The Wistful Dragon

Omens and endings

•October 3, 2023 • Leave a Comment

This morning I grabbed a moment to reach for the book in which I write my omens for each month of the year over the twelve days of Christmas . I was curious to see what I had for October, and I’ve decided it’s definitely worth sharing.

You see, the timing is exquisitely perfect in relation to my counselling studies. We are nearing the end of our placements, and this week our seminar at university covers handling endings to counselling relationships. The omen was written on the 4^th of January, ten days after Christmas, and long before I had any idea of what the second semester coursework would be covering and when.

Tenth Omen Day – October 2023

Twelve silver eggs on a eucalyptus branch…

The eggs – presumably from a shield bug – looked like silver pearls lined up. So beautiful! The thing that struck me was the way it seemed like treasure – abandoned? No, left in trust that something good, in shield bug world, may come of them.

We are so accustomed to protecting, securing, hoarding and nurturing. At the end of it all, we, too, cannot control everything that will happen to anything we might create or treasure. Everything, ultimately, has to be released with hope and trust, and the knowledge that no outcome is guaranteed.

This strikes me as so pertinent for the process of counselling. For a little while we seek to nurture and protect, but nothing is guaranteed. In the end we send out our treasure – both what we have invested of ourselves and our clients – in hope and trust that something good may come of it all.

Posted in Counselling and psychotherapy, vocation and purpose
Tags: letting go, counselling, endings, trust, omens

Creative potential of mud…

•June 15, 2020 • Leave a Comment

I give up!

Going back to sleep after letting the cats out is impossible. My mind is too busy and the trajectory of my thinking warrants better attention. There’s thinking and there’s thinking, you see. There is the usual predawn sleep-disturbing litany of things undone, uncleaned, unfiled and generally unattended to, compounded by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness and impotence with regard to matters on the world stage, which is all very well and probably pretty average. But then there’s that question that demands an answer – how can I think differently about all this? And why is it that I can have enlightening pre-dawn revelations that never amount to anything, that correspond with my walk over the bridge from my parked car to work, when I consider how intentional I want to be about my work only to have the intention vanish the minute I cross the hospital threshold?

One thing I have learnt is that shifting how one thinks about things takes practice, and that over time the difference becomes apparent. It’s not a lost cause.

Since the lockdown for COVID-19 began, I have lost my sense of direction. I imagine this is a very common thing. The abrupt shift in focus took all my mental and emotional energy, given that being a nurse suddenly became a potentially life-threatening occupation. All the things I had been paying attention to – my health through a new gym membership, learning archery, preparing to learn to give talks on health and sustainability for nurses, and so forth – came to a halt, not just physically due to restrictions, but mentally, as I studied the threat and learnt how to contend with it. This was a major mental uprooting from the better part of a decade of sustained focus on matters of the environment, climate change and healthcare intertwined from a more theoretical and philosophical perspective.

The result: a measure of depression, not insurmountable, but definitely there.

The morning unfolds…I let the cats out cursing them for their 4.40 am demands, and plan to go back to sleep. However, instead I find myself mulling over the dream I have woken from which featured a Scottie dog (I had one named Bonnie Black Bess as a child). In my dream, I am aware that I don’t have the things I need for the dog and proceed to journey out to find her a decent dog basket to sleep in. There is an immediate sense of taking steps to care for something, improve the situation. From there I contemplate the matters the house – it’s general untidiness, too many things needing to be sorted, disposed of, dishes to be done, paperwork… I should have everything in a folder for my youngest son’s school leaver transition programme; I must email documents to a coordinator before Thursday, the car needs to be serviced before the end of the month, I asked the other members of the household for a meeting about creating the space we are in and it never materialised…and…everything settles on me like a cloying layer of mud and judgement. Overwhelm.

Like mud or clay…I can’t take total credit for the imagery. It comes from a friend’s shared dream, and this is perhaps the interesting thing about how shared dreams can work socially, where common images or themes travel and take on personal and collective meaning. The thing about mud or clay, is that while it can weight one down, it is also chock full of creative potential. It can be moulded and it can grow things. I view my depressed feeling though this lens. All the mixed-up weight of undone things is like clay. They aren’t sorted out. They are fragments inextricably blended together and they are full of potential. What I want is to be able to approach my life with mindful awareness and curious enquiry.

