​This morning I woke full of her. She was right there in the bed like she never left, arms and legs akimbo, head burrowed into my armpit like a forest creature. It’s years since her ghost has been this solid when I wake. Usually she arrives later, randomly, flitting around the corners of my vision in a waft of wild titian curls and some delightful concoction of tulle and stripes, handbag and feather headband, sunglasses to complete the ensemble. Clomping around in someone’s shoes, probably one of the abandoned pairs in my closet, those I never wear but hang onto in case there’s a wedding.

Alone episode four screened last night. It began with her. Blaise. My one perfect cub. It was her birthday, you see, when I was out there in the mud and those vast, inky, icy nights.

I can’t remember when I realised her birthday would land out there. As the drop date crept closer her birthday sang through the hectic rollercoaster of preparation, loud and true, a pure note ringing through an empty hall, calling me to her. I knew she’d turn up on her birthday, because she does, every year, wherever I am.

lutruwita. I crawl into what serves as a bed the night before her birthday, quite early. It’s a laborious process. Strewn detritus explodes everywhere, boots and gear, loops of paracord ready for my shelter build, dry tinder and firewood stacked in haphazard piles, a bed of heaped wattle sprigs barely keeping my possum coat off the wet ground, and uncomfortable as fuck to sleep on. This is familiar chaos. I’m not super organised like Mike and Kate, I don’t naturally file and sort to feel safe. I’m more of a wild creature, burrowing into the earth, nesting with my nose to my tail, smelling the earth. 

The moon sings me awake, or maybe Blaise does. Miraculously, there is no rain, the night is clear as spun glass. Stars tumble faintly where the moon can’t reach. Perhaps one of them falls into my shelter. However it happens, I’m awake in the deepest sigh of night with my heart is full of her.

Of course I shuffle out of the possum coat, pull on the dreaded boots to keep my socks dry, lay out my poncho and craft a fire. The landscape is eerie under the soft blue kiss of the moon. Dead trees surge from the lake in soft shapes against cold mist. Tonight’s fire catches easily. Did you blow on it for me, little chicken? Are you helping your mama, again?

Bodies remember anniversaries. We are animals like this. Wise old parts of us track fragile scents of flowers, lengths of days, the bitter taste of winter. My body remembers birthing her. Now, here, in the flickering gaze of this fire, all the years collapse and she’s dancing inside me, calling herself into the world to change my life with every breath she takes, and all the years afterwards, once that breath is long, long gone.

It’s strange watching myself grieve on TV. I’m proud of myself for telling the truth out there in the wild places. I made a vow of veracity, vowed that no matter what, I’d film my journey, let my masks fall, allow my vulnerability to show. I don’t hold back on her birthday, give myself the gift of this night around the embers with my little one, a beautiful vigil, fire and light and love, just her and I under that huge pale moon. 

‘Grandmother Moon,’ she calls it, snuggling into my belly like she used to when she was warm and vital. It feels so good to cry. My insides and my outsides get to meet and I’m all the way here, all the way to the centre of myself. The moon reaches in to cup my heart, murmuring some nameless song of belonging.

And now there are photos of her on the telly. My voice telling the story of her to people I have never met but are now friends, how strange. How beautiful. All these humans meeting her for the first time, funny critter she was, dressing herself every morning without any help, phenomenal sartorial ensembles, never smiling for the pic, she didn’t perform, she was just herself. Enormous dark eyes to forever, a laugh that could stop a room and stillness so deep it’s no wonder she loved the moon, she was woven from that silver light and half of her lived in the silence between notes. Until one day, all of her lived there, except for the parts I carry in my heart.

Everything I am now is because of her. This has me shaking my head in wonder at the perfection of life. I have dived to to very core of my being and am not afraid of any feeling, because I know there is nothing that cannot be borne. Journeys into inner and outer wilderness, touching the void, listening to Mama Gaia, all make sense because those elements have held me through the darkest days. I know that every single living thing is part of the same thing, we all are. This is home. Not as a new age concept, but as a visceral, lived truth.

This is her gift to me. Over and over I keep dying to myself. She is scalpel and scythe cutting away dead wood. She is cool rain, balm on a burning heart. She is the joy of singing birds serenading another dawn, how wonderful we get a body for another day, and breath to know we’re alive, and eyes to see and a voice to sing and bones with which to grip the earth and dance.

Now I’m in a comfy bed far from the dream of lutruwita. Rain drums on a tin roof, my hair is clean, my hands also. This morning I woke with her next to me, her breath rising in those soft snoring whuffles of small creatures at rest. It’s nine and a half years since she flew away. Once again I marvel at the myriad gifts of her presence, and her absence. Then I stir, the air moves and her ghost fades until it’s just me again, silver feathers in my hair, creases in my face to mark the years she’s been gone. It’s ok she’s flitted off to wherever she goes, I don’t even wonder at her adventures any more.

I’m just grateful she comes back to visit her mama every now and then.

It’s a year since I started the whole wild, wonderful, crazy journey of applying to be a participant on an insane TV show called Alone, which took place on palawa country, on lutruwita, or Tasmania as we may know it.

A year I have had to keep my big mouth shut about every part of the process. One of the hardest things about this whole experience has been having to out and out lie about where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, to those I love.

Alone is the second biggest thing that has ever happened to me in my life, after having cancer while pregnant, being told I had to terminate the pregnancy or die, bringing Blaise into the world against all odds and then losing her three years later to cancer. Then the endless wall of grief I’ve been scaling ever since. That was the biggest, hands down. Still is.

