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gina chick / gigi amazonia Blog...

Welcome to the place where my heart haikus fly free. You'll find they are honest postcards from frontiers less travelled, unwrapping taboos about sex, life, drugs, dancing, grief, death and a world in transition. Each piece will take you on a journey. And each piece will deposit you safely back on the shore, I promise. 

You can support this process by commenting and sharing to your networks if a piece moves you. To share, simply click on the heading of the post, copy the url and paste to your network. Comments are gratefully received and add to the yummy conversation, helping us stay connected.
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Thank you for helping this community grow. All my love, Gigi.
    Yes! I'd love to know when the next Gigi offering lands, and to hear when her novel She Wolf is published in 2021. (You can opt out at any time)
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The Boy and the Butterfly... (a love story)

4/3/2021

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​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.-

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Staying alive (in the 90's)

15/2/2021

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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. 
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For me, a decade-long dance-fuelled odyssey along Oxford St and its satellite sisters was a long slow shattering of innocence. It wasn’t all hearts and flowers, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

It started when I was 21 with a certain ridiculously gorgeous, well-hewn lad who was, shall we say, an entrepeneur of the endorphin procurement variety, (yes, you… you know who you are), sorting me out with my first ever party favours. With a hammering heart and all sorts of belly fluttering anticipation… will I turn into a drug addict? (uh, probably, but by that point you won’t care) I dived in, turned inside out and upside down, discovered god (is a DJ), holy-shit, sign me up… and found a home.

​The speed and eccies definitely helped me get fit, but the fitness helped me not need many chemicals, and became its own purring joy. Very quickly I dropped about 6 kilos and discovered that underneath my post-adolescence awkwardness I had the body of an athlete, fluid and fit and muscled, and fuck me, did I enjoy being in that body. Everything felt smooth, walking was like prowling, dancing was almost better than sex. Almost. I could climb mountains, run like I had wings under my heels, dance all night. I found my groove, found the dirtiness in my hips, chased bass-dropping DJ’s like they were lovers, and every night on myriad dancefloors their music fucked me to god. Can you sing hallelujah, my fine party brothers and sisters… hallelujah and a-fucking-men. Cos I did.

Ecstasy was the predominant flavour of the scene, and blurred the edges of the permissible. Those tiny heart-opening love bombs meant that a sweet intimacy was everywhere, knots of people like sweaty happy otters, delicious tingly tangles of arms and legs and massages and long pashes with all your friends, D&Ms that lasted hours, relationships that began and ended on dance floors. This was before the ice and GHB scene-fucking extinction events arrived, the chemical asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. People on pills are largely just… nice. They are their best selves, for a while. The problems don’t really kick in for a few years, when you’ve exhausted your natural serotonin production mechanisms and the proper crashes begin. But I’ll get to that.

I didn’t hang out with straights unless I ran into them at gay venues or at the big parties, or at DCM. Sure, every now and then I’d swim into those fishtanks, but my world was very firmly entrenched in the place where I found the most acceptance. With gay men. In those days, bi chicks copped a lot of flak from lesbians, so I didn’t have too many dyke mates. (Sadly, my loss). So my viewpoint of the 90s is largely from the inside of a community that was being ravaged by AIDS, and beneath the parties and good times, was in an MMA fight for rights and acceptance and simple human freedoms.

Visiting friends in hospital who had been terribly beaten up in a back street by a gang of men, one of whom had a crowbar. Going to the funeral of another friend who was beaten to death. Holding the hand of a weeping bestie who had just gotten the HIV diagnosis, and in those days, with so many beautiful men wasting away, it was a death sentence. Sitting in someone’s house sewing sequins onto endless Mardi Gras outfits. Putting together the Ken's Camper float with my best friends, and being the solo female for that float, a platinum-wig-wearing pink-baby-doll-strutting barbie perched on a lurching campervan covered in pink tulle while eighty gay men marched in gorgeous choreography with their held-high barbies in the third float to the blaring soundtrack of 'I'm Your Barbie Girl.' Receiving mindboggling lessons on how to give the best blowjobs on a banana (thank you Stephen, watching from whatever cloud you're on: I have never forgotten. Nor have my lovers). Dancing in a river of sweat on the raised back section at the Shift, watching men who belonged on magazine covers kiss and caress in heart-stoppingly beautiful displays of merging skin, under a shimmering rage of strobing lasers. Taking 90 minutes to get from one end of the RHI to the other, because every 30 seconds I’d stop to hug someone whose face lit up when they saw me… ‘Gina! Girlfriend! You look faaaaabulous.’ And I loved them all. It’s not the drugs, but… I love you. And you. And you.