The idea of living with better intentional awareness has a magical effect. It takes the sense of judgement away. I realise that most, if not all of my feelings of depression seem to be attached to that self-judgment. Now I can consider the dust on my carpet and ask myself clearly how strongly I feel about it. Do I feel the need to do something about it now, or is there something else more pressing? Now I can question the possibilities and options around filing and untidiness – what do the mean to me – not you or anyone who might want to judge it, but me – without judgement? Is it important now? Is it something that will have it’s time and place? Is there a sense of the flow of my life and its priorities in the way things are scattered? What does it express? Oh this is interesting! How quickly my mind is concerned with what other people think it expresses and the limiting narrative of “clean and dirty”! What about complexity, interwovenness, interaction between living and nonliving things and forces that push and pull between everything?

When I think about practising mindfulness and coming into the present, I am aware that I want the “present” to be full of intention. I want something that is generative: Creating space for unfolding and change. Can this be something I focus on and explore? Can it be an idea to pivot on, a project or theme that will hold my attention long enough to help me shift my thinking from self-judging patterns that leave me feeling weight down in mud instead of holding the mud or clay that is so full of creative potential?

If I am serious about shifting how I think and how I choose to act, I shall have to give this some serious thought to shape an document the process. Perhaps this will be a beginning…

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: creativity, depression, dreaming, dreams, presence, self-judgement, thiking, thoughts

Farewell to our tree…

•March 11, 2019 • Leave a Comment

This eucalypt…

It was the last tree left standing along the fence. They are going to build there now. More concrete.

It was the last roosting place for cockatoos, the last bearer of blossoms for flying foxes on this bit of land.

Once, when this tree was young it was surrounded by bush, buzzing with life and colour, other trees close by, sharing the soil with grass and shrubs gathered around their roots protectively. As this tree grew and spread its branches the land was changed. Houses were built, and then hospitals – our hospital. It grew hotter at night, more concrete, tarred roads. Still this tree stood. When the houses were demolished and the other trees chopped down, this one tree remained alone.

When will people notice and learn that trees and plants talk to each other and nurture each other through their complex system of roots and fungal brain under the ground? How could this tree not, in some tree-like way be aware of everything gone around it when the information no longer came back through the networks from other roots near nearby?

Each day countless people coming to and fro to work, or for treatment, or to visit family and friends exchanged breath for breath with this tree – life giving. This tree gave – oxygen, shade, life to the communities of its roots, bark, branches, leaves and flowers. It gave food. It gave homes. It gave shelter through the night.

Today all the communities it held were reduced to wood chips. And some of the people who passed it every day didn’t even notice there was a little less oxygen for them today. Some of them laughed and said they didn’t much like that tree.

And some of us cried, because we knew we had shared breath for breath, day after working day with that tree for over a decade.

We lost a friend, today.

We lost our tree.

Posted in Pause..., Uncategorized
Tags: druidry, earth, environment, grief, health, life, loss, nature, social ecology, trees, wood chips

Where Monk and Wizard meet

•January 1, 2019 • Leave a Comment

Moving house just before Christmas led to the inevitable cry of “I must de-clutter!” A friend smilingly commented that a bunch of folk she knows are saying the same thing, and that we all must have been monks in our former lives. And there it is: the two movements of life for some of us – am I monk or wizard? The monk is about simplicity and detachment; the wizard we imagine surrounded by scrolls, books and bottles, skins, herbs, bones and feathers.

If I look back to my younger days and my thoughts of entering the monastic life, my desire, then, to detach from the things of the world, I see the monk in ascendance. Now, as I surround myself with books and collect bark, sticks, stones, feathers and shells, the wizard is much to the fore, yet there have always been the points where it’s necessary to de-clutter and let go of things.

As I look through a bowl of shells, acorns, stones and feathers I notice that some things are easy to let go of, others not so – not that feather, what if an acorn grows in the wrong place? No – that seed case is too interesting…and so forth. It seems there is an entanglement of energies that becomes a sticky web of attachments.

