Welcome home

To G. The sage said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What he didn’t mention was that each step demands a thousand journeys of the spirit. By this I mean that the purposeful placing of one foot after another - be it on a moving footway in a sleek urban airport, or on the broken promise of lonely shoreline - requires a persistent commitment to purpose containing a small universe of dreams, hopes, and desires. Like you, I’ve dreamed and hoped and desired, and I honour every step you’ve taken.

Welcome home.

In the name of the father

US psychologist, Martin Seligman, says there are three portals to happiness: hedonism, "flow", and service. On the latter, I was musing recently about how much unsought, unexpected joy I've had being a parent.

Having children led me to a host of decisions that altered my life in fundamental ways: work, career, income, where I lived, and, my relationships: with myself, spouse, parents and extended family.

Fifteen years after conceiving our first child, I've enjoyed a lot of pleasure from trading one life for another. Mind you, my spouse and I had never wanted to raise children but 10 years into our marriage, she changed her mind. She wanted children.

Much discussion followed. Why change the great life we had, I asked? After all, our life in the city gave us all we wanted, right? Freedom, travel, double incomes, cars, a trendy inner city house, an investment property near the harbour, and a rich social, intellectual and cultural life. In the short term she wanted me to trade that for chaos and the end of civilisation: morning sickness, birthing classes, birth trauma, one billion shitty nappies, colic, mastitis, broken sleep, baby talk, baby showers. Fuck, no! Becoming a father was not one of my fantasies. Not remotely. But motherhood had become important to my spouse, and I acquiesced. Why? One reason only: I loved her.

Needless to say, fatherhood changed my life. It was a revolution. The full telling of that story, and the changes to my home, career, economic and social circumstances, is for another time. But Seligman’s thesis that what some call “sacrifice” was for me a pathway to unlikely pleasures. I traded my former life to become a co-creator of children’s lives. Today, this experience continues to be a privilege, a self-revelation, a sometime pain in the ass, and an unparalleled joy.

Being in relationship with, and jointly responsible for the physical, emotional and intellectual development of a child is to become more fully oneself. More human. I’d never expected to learn this lesson. In my early days of parenting, I was asked to forego, abbreviate, suspend, and alter my interests, hobbies and pursuits. At the same time, I was invited to receive and hold many unexpected and undeserved gifts.

There was a time when my daughter used to miss me because I was spending long hours away from home commuting to a day job in the city. I was in the habit of leaving our new home in the blue mountains before dawn and returning again in darkness. Because of this, she sometimes missed the opportunity of seeing and speaking to me, as she'd be sleeping when I left in the morning and in bed again by the time I returned home in the evening.

One morning, determined to speak to me and hug me before I left for work, she rose early without my knowing and sat beside the front door, waiting for me in her dressing gown. I rose, showered, dressed, and breakfasted, not seeing the sleeping child slumped beside the front door, as I quietly left the house in darkness. I learned of her efforts to share a moment with me when I returned home that evening. The memory of her loving deed, and our missed encounter, still brings me sadness and tears.

I'll soon become a divorcee - a designation that awaits two thirds of people who marry. Today I live 70 kms from my children. I see with greater clarity how parenthood has changed me. I realise how much pleasure I’ve taken (sometimes for granted), merely at hearing the sounds of my children's boisterous, laughing, fighting voices in the house. Recently, I was awakened by a conversation in the street between a young boy and girl. For all the world, they sounded like my son and daughter: the tone of their voices and the music of their laughter came swimming to me as if I were still living with them at home. It was a bitter-sweet moment.

I'm living in the city again. Come nightfall, wailing sirens, barking dogs and babbling drunks play the sound track to my dreams. It's a time to re-engage with an urban life and a career that I’d paused 15 years ago. There's a rack of old suits, shirts and ties to dust off. But it feels like going three steps back to go two steps forward. And there’s a nagging thought that maybe I’m a bit a bit behind/beyond the business of re-establishing a life and career in Sydney town.

