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.
​

​Anniversaries get me every time. There's something in my musk animal centre; wolf-wise parts of me track the length of days, even when the human skin I wear is numbed to that knowledge by soft beds and hard deadlines. The turning of the earth, the pull of the moon, the harbinger winds still register, way down deep where my fur is soft and my claws are sharp. I pant and count and wait with the endless patience of a hunter. Hunting myself, if only I knew it.

Today I feel insane, all out of whack, my skin too thin, eyes too hot, every noise a prickle, every puff of air a howl. Like all the dials are turned up too high. I can't find the switches and the feeling is almost panic, what if I get stuck like this when the wind changes. Loki's laughing from the dark corners of forest as I dance the helpless dance of the red soul shoes, unable to stop until my heart is in ribbons. Insane.

I'm prepping for a Vision Quest in a week, have been tilling and kneading at the secret soil of myself, digging my fingers into rich loam, snagging my nails on sharp rocks and heavy roots. Blood blesses the dirt of me, this is the preparation, unearthing. This is good magic, the best. It hurts as splinters do when you press on them, before they pop out in a rush of softened wood and ooze. Before the wound runs clean.

Fasting, questioning, what is who am where and how and when and oh and deeper and I'm following a tune I can't quite catch but it's lodged in the back of my eyes like a rusty hook, a maddening whistle, I track and trace but it's elusive, leading me down and in and it's muddy in here, there's barbed wire in tangles. All the creatures I avoid coil and gaze, we're waiting, we always have been. Quest brings them up, its siren ceremony is the scent of raw meat, the acrid tang of spilled blood, maddening, luring them to where I can finally see them if I want to. Make friends. Sing. Slay. Soften.

Should I want to.

I do. I don't.

Fisherwoman that I still am, gnarled and salt scarred, casting filigree nets into ceaseless tides, yes, still casting... but I've been less diligent, less vigilant of late. Tired, I suppose. There's only so much awareness you can blaze before it burns your own eyes to squinting wrecks. And grieving takes so very much awareness.
I know I've earned the rest, like a week bingewatching Netfflix after teaching months of back to back programmes. Lights switched off, nobody's home, crap films and chocolate and late night fantasies that are nobody's business but mine.

I've grieved for six and a half years now. Her birthday is close. Solstice, the shortest day. Anniversaries stir the wolf hairs at the back of my neck. We were in the hospital now, back then, the antiseptic stink of that groundhog hell, before we knew how bad it was. When there was still hope. When there was a future with her joyous laugh pealing though it. When I was still a mother.

Grief, my old friend, today you have me python-style, wrapped around my neck, my ribs, and you squeeze and squeeze. I know I will never be done with you but plaintive, I sometimes wish it. That's the weary, right there.

I miss her.

Her half sister runs through this gorgeous field, her face splashed with sunshine and promises. The shape of her head is Blaise's, even if her hair is the wrong colour, thank goodness. Seeing her day in day out, her face open, her heart blessedly unmarred, secure and vital and beautiful, chattering, learning all the words, sharing all her food, always... is bringing up the ghosts.

Ghost. My own beautiful ghost.

The little one gives me a cuddle today when I cry.

'Sad?' she says, concerned, her two year old voice making the word like she's proud she knows it.

'Sad' I say. She pulls a mock-sad face. She doesn't look like Blaise but she does, and the wolf mama in me howls a little, every day, to see her. There's that rusty fish hook, lodged in my heart now, and I can never pull it out, it's the shape of my love, and my pain, and my dedication, and my devotion. And my grief, let's call it what it is. My old friend.

Questing in a week, and already it's doing what Quest is supposed to do, it's bringing up the bones. I'm a little afraid of how intense it will be, four days and nights in the wilderness alone with her ghost for company. I called her in, in my first Quest, over a decade ago. She told me her true name and I sang it into the abyss and she sang back and then she came, for real, in the flesh, her spark landing in my body less than four weeks later. She found me in that first Quest and now she’s dancing me into this one, tugging at my hand, come ON, I want to TALK to you.

I'm looking forward to it.

This pain, this rawness, this reminds me how much I love her. How much she is woven into every cell in me, the fabric of my being, the cloth of my love is cut with scissors her starfish hands can no longer wield, long gone to ash. My tears belong to her.

I know I will never be done grieving, but today I wish I was.

No.
I don't.

This is the shape of my love for her. I never want to forget it. I'm tracing its frayed edges and forgotten hollows with fingers callused from guitar strings and hands striped with fire scars.

Even through my scars I can still feel her.
​
She never left.

​I don't know if it helps, but I'm making a big pot of tea. It's quite strong, real leaves, cos that's how I was brought up. I've got a couple of packs of virtual timtams that I wrestled someone for in the shopping isles... everyone else was going for the toilet paper, but just wait, I'll be able to trade later, a timtam for a roll. Let’s crack one of them open now though.

So here's your cuppa, I made the cup with my hands from clay I collected out of the ground, and I baked the clay in the campfire and glazed it with milk, it's rustic looking and it still smells a bit like bushsmoke, but the tea is hot and good.