One part of my brain is happy to discuss energies and entities, wisps of potency, trails of magic, intrigue, inspiration that one might discover in the collected items. They fit easily into the wizard realm and float along with myth and poetry and art, making and unmaking, powers not easily defined and tricky when it comes to unintended consequences if one works with them. Another part of my brain is insistent that I point out to the logical non-magical science folk that it’s all OK. Language is a magic in its own right (or rite?) and these “energies” can also be explained as memories and associations built up over a life time of interaction the world and other people. There. Reduced to reason. It’ strikes me as a boring way of viewing an astonishingly deep and complex way of inter-relating with/in our world. And the shift in feeling it gives to some regarding the same subject matter is language “magic” at work. Evocation. Do these two differing ways of describing the same thing relate back to the Monk/Wizard divide? I think they do. But should that even be a divide, so much as an interplay – a movement between polarities, where avoidance of stagnation is the critical factor?

As I contemplate the holding onto, or releasing of things, I realise that not only is there the original meaning/symbolism/energy attached to the acquisition of a thing, but also a long tradition of using things to deliberately create associations that one wishes to discard – ways of drawing lines in the sand, of creating small (or sometimes big) ceremony or ritual that mark a shift or change in direction. Perhaps that is the

purpose of things I find harder to let go of – perhaps their purpose has not yet be created or realized or imagined and they are waiting – a store of potential for shifts and nudgings.

All of this is about creating flow, easing the logjams in life. Easing one small twig in a stream can send a cascade of other things rushing on their way.

The Wizard and the Monk watch the water skipping and singing past them between the rocks, and seem satisfied with this arrangement.

Posted in Pause...
Tags: attachment, clutter, declutter, detachment, druidry, meaning, monk, New Year, social ecology, wizard

Red dragonfly

•July 8, 2018 • Leave a Comment

On the weekend, while celebrating a birthday, there was a pause in the chatter, as a friend and I realised our mothers had passed away on the same day in April. The pause was filled with the “who goes first” of a story to be told, each instantly aware of the complexity of the passing of a parent. We gently gave each other space for that telling , comparing notes as far as was appropriate to the circumstances, as the general chatter recommenced around us. That pause is what leads me now to reflect on the story-telling of death and grief. It takes time to create the story to be told and it has different form in different places.

At the beginning of this year I rehashed a practice I’d tried for the first time during the Twelve Days of Christmas between 2016 and 2017: the Omen Days. On the fourth Omen Day, corresponding to April for 2018, I saw a red dragonfly on my car aerial as I was leaving for work, a second red dragonfly as I crossed the stream from my car parking spot and walked to the hospital, and had a third red dragonfly zip closely past my ear.

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When I got home, I looked up the symbolism of dragonflies – death and transformation, said the interwebs. It doesn’t really matter by whose tradition. Meanings are formed by consensus and the life of a dragonfly from nymph in the water to predatory flying creature of the air makes the symbology fairly inevitable. I noted in my Omen record that perhaps April would be the month of my mother’s passing.

By the beginning of April my mother, who had been struggling with a brain tumour since October of 2016, was in palliative care. She had no capacity to lay down new memories and could barely hold a conversation as she struggled with word retrieval. The month of the red dragonfly was upon us.

On the 4th of April, my parents wedding anniversary, I noted that my mother was no longer coherent. The palliative team has started a continuous morphine infusion and I wrote in my journal that the last coherent pieces of her mind were shattering.

I made a red dragonfly to add to the Shamble I had created at the beginning of the year, but wasn’t ready to include it yet. A piece of me felt as if the act of creating it was invoking my mother’s departure. I noted in my journal that it was about tensions and entanglement. Letting go is never easy. The dragonfly was made of red and orange ice-cream sticks from an old school project, wrapped in red Lindt chocolate paper and wound with red ribbon from a book mark. Its thorax was made from a red Christmas card envelope, and the wings from the plastic lid of my middle son’s birthday cake container. The head was a shell of camellia seed capsule from the camellias leaning over the fence from the neighbour’s garden. This hotchpotch of bits and pieces from life, representing connection, celebrations, mundanity, growing family, and community, seemed just right. The red dragonfly is a Shamble in its own right.