Am I?

Hope springs eternal

New endings, new beginnings

So another year has nearly slid by. And it’s been a momentous one. The most notable tales this year were ones of a love lost and new prospects. What to say about love lost? It was a slow train coming, that’s for sure. We were together a long time and, like most couples, we were by turns happy, angry, confused and resentful but in that final stretch – for five years or more – I hadn’t felt so isolated or sad or desolate since those interminable years of adolescence.

As our marriage plummeted we revealed our best and worst, we struggled in the embrace of a pain-body that plagued us day and night. I lost feelings of respect and admiration for my spouse and myself. I lost hope. I stopped trying. I felt misunderstood, unacknowledged, unappreciated. Most of all, I stopped believing in the idea of love.

I recall walking down a street looking at couples and asking myself: “How do they do it? How do they make it work?” At rock bottom, I believed that I didn’t know how to love (anyone) correctly. I told myself a story that my parents’ wounding gift to me was this: “We don’t know how love each other any more, so we’re passing it to you to solve.” And being unable to unravel it, I decided to do the best I could: instead of finishing the marriage badly, as my parents had, I resolved to end it well. I want my kids to learn that even if I couldn’t sustain a functional marriage, I was damn sure I’d show them how to leave one with respect and integrity, for myself and my spouse.

So far, we’ve managed to do this. We’re successfully negotiating the challenges of financial commitments, property settlement and co-parenting. We talk regularly about what we want and how to achieve it. We meet as a family, we attend school events and prize-givings and the odd social occasion together, for the sake of the kids. Our communication is less fraught and more positive and functional than it has been for a long time. I feel happy and I’m hopeful that it’ll continue to be so.

Managing these issues in this way moves me to believe in the idea that I can also commence an intimate relationship in the same positive manner: with candour, compassion, and trust. So meeting someone recently who is supportive and curious and (incredibly) intuitive has been as startling as it is delightful. I know, I know: rose tinted glasses! Love is blind. Brain gone to mush. My critical faculties have deserted me. All true, no doubt. And yet, I find myself trusting my intuition more these days. I’m learning to give greater reign to instinct. To gut-feeling. To that unnameable sense that if it feels okay, it is okay. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink! is serving as my spiritual/intellectual guide, lest anyone judge that I’m simply another hapless, lovelorn, middle aged single male on the rebound . . .

Love made sweet and sad the same

Love is everything

KD Lang's version of Love is Everything summarises how I feel right now about the experience of a love relationship. It's not easy, is it? I've discovered that being with someone requires an enormous capacity to give selflessly, expecting nothing in return. For me, expecting someone else to be the person I want them to be only brings suffering, for me, them, us. To love selflessly requires a capacity for deep self-love -- something that I am not always alive to. It requires a disposition of acceptance and surrender to what is, without attachment to what should be or could be. How's that like my life?

See KD Lang sing Love is Everything here on YouTube

Maybe it was to learn how to love
Maybe it was to learn how to leave
Maybe it was for the games we played
Maybe it was to learn how to choose
Maybe it was to learn how to lose
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

Maybe it was to learn how to fight
Maybe it was for the lesson in pride
Maybe it was the cowboys' ways
Maybe it was to learn not to lie
Maybe it was to learn how to cry
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love did not hold back the reins
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

First he turns to you
Then he turns to her
So you try to hurt him back
But it breaks your body down
So you try to love bigger
Bigger still
But it...it's too late

So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
And know you'll never be the same
And find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn't I?
And I gave it big...sometimes
And I gave it in my own sweet time
I'm just leaving

Love is everything...

(Lyrics: Jane Silberry)

Change

Goodbye to all that

Tomorrow I pack and leave a 23-year old marriage. It’s a relationship that has spanned 29 of my 44 years: a big chunk of my life. Why leave? To be free. To explore. To be alone in the universe. To learn to live this life in another way. To walk the road less travelled. To live unfulfilled dreams. To travel light upon the earth in a way that marriage and parenthood and others’ expectations haven’t permitted.