For me, some tribal memory encoded in my DNA uncoiled and made itself true in my body at those parties. It felt like cheating, being able to access this. I knew it was teaching me things I would take decades to unpack. I made smoothies and chugged vitamins, real ones, to counter the chemical nasties. Went on picnics and pool parties and adventures to the mountains on strawberry trips and mescalin, Fair Day, Andrew Boy Charlton, Harbour Party, various camping trips with a bunch of queens in amazing outfits, danced in shows at the big parties and the small, went to after parties, sex parties, subculture parties, kink parties, fetish parties, queer parties, all-girl play parties. It’s so bizarre, writing all this now. At the time it was just life. Now I’m wondering how on earth I sustained that for a decade. Youth, I guess.

In the beginning, like a passionate new affair, the scene was shiny and delicious. All the good times. And then over the years, the cracks showed. I saw things I could not un-see. I did things I could not un-do. I made choices with the tools I had, and I was young and naiive so my toolkit was not what it is now. Now I am a grizzled veteran of Life, with the silver feathers and the bone-deep scars to prove it. Back then, I was invincible. And stupid and foolish. Young. Sooooo young.

Life... Ha. Nobody gets out of it alive. Humans are run through with fractures and fault lines, and when the times are good we can pretend they aren’t there, or we just haven’t found them yet. And then when things start to go sideways, those cracks open up and the only way we ever really learn a lesson is to fall into it, all the way, and have to figure things out from inside the jagged maw of our own fickle fate.

I was lucky. I never stuck a needle in my arm, some blessed wise part of me stopped me from sliding down that particular slippery slope. I didn’t hang out with the true gangsters, those glitter-dark predators swirling through the scene, dorsal fins surfacing every now and then then submerging back into the depths. Some part of me knew I wasn’t the right temperament to survive there, even though I was curious. But I did dive deeply into the human zoo, always fascinated by people, and by the shadier edges of things. I started seeking out the shadows. I soared into the chemical wilds, and the scientist/researcher in me trapped and tracked like there would be no consequences. I was my own human experiment, my body was a petrie dish and I got cocky, skated right up to the edges of cliffs, and learned the hard way that falling is fun until you hit the ground. And then it’s a long long way back up that cliff hanging on by your fingernails.

In 97, after close to a decade in the scene, I broke myself, utterly, falling in love with a pretty, muscly, narcissist sociopath city-gym ‘roid-boy who was also a con. He faked a brain tumour and I believed him (o stupid, foolish girl), and he showed me how to scam a loan from the bank, and then I supported him with it so his last 6 months of life would be some kind of comfortable. I’d drop him to the hospital for chemo. He’d have coffee out the back until I came to pick him up. He read my naturopathy textbooks and faked symptoms every time I started to wise up. I wanted to believe his words so badly I overrode my instincts. I took myself into my own private hell, and went down flaming.

I borrowed from people to pay people to borrow from people to pay people, spiralling further and further. He was a wannabe gangster (but not a real one, he just talked the talk like he was a hard man but the time I saw a well known hitman look at him sideways he went white and melted away and I didn’t see him for a week. Said he was visiting his sister. He didn’t have a sister. Little shit was cowering in a hole somewhere). He was a small time crook, a shiny-grin shyster at best. Anyway one day he said, I need to borrow your phone, and I didn’t ask, and gave it to him, all the Bonnie and Clyde bullshit, and later that day he turned up furious because the job he’d just done rolling over a guy who was taking the cash from a nightclub to the bank had gone south when his partner had run off with the money. I remember looking at him and wondering how the fuck I had got here. I knew the guy they’d rolled, he was a sweetheart. And to my shame, I didn’t leave, did nothing. I don’t hate myself for many things, but that one has hooks and still gets me on inky nights.