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On the 5^th of April I added the dragonfly to the Shambles. It felt like an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

By the 8^th of April her breathing had changed to the pattern of end of life. I read her A.A Milne poems so she had the sound of my voice, knowing that the words were buried deep in her memories from her own childhood through to mine and my brothers and those of her grandchildren. Familiarity is a balm. I did the same on the 9^th, visiting after work, reading different poems, this time, but struggling through the tears. I organised to take the rest of the week off work.
Once upon a time there lived a girl with shining red hair and freckles. She was tormented by her brother and harassed by nuns for her wicked sense of humour, but her indomitable spirit could not be quelled…I have often imagined my mother as a storybook character. She so identified with L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

On the 10^th I printed out my own poetry to read to her – every sort of poem on love and nature, children’s poems, sonnets, villanelles…

The phone call came at 6.30 am on the 11^th of April. I joined my father and brother at her bedside and we began planning the next steps.

Pending death is like a pregnancy of sorts and death births the grief. Grief doesn’t want to do much at first except cry and sleep and maybe eat a little because survival matters. However, grief is a creative energy. It thrives and matures with ritual, remembrance, connection and feeding oneself soul food, through gentle connection and creativity helps the growing grief child.

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I felt a deep need to express my grief creatively somehow, so I honoured the red dragonfly omen one more time in a painting. I didn’t know for sure if I could do it justice, but it mattered that I tried. I added words from my journal to explain the red dragonfly omen, and an epitaph in memory of my mother, Philippa Moira Holland.

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Posted in vocation and purpose
Tags: art, creativity, death, grief, grief work, grieving, health, journal, life, mother, nature, transformation, writing

When the Christmas biscuits are finished…

•January 28, 2018 • Leave a Comment

There were three biscuits left in the tin from Christmas. I took them out, gathered all the empty paper rosettes from the tin, and left the them on top of the tin to be consumed by whoever grabbed them. Those white paper cupcake rosettes were silently screaming “make something…”

The need to create had been building over the past three days. Make something with what? I didn’t have a canvas…but I had sticks in the back yard, and string…What else? This thing wanted to make itself. Wrapping paper left over from Christmas… Beads I wanted to rescue from what had once been a dry arrangement of sorts, due for chucking out… A necklace I didn’t use but that had sentimental value…A bit of gold braid…Feathers…

I lashed the sticks together into a rustic frame and wove the string back and forth across it a few times to create a useable space and realised that perhaps the best description of what I was making was a shamble.

‘A shamble (also called a shambles) is a handmade device used by witches to detect or amplify magic. It can even be used for protection or to send a spell. The device itself is not magical. Shambles are like spectacles, they help you see, but don’t see for you. A conversant witch can assemble a shamble in a matter of seconds using stuff like strings, twigs, leaves, feathers, beads, coloured paper, an egg or even a beetle. The whole thing looks like a “cat’s cradle”, or some sort of nest made of rubbish. The ingredients are not really important, although the centre should contain a live ingredient (e.g. an egg or a beetle. On one desperate occasion, a Nac Mac Feegle has been employed as the living part of a shamble).

The magic lies in its assembly and use, which is to catch the moment. “The way you tie the knots,” said Miss Level, who was a Research Witch, “the way the string runs – the freshness of the egg, perhaps, and the moisture in the air – the tension of the twigs and the kind of things that you just happen to have in your pocket at that moment – even the way the wind is blowing. All these things make a kind of… of picture of the here-and-now when you move them right.”’ (https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Shamble)

The bits just seemed to know what they should be and where they should go and I thought as little as possible, letting the thing make itself for the most part. An assemblage for the here-and-now moment of starting a New Year – a potentially challenging year with an un-well mother and university stuff to do…

Once I hung it on the wall, I realised it needed something behind it, so added the cheap scarf that it seemed to ask for.

I didn’t have time to sit down and consider what my shamble was telling me as I rushed headlong into a busy week, but now I’m grabbing an opportunity to use it and see what it has to say.

The sticks were grabbed off a pile of old branches. at least least some of them are from the old Ti tree that probably predates the house and the neighbourhood being built up. It’s a link to the ancient soil and rocks beneath this suburb – a link to deep time. Lashing them together brought back memories of my time as a Girl Guide, learning to lash and tie knots. Working with the sticks in my bedroom left bark all over the floor mingling my indoor life with outdoor life merging realms and timelines.

Weaving the string between the branches invoked the weaving of life, of portals, complex pathways and mazes, things for seeing through, scrying, dreamcatchers…it forms a gateway to other worlds, other views, other perspectives, the spiritual realm.

