing with the old bastard for ten years now, since being diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with her and being told I had to terminate the pregnancy or I'd die. Making life and death decisions for that whole pregnancy. Having chemo while pregnant. Then losing her three years later to cancer... Death took a number and in the end it was hers.

​And now I am grateful that I have danced with that cheap suited shyster of clacking bones for so many years. I have been trained to let go. And so as I feel the wave looming, the one that washes me away, washes all of us onto some strange new island as yet unmapped, uncharted... I feel some faint stirrings of despair, but mostly I feel a sense of adventure. 

If I can truly let myself perceive Capital R Reality, face the dragon in its flaming molten maw, stand firm as my eyes and heart are seared by visions of what my bones know to be true; after the grief and panic have been digested... my despair turns to action.

The struggle against Capital R Reality is the torment. Once I accept it, now I can make choices, real, empowered choices. Choices to Rewild myself, my community, my family. Choices to wean from my addictions to culture and comfort and entitlement. Choices to upskill my primitive skills, ancient social technologies, nature connection. These may not be the choices I want, Life may not give me what I like, but I still have choice, and with choice comes movement and to avoid despair we must move. Anything that stagnates in nature, dies.

For me, we are now in one of the movies we've been making for decades, fifteen bucks and a two hour adrenaline rush, training us for this time. How do I want to be? Do I want the movie to happen to me or do I want to be the heroine? Sit and do nothing with my fingers in my ears or start to actually prepare for transition times? Bitch and moan about whose fault it all is or create community that has tools to move into a new reality? Turn my dreaming function toward a world where we can't take anything for granted, so how do I re-educate, learn new skills of survival? How do I help those younger than me transition? How do I take care of my elders?

Seven billion sentient organisms are facing the same thing, all at once, with varying levels of awareness. And much as we see when we face our own personal death, some people go to meet it open eyed, others kick and scream right to the moment that final kiss steals the last sweet breath from warm lungs. Many many many people find god (little g... insert your word for 'that which is greater than us') as they face death. And now we are all here facing it together.
On this planet, right now, an entire species is coming hard against the glass of faith and belief and trust and meaning. Some react with fear and rage. Normal. Some with despair. Normal. All part of what we go through in our layers of denial. 

What I'm seeing is that once I actually let the knowledge of deepest truths rise up from the depths to become known and embodied, I call on my strengths, passions, strategies, tools, art, song, skills, service. I discover that I am resourced, that once I stop trying to make what I see fit into the box that I so desperately want to be true, and see what is actually there, there is a sense of relief. 

Capital R Reality.

And in that I move with the breathtaking realisation that each thing I do now may not have a tomorrow, so I must be all the way present for it right now. Digest my fear so I live in wonder at the beauty of this day, this breath, this cuppa with this friend. If I can't count on tomorrow I can sure as hell be here for today. And in that presence, that wonder, I can make healthy choices to prepare for a new world, open hearted, knowing I will die one day, and not knowing what that day will be.

This is my Capital R Reality. I'm not saying it's true, but it's true for me. I'm dancing in hope and grief and a sense of wonder at the beauty of humans, falling until we fly. I'm making a stand for this breath, and this love, and this, and this.

Now.
Now.
Now.


As always, feel free to share. ​

Every morning the Muse wakes me at 430am. No matter what time I sleep, at 430am I am suddenly and ferociously awake. I get up to write songs. Living on this wild and empty mountain, my fingers are often too cold to play at that time, so I stumble out to have a pee under an icy moon, say hi to the roos and deer and wombats, make a chai and fumble with instruments until I warm up.
I actually see Muse for the first time not long after Vision Quest, when I am curled into blessed comfort and clean sheets in the arms of my lover, who I haven’t seen for weeks. The night is cold, the bed warm, his arms and skin warmer still. The air is so still I can hear the scrit scrit of tiny creatures nesting in the ceiling. We haven’t slept til after midnight and now it’s 430am and I’m all the way awake.

Muse has been kicking me out of bed to write music every morning for weeks now. I can almost hear her tapping her feet impatiently this morning.
I groan. And bargain.
‘Really? Can I have a morning off? Look, here's this gorgeous man all naked n stuff and he’s going to cuddle me all morning and make me a cup of tea in bed and probably breakfast and then ravish me again, can we do this at, I don’t know… 9am?’

Then I see her. I don’t ‘see’ often; just glimpses when the veils lift, but this vision is clear as a shout.

She’s sitting naked on a rock. She looks nothing like any Muse I would make up. The one I’d create would be a jet-locked, leather-clad warrior poet. This one is leonine, with a cascading mane of amber and gold, skin the colour of melted honey and the perfect legs of a hundred metre sprinter. She’s sitting on a rock playing a lyre. A fucking lyre. She glows like she’s lit with some inner fire. She is such a cliche of Greek Goddess that I instantly believe her. She doesn’t even look at me, just sits there, playing the damned lyre. What fills me is the scent of a bored yawn and a casual flick of attention, which stings. The disdain of a sleek cat, playing with prey.

She doesn’t say anything, but I hear it anyway.
’I’m here. Where are you?’

I don’t know which facet of the nine Muses she is, but when a goddess tells you to do something, you do it, in case she doesn’t come back.

I get up.

No cuddles, no tea in bed, no lazy warm morning of new-caught sunlight and sleepy chitchat, just cold fingers and hushed picking into the dawn and another song falls out some like unlit diamond and I shine a torch onto it and it blazes.
Thank you, Muse. By all that is holy, thank you and thank you. I will sacrifice goats at the altar of your regard every day, just keep me in your prickling lights.
In Vision Quest last month I was thoroughly slapped by that which is greater than me. Call it what you will… creator, life, gaia, essence… call it fantasy if you like, I don’t care.

I was shown the pathways whereby I don’t bring my creations fully into the world. I have four books unpublished, so many songs and pieces of music unheard, unsung, I post my writings on Facebook where they will be read by a couple of hundred people and then lost in the digital timelines… I don’t show all the way up. I don’t send my offerings to fly free. I have been hiding.

On the last evening, after four days solo in the wilderness with my darkness and demons, shivering and wet and cold on an endless, interminable, six degree night while a thunderstorm threw branches around like confetti, I was scolded like the infant I am. I saw myself wrapped around glowing eggs in a dark cave, jealously guarding them from others.

Scolded like a child.
’You think all these gifts are for YOU? For YOUR pleasure?’

Err.. Yes. I did think that.

I’ve been hoarding my creations, ignoring all the nudges, invitations, encouragements from so many different places. And now, unceremoniously, I’ve been booted firmly up the arse to set them free.
​