Things got dark. I remember a lot of back rooms, cigarette smoke, bad comedowns, crawling around the carpet looking for any crumbs of weed. I still went out, but everything about the scene had changed; ice and GHB had replaced pills (although I never went there), there were turf wars on Oxford street, shootings and violence. For a couple of years I was stoned from first light til bed. Conman long gone and me with my name on everything and no way to pay it all off, wandering around with a debt equivalent to 150K (these days) at 29 years old, going o fuck i’m fucked, a thousand times a day. Wondering how I was going to get out of my epic financial fuckup. Wondering how I was going to get off the weed. Wondering how I was going to get over the anguish and heart-tearing grief of realising I had been conned, that it was never real with that guy, and that I had done it all to myself. Wondering who the fuck I even was.

I did get out of it all, by the way, paid all the money back, resurrected my life with interest. But that’s a story for another time.

Getting out of the scene was the first part. And it happened, like most things don’t, all at once, 1998.

It was a standard night. I was out alone. I ‘came to’ at 3am, in my body, on a podium in good old DCM, now long past its heyday, like an ageing supermodel who's hit the booze and spent too many years in the sun. It was like aliens had dropped me into my body and I was seeing everything for the first time. I remember it, clear as day. Looking down at myself in dazed wonder, and thinking… what the fuck am I wearing? Then around the space. And what the fuck is this place? There were about 50 people shuffling desultorily around the dance floor. The acrid stink of amyl stinging my eyes. An older woman we used to call the Eccy Monster shuffling by talking to herself. Condensation fell from the ceiling, cold on my skin. Jaysus fuck, what the fuck is this music? I jumped off and wandered out to the back bar. A couple of regular divas were holding court. I saw with new eyes. Everyone here who is under 30 looks 20. And everyone who is over 30 looks 50. I was 29.

In that moment I knew I was done. Just like that, the switch flicked.

I walked out of DCM and never went back, rang everyone I knew and said, ‘I’m out, don’t invite me to things’. It was hard for the first couple of months, every weekend, seeing the posters for parties and events, hearing the music washing out from doorways, seeing people I knew on their way to some fabulous night. All the FOMO.

I white knuckled it through a few weekends, ditched all the numbers of dealers out of my phone. I learned what Sunday looked like. I hadn’t seen one for close to a decade. Now I was the one walking out after a good night’s sleep seeing the people spilling onto the sidewalk because the club had closed. It took a while to learn how to be a regular human. I’m not sure I ever have, to be honest.

I still went to Mardi Gras, Sleaze and Inquisition for a few more years, but that was the moment when I realised I’d learned whatever I needed to know from the scene and life had other plans for me. And it was time to get my shit in a pile and fix the almighty fuckup I had made of myself. And fixing the fuckup, digging myself out of the colossal hole I had dug, shattering the parts of my personality that no longer served me.. teaching myself how to make wise choices; these things are the foundation for everything that is strong and good in my life now. Those 10 years toughened me, wisened me, smashed and rebuilt me.

So much of the work I do in the world comes from those days. I still love to dance. Became a global travelling facilitator, a 5rhythms teacher, and now I DJ for conscious dance events, helping people open to music and movement without any chemicals bar the ones our own bodies make. It’s awesome. I fly a lot slower these days, but my body still remembers. And I have those years and all of you to thank. I remember it all with gratitude, and marvel at our resilience, all of us, the ones who survived. We made it. Holy shitballs, what a ride.



Pic.. jewellery photo shoot, mid 90's, by Mazz of Mazz Image
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​All I see is the naiive innocence on my face. Bless.
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Discovering the silver fox

28/1/2021

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I know, I know. I’ve been off Facebook for a year, and all of a sudden I’m posting like a mofo but it’s a grey day and I’ve started writing again and I haven’t connected with you all for bloody months. I think you might like this one. I hope so. It’s about sex, and I know there are a few of you who tend to like my sex posts. As usual it’s got some personal stuff, but ties into a larger conversation.