There are dreams of writing and travelling and living and working in other places, other countries. But most of all, I want to develop a relationship with myself that has eluded me. And to do learn to do this I must live apart and alone. I intend to devote myself to living a life a presence: abandoning ego and mind to live a life of consciousness, compassion, gratitude, joy, love and sacredness.

There is too much history where I now live. And too much future. By that I mean that I am haunted by the ghosts of a three-decade old relationship. I find myself being reminded too frequently of my failures, my transgressions, my sins. I’d like to believe that I am none of these things: that I am not my failures (or my successes). Yet looking forward, all I see is more of the same. I will not participate in the madness, the pain, the loathing, the unconsciousness any longer.

In the past month I have read and re-read Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. For too long, I’ve believed that my dysfunctional marriage was principally my doing, and that it was my responsibility to fix it. I’ve been told the same many times: as soon as I get my head together, our relationship can improve and prosper. Reading Tolle has revealed to me that the two of us have colluded in not speaking our deeper truth. That we have spent our time together mostly striking out and reacting from our unconscious wounded egos.

Now I see that I am not simply my little ego. In essence, I am something much greater and deeper. I am part of the life force of the universe. I am not separate. And I do not need to fight to protect my ego: my “boundary”: myself. “I am,” as Van Morrison says in The Waiting Game, “the brother of this snake.” I am connected to the flowers, the sky, the wind, the trees and the ocean. I am cosmic conscious dust and must die (before I die) to the fiction that “I think, (and feel), therefore I am.” If I keep believing and feeding my mind/ego, which lives on judgements and concepts and ideas and preferences and attachments, I am doomed to eternal suffering: sadness, anger and fear.

Goodbye to all that, As Robert Graves once said. Instead, my new mission is this: “I create a conscious world by living in the timeless realm of present-moment awareness.”

Nature knows the power of now

Sydney’s first MKP Purification & Renewal Ceremony

The winter solstice marked the occasion of the Sydney MKP community’s first purification and renewal ceremony near Thirlmere, an hour’s drive southwest of Sydney. The solstice is that times of year when -- in our hemisphere -- the Earth’s axis is most tilted away from the sun, representing our seasonal mid-winter.

Brett, John, Ted & Dan celebrated the event, while Peter, Daniel, Rick & Denis sent their heartiest blessings. Set in a lovely bush setting, the new lodge is a plain structure made from she-oaks. It’s an intimate configuration, built on a levelled piece of ground that runs down a hillside to a trickling stream. In its current form it will probably accommodate a dozen or so people.

All kinds of spirits came to bless the occasion: black cockatoos crowed their greetings; wombats marked our site with green droppings; and bush wallabies crashed about in the darkened bush, while our blazing fire cast ghostly shadows on the towering fire-scorched gums that border the site. Below, the gully sang a hushed siren song of distant ocean shores, strewn with weed and kelp and magnificent pearly shells.

Inside the lodge, grandfathers hissed: “The place is here! The time is now! Speak your truth, for it is welcome in this place of darkness.” As always, the steamy purifying heat drew lazy beads of sweat from our invisible bodies. Descending now, we left chronological time behind as we spoke to the lover, warrior, magician and sovereigns within. We had entered a portal to kairos time – that wonderfully dreamy space-place somewhere being and non-being.

Stories and songs and questions and tears and laughter swirled and flowed around and through us, as the un-manifest became manifest. No past. No future. Just the simple power of now-ness. Utterly present. Intensely alive. Deeply conscious. Blissful. Peaceful.

Ceremonial fire

The lodge builders

The sonic call of a whip bird breaks my sleep. Under my window there is a tiny jingling, tinkling sound, like a small solitary Christmas bell. I hear the rustle and hiss of a goanna moving with slow deliberate purpose in nearby scrub. A kookaburra cackles insanely, and overhead the lyric call of a currawong warbles a greeting to the new day.

