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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 2023. (You can opt out at any time)
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Mother Tongue

30/8/2020

9 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.
​
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
9 Comments

Capital R Reality is Upon Us. Shall we dance?

11/8/2020

9 Comments

 
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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. ​
9 Comments

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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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  • Home
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  • Programs
    • Dirt Time (women's 8 day rite of passage) >
      • Dirt Time application
      • Dirt Time, your facilitators
    • Thrive Rewild Quest 8 day survival trip >
      • Thrive 2023 Quest application
    • Vision Quest - 4 day solo (8 day program) >
      • Vision Quest information
      • Vision Quest application
    • Vision Quest Protector >
      • Quest Protector application
    • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest >
      • Apocalypse Babes Mini Survival Quest application
    • Seven Levels of Quest
    • Powerful workshop Sydney
    • ManCraft Men's Retreat - 3 day
    • Women, Unchained
    • Archetypes of Power
    • Thrive 2020 Wandering Quest 8 day survival trip
    • Rapport Based Relating
    • Goodbye Good Girl- Hello Wild Woman
    • River of Grief
    • Wild Heart Gathering for adults
  • Gigi 5Rhythms
    • 5 Wounds of Connection 7 day retreat
    • Heart of the Huntress 2022 Australia
    • Archetypes of Power workshop
    • Pussy Says No - Australia 2020 with Catriona Mitchell and Gina Chick
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    • Dance of Transformation Ongoing
    • 5Rhythms workshop enrolment/ enquiry
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    • Heart of the Huntress 2020 portugal
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    • 5Rhythms EnTrance monthly class
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  • About
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