The personal bit… I have a confession to make. I’ve been an ageist for the last couple of decades. You know that stereotype of the middle aged dude perennially seen with younger women? I’m the female version. Guilty. I tend to naturally be attracted to men and women about a decade younger than me. I could list a whole lot of reasons… energy being the main one, (and ah hell, I like ‘em pretty), but recently I had a date fail that made me rethink my prejudices.

I was coming back from the south coast on the motorbike and stopped in to Canberra to visit friends. On dating apps, Canberra is within my distance limit, but I never chase up the Canberra matches because… well, I’d have to go to Canberra (I know, I know… more prejudice). Anyway, I was blowing through, and there was this hot 40-ish man I’d matched with, who was into older women, and it had been a long while since I’d been on a date. We arranged to meet. OK, so the red flags should have gone up when he suggested some mall, but all he said was that it was outside and we could chat under the trees and I don’t know Canberra so I thought it might be on a riverbank somewhere, on the grass.

It was a blocked off pedestrian mall in the middle of the city. Err… what? I followed my phone gps to where he’d said to meet, rounded the corner and looked up to see this figure in the distance. And then something happened which was horrible and actually beautifully karmic. He saw me… and for a millisecond… he slumped.

Now. I know that slump. You go on enough online dates, you know that slump. It’s that first impression moment when you realise you’re absolutely NOT attracted to the person so now you need to go through the hour or so of getting to know you conversation to then extricate yourself and never see them again. Brutal, I know. Online dating is not for the faint hearted. I’ll put my hand up high here, I have invisibly slumped with the best of them. I have probably been the unknowing agent of another’s slump many times, however it’s the first time I have ever actually noticed someone slumping when they saw me. He was lovely, kind, polite, beige in a Canberra kind of way… and totally not interested. We sat on a perfectly nice park bench in a paved pedestrian mall with a few people wandering aimlessly about, under trees lit up with coloured LEDs… as far as ambience went, it was like being at a failed rave before anyone got there, or the train-wreck-in-slow-motion birthday party nobody showed up to. The ambience of very well laid out hospital grounds. Mmm.

I told a couple of my less extreme but still exciting stories, because if someone can’t handle those they will never handle my actual life. Told of ripping out the ceiling of my bus in a hazmat suit to eradicate the festy mouse colony, then making a mad dash in it (the now-clean bus, not the hazmat suit) for the Victorian border, before the barbed wire went up, to give my 12 year old niece her first ever road trip over New Year. By the time I’d finished the story he had inched another foot away, his eyes a little wide. Needless to say, we went our separate ways and that was that. Chalk it up, aikido roll, move on… except I couldn’t. This one had hooks, nasty little barbs that wormed their way under my skin and pinged something old and deep.

I don’t normally take internet dating personally. Here be dragons and I’m not into wrestling those big scaly bastards. For me it’s a way to connect with new people, and sometimes on a meeting there’s actual chemistry but most times it’s a nice hour or two meeting someone and hearing their stories. I don’t have expectations or even agendas. I meet really great humans and usually that’s all it is and that’s ok. Coming home from this one I felt like utter dogshit. Felt invisible and unwanted and old and haggard and rejected and ashamed and full of grief and self loathing. The dragons chewed away at me, bite by bite. It was a long night doing my homework, diving into the pit of ugh.

That night I faced something I’ve been skirting around, all squirmy and in denial. Menopause and sexuality. I’m 51 now, and more sexual than ever… and for the first time, I’m noticing that the normal bandwidth of younger men aren’t as attracted to me as they have been, which incites feeling of panic and despair. 50 is a landmark. It’s not just a number, not in our culture. I’m looking down the barrel of elderhood and I do not want to go quietly into that good night, if it means I stop having fucking amazing, mindblowing sex. Hell no. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to drive this body like a fighter jet. I’m not ready to hang up my wings and fly a desk. And, shitfucknbuggeration…. my options are dwindling.