I'm staying at 'Narrowleaf' with Terry and his wife, Trish. 'Narrowleaf' is a sanctuary-cum-hospital for the rehabilitation of injured native Australian wildlife. Bats, possums, koalas, wallabies, sugar gliders, echidnas, lorikeets and dozens of other animals and birds are brought here and nursed back to health. Some of the animals have been electrocuted. Others have suffered attack by humans or domestic animals. Many are the hit and run victims of collisions with motor vehicle, left to die by the roadside. Those whose injuries and diseases are evidently too distressing or too advanced are humanely put down on return to Narrowleaf.

In the six years since they established Narrowleaf on the outskirts of Queensland's Gold Coast, Terry and Trish have built a network comprising hundreds of volunteers who retrieve and care for injured animals. Together, they have established research and teaching links with veterinarians and universities, and travelled the world to educate themselves and others about animal breeding, physiology, anatomy, microbiology, pharmacology, and veterinary surgery. They've ploughed hundreds of thousands of their own money into a venture stretching across southeastern Queensland that has helped countless thousands of animals.

Today men are coming to Narrowleaf to build a sweat lodge as a gift the local community. Daniel Cloud and I have already cut the Casuarina saplings that will serve as a framework for the lodge. I feel happy and curious. Today will be my first opportunity to build a sweat lodge.

By mid-morning everyone has arrived and we start work. The lodge builders are Terry (Flying Fox), Rick (Bat), Daniel (Powerful Owl with Frolicking Tui), Shannon (Happy Dragon), Steve, Michael (Tiger's Eye), Damian, Bill (Southern Eagle), Allan (Big Bull), Antoine (Possum), Peter, Wayne (Dingo) and myself.

Spades, picks, crowbars, axes, saws and string - lots of string -- are employed to fashion the lodge's dome-shaped skeletal structure. Daniel and Rick are our tutors. Later they will share water-pouring duties inside the lodge. Later, Jai Hennessey and Larry make a visit. Larry has brought his young grandson, Lachlan, who is smudged into the circle with the men. Later, we stand in a ceremonial circle and I hold young Lachlan's small hand in my own as Larry offers a blessing for our work.

At the centre of the lodge a deep hole is dug with sufficient depth to hold 20 or so "grandfather" rocks. Later, these will be roasted in a fire until they are fired to a glowing orange-red. The "grandfathers" remind us that all matter is ancient and changing. Like the grandfather rocks, we are all in transition from one form to another. For me, the grandfathers represent all that is past, present and future.

They explain that the lodge entrance will face eastward, towards the sun-lover energy. The archetypal energies are acknowledged around the lodge and its perimeter by tying gold, red, black, white, blue and green cloths on stakes. Young Lachlan ties the gold coloured cloth onto the stake in the east, representing new beginnings. When we have completed the lodge's framework we drape it in layers of underlay and canvass. Inside, the lodge is pitch black.

Some time later Trish visits us at the lodge. She is holding a dead male fruit bat whose back was broken last night, probably due to a collision with a car. She tells us it has lain all day where it fell by the roadside, suffering an agony of pain and bewilderment. A broken back means its life as a bat is over, Trish explains, so she has injected it with a sedative and a fatal quantity of barbiturates to stop its heart. Thanks to her the bat was able to die in peace and dignity after its long ordeal.

She wraps it in a soft cloth, like she would an infant, and hands it to me. She asks me to give it to Rick, whose totem animal is Bat. When Rick returns from his water pouring preparations I tell him the story of the bat's ordeal and its final hours of loving care by Trish. He cradles the bat, caressing its ears and stroking its black fur. Later, he buries it (headfirst) in the hill that rises to the west of the lodge.

We build the fire that will be lit at day's end by our fireman, Allan. According to tradition, the fire represents the sun's male energy. The sun communicates with the moon via a "heart line" that has been traced in yellow-white powder on the ground. The moon, representing the feminine principle, is created from earth dug from the hole we have dug at the centre of the lodge. The moon mound serves as an altar. We place sacred objects such as talismans, worldly chattels and mementos on it for safekeeping.