The biscuit papers – strewn across like flowers on a vine – are the moments i treasure – times with my children, my parents, my brother and sister-in-law and niece and nephews, and my friends, blight sparks of laughter, togetherness, meeting over food and drink, building community and sharing adventures and life events.

The butterfly painting – something I did in 2003 – fifteen years ago, now. It was, back then, a moment of reconnecting with my creativity, reminding myself that I could paint if I tried. Butterflies are always a symbol of transformation, of stepping through the next gateway on the path, moving onward and upward and taking life lightly, too.

The wrapping paper leaves run across counter to the biscuit paper flowers, invoking growth, but mostly they are there for their delicious aquamarine colour, my favourite colour – a combination of the green of the heart chakra and the blue of the throat chakra – a reminder to speak from the heart, to speak my truth, to be guided by compassion.

The dragon pendant was a gift from my mother, who knows I love dragons. It represents her love for me and her desire to nurture me. Dragons are symbolic of the power in wisdom to me – an ancient mythical being from so many cultures. It’s hard to find the words to explain what a dragon is to me – a sort of gathering of the essence of something, be it a powerful intention greater than the some of the people or creatures intending it, or strong emotion that gains a momentum of it’s own…I see dragons forring or summoned in those sorts of things.

The bell – probably left over from some past Lindt bunny – it wanted to be part of the whole to add sound. It’s presence invokes the wind chime in the back yard, and the voices of the birds. It is present to give warning of comings and goings, to include other senses to create the whole.

The feathers! – ah the feathers – bird gifts. Where would I be without my birds? I am in constant conversation with the birds around me. The cockatoos come for a bit of bread and seed, gently and politely accepting to be hand fed.

The lorikeets ask for apple at the kitchen window.

And ravens – visit occasionally.

The birds link me back to my maternal grandmother who taught me to watch and love them and to tell the difference between a Laughing dove and Rock Pigeon at the birdbath in the centre of her lawn as we watched from her bedroom window when I was little (back in South Africa)

The ribbon comes from a Christmas gift from a dear friend and fellow kenshi, representing the importance of friendship and kinship – the ties that bind us, and the link to the sword, the life giving sword – only drawn to defend and protect.

The golden braid was left over from the making of a druid robe. It meanders coming in at an unpredictable point and going who-knows-where, because the way is like that. We catch glimpses of the thing that draws us forward, and for a while we are certain or our path, but then it seems to vanish for a time, yet as we press on it reappears, gleaming strongly again. This is like my current relationship with druidry which I would dearly love to give more time to, but just can’t while busy with university studies, and yet at the same time, the university studies align uncannily with druidry.

The beads represent light and reflection moments to pause and be still.

The scarf behind was originally bought as part of my costume for the first druid assembly I attended, where are evening festivities focused om Manannan mac Lir, the sea god. It forms an appropriate background as the way of being that druidry represents, with its strong sense of being situated in nature and part of nature, connected to place and season and creature, is what governs my life.

This is no small shamble. It focuses everything that is important to me – a web of community, love, friendship and support. Through this I can focus the magic of the year.

Posted in vocation and purpose
Tags: applied imagintion, art, creativity, earth, environment, focus, imagination, life, magic, nature, reflection, shamble, social ecology, writing

The calling…

•September 30, 2017 • 1 Comment

When I began my Wistful Dragon blog, it was to consider the nature of calling and vocation. It was born out of the space between leaving the church, where the concept of calling is a given and shifting into unknown territory, where I could no longer attribute the idea of a calling to something dispensed by a God.

The concept of a calling has always been important to me. It’s a gift that my past life as a Christian gave me and it didn’t crumble when I found the creed collapsing in the face of too much scrutiny. That idea of a “one thing” provides a path through life that gives meaning and a sense of fulfilment.

It has taken me until now, in my 50s to be able to say with confidence and clarity what my “one thing” is, to which I feel sufficiently dedicated that I will happily spend time on it regardless of whether it generates an income or not.

Over the last couple of years I have done some serious soul searching and taken deliberate steps to reach this point. The first thing was acknowledging that I needed to change something in my life if I wanted to reach some future point where I felt differently about what I was doing. The future point looked impossible to reach. I didn’t have skills for a different job, and I didn’t have money to study. One thing I could do was apply to move upwards slightly in my path as a nurse. Prior to that point I had felt that the additional payment for a Clinical Nurse Specialist role wasn’t enough for the extra work expected of the position, but now I had a different reason to apply. I need to push the nearest boundary – change something that was within reach to change. That was in 2014.