And now you have your tea, and I have mine, can we go out to sit and look at stars? It's a beautiful night, the air is crisp but not too cold. The milky way is a giant galloping dragon running from one end of the sky to the other. We don't have to talk, we don't have to say anything at all.

I'm leaning a little against you, our shoulders are touching. I sip my tea. You sip yours. On the other side of you is another one of us, and on the other side of me. Here we all are. Just sitting in the Quiet, in the deep stillness, the space between breaths. Where there is nothing to do, nowhere to be.

The tea is good, it's hot and I can taste the tannins. The cup is rough and comforting in my hand. An owl cuts a dark shape into the bowl of stars, silent as it hunts. Far off we can hear waves, or is it wind?

In this moment, in this endless moment, words want to pass my lips but I don't speak. I want to tell you I love you, but I don't need to. It's all there in the simple pressure of your shoulder, in the soft sounds of sip and sigh, in our deepening breaths, in the velvet kiss of night.

​There is nothing to say. The stars say it all.

This was written for the women who have just finished a 6 day Heart of the Huntress 5rhythms immersion... but if I’m honest it is also a letter of reminder to myself, as I grow and dance and die and do it all again, because I tend to teach what I need to learn.

We are mammals. Mammals need touch and connection. We need community to do this work. Together. So as you dance your own unique path, keep sharing with each other... the moments you have said no and yes, the almost inevitable contraction after the expansion, the feelings of wistful yearning to be back in connected family and the often harsh realisation that finding these connections can be challenging out in the greater world. But we have each other, we can't undance the dances we have done together.

As one Huntress put it, sometimes it can feel easier to be in blindness; ignorance is bliss. Unconsciously moving through our habits, falling into our stories which are safe and known.

But as we move into consciously getting our needs met, shifting our patterns, taking responsibility for our choices and their consequences, the grief and even rage can be overwhelming. The whole process can feel insurmountable. The realisation that I got myself here and now there are so many steps to get myself through this to more fertile country.

For me though, it's useful to remember that awareness is a solvent. By simply being aware of the patterns, our organism naturally moves towards a new way. Our psyche throws off everything in the way. It's like pulling out splinters that have been deeply embedded for years or even decades. The poison and inflammation is going to release as well. It may hurt or be uncomfortable. Old stuck feelings may surface as the poison releases. This is the icky stuff that has stopped us going into this territory for so long.

Emotions are energy in motion. They want to move. So move, my loves, dance where you can, dance what is true, turn your suffering into art. As one Huntress showed us, sing your heart out. Keep moving, because in nature anything that stagnates, dies. Give your stories shapes, and know that they those stories are not true, they just need to be heard. Dance and dance some more. Dance the poison out.

If you are having a crap day, then wallow ON PURPOSE. Eat all the shit food, watch mindless drivel on Netflix, feel sorry for yourself, but do it with panache, do it like it's a career, with a flourish and a pirouette and a bow to yourself as you bellyflop into the mud. And as you watch this story having PERMISSION to exist because you are holding it now instead of making it wrong, start to notice the deeper stories of your own wisening child.

And ask.... what is happening here and what is it teaching me? What is it teaching me about my deeper patterns? About my life? About my habits? About the nature of existence? Be fascinated. Be your own anthropology experiment. And be kind. Be kind. Be kind.

Above all, FORGIVE YOURSELF! Nobody changes all at once. You are amazing for even looking. We can only eat the elephant one bite at a time. We can only dance the step that is in front of us. So if you can, let the arrow of your intent fly and LET GO THE OUTCOME. You cannot know where it will land. Have faith in every single step you have ever made, even the ones that feel like mistakes, because nothing is wasted and every single thing that happens to us is a gift. Every single step was necessary to get you right to this moment. So instead of contracting against the onslaught, take a breath, curl up to let the wave take you until you rise again into the foam and as you witness yourself, keep asking... What is the gift?

Growing hurts. Loving hurts. If we lean into the pain, lean into the sharp places, dance and move and love with our whole hearts, we are bigger than those feelings, we are designed to feel it all, it is how we know we are truly alive. We are Mountain Mama with roots buried deep into the earth, listening to her oldest stories. We are the high cloud, endlessly changing, never the wrong shape, and we are the sun, sometimes masked by the cloud but still radiant, still burning bright. The storm is the storm is the storm and the storm cannot help being a storm. It just is. Our true natures are not something we can alter, only remember, and when we truly let go into that, without trying to make them something that they are not, we can allow all our colours to shine, even the ones we judge as wrong.

No colour can ever be wrong. Especially not yours.