I’m embarrassed to say this out loud, because I know how shallow it sounds, but I have never been attracted to men my own age. I don’t know if it’s tied into an old sexual abuse at a young age, but since I was 30 I haven’t got that phwoar ping from older men. Which is strange, really, considering how sexual I am. I have a whole lot of stories that are all projections and judgements, with some personal histories that back them up, but at the core of it, I have been repelled by age. The thing I got to after the slump date, was that by rejecting older men I am also rejecting my own ageing. I am rejecting my life stage, my life cycle. I am denying myself the wisdom and experience of these divine, vital, passionate men who have been around long enough to do their work, to really learn how to love a woman. By only going for men a decade younger than me in some ways I am taking on the filter of having to look like a 40 year old woman, which is a whole lot of pressure, and when I don’t (because I can’t, and shouldn’t) my self esteem can get involved in a negative way. I can set myself up for a really (really) bad day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve given the older men angle a good nudge. But when I get to it, my body traditionally hasn’t responded, or it’s taken some mental gymnastics to drop in. I’ve accepted ageism as my kink, gone with it because I’ve been blessed with a succession of gorgeous lovers (and a couple of husbands) (omg that looks so bad when I write it), so why would I shake the tree? No need to challenge my paradigm, my judgement that older men couldn’t fuck me the way I need. I know, I know, it’s ridiculous. Like I said, I’m embarrassed to write this cos I KNOW how stupid it is. But our blind spots are our blind spots and this is a conversation and my blinkered attitude has been butting up against reality and it's time I opened the windows and let in some fresh air. Time and gravity get us all in the end.

Last year I had an amazing affair with a man only three years my junior and it was sexually incredible. Mind blowing. That’s gone a long way to rewriting my script. After Canberra slump-man I went in and spent a whole loooong night in the red wild cave of my psyche, examining my judgements about age, looking under the bed, lifting up the carpets, peering into every nook and cranny and dancing all the icky sticky shameful bits, finding my visceral horror at my own ageing, the places where I am hanging on with my fingernails to a picture of myself that’s two decades out of date. Really working to accept my life stage, my 51 year old face and body and everything that goes with being in a body this long. Not as a pretty new age aphorism or motivational cheerleading pithy quote, cos fuck that, I’m not interested in an instagram meme, I’m interested in transformation. I stayed in it and it was bloody horrible in there, layers of shame and grief, but I felt the horrible until I finally got to call those parts of me home that I reject. Well, some of them anyway. I’m under no illusion that this is a one time dance. But I stayed there until there was peace, and on the other side I thought about taking older lovers… and found space... and hope. And excitement.

And dayumm… suddenly I’m noticing the silver foxes. Turns out I have a new kink to add to my rather impressive collection. Silver, wow, it does something to a face. A well earned face, with history written onto it, the griefs and joys and all that delicious life unspooling backwards, all the mistakes and lessons and that sense of place that comes when you have claimed your space in the world and in yourself. SexyAF. Give me a grizzled greybeard in a white tshirt with a couple of tatts and big wise hands and a bit of belly and a knowing, in-the-world swagger. Meow. I find myself stopping in the street to watch a fit 50 something prowl by. Appreciating, and I mean really appreciating conversation with a bonafide grown up. I’ve started saying yes to men my age, and older. I’m intentionally prioritising them, going on dates, rewriting my paradigm. Smashing those glasses of prejudice and giving myself a chance to let my eyes adjust to the light of capital R reality.

And hot diggity… less than a week later, after a couple of random 50 something bus dates (these are always fun, instead of going out to a bar the date is in the bus, parked looking at a beach, great food, chai, good music and awesome conversation… the bus seems to bring a sense of fun and life and adventure to a first meeting)… I ended up being half ravished by a 55 year old utter hottie giant, hands like dinner plates, built like a fridge, sensitive where it counts, and… ahem… hard as a rock, who I then visited to seal the deal and can I just say…. what the fuck have I been doing all this time?! Gina, you idiot. Facepalm. D’oh.

