PLANET CULTURE

 
        As orange seeped through the cloud bank on the Eastern horizon,  International Women's Day arrived at the edge of the Tanami Desert.  The morning light hit the roof of the Tjilimi (Women's centre) as I finished my sun salute and returned inside to the women in my care. They are from the last generation of people born in the Western Desert. They are Law women,  elderly now but they are Elders with great power in their hearts.
       I am here with another Malpa (carer and companion) and together we take care of all their basic needs.   As my friend and partner Malpa told the Elders about the significance of the day,  it occurred to me how special it was for us to be spending International Women's Day at one of Australia's only Women's Law and Culture Centres.
       The significance of this day resonated easily with the women even though their understanding is limited by language and cultural barriers,  reduced senses,  short term memory loss and some dementia.  One woman sat up with her eyes a shining smile and announced,  "Planet Culture ".
        Her vision took me with a flash of quickening, to deep understanding of the weaved net of culture that women held all over time and all over the world.  In this country they call it 'Yawulyu'. Intricate, delicate and yet strong.  It is silk, spun from the hearts of women everywhere; the womb of the stars,  the matrix of culture.  Deeply imbedded in our genetic fibres it links us all in an exquisite tapestry.  Spun with wisdom,  held with love.
        Women held culture strong throughout time so that there was no time.  There was nothing to measure when all was intact and the sacred cycles of life were unbroken.
         The tragic ripping apart of this net, this knowledge, began in our history and became our matrilineal heritage.   While women cosseted embers of this knowledge away, their ways and knowledge were captured and destroyed.   Imperialism grew and spread around the world,  enslaving the intricacies of culture everywhere; reducing the calaedescope of patterns to linear time constrainted flat lines.
         Now is the time of the great remembering.  The patterns women weaved throughout time are awakening in our minds and hearts. They  are being rethreaded through our lives as if we ourselves are being weaved.   This is the time of the New Dreaming.  This is a creation time and we are Goddesses alive to this power.
        When we open ourselves up to this Divine Intelligence, we create channels for power to work through us.  In our surrendering we release fibres of intention and that adds to the holding pattern of the womb space of this new Dreaming.
         It may seem hard to escape the clutches of our modern minds because our entire world view has been constructed with this linear pattern of duality and separation  However Planet Culture lies within the matrix of our human bodies.  It is our birthright and each of us is individually important as vital strands in these Intricate patterns. While our Earth people and ecosystems are being consumed by the linear construct of a disconnected intelligence, we women can gather power through our intention and feed it to the collective, thereby helping to form Planet Culture.
      We can bestow our children with an inheritance of faith and hope and intricately woven love for all. From threads of compassion and forbearance, with surrender as wings, we can soar above and weave our magic.  Connecting with one another and the great Goddess Gaia that gives us life, we will spin the New Dreaming of Planet Culture.

  If you're interested in volunteering as a Malpa, contact Zohl de Ishtar at kapululangu.women.centre@gmail.com.
 Or visit www.kapululangu.org
     
     

EARTH PARENTING IN MARRIAGE

    In my journey mothering while intuiting the ways of the ‘forgotten people’, the Indigenous peoples of the Earth, I have continued to find myself facing my relationship with my husband and its ongoing web of entangled stories. Our journey is but one of the collective of our genre. We are the generation with choices, and statistics show we are still making black and white ones; good and bad. We are walking away from our problems in every increasing numbers and our children are left in a psychological chasm created by our separation. Or are they? 
    This article is not written with anything more than anecdotal reference from my own experience and observation. Throughout our relationship I have anchored our experience to our ancestors and the Indigenous model, which has allowed me the benefit of forbearance long before I even knew there was a word for it.  There is a bigger picture to our culture’s collective pain that we suffer in relationship and I believe my story shines a light on another way of looking at our present predicament.

      I could have left my husband more times than I would like to imagine.  He has left me at least that many.  We still have unresolved issues. We have four children together. We love each other. In times of survival that would be where the story ends and living begins. Who would care about past mistakes?  It would be a case of getting on with living and raising the children. In the Indigenous world, the fabric of their societies and marriage lineages and Dream time law would have safeguarded and held relationship in a way that doesn’t allow for comparison in such a short piece of writing. In any case there are endless examples of how different tribes dealt with marriage problems and that fact alone demonstrates that it was in the interest of the entire tribe to arrest problems and deal with them.