No sooner than I had accomplished that change, something completely outside my usual realm of experience came up. I was asked by my local Greens group if I’d be willing to stand in the 2015 State Election so that we had a Greens candidate on the ballot paper for our area. This meant I had to be willing to put myself in the public eye and run as much of a campaign as I could manage. Scary indeed for an introvert – not in terms of being public, but in terms of the energy expenditure with all that interaction! It was a fantastic experience as I learnt what I was capable of in such circumstances and what I could push myself to do. I was safe from being elected in my area, but still able to contribute to the overall support of the Greens.

Following the election, I had to consider long and hard where I most wanted to put my energy. So many issues across the spectrum of environment, education, healthcare, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander concerns, social welfare, infrastructure and climate change jostled for attention, and I could not apply myself to them all while also caring for my family and working full time. I had to find what mattered to me most. I pared it down to environment and psychology and hence discovered ecopsychology. It was time for a new decision.

At the beginning of 2016 I didn’t think there was any way I’d be able to study ecopsychology. Nevertheless, I joined the Ecopsychology page on Facebook and started reading, determined to learn as much as I could anyway. Then someone posted a link to a course that was running for free. It had a mouthful of a name: “Environmental Education: Trans-disciplinary Approaches to Addressing Wicked Problems”. It was focussed on sustainability, so I signed up. It was interesting and kept me busy. In the meantime, on the Ecopsychology page, I struck up a conversation with a professor in Nebraska, who suggested I find out what one Dr David Wright was doing at Western Sydney University. I followed his advice and discovered the Masters of Education(Social Ecology) course, and set up a meeting with Dr Wright.

I worked out that the course cost was within my reach and applied. It started just after the Trans-disciplinary Approaches to Addressing Wicked Problems course ended, as if they were organised semesters of the same ongoing education. One of the subjects of the Social Ecology degree is Ecopsychology – the thing I had thought at the beginning to 2016 I’d never be able to study formally!

I am now half way through my Master’s degree and loving it. In the space since it began I have joined with others of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association(NSWNMA) to form the Climate Change Action Reference Group. I am working at keeping my coursework concentrated on how we can shift and change our perspective regarding healthcare, so that what we do is kinder to the environment, It seems appropriate to me that healthcare should be about sharing good health and healing with the whole of our biosphere, and not just about healing humans at the expense of everything else.

More opportunities are coming up as have found I can write for the NSWNMA blog, and am making amazing connections with other people at the university and beyond.

It’s easy to be caught up in all the bad news about the impact of humanity on the biosphere, and as a nurse I am particularly aware of the health impacts of climate change and environmental damage. However I am also aware of the dandelion that pushes through the concrete to bloom in the most unlikely places.

I hold a vision of us working with the amazing generative and sustaining forces that give life and healing to our beloved planet and to us, so that healing and healthcare become a mindful and collaborative process fully aware of our interbeing with all of Gaia. My calling is to live, work on, and teach this vision – a process of cultural change.

There are already so many lovely people with me who share similar ideas and visions. I hope you will join us too.

Posted in vocation and purpose
Tags: action, calling, challenges, communication, earth, Ecopsychology, environment, health, healthcare, life, nature, NSWNMA, nurisng, purpose, social ecology, vocation

Writing about writing

•April 25, 2017 • Leave a Comment

25-DSC_0240 I miss my blog! It’s way too long since I last wrote something here. It was never meant to be this way. I’ve had ideas and thoughts and they’ve come and gone as I’ve failed to set aside the time to write them when they came.

Sometimes my critical mind takes over and dissects what I want to write too viciously before I’ve even begun. Sometimes there’s a bottleneck of ideas – too many things all demanding I find a way to say them Right Now, so that not one of them will come through clearly, without getting mixed up with the others. At other times I’ve spent time reading things that resonate profoundly with me, written by other people. When I want to articulate my own ideas I can’t untangle them from what other people have expressed, and it all gets too messy.