Needless to say, I am grateful to meet my prejudice… head on, shall we say… and I know it’s going to take more than one adventure to really dissolve this script, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that already I’m not judging my 51 year old body by 40 year old woman standards. Which is all totally self imposed, but a prison, nonetheless and it feels ten flavours of amazing to be picking apart these gossamer cables.

I’m sending out a huge thank you to Slump Man. Thanks for letting me see my own reflection, for the exquisitely aimed shard of pain that allowed me to really look at this stuff. I’m sorry to all the gorgeous my-age-and-older men who I’ve been unconsciously rejecting for all these years… it really isn’t you, it’s me. I’ve been a right judgemental twat and I’m sorry. I'm the one who's missed out on your magnificence. My loss. I'm looking forward to discovering you, if you're up for giving me a second chance.

So there you go... my latest postcard from the taboo wilds. Hope you enjoyed the ride. And as a PS, I'm running a retreat on women's sexuality in May, if you're interested, here's the link.
https://www.wildheart.life/women-unchained.html

Big love
Gi
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Women, Unchained

26/1/2021

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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
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The cosmic MEH (when Gaia says... go to your room)

14/1/2021

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​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.
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Mother Tongue

30/8/2020

8 Comments

 
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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.
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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.

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Humans have this amazing cerebral cortex. We think therefore we are. We have the ability to make meaning of the world, to see not Capital R Reality, but the infinite realities spawned by our own complex minds; casting our shadows on the world and calling them true, missing the honest brilliance of the light that generates them. All we see is our own shape, reflected, distorted; not the canvas upon which it falls. We have the ability to hear our own voices, and we have fallen so in love with their sound that we stopped listening to the warp and weft of deepsong through which they twine, like pretty spring flowers pushing through trellis, to bloom for a minute, then wither in the summer heat.

And through this meaning-making facility we have created marvels. Our minds are made real in the world; we are indeed tiny gods, giving our most wicked and marvellous thoughts structure and shape, making monsters of men and men of monsters. Soaring spires and crenellations, temples of worship that push to the heavens like antennae straining for some refrain of that song, those songs; the one we know in our hearts from Her, and the one we know in our spaces from the star-dazzling Divine through which She swims.

​We suffer terribly in these prisons of flesh, and then, wonder of wonders, we shape that suffering into art, casting our wounds across creation as ephemeral butterflies of unutterable beauty, each of us shining for a moment of  brilliance, a shout in the dark, made more perfect by nature of its transience. Here. Gone.

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​Ah. I have brought poignant sadness to the party, haven’t I. Speaking of the loneliness of living things, the separation of being cast into this physical space from wherever it is we come, the yearning once we're here for connection, oneness, completeness. 


And yet for me, there is a comfort in this naming. This is the Capital R Reality, the bedrock of me. If I lean into this, accept that yes I feel separate, yes I have lost the wisdom of my ancestors, who had to listen to the lovesong of Gaia or they would die, yes I project my own shape across my world. In this acceptance I acquiesce to this layer of separation, this veil of delusion, and now I can drop into the gritty roots of myself, into the heart- knowing still drumming from Her through my bare soles into my bear soul. I can start to relearn to read the book of nature, start to remember the skills of those who lived and died wild, and whose voices sing from my bones that all is not lost, because nothing ever is.

For me this is such a simple thing, and is all the things.

Listen.


Go outside and listen with every cell and atom. Lie on the good earth, dig my fingers into soil, breathe in the rich delicious scents of woodrot and loam. 

Listen. Spend an hour watching a beetle navigate a forest of giants, each blade of grass an obstacle. Lie on my back and track veiled faces in clouds; now a dragon, now a cup, now a child, now a kiss. 

Listen. Actively hunt the skills of my ancestors; re-learn to live on the landscape, solving the eternal problems facing all mammals… shelter water fire and food. 

Listen to the birds as they teach me who and what is on the landscape. 

Listen to the wind as it shows me that rain is coming. 

Listen to the rocks as they bid me find a cave to sleep in. 

Listen to the trees and shrubs as they show me this stalk hides fire in its tiny spaces. These leaves give me energy. This root heals my wounds. 