So, my loves, as you integrate back into your greater world, and the new space and shape of you rubs against the shape your Life made around you, keep moving what is true, from this breath to this, to this; shape after shape in the biggest dance, where control is an illusion and we remember that we are made of stars.
​
Big love
Gina

​In Australia, today is Invasion Day, or Survival Day... and I want to say sorry. Sorry for my ancestors, sorry for my government. I am sorry for my white privilege, for all the places I simply cannot understand, because I view the world through the lens of my own privileged upbringing. I am sorry that all over the world there are First Nations people who are displaced, who have had their children stolen, their oral traditions broken, their songlines drowned and destroyed by the stomp of booted feet where before those songlines were danced with lightfoot grace.
I am sorry that even in writing this post I am blind and deaf and clumsy, like Shrek at a tea party, smashing all the china with the best intentions of just pouring someone a cuppa. I cannot truly understand and I am sorry for that, that my heart cannot truly know the pain in the shards of anguish cutting the brothers and sisters I have never met to the bone.
I am sorry that the invisible webs of violence still exist, in my attitudes, in those around me, in the systems that well meaning people use to 'fix' an untenable situation and just make it ten thousand times worse. I am sorry that I walk on land that covers pyramids of bones, that my happiness comes on the backs of displaced and dispossessed and massacred people.
I ran an event last Friday night and in my heartfelt (but ultimately ignorant) acknowledgment of the original Gadigal custodians of the land, the floor upon which we danced, I also acknowledged that there is a tension in me, shame at the actions of my ancestors, in my own habitual and cultural attitudes.
Shame that I cannot change the past, and the tendency that I, that white people, can ‘do’ the acknowledgment without feeling the true cost, without feeling our own discomfort at what it really means. We can pat ourselves on the back, tick the box, yes I said the words, I am not one of the invaders, I am making reparations, all the while wallpapering over the squirm in our guts with our attempts at worthiness.
For myself, in my heart…. I call bullshit.
I cannot make reparations. How can I repair genocide? How can I mitigate the annihilation of a culture that has caretaken this country with grace and wisdom for 80 000 years? How can I meaningfully say sorry for the loss of the songs, art, the ceremonies, the history, the wisdom? It is on par with the library of Alexandria being burned. It is worse. It was deliberate. It still is.
So today, on Invasion Day, I want to acknowledge that I am a privileged white woman who walks barefoot through the blood of a culture that essentially died so that I may exist. I mourn its loss. I grieve the conversations I will not have, the things I now cannot learn, the connections unavailable to me, to those I love. I grieve the loss to the world of such a people, such incredible connection to all things. I grieve the richness that is lost, here in Gondwana and all over the world where First Nations peoples have been dispossessed and displaced and their cultures destroyed and their families massacred.
And now I am going to shut the fuck up, go sit outside with my butt in the dirt of this old old land, and I am going to listen really really hard to the grief songs from the indigenous ceremonies that are right now happening in parks and on beaches and in halls everywhere today. I am going to listen to the speeches and stories and the rage. And I am going to lay my head on the earth and thank the spirits of those who have died, those who still die, from suicide and addiction and essentially the broken heartedness that comes when someone steals the sun from the sky and the stars from the night and the animals who are your brothers and sisters and the trees that are your friends and kills your relatives over and over and says, ‘here; you can live in this concrete box now, and be grateful’.
With every exhalation I am going to say I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. And it will never be enough.
Gina

Oh dear. It’s another long one (though you’re used to that from me by now). It's a bit different from my usual postcard from the landscape of grief.

This is a post about skills for transition times. I’ve been asked what I mean by this phrase, quite a bit lately. It’s a good question, so if you’re up for a little journey, I’ll have a wee ramble. (And if it all sounds obnoxiously preachy just let me know in the comments and I’ll blush and delete.)

OK. To answer, I need to dive a bit into some of the stuff I’ve trained in and also teach. Primitive, ancestral skills of survival, hunter gatherer style.

Basically; if we were a mobile tribe moving through the landscape, hunting and gathering what we needed, making our tools; how would that look? What would we need to know?

The classic order taught in survival schools in the lineages I work with is this:
Shelter
Water
Fire
Food

Lack of shelter will kill us fastest, then water, fire, and lastly food. So if, say, I fell down a big mountain, got turned around and had to survive until I got myself out or was rescued, first I would make sure I had shelter, then find potable water, then sort out fire, then worry about food.

However, in my experience, in my observations of living things, I’d add something to this, an overarching tenet… that the actual number one rule of survival is this:

Conservation of energy.

Whether that energy comes from ingested calories or from the sun, it is the fuel for all movement, is a precious resource, and is the framework for all life’s myriad behaviours. Living things conserve energy because if they waste it they have to find more, somehow, and risk death or injury in the process. Living things only do things that work. There is no unnecessary action. Tom Brown says that an animal is an instrument played by the landscape, a quote I love.

We are the only living things I have observed that do not follow this rule, because since we first broke ground and planted crops and had surplus, we have had the ability to store that surplus, therefore have riches, and haven’t needed to follow this first law of conservation of energy. (There’s a whole side thread on haves and have nots and I’m going to leave that for now)

Humans splurge energy, and this one basic action has contributed hugely to the pickle we are now in.