Mostly, this past year I have been sorely pressed for time, with my thinking tied up in my Master of Education (Social Ecology) degree. But here’s the thing: what I am studying demands that I also be writing and practising expressing my ideas. On one hand that is achieved through my assignments, but that also implies a particular kind of writing, which isn’t the same as the freedom of my blog.On the other hand, what I am studying ties in beautifully with everything that is most important to me regarding our relationship with our lovely planet and it’s important that I keep up the informal sharing and conversation that this blog gives me space for.

So, my hope is that this little piece will shift the logjam in my mind and allow a trickle of inspiration to flow through again. I need to write, I need to share, I need to keep telling anyone who reads this about the magic of nature, our place in nature, our place in our environment, how important it is, how important we are, how important YOU are, for we are, every one of us, bearers of the message that we have the capacity to be carers and healers and nurturers of nature and of each other.

Posted in vocation and purpose

A Threshold

•March 19, 2016 • 5 Comments

1-DSCF1058 Last Sunday I experienced something I had never felt before. I have been for more walks in my local reserve area than I can count, since living in Australia, but no walk has ever been quite like this. I rose early, and felt compelled to remain fasting, and head out for some time among the trees. Sometimes a sense of ritual is particularly helpful.

As I entered the reserve, the morning sunlight was slanting through the trees – a rich, warm gold. One has to see and appreciate Australian bush to fully grasp the loveliness of the red earth and the particular shades of green of the eucalypts. The colours are intense, and more so on a day like this, with a very blue sky overhead. 1-DSC_0117 (2)

Not very far in, I became aware of a sensation that was completely new to me. I felt a warm glow starting at my feet and rising up to knee level. It was strange – like the comfort of a soft blanket. There was absolutely no logical, concrete explanation for this experience, and it seemed the place was recognising and welcoming me: the ground that knew my feet, the trees and shrubs that knew my skin cells, my hair, my breath, my microbiota – the parts of me that I exchange with the environment every time I visit.

1-DSCF1055 Further along my way, as I moved slowly and wonderingly, I felt as if I was joined by other unseen beings. It had all the sense of a welcome for an important ceremony, by community where one feels utter and complete belonging and love. I don’t know who or what those presences might have been, and it didn’t really matter. I felt them there and I belonged with them, and they with me, and they brought with them an incredibly deep sense of acceptance, celebration and joy. Just before I crossed the stream, they seemed to stay behind, sending me forward on my own.

I paused at the stream. While the water was very low, it was the clearest I’d seen it in a very long time. There was a Water Dragon up on the rocks – my Australian totem creature – an affirming sign, and at the edge of the stream I found two four-leafed clovers. Four-leafed clovers have featured strongly in my life sinc 1-DSCF1268 e childhood, as a sign of abundance beyond the expected. A tiny Thornbill nearby paid no mind to my presence at all, as it hopped around the branches of a shrub and paused to preen.

As I continued up the path on the other side of the stream, I became very aware of the rocks. They reminded me of the rocks at the headland at Mona Vale Beach, where the crumbling cliff has strewn an astonishing variety of different boulders on the shore below. Many contain fossils and I have always felt frustrated that I was not a geologist who could read the stories they had to tell. Now, these rocks in my local forest seemed to be inviting me to read their stories in a different way – not the scientific way, but rather in terms of their long, slow transformation and witnessing of life. They seemed to be inviting me to shift my way of seeing.

I came to a particularly large tree – an old ironbark, fire-blasted and strong. I felt this was the right place to head off the path to find a space where I would be truly alone, away from any other folk enjoying a morning walk or run. It meant a new level of awareness of my surroundings, with the very real possibility of encountering a poisonous snake. Without a path, the layers of sticks, twigs and leaf litter build up over the rocks, hiding treacherous gaps and animal hidey-holes. There were times I wondered at the sense of making this off-path effort, but I realised that nothing worthwhile comes easily. How can I ever be “of the wild” if I am not prepared to negotiate the wild and test my ability to put my feet in the right places? I found a spot where a live tree and a dead tree leant together to make a gateway – a liminal space, a place of one thing meeting another. 1-DSC_0122

I spent my time there in reflection, meditation and movement, just being. The process of leaving the beaten track seemed to symbolize leaving the normal tracks of thinking and pushing into new and unknown territory. I considered nature’s values – something that had been on my mind after reading someone’s suggestion that nature had no values and didn’t care about us. Just looking around me I ticked off the values I could see: Life and death cycle of conservation- no wastage, complexity and diversity, symbiosis, inter-connectivity, mutuality, balance, sustainability, experimentation, systems behaviour, balance, cohesion, nurture…

With these thoughts I felt I had moved out of the highly intuitive space where I could read symbols on rocks, and into a more cognitive space, but bringing the reverence and perspective with me that allowed me to be both intuitive and cognitive, rather than either/or. It was a wonderful sense of bringing integration to parts of my thinking that have often seemed poles apart and irreconcilable.