Listen to the deepest songs that hide and nestle and creep and crawl everywhere I could possibly turn my ears.

This journey, in my meaning making facility, I call Rewilding, but it is more honestly Remembering. It is never too late to turn our ears in. It is never to late to stop talking and finally fall into the Silence that is the death of all that I think safe, and learn that it is awake and aware and teeming with life.

And so I take myself out in ceremonies of Listening. Vision Quest is one name, a beautiful journey of awakening, sitting for four days and nights with no distractions, alone in my terrible loneliness, to learn that I can never be alone. Survival Quest is another: roaming the landscape with only a knife and a daypack of some calories and basic gear, hunting and gathering with no sleeping mats or sleeping bags, making shelter and fire for warmth, finding water by following the birds, learning by doing, where my choices have consequences and I can learn more from a night of true cold than I could learn in a decade of reading books about it.

Listen.
Remember.
​Learn.



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I am no master or expert; not even close. To be an expert I would be able to live completely wild, gather all my calories from the landscape, be self reliant without any technology. Read the book of nature as it flows across my senses, absorb the intimate tales of wind and weather and season without thought, without translation. Track and trap and weave and tan and shape in the flowing dance of an untamed creature, listening to what is true and understanding the pure poetry of wisdom encoded in the high flight of a hawk, the silver flash of a fish, moonlit waves of cloud marching single file from south to north, promising rain in three days; make shelter, take cover. Everything is fractal. Everything in nature is teaching us everything, if we know how to listen. 

Gaia sings in a song I can still only half hear, I do not know all the words, I’ve grown in a petrie dish of culture estranged from her deep roots, a culture of boxes and measurable outcomes and entitlement and food in packets and addiction to convenience and the reckless splurge of energy that comes when you don’t have to hunt for everything you need. I do not speak my Mother Tongue, and for this lack and loss I mourn, I mourn.

​But I am listening, and in these times of chaos and confusion I have turned away from the babbling stories of my culture. I have one bare foot firmly in the wild mud, and the more I stalk these ancient pawprints, the louder Her song grows, until I wake under moonlight with the urge to howl like the wolf I am, howl into the desert and forest, howl with my head thrown back and my throat to the night, howl and sing with my whole soul like the loneliest whale, like the living planet, like the abandoned child, like the grieving mother. Howl knowing this is part of what makes me human, and that when I strain my ears I am met, not with silence, but with the sweetest music of a chorus of howls across canyon and ridge and valley. And further away, the song grows and grows, because deep down, we do remember, and space is not separation if I can hear the song of another, just one other voice, no matter what language its tongue shapes the sounds. When I listen, I take them in as they take me in and now we are connected, now we are joined. Now we are one.


I do not need to hear the words to know the music. 

And I wonder. 

Maybe the loneliest whale isn’t looking for an answer. Maybe the loneliest whale is listening to all the songs, collecting and catching them, and is answering in the only way it can, singing to us all across thousands of kilometres, singing through deepest oceans, singing around the whole world… ‘I’m here, I hear you, I love you,’ over and over, like a beacon in the night. 

Singing in the Mother Tongue.

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*Most pics in this piece are from a recent Survival Quest in NSW, on Dharawal country. I'd like to deeply thank the Dharawal caretakers and ancestors both on the land, and displaced; thank elders past present and emerging, and thank my teachers.
I acknowledge all indigenous custodians and owners of this country and grieve what has been lost.
We walk on stolen land. 

*If you're called to Vision Quest or Survival Quest, check out these programmes run by Lee, Gina and Hannah at Wild Heart 
https://www.wildheart.life/vision-quest-information.html
https://www.wildheart.life/vision-quest-protector.html
https://www.wildheart.life/thrive-2020-wandering-quest-8-day-survival-trip.html
Or get in touch for referrals to other earth schools and Quest facilitators in your area.
I'm also running bespoke weekend Survival Quests for 1-3 people, message me on gina@wildheart.life for details and availabilities.

As always, thank you for your support, for reading these postcards from a wandering heart. Thank you for listening to my wild song. Please comment and share if you're at all moved... adding your own notes so we can all listen and learn from each other's unique music.
​
Big love, Gina
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Capital R Reality is Upon Us. Shall we dance?

