message in a bottle

regardless of the unlikelihood of a user specific message carefully placed in this bottle [i lost count of how many i sent off as a kid but never received], there is some kind of inherent communication with this bottle anyway.

pondering on a bevvy of related tangential manifestations on this bright gleaming day where the sun kisses the ocean makes me partially happy & sad.

one day we may not be able to see/touch the ocean for the toxic waste but for now i cling onto the nostalgic fantasy which accompanies one solitary bottle bobbing on the harbour waves...

and then place a freshly scribed piece of reflected light back into the floating vessel liberating it back into the emerald blue yonder.

life is a cabaret

...and then in an apparent overnight coup my baby duckling turned into this, erm, colorful vivacious swan.

it's so surreal that we just did her 21st birthday party. i'm still pinching myself & assume there was an alien abduction involved. there is no other reasonable explanation.

she seems to have inherited a shy retiring manner & love of dress-ups from her mother [but is much more wise/sensible]. she has incredible friends too. aint life grand?

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.

no dig, ya dig?

one of the appeals of heading up to peats ridge fest under the guise of work mode was to 1. break my 21st century eco fest virgin bubble and 2. pick up a couple of refreshers in the multi-disciplinary field of permaculture. the good times/peeps which surrounded were a most convenient side-effect. reconnection with the earth & life force around are vital for any sustainable community.

i've been certified as a permaculture designer since 1988 when people outside of the biodynamic community didn't know bill mollison & david holgrem's names [modern day founders of the movement], but i haven't been actively practising throughout. this all changed in the last few years where outside of a limited city practise i now have the opportunity to pursue one of many dreams under challenging conditions: developing an eco community & sustainable lifestyle on a drought stricken temperate forest block just shy of the blue mountains national park. time to infuse new sensory experiences to jump-start old filed knowledge & brush away a few of the more obscuring cobwebs.

i'm currently in the process of building a long planned no dig multiple mandala garden complete with straw bale wintering chook shed after being partially influenced by the writing of australian, linda woodrow who over the last couple of decades has popularised the science/art of chook tractors in a rotational multi-cropping scenario for domestic/commerical application.

the heritage chicken source has been researched [probably going with australorps], the worms are breeding away happily munching down on organic leftovers both within the city borders and without. now all that needs to be done is to gather/harvest raw materials to build an oasis on what is essentially a concrete carpark. an impervious bedrock of hard claypan with no top soil in sight. enter no dig garden. if you want to know more check out esther deans who is one of the modern day matriarchs of the movement. i still have an adorable much thumbed version of her book from yesteryear.

utilising the super powers of chooks & worms there is about to be launched an incredible before and after scenario in the makeover journey of the decade. it doesn't actually take quite that long but there is a lot to do. in fact the cool thing about no dig is essentially after building a bed without technically breaking one's back is that it's almost immediately ready to go in terms of planting. generally it's good to wait a couple of weeks however to allow the microbes to kick in and stuff to break down. just a little.

not unlike a day of compost building no dig gardens are like the opposite of peeled onions -- you just keep piling on the layers laden with moisture between each one. a little newspaper, cow manure, compost, lucerne, seaweed, chook manure, pea straw, lawn clippings etc goes a long way... a delicious lasagna for the outdoor senses. just add water & sit back and watch...

another day, another decade, another song

with the beginning of one year lies the shadow of the last. mine was cast in glorious tribal technicolor beats & imagery surrounded en masse by beautiful people, vibe and scenery. peats ridge festival 2009.

best of all at my side was this similarly solar powered faerie lit chick who i even have a theme song with & a bunch of long distance calls with the man who brings the music. i am fortunate that there is a whole symphony worth of incredible people in my life [hello raen, punk monks & friends] & nothing shows that more than a few trashy self-depreciating new year's eve photos. aaah, out with the old and in with the new.

sadly all my footage is in mobile film this year as we played wannabe rolling stone journos so i rely on the cooperation, read vetting, from my fellow conspirators to provide more of these humiliating time-capsule gems. you know who you are.

apparently there are a lot more where these came from...