We haven’t had to respect the environment to get our needs met because we have calories in the bank, and we change the environment to meet our needs to maintain those banks of calories.

We haven’t had to hold onto the skills of hunting and gathering, up close and personal, respecting the lives that we take because WE take the life, there is no remove, and it is like taking the life of a friend.

We have food stored. Someone else can get our calories for us.

We haven’t had to listen to the weather, preserve our oceans and forests, make friends with every living thing as a node on the web of life, where every action affects every other thing.

We haven’t needed to spend our energy maintaining these relationships and skills, so we’ve let them slide, cutting ourselves more and more off from the natural world until so much knowledge and wisdom has been lost, now we have forgotten those old ways, cannot survive this way; we simply don’t have the skill. Not until we reawaken, relearn, remember the wisdom in our DNA.

The thing I love about biological systems on this big beautiful jewel of a planet, is that there are feedback mechanisms that keep everything in balance. If a population of grasshoppers eats all the food in an area, and they cannot move somewhere else, they die, releasing the pressure from the area and the area regenerates. Simple, elegant.

Those times when the pressure in a system is highest, when things are moving from one state or phase to another, these are what I am referring to as transition times.

What feels true to me is that we are in transition times. I don’t know about you, but I feel it in my belly. It’s not about the scientific evidence or the deniers, it’s not about the handy sound bytes and social media memes… it’s slower than that in me. There is a deep wisdom in the animal centre of me, my lizard brainstem, the part of my wolf awareness that notices the changes in atmospheric pressure, counts the length of the days, tracks the dryness of the leaves, feels the silence of the hunting hawk. My senses are still active, even if I no longer have the sensitivity or handed-down teachings in stories and songs to put my finger on exactly what the information is telling me.

My intellectual self may hunt endlessly for evidence, but my instincts have a clear message, loud as a shout. They tell me that we are in transition times, when everything is about to change. A storm is coming. Is here.

Transitions take energy. When we move from one place or state to another, we have to rouse, to shift, to generate momentum away from the place where we have comfortable settled. Transitions are scary, because we are moving from the known, no matter how crappy it is, into the unknown, and humans don’t tend to like the unknown. We are pleasure seeking, pain avoiding, meaning making machines. We like to be able to plan the day, the week, the year and bundle it all up into a nice logical package that makes sense so we can understand it and therefore predict its trajectory.

Transitions are when we can no longer predict behaviours, because systems are moving into strange new forms. Terrain changes. Weather distorts. Landscape shifts. Rhythms stutter.

Now we get scared. And this is when our fault-lines reveal themselves.

Do I go into obfuscation and denial, stick my fingers in my ears, cover my eyes with my hands, lalalalala, it’s not happening? Like the little kid playing hide and seek who stands in the middle of the room with her eyes covered, thinking nobody can see her.

Do I go into rage and blame… it’s somebody’s fault, and they should fix it?

Do I go into despair and collapse… we’re all fucked, everything’s fucked and there’s nothing I can do because it is all just too big, too hard, my heart hurts too much? Overwhelm turns to paralysis and apathy. I give up.

In my experience of 30 odd years sitting with people as they go through emotional process I see that all of these are stages of dealing with transition, and all are relevant, like the stages of grief, and grief is a huge part of this. The size of our grief is the size of our love for that which has been lost. We are losing a familiar way of life. We are losing animals and plants we have known our whole lives. We are watching destruction and devastation of life on this planet that is our mother, our home. Acknowledging and managing grief is a big part of transition. If we are to move through transition times, naming these stages and understanding that this is part of the human psyche coping (or not coping) with transition is the first step to accumulating skills to be with these emotions.

It’s simple. Our world is changing, we’re scared, and we’re acting out. Cool, good to know! There are resources to teach us how to move through all these things.
In my experience, if we work on certain skills of resilience, a fourth way reveals itself, that helps with all the others. It isn’t about big gestures, sweeping changes. It’s about small steps of individual action.

How can I feel what I feel and still respond in a way that is useful?

It can be summed up thus…
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

For me, transition times are exciting, once I get over the 'o shit, everything is about to change' panic. Transitions are when things get interesting. When I get called to step out of my comfort zone. There's huge power for me in the moment when I let go of the reflexive need for control and start to respond to what is in front of me. There's a freedom in that. Transitions are when we grow, learn, transform. Where we discard the chrysalis of our old stories and flex those shiny new wings. Yes, it's painful. Growing is. It's also, in my experience, worth it.

Transition times teach us how to eat an elephant. They call for us to break the overwhelming call for global action into the little things, the really little things, the mundane tiny movements that break us free from the claw of despair.

If we can all do just one small thing, every day, those tiny things add up to bigger things. And more than that, we have changed our trajectory, we have broken our habit of relying on external authority and now we are on stepping stones where we are learning new skills, taking responsibility for ourselves. We are doing what all life is programmed to do; adapt or die. Without judgement, without a story… just adapting to the changing conditions. Every living thing does it. So can we.