A stake placed through the centre of the moon-altar is decorated with green and blue cloths. These represent mother earth and father sky. The heart line running from sun to moon continues into the lodge. Inside, the heart line communicates with the "womb" that will hold the grandfathers.

Each of us places a grandfather rock in the fire, setting our intention for the sweat. Wayne and Steve are the "rock bearers". Later, they will scour the fire with a long handled pitchfork and shovel and bring the glowing grandfathers to the lodge. I will be "inside doorman", a human bridge who communicates messages between the fireman, rock bearers and the water pourers.

Finally, the fire is ceremonially lit. It burns for an hour or so while we talk contentedly, reflecting on our good work. Allan recounts an uproarious story about his search for the string that now binds the lodge together. At dusk we enter the lodge. The first set of six grandfathers is brought inside. The lodge door is then closed, leaving us in inky blackness. I brush the grandfathers with sage, sweet-grass and a mix of crushed native herbs gathered by Daniel. Their sweet, smoky aroma begins to fill the confined lodge space.

The first round is the round of the lover to the east. As each man speaks to his feelings, the water-pourer sears the rocks with water. The steamy air warms and closes in around us and we start to nudge up against one another, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. We allow room for each man to claim some unanchored part of himself and I feel the healing spirit of the sweat lodge beginning its magic. The lodge for me is a dark, safe, sacred container that mirrors a sacred space I hold inside me.

Round two is the round of the warrior in the north. The water pourer invites us to honour ourselves for our capacity to stay the course in the face of adversity and self-doubt. I speak of my father, who at age 14 ran away from home on a boat, leaving his native Ireland for good. Six years later he stepped ashore as a man of experience in Australia. His gift to me was the dogged determination and self-reliance he learned at sea, and later, as an immigrant to this land. Now the lodge is cooking. The juice of men's truth is firing us to go deeper.

Round three is the round of the magician in the west. What burdens and wounds do I carry? Does it serve me to carry on being a victim? A perpetrator? Am I courageous enough to speak to my wounds and my wounding of others? And having done so, am I prepared to let them go into the void, trusting spirit to take care of the rest?

Now the lodge is a thick, intense place filled with the groans and moans and tears of men. We name those who have wounded us and those we have wounded. We vent our torments. We unburden ourselves, howling at the unseen moon that now bathes the lodge in a pure white light of feminine understanding. We swoon. We ebb and flow into and around one another, as the healing magic of the lodge transforms our pain into an ecstasy of release.

Round four is the round of the sovereign and we name that which is kingly in us. We honour and bless ourselves for what we hold dear in our kingdoms as fathers, grandfathers, brothers, husbands, sons. My breath is a searing hot gas, tearing at my throat and lungs. Part of me can't stand the intensity any longer yet I am deliriously happy here with my band of brothers. The grandfathers of countless generations are holding me safe in their wise embrace. At last, the door is flung open and we drink the cool night air that floods the lodge. I crane my neck to see father fire and mother moon dancing in a heat haze before me. Above, a billion points of light dazzle and dance in the cosmos.

After a brief respite, rounds five, six and seven follow in quick succession. All the grandfathers have been welcomed into the lodge and they hiss as they are lashed with water. The heat is so intense that I have to bend my body and breathe close to the earth where the air is a little cooler. We chant. We sing. We laugh. We weep. We're dying and being born anew. Then, something warps inside me. I feel a massive leviathan spirit has consumed me. I am deep inside its gut. I surrender to this and feel my shame peel and break and fall from me. I'm free again.

The door opens for the last time and we stagger and slither from the lodge, exhausted, happy and complete. We hose our bodies then drift into a ragged circle to dry ourselves around the fire's embers. We check out, feeling wrung out, serene, happy, wizened and complete. A man remarks to the group that today is my birthday. And so my brothers sing to me a happy birthday that I will cherish for the rest of my days.

It is done and we are one.