She’s been gone almost ten years, and now there’s this. Alone is a wild boot up the arse and into the world in ways I never even thought possible. I haven’t been able to say a word about the process. You know me. I’m all about words. This has been excruciating!

It’s like a modern koan. If Gina puts on 24kg (even though they say 19kg on the show, I'd already put on a bunch before my first weigh in with them), and goes out on a winter survival adventure with five cameras and a small fistful of gear and nobody knows, did it even happen? I’ve had days wondering if it was real.

Now the show is finally airing, and the whole juggernaut is rolling on, and there’s a little part of me that wants to curl up in a ball going fuckfuckfuck with my fingers in my ears and my hands over my eyes. The feeling that my little life is about to change forever. My anonymity blown to shreds.

It’s the strangest feeling. On one hand I’m purely practical, getting my websites in order, FB comments set to friends only to minimise the inevitable trolling. On another it’s an existential move, a feeling of psychic indigestion, of being poised on the edge of an abyss, about to tumble into the unknown.

Spending time out in the wilderness was the easy part. That’s a jungle I am familiar with. This urban jungle of interviews and the court of public opinion scares the bejeezus out of me.

And yet, along with the terror, It’s exciting, thrilling even. I am so glad this is happening in my mid 50’s and not in my 30’s. I have earned these silver feathers and with them, some wisdom.

Which is lucky, cos already I’m learning on the job. Learning not to swear in the press interviews. Learning (again) that my survival mechanism when I feel overwhelmed by people is for my personality to get big, like a puffer fish, and that this isn’t appropriate at a publicity event.

The introvert in me will need to get pretty skilled at finding ways to manage all this attention without losing my centre. I’m learning on the fly.

One of the reasons I did the show was that I knew that in the discomfort of surviving in wild nature I would have to lean in to parts of myself I hadn’t met before, and this is exactly what happened. In the lake of a thousand mirrors I dissolved, died even, and was regrown as a part of the land, no more important than any bird or worm or cloud or tree. It was hard, and cold, and wet and muddy. I fucked shit up constantly. My pride and ego died a thousand deaths.

And it was beautiful. I broke into ten thousand pieces which were scattered across that brutal landscape, and in the spaces they left I filled up with life in all its unfurling mystery. I am forever changed. It doesn’t matter how many days anyone lasts out there, ultimately it isn’t about winning, it’s about meeting the deepest parts of ourselves, finding what’s true under our stories.

Nature breaks us all in the end, and thank goodness for it. It’s a necessary breaking. A breaking open of that which no longer serves so we can finally accept what we are. There’s a necessary humility in that. Learning that we are part of something wonderful.

Nature teaches us who and what we really are. Anything that isn’t nature burns away, and we find, often painfully, that our stories aren’t relevant, because they aren’t real. They don’t serve us. I am still pretty raw from the whole thing, and probably will be for a long time. And so so grateful.

I am so excited to see the adventures of the other Aloners. Kate, Beck, Michael, Rob, Mike, Peter, Jimmy, Duane and Chris. We only met for a week at boot camp, before we were dropped into the wilderness in the middle of winter to try to survive with a few bits of kit and our wits.

I fell in love with them all, we feel like family. Mainly because we are the only ones who have an inkling about what the others went through out there. Shared experience binds like blood. It’s still super weird cos none of us know each others’ journeys. We have to watch to find out. The gag orders are strongest for us.

The first two episodes dropped this week, back to back. I love the Aussie humour that’s apparent right off the bat and am already devastated that some of us won't be going any further, and am so so proud of every single one of us.

I want to watch more. I’ve received sooo many messages from people having ongoing watch parties (please send me a pic of your crew from the night or chuck it on my fb feed). There is such an outpouring of support I feel humbled and blessed by the size of my global family.

I’m taking the deepest of breaths now, in the quiet of this morning with the rain drumming the roof, remembering the sound of rain on my shelter in the inky, icy dark of lutruwita, marvelling at the turns of this life and the huge capacity of the human heart to feel it all. Feeling like I’m at the top of the roller coaster, looking down at the track, hanging on to the bar thinking how the fuck did I get here and knowing the only way through is though. Waiting for the sickening rush as my stomach tries to climb out my ears.

I know I’m going to fuck parts of this next bit up, as the carriage drops and it’s going faster than I can map and really I just have to hang on and figure it all out on the fly. And that when I do, fuck it up, that is, spectacularly at times, you’re going to be the shoulders I lean on, so thank you already, beautiful humans.

Those pride and ego deaths I went through out in the winter wilderness will see me in good stead for this next part, as I meet new places in myself, probably gracelessly in moments. You’ve been there for me through my whole journey of losing Blaise, your arms are long and your hearts wide as the sky, and I feel you here now for this wild ride. I know I’m not alone. Thank you from my bones.

I'm about to start recording some Alone videos, commentaries and Q&A, and interviewing awesome rewilding humans, and generally getting my youtube channel launched, so keep an eye out and if you feel to, when it's up like it or subscribe or whatever it is people do with youtube. I have no bloody idea. I just tried to do it and somehow deleted one of my existing channels and now can't even access youtube at all!!! So yeah. Send me back to the jungle where things make sense :D

Holy shitballs, this is happening.

With deepest gratitude for the incredible generosity of spirit of our palawa teachers and wisdom keepers going in to this experience, and to palawa custodians going back 60 000 years.

You can watch alone on SBS on Demand Wednesday nights 730pm

#aloneaustralia #sbsaustralia #sbsondemand #itvstudiosaus