We are so geared to demanding that our environment adapt to suit us, we have lost touch with the reality of nature connection. Capital R reality says that there are forces of wind and wave and weather that are quite simply bigger than us, and that we are at the mercy of, that we can’t just magic into the shapes we want. We’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, which is an invitation to change our moves.

How do we skill up to be with these changes? How do we eat the elephant?
One bite at a time.

We look to the little things, and we find the ones that we can start to do right now, today. Whether they are skills of resilience and emotional well being, physical skills of self sufficiency, skills of real community building and tribal support, survival skills for moving through the environment, skills for processing our emotions so we stop blaming everyone and everything and take responsibility for the stuff we can change, embodiment practices to make sure we are grounded in the real world, making things with our hands… all the little things. Just pick one thing, and do it.

One Small Thing, this crazywonderful group that’s seemingly sprung out of thin air, is just one hub to support this movement. It gives light and air to the simple wisdom seeded in the little things.

I wonder, if we see enough people doing these little things, maybe we’ll today have the courage to take our own first wobbling steps, gather our bundles, let our hands remember that they are born to be clever, be kind to our neighbours because if our house blows down we may need them; teach each other from our own experience; try new skills, fail until we succeed, forgive our lack of perfection on the way; and above all help each other learn because in transition times we don’t operate from the top down, we grow from the ground up.

I’ll follow my own rules for the One Small Thing page, and offer a doorway to individual action, if you’re up for it. It’s simple.

Look at your hands. Your clever, wise, creative hands. Those cunning opposable thumbs. These hands that are the reason humans can create in the world, all the things we do; caress a lover, break that which no longer serves, carve a spoon, wield a sword, call music from clay and wood, make art from dirt and paint and clay, build a bridge, plant a seed, grind flour, bake bread, fix broken things, wipe a tear, hug a child, take a life, welcome another one into the world…

My invitation is this. If your hands are your passage through transition times, if you could try one small new task with them, what would that thing be? One tiny thing to teach yourself that there is hope, and it will come through these hands.

What is your bite of the elephant?

Mine was to buy a metal container to take with me when I go to a cafe for lunch, so there is one less takeaway container in the recycling. I’ve been meaning to do it for months. And today I did. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was when I saw my dumplings nestled in it. And then when I left the cafe, still in the glow of my small action, I picked up three bits of rubbish on the footpath. Such little things. Adding up to big things.

A friend, in the comments, just remarked that it’s got him thinking, about that One Small Thing. Like becoming vegan for a day, or going a day without using any additional plastic. Imagine if that became a movement of radical achievable action. Just One. Small. Thing.

So today, why not pick something.

One small, inconsequential thing.
And do it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

Hope 2020. (Now called One Small Thing)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

This is a call to action, not just for Australia, the singed canary in the coalmine, but for the whole world. Pay attention. What is happening to us is coming for you.

We have reached tipping point in Australia, which means the rest of the world isn't far behind. Tens of thousands of climate refugees are right now evacuating vast areas ahead of another predicted day of firestorms. Thousands still stranded and now many towns have no viable drinking water as it has been contaminated by aerially dropped fire retardants, metals, arsenic, ash and debris and the treatment plants have been lost to the fires. States of emergency declared.

This is real. Not dry scientific statistics and reports, not predictions, not pretty graphs and models you can bat away and think about later. Real, right now, affecting tens of thousands of living breathing humans. And many dead ones, with more to come. This is just the beginning.

If you are witnessing this from outside Australia, you probably have no real idea of the scale and scope of this thing as the international media has been strangely muted about what is actually going on here.

The size of this climate emergency is staggering, and it is being fought principally by volunteers, who have ordinary lives and jobs and are not being paid, and have been on the frontlines for months. They go out day after day, night after night, into a war zone, without proper protective equipment, in worn trucks that can malfunction. There is no real help or leadership from our government. The rage in Australians is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like it.

If we had 30 000 displaced people, 1300 houses lost, 2000 outbuildings lost, 100 facilities destroyed, many people dead, dozens more missing, and 6 million hectares of land annihilated from, let’s say… terrorism, there would be such a huge international groundswell of attention, support, commentary and action, it would galvanise the whole world.

Instead, there is global apathy, starting with not only our own government, but us, the people, the on the ground Aussies. I think it is because Australia is the canary in the coalmine for climate change, and nobody really wants to accept that our world can really change this way. Not really, because if it can, we feel doomed.

Let’s face it, we’ve left it too late to tackle carbon emissions in any real way. Because we don’t want to lose our comfortable way of life. We don't want to make the necessary changes to our comfortable lifestyles. We wait, and wait, saying, later, when it’s obvious, it won’t happen in my lifetime.

It’s one thing to put out the recycling and talk about policy and point fingers at politicians, but it is another to make the very real sacrifices that are coming, whether we are willing or not. We’ve all got our fingers in our ears going lalalalala to drown out the increasing howl of the hurricane that is coming.

The hurricane that is here.