1-DSC_0143 I had meant to spend only the morning there, but by the time I left it was late afternoon. I had lost all sense of time. I left slowly, contemplating this amazing experience and feeling I had indeed crossed a line. I no longer felt like an imposter, stepping off the path into forest that had not felt human feet for a very long time. Rather, I felt welcomed and I belonged there, because I am part of nature, sprung from Earth, made of her, breathing
with her, constantly exchanging myself with the rest of her and here as her guardian.

Posted in Uncategorized, vocation and purpose
Tags: druidry, earth, Ecopsychology, Ecosophy, Ecospirituality, journey, life, meaning, nature, pagan, passion, present moment, psi, psychic, psychology, purpose, ritual, spirituality, transformation, transpersonal, values, vocation

2016- and moving forward

•January 2, 2016 • Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

It is now over a year since I posted anything on this blog, but that’s fine. I created this space to explore calling and vocation, and sometimes that is what a pause is about too. Coming back is a gift, for as I reread my last post, back on October of 2014, it ties in perfectly with where I am now, a year and three months later.

Last year, 2015, was strange, exciting and boundary-pushing. My pause in blogging coincides with taking on the task of standing for the Greens in the New South Wales State election. It was not comfortable or easy for me doing something like that, but the opportunity arose and it felt meaningful to stand in that gap and represent the green-minded people in an area that is very conservative and capitalist.

I had the opportunity to go to Townsville and grade in my school of Japanese swordsmanship, Nakamura Ryu Battodo, so finally have my sho dan (black belt).

In May, after the State Elections, I needed to retreat back into my comfort zone, but I was also left feeling “what now-ish” after all the energy spent trying to engage with people and get my message out to the community. How was I to build on that experience? I found myself struggling with the rage and grief around our failure to work meaningfully to end our dependence on fossil fuels, but recognised that despair is not a solution.

So, I made a list of all the things that mattered most to me and found pictures, and ended up creating a vision board for myself. It focussed on the best kind of future for our planet that I could wish for. I worked out an acronym using EARTH – Envisioning Abundant Renewable Transforming Healing….and added “for our planet”, and created a Facebook page, EARTH Thriving – where I could post all the good news: every article and interest story and meme telling us about people doing the right things to move towards sustainability and healing.

Visionboard1

Over the next few months I found myself returning again and again to the same theme: how to shift our relationship with the planet – psychologically. On the 21^st of October 2015, I have a journal entry where I grilled myself about my nebulous sea of “what” – this human/planetary/environmental nexus that I didn’t know what to do with, but has me so entranced. I was looking for the “base thing” that could be a launch point, as suggested by a dear friend, Janette Dalgliesh. That date is intriguingly noteworthy. I decided there must be something that connected ecology and psychology so googled “eco-psychology” to see if it existed. Bingo! The 23^rd of October 2015 marks the date in my journaling where I acknowledged I’d found my “One Thing”

Yes, I would love to study and get an appropriate qualification, however that might not be possible – yet – so I am reading and educating myself. More books are ordered, websites bookmarked, and I’ve started a blog especially for this: EarthThriving.org – still in its infancy as I feel my way forward with baby steps.

Now, at the age of fifty, I finally know my life’s purpose. It is all about connection – ours to Gaia – our planetary environment, our interdependence on and relationship with the exquisite network of life, which is what ties in so perfectly with my last blog entry exactly a year before: Connected.

Visionboard2 Visionboard3 Visionboard4

Posted in vocation and purpose
Tags: calling, connection, druidry, earth, eco-psychology, journey, life, living, meaning, nature, passion, planet, present moment, psychology, purpose, story, sustainable, thriving, transformation, values, vocation, writing

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