      When our problems came to a head I would spend time grounding my hurting heart with ‘earth’ jobs with the kids; gardening, looking for insects, walking and just being out in nature.  While we spent these times together it would allow for recapitulation, where the argument would come back to me in small waves immersed in understanding and compassion. Often one of the kids would synchronize with this understanding by bringing me something that represented it, like an emu feather which to me means ‘fathering’. Their spontaneous gifts seemed to be prompted from another world.  They were working with the angels in sustaining me with the fortitude to pray again, to dream again and to let go of the hurt. 

     In my wanderings in this kind of relationship ‘pea soup’ I have discovered that an important aspect of our current climate of relationship stalemate is individualism.  Our egoistic state is more pronounced than any generation before us, partly fueled by consumerism and also accelerated since the industrial revolution when families have been separated by the work force and schooling. (Which are relatively recent phenomena.)  
       When we compare Indigenous cultures we can see that their fabric held them as part of their tribe first and their individuality was sustained by the tribe.  We come from thousands of years of slavery, serfs and commoners; serving the elite, our individuality was not free to blossom. Now in our current culture it exists in spite of our family groups or communities; we are cultured to believe in our thoughts as if they are our individuality.  Instead often they are our ego and very often they are running the show.  
       So when I added this wider perspective to my individual problems, I found that they would shrink away to mere shadows.  Those shadows are the culture's pain body, haunting us from within our own minds as we, the next generation, carry the stories of our mothers and fathers.  “Men were generally not useful in the home.  Women were usually complaining and nagging.” These are just examples of common expectations of the husband/ wife experience. 

       When I step out of my story I can see how I have supported that cultural view of the fish wife at home nagging and complaining.  When I let go of expecting him to have simultaneous realizations that he too has let me down, I release the whole story and my authentic self can emerge.  My relationship is essentially with the now.  Now extends throughout time and connects me with a wider perspective.  I can see that my problems will be my children’s and were my grandparent’s until I release them; until I stop giving them energy.  That means trusting, leaping grandly into my inherited fear; knowing I have nothing to lose because love will always shine more brightly than any shadow.

     Indigenous women did not talk about their menfolk in negative ways.  They may have laughed knowingly and shared teasing looks but their children’s minds were not cluttered with this conversation that has littered our lives for many generations.  I remember how my complaints with friends about my marriage gave me short term satisfaction but did not relieve my problems.  Looking back I can see that they extended our problems as if they had been prayers for what I didn’t want. 
     I think often marriage break-ups are exacerbated by this kind of talking.This talking is however necessary to some degree because we are living so separately. We need to offload and talking helps us put things in perspective. I found that when the friends I confided to echoed my alarm and distress, my problems became exacerbated.  
      I discovered that other friends were able to listen and in the listening allowed the space of love to return, giving me back the presence of feminine power; yielding and softening.  This yielding is the power of women and I have much to learn about it.  Single parenting for so long has stifled my ability to yield.  In our culture  yielding is often regarded as a flaw, a weakness.  It is the primal state of woman.  Yielding is acceptance and is the birthplace of prayer. 

   In staying in my marriage with its ongoing problems I now understand that when differences arise between us, there is less resistance when I yield, surrendering the moment to the Higher realm.  Interestingly, when I alone work on what I focus on and stay grounded in my connection with the Earth then my husband rises to his higher self and equilibrium comes over us again.

      This is a wonderful realization, how I think about my life affects our whole family.  I have stumbled on the power of woman.  The flip side of this then threatens to taunt me.  That means all the problems were created by me and how I handled them.  Guilt is the inheritance of the modern mother.  Modern mothers have bags full of guilt that arise at varying times of our children’s lives and usually come as a hidden package that quietly motivates us at the level of sabotage.  I believe this has roots going back into our European ancestral antiquity.  I don’t spend time digging up that Pandora’s box.  I have just found that by accepting that it is the modern mother’s shadow I can  recognize that it is an illusion.  We have nothing to feel guilty about.  We do our best with the cloth we have.   

      Now let us get on with working with the cloth.  That work needs forbearance and the quality of yielding so we can quietly gather more information about what questions to ask and what to call in.  And so I accept our family’s story, share it where it is needed and then get on with the work I have to do in my own family; cleaning and lightening our load, enjoying each other and giving thanks for the bounty we share.