Our world just changed, forever. This is a dramatic statement, but a whole country is on fire and the devastation is beyond comprehension. Whole towns gone. Half a billion animals dead, and that number will rise substantially in the next weeks as there is no food or water in the aftermath and habitats are destroyed. People talk about the Aussie bush regenerating, and in our traditional bushfire patterns this is true, but what is happening here has never happened before.

Usually Aussie bushfires take out the underbrush, the bark and leaves, and some of the canopy, but the trees still live. When there is rain, new shoots rise out of the black. It is a beautiful thing to witness, the incredible unfurling of green through the ash. Fires happen in sections with corridors so animals can escape.

This is different. People are calling the firefronts monsters, without exaggeration. Towering fires have stretched in unbroken fronts for 80km. Imagine an 80km wall of flame so hot and huge it creates its own storms and fire tornadoes, like the one that flipped a five tonne firetruck, killing two of its volunteer firefighter occupants. Flames higher than the opera house exploding into columns of chaos. For real.

There is no escape for animals, birds, insects, all the marvellous and varied living organisms that make up an ecosystem, from such a thing. Now vast national parks are made of endless silent sentinels; trees are black twisted sticks in lifeless forests of eerie silence and clouds of ash. Not a birdsong, not an insect buzz.

Our natural world is giving us feedback, right now, in the real.

How will we react? How will we respond? How will we act?

Governments, whose only focus in on the next election, have no vested interest in long term planning, environmental or otherwise. The simply won’t be here for the consequences.

They know populations are dangerous, once the peons realise that there is power in numbers, so we are sedated with distractions, with banalities, with PR blah blah; with tv and shopping and alcohol and a million messages to buy stuff instead of messages of how to skill up for transition times.

We are discouraged in a zillion ways, covert and overt, from uprising. Once a mob is roused it becomes its own raging firefront, a ravening beast that can overrun governments. If we ignite, we can burn the whole house down. In Indonesian there is a word for a crowd gone berserk. It is ‘amok’. To ‘run amok’ is to see a crowd boil into action, to become a creature greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, wishing I was in some position of power, to be able to step in, but I am not a political animal and I don’t have answers on that level.

What I am, though, is the matriarch of a little community, in the real, a community that gathers in the wilderness 8 weeks a year to explore a different way of being human, using ancient tribal technologies to weave a basket of community and safety, where everyone gets their needs met. There is no alcohol, no internet, no spiritual bypass… just real people sitting in circles telling the truth, kids being mentored by a host of aunties and uncles, everyone taking off their masks with a common agreement to look after each other, no matter what. We have been through things in our little Rewild Tribe that could have been disasters, except we looked after each other, and they weren’t. Crises fostered trust, resilience, communal strategies, safety. We look after each other to we learn that we can.

No matter what.

I don’t know politics but I do know this. That if we agree to look after each other no matter what; magic happens. It is such a little thing but it is everything.

And now, on social media, I am struck by the disparity between the political animals and the human ones. While our prime minister reveals his lack of empathy and compassion with every gesture, meanwhile in the epicentres of the fires, people are fighting together to save each other’s homes and lives. Firefighters, volunteers, risking their own lives over and over, day after day for months to save another’s house, only to find their own has burned to the ground. People taking in the wounded, the displaced, the shocked and distraught. Families screaming from the bank of a lake as their house burns and the fire is at their backs, being picked up by another in a boat so loaded it is almost to the waterline. People going into burning houses to pull others to safety. Thousands clustered in beaches or huddled in evacuation centres while the sky is luminous red to black and the ash so thick you’d choke, all singing so the kids don’t get scared. In the lines of traffic stuck for seven, eight, twelve hours trying to escape the disaster zones, everywhere there are stories of people looking after each other. A man with his foot in a cast going up and down the lines handing out water and food to families stuck in cars. Another with a guitar, singing funny songs to make the kids laugh. People offering places to shelter; their homes, their yards, their clothes. People helping complete strangers because in times of crisis we remember that we are a community.

This is an amazing time. And to me, to the matriarch who sings in my bones, it is time to forget the politicians and remember that we are tribal creatures. That we know how to do this without relying on some so called leader in a system that is broken, kowtowing to mining interests that suck the lifeblood of water from an already parched country, for money.

I’ve been wondering where my power actually lies, and the matriarch whispers that it lies in community.

It is up to us to take personal responsibility. Not to wait to be told what to do, but to make the individual choice right now to behave as if we have been given a path through this.

We love our way of life, We love our comfort. Humans will take the easy way if it is available. To prepare for transition we have to make sacrifice. We need to choose the hard way so we are prepared for new times. We need to find the path of hope.

So this is my call to action.

Can we start a hub for groundswell community collaboration during transition times? The transition is here. Let’s get our fingers out of our ears and our hands off our eyes and recognise that our world is changing and this is just the beginning. We cannot rely on things being the same.

Everywhere in our global media, in social media, in governments and communities and families there are reactions to climate change moving from denial and obfuscation, through rage and blame, to despair and collapse, none of which are useful. All are paralysing.