11/8/2020

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​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.

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​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. ​
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The Muse Is My Mistress... and she is one jealous bitch

3/6/2020

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painting by Karol Bak
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.
​
I say yes.

Every week I take these creations into the studio, to the palace of the real, where I share them with another human... the one who first heard me sing and said… yes, you, I want to record you. The one who takes these newborns and paints their many colours and blows their embers into flame, until they fly. Who pours himself as deeply into them as I do, with dazzling brilliance. Who is, I suppose, the father to these fragile children of mine, and without whom I would still be sitting in my tipi, singing to myself. The one who is making them real in the world with such skill and talent and wild creativity. Blessed, blessed be, and thank you, Tank (Paul Greene), with all my heart. Co-creation is a dream. Every time we create a song like this together, it makes space for the next ten.

I understand now how creatives end up living in squats and crack houses, selling their grandmother’s jewellery for a tube of prussian blue, that exact shade of ocean drowning them in fever dreams. I’ve finally surrendered fully into the river of music and let the Muse take me, and take me she does.

Nothing else matters, this is a wholly holy unholy obsession. I understand that when I push myself away from the shore, I float to the underworld, carried deep and lost on the river Styx. I understand that to stay here I sacrifice the world of logic and linear time, and the deeper I go, the less tethered I am and the more purely I dance in the abyss from which all creations come. Every song is there, all I have to do is listen with all of me, call in the lightning, asked to be blessed, and every day lightning comes, scorching me savage and tender as promises.

I burn.

This is a drug, it’s bliss beyond price.

And by some miracle of alchemy, in the midst of all this I also have a lover who can meet me here, out beyond the stars, in a frenzy and fury of flesh and skin and fire, where the creative vortex of sex and music is a single ecstatic braid mainlined straight from the veins of god. Deities dance through me and when my mouth opens in this place, sometimes they even sing their own songs, which choose these hands, this heart, this voice to be made real in the world. I feel like I am roaming the universe with a butterfly net, somehow snaring dragons, clinging to their rough scaled backs by my fingernails, hoping not to be thrown off the waterfall at the edge of all things.

Yes, I am a little crazy right now. I’m grateful that I’ve devoted a lifetime to skills of grounding, of deep rooted here-ness. I trust my tethers. They’re holding, for now.

And… I am a long way out. I can see the shore, but sometimes mist covers it, for a while. I’ve let the world fall away. I am rarely on social media. Don’t reply to texts and calls (even more than usual). I'm not dancing, not teaching, not fixing websites and sorting emails. I resent every moment away from Muse. I love my friends, but sometimes when they speak I grey out a little, following a melody heard faint as mist at the edge of the field, counting the seconds until I can catch it and weave it into song. I am in the throes of an affair, am luststruck by lifeforce, by the pure thunder of now.

I know, because I am a creative to my bones, that there will be a time when I look back on all this with yearning and heartbreak and grief, when the raw power ripping me daily into atoms finally turns its attention elsewhere, leaving me bereft and mortal, waiting valiantly to catch Muse’s attention once more, making sacrifices to all the gods, staking myself out before minotaurs, giving my liver to be torn by eagles. Anything to live and breathe and be obliterated by music again, where every note is a cell dying, another dancing in harmony.

I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I wanted to write to thank those of you who have been checking up on me, to send this postcard and say, that I am in the throes of a love affair with Muse, and She will break my heart in all the best ways,, and when She is done with me I will be devastated, but I wouldn’t change a single thing. And that in about three months I should have things to show you, some glittering gifts to give, children of this affair. Until then, though, if you call, I may only answer in music.
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Anniversaries get me every time

7/5/2020

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​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.
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The world's just changed forever. Let's have a cuppa

22/3/2020

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​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.
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    Gina Chick (Gigi Amazonia) brings you miscellaneous musings on ReWilding, Grief, Love, Healing, World Consciousness, Transformation and a whole host of other juicy morsels. Grab a cuppa, put your feet up, and enjoy.

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