former incarnations

in a former life this was me. my van was called nettle. hippie much? this was the first house/land i ever bought: a half acre with an orchard & loads of native trees where medicine herbs were grown & organic seaweed/comfrey fed plants ran amok in raised biodynamic beds framed with gathered driftwood. i was twenty. my year off from uni.

leaning against the hedge [which i climbed into & hid just prior to my daughter's birth -- i heard pushing hurt] is my old bike i rode 1 km on to call the midwife after being in labour for over ten hours. on the rural outskirts, there was no landline & this was pre-mobile phone popularisation. aaah, the 1980s.

this is the place where my earth faerie sprite, raen miro, was born. she's right there in that pram. born eventually following a storm which broke a several months long hot drought. i named her for the hopi indian tradition of which i was a student at the time under the guidance of wise woman, susan weed. rain is life, "ae" for faerie, miro for the artist/tree.

twenty years later my beautiful friends, marianne & francois today have given birth to a little boy eliah. taking the essence of the universe into oneself & believing it is one of the many secrets to life. the naming tradition is vital as is listening to the signs from within/without inherently key to many aspects of our journey.

eliah is such a great name. powerful yet humble. he will undoubtedly be blessed as will others around him. along with my other pseudo nieces nehlia & bella he has the best parents i know. lucky them.

onto excrement which sort of segues... hanging out with all the feral hippies at peats ridge has made me all kind of nostalgic. yesterday my GF anna who was also there posted on facebook that she'd acquired bacterial pneumonia as an occupational hazard from being at the fest. she's now riddled with antibiotics after kicking off the year in A & E. joy.

the compost toilets did get beyond epic overflowing proportions at one stage. if one chose to sit on the seat after standing through the queues, one's ass grazed previous attendees recycled breakfast [needless to say i did my squat muscles a favour & used them]. i can talk shit for hours & am happy to go into great depths about the inane beauty of a colonic irrigation, perhaps not changing nappies, but there is a line drawn when dealing with others beyond perhaps one's inner nuclear core. i can't even clean a carnivore's oven/cooking implements & that's prior to digestion.

thing is, those dreadlocked hippies in all their technicolor wonder, tree of life garb & underarm crystals are not so many poles apart from me. if i were to be experiencing anyone's shit outside of my own comfort zone i'd have theirs any old day over the general populace. there is something to be said for peace, love and happiness. even when it assaults the nasal senses or even inner polarity.