What if we find a middle way where we look to our communities, look to our heart connections, look to the places where we come together, and work on skills to support each other through transition, through emergency, through a world in fire and flood, ice and storm.

I’m talking about real, practical tools for transition. Social media is a gift here, a tool we can use for all our benefit, a place where we can gather to share information, to reach out to our people, making decisions at a grassroots level.

How can we form better connections with our neighbours? How can we personally start to make the sacrifices we need, not from the top down, but from the bottom up, regardless of government policy? How can we take this rage and turn it into action that is useful? Grow our own food, purify our own water, drive less, become self reliant? Learn how to read the book of nature, to make friends with our environment, drink less booze, connect open eyed, have community days, prepare for disaster? How can we learn to move with our families through a changing landscape? What if instead of going into numbness, we go back to school, start to train and prepare, in small groups, pods that can thrive in any conditions?

A dear friend just said that the most beautiful child’s name he knows is... Hope. What if we all birth this child together? The child of our best intentions, our sacrifices, our education. What if we grow the fuck up and stop expecting someone to save us and then blaming them when they don’t?

This page is a place to share useful skills for transition times. How to nurture myriad small communities into self reliance. What we can actually do individually to mitigate the changes in our world, and how to cope with those changes that are inevitable.

This is a call for ideas, thinktanks, practical solutions for support on all levels. Community builders, scientists, researchers, activists, artists, gardeners, rewilders, families, elders, fixers, dreamers. Between us we have the skills to teach each other, to remember the wisdom in our DNA, to solve problems as a tribe. This page is the beginning of a hub where we can move into constructive action.

Any political commentary will be deleted; there are plenty of places for that. Any negative chat is not welcome. Calls for prayers, while beautiful, can find other places to fly. This page is a forum for practical solutions.

If we face the possibility that the world as we know it will change in our lifetime, and if nobody is coming to save us, how do we save ourselves? I know we can.

If we look after each other, no matter what, there is always hope.

If this speaks to you, welcome home. Let's see what we can do. Together. Share your skills. Share your ideas, no matter how far fetched. Share what you know in your bones. Be courageous. Speak up.

This is the link to the group Hope 2020 (EDIT... now called One Small Thing). See you there. (Make sure you answer the three questions and agree to the group rules or you won't be able to join.)
And if you're called, share this post far and wide so we can collect all our people.
Big love,

Mama G
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

This is unlike anything I have ever written.

Time for a revolution.

The pic is from Bondi beach this morning.

Climate change is an equal opportunity invader. Our first world white privileged complacency has just gotten a massive kick up the arse. I wonder if the groundswell of community rage that’s simmering with the fires relentlessly chewing through Australia will spill into action.

I rarely get political, because for me, it's irrelevant which party is in, because the system is broken.

The system is broken.

I sometimes travel down timelines. Have you ever done that, followed a thread of a possible future and just played it out to see where it will end up? I don't tend to go too far these days, because I always end up in apocalypse. Five years, maybe ten, and all these earnest and frantic conversations are a dim dream. In my world. Not saying it's true, just saying this is where I end up in my time wanderings. But that’s a whole other conversation.

Where was I? Oh yes. Australia.

There's a climate change rally on Wednesday at Sydney Town Hall on George St at 530pm. I never go to rallies. I prefer my activism to be one on one, by living a reality other than the consensual dream/nightmare. Teaching by being. Singing a different song, to break the trance of fear that is tool used by media to motivate us. Singing a song of choice and opportunity rather than victimhood and oppression. We can't control what is done to us. We can control how we respond to it. We can find the blessing in the lesson. I tend to teach internal skills to dance with transition, rather than throwing myself into any social movement to create that transition.

So this is all new territory for me.

Last night I played a little scenario in my head, of going to the rally and grabbing a megaphone or a microphone and jumping up in front of everyone. In my scenario of course everyone stopped and listened. It's my scenario, I get to be the heroine. You know how it goes.

This is what I say into that microphone, in the movie in my head...

-Raise your hand if right now you have a life that is fulfilling and nourishing, where you bounce out of bed every day knowing who you are and why you are here. Knowing you are bringing your gifts into the world in a way that fulfils you. Knowing you have enough time to be with your families, to make art, to sing, to dance, to spend time in nature listening to birds, to swim in the ocean.
-Raise your hand if you are living your birthright.

-Raise your hand if you feel part of a tribe where everyone looks after each other, from neighbours to leaders.

-Raise your hand if you have a life that works, really works.-

In my little mental movie a couple of hands go up, maybe. So I continue.

-Raise your hand if you feel right now that you don't have a life that works.-

And all the hands raise, a sea of them, a forest of limbs thrust skywards. In my mind I track through the rally to the city and it's like a wave cresting, the hands keep rising, ripples spreading further, and further, over the country, and the hands keep rising, in their millions and then across the oceans, and the hands keep rising, in their billions, all over the world. Rising.

And rising.

And rising.

Can we rise?

A system that means that the humans within it do not have lives that work, is a broken system. Period.

I am not a politician. I would suck utterly at it because my heart and my body are my compass and I light my way with a guidance system of deep rightness backed by reason, rather than logic overriding emotion.

The tangled morass of sticky threads of influence, barbed-wire spiderwebs of interconnected financial systems based on nothing but hypnotism and greed, people in power jostling for more power, and the part where we actually give a shit about living breathing humans so numbed by overwhelm that it's simpler to retreat into statistics and outcomes... this thornsnarl of lies and self interest is not my maze to navigate. I would asphyxiate in a week dealing with these things.

I would simply burn it to the ground and start again.

Politics isn't my thing. But now something has switched over in me.

I've felt like for years we've been lost in a forest, but it's a nice forest. Sometimes a bit dark, mostly quite light, with beaches and birds and sure, we're lost, but there is enough to eat and drink and it doesn't get too cold in the winter.

But now I feel like we've fallen in our lostness into a swiftly flowing river, and like an old Tarzan movie, the music is getting super dramatic, and we're caught in the current, bashing into hidden rocks, spluttering and drowning and the whole thing is heading to a big fucking waterfall.

I tend to notice patterns. Tracking is about pattern recognition.

For me, what feels utterly true is that we are living in a global system that is broken. We're running around with bits of gaff tape, trying to patch over the leaks in the pipes running from a huge concrete dam, when behind us the dam wall is cracking and the water is fouled.

The system is broken.

I want our existing ways of governing gone. Gone. Our house is sick. There is rising damp in the carpets and mould in the walls and rats are chewing through the wiring. It is a sick place to live, rotten in its foundations. I cannot see the sun, cannot smell the wind. And now the country burns and the colour blue has been sucked out of the sky, leaving queasy uneasy reds and oranges. I yearn for blue. I yearn for clear air, crisp horizons. I yearn for a system that supports the humans in its care, instead of a country heading incrementally towards fascism.

What are the alternatives? Small countries like NZ and Sweden and now Finland can manage with actual heartful humans in charge; men and women with empathy and compassion, to ignite our own passion and compassion; that's how it works, leaders wake us up, they ignite our better selves. They call on the part in us that wants to be good, wants to be connected, wants to be part of a healthy tribe. Where we can feel pride in the way we look after each other rather than creeping shame at what we allow, shame we don't want to feel so we wall it off, bury it, freeze it, numb it and allow more and more human rights to be taken away, until our hearts simply disconnect and we collapse into apathy. Until the territories of our own hearts are small and shameful prisons and we simply can't let ourselves feel how we created this for ourselves and each other.

We did this.

We are doing this. Right now. We. Are. Doing. This.

Leaders motivate us in one of two ways. They ignite our belief that we can be better, or they play on our fear so we will make decisions from our smallness. And whichever way the momentum runs, it will keep running.

How do we want to run? Do we want to be better than we are, or will we keep giving away those parts of us that allow humans to be magnificent.

The system is broken. If we threw out this government (oh please, please let us throw out this government) we'd just get another one with the same kind of problems, because it is the system itself which is sick, because governments are run by people with vested interests in industry and we are all addicted to our first world lifestyles and if it comes to real sacrifice we will not do it until we absolutely have to, when the whole rotten house falls down around our ears. I want to cry.

I want a leader to rise. A real live honest to goodness leader. I want to see Robin fucking Hood, Joan of fucking Arc. Gandhi. I want someone I can believe in when there is nobody I can believe in. Not even myself. I wish I had the political chops to leap up at that rally and scream at people that we have a choice, that we can say no, and if we all do it together then it's a revolution, so let's revolt. I want to break the broken system so it can never be rebuilt in the way it exists now, but the broken system is the whole world and in all my imaginary wanderings, in all my time travels, I cannot see a solution where any leadership steers this ship away from the rocks because WE are the broken system and until we realise that we are just pointing fingers at everyone but the true culprits. Us.

It is up to us. The system is broken.

I don't know what the alternative is, not at this pre-collapse stage. And in this I understand why we do nothing, because the only thing more paralysing than shame is despair. So we hide in our netflix, we obsessively pore over the social media feeds about the state of the world, social media feeds given to us from algorithms tailored to feed our fear. And. We. Do. Nothing.

Australia is the canary in the coal mine for climate change. Everything just changed for us, forever.

Shit just got real.

Can we?

I'll be at the rally. I doubt I'll jump up and grab that microphone, because as strong as the impulse is, as deep as the glorious engine of my rage is, I honestly have no idea what to do next. In the movie in my heart, Australia rises, all those arms in the air thrust for the sky, we chant with one voice and unite and we wake the fuck up, change our attitudes, become willing to make sacrifices to our lifestyles, lose our self interest, look after each other no matter what. Because that's what a tribe is. A group of people who look after each other no matter what. In the movie in my mind, this is what happens.

And then... I don't know what happens next. I have no answers. The Kali in me just knows this shit has to change.

Revolution, anyone?
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