PARENTING TOWARDS UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

Earth Parenting is a philosophy formed from the understanding that before our culture discovered the Earth people, their parenting practices which shared common threads through out the world, created foundation for harmonious coexistence between themselves and their environment.  In seeking to find this information, which is beyond the written word, my husband and I lived without running water or electricity with our small children for six years. I based this philosophy on what I call 'Indigenous mind'; simple in structure, complex in design.  It is completely relevant to our current world of complexity as it activates the heart intelligence that resides within us all. This is the age of the great remembering; the return to our heart intelligence. Our collective agreement to reach Unity consciousness is upon us. More and more we collectively are turning back to the ancient people for their wisdom. There can be no coincidence here in the widespread seeking of this knowledge for these cultures lived in Unity consciousness already. What is occurring on the planet now is Planetary Unity consciousness. In a way, it is a mindset to achieve an open heart. The mind filters our awareness and colours our reality. This heart intelligence is blocked by all this perception because our collective world view has hundreds of years of belief systems tied up in what we experience. Modern science has even discovered that the thoughts of our grandparents live in us now. Quantum physics has concluded that in order to change the future, we need to alter the past.  So even our latest advances point towards the logical conclusion of instilling love into our children through acceptance of our parents and grandparents, even our ancestors. Part of accepting the past is becoming acquainted with it. Our culture's past history continues while we remain within the consciousness of a culture that has for so long been disconnected from its heart intelligence. When the simple fact is looked at that Earth people lived so successfully for many millinea while this culture interrupted the fabric of life in the blink of time's eye, then we can look to these ancient ways with a reverence that allows us to see reality differently.  In that shift we then find our own culture's beauty and wisdom. We will need both cultures' beauty and wisdom to navigate out of planetary chaos and towards Unity consciousness. There is no blame in the place of heart intelligence. There is no black and white, no good and bad; it simply is either connected to heart intelligence or disconnected to some extent.  We need only to expand our awareness and raise our vibrational frequency. That's all we need to do. Both intentions are a life times work. Both lead us ever closer to increased happiness and joy, health and peace.

NATURE MANIFESTS AT OUR HIGHEST EXPECTATION OF IT It is a free will universe so nature will give us our experiences based on our belief systems. Through many generations in our culture, we have been schooled in the understanding that nature is an unpredictable and wild place where we are potentially in danger. However that is not the reality of nature. Even though our modern documentaries focus of this exciting aspect of nature where it is survival of the fittest, the statistics of injury in nature do not support our collective fears. Instead Nature tolerates our unsubstantiated fears by giving us the highest manifestation of them. Those with snake fears may simply have one cross their path. Someone scared of the dark will hear a noise. Another person perhaps scarred of spiders might freak to the sensation of something crawling on them only to find it was an ant. And so in this free will universe we have the right to be frightened of nature but nature has its own relationship with us which is above and beyond what we have interpreted through our collective myopic vision. As we approach Unity consciousness, we are remembering that we are intrinsically linked with the natural environment around us. The older cultures of the world understand this deeply. The Earth is our mother and all its forms are sentient beings with their own spirit forms. When we, as individuals, raise our vibrational level through uncluttered thinking, being present and surrendering to our heart intelligence; we begin to reach Unity consciousness. Our ability to manifest our reality becomes increasingly obvious as we reach this state. We naturally vibrate at the same frequency as Nature. When we enter natural environments we potentially extend our experiential field. If we are able to surrender our fears the experience in nature will be nothing less than sublime. However for many of us the fears will be deep; having been inherited, they often lie dormant, hidden in obscure places in our psyches. All fears separate us from our potential experience with love. What we don't deal with we hand on to our children, like unpaid bills. So by design our children will on some level, bring these fears to the light. This generation we are given so much help with this ancestral processing. All we need to do is to be open to letting it be released by understanding that we hold onto it when we block Nature from our lifestyle. Step by step we are invited to reclaim this relationship with the wild. We are invited to gently push past our comfort zones.  We will find guides waiting to take us further. They could be our children, or our spouse. They could be just a natural sign at the place in nature we venture to.  When we observe the elements as we would if our life depended on them, we activate an ancient listening skill that lies dormant mostly in modern life.  By remembering that our shadow is death, we rekindle this communion. Then we can walk as spirit in a human body; alert and in love as Nature itself is. Held in the primordial dance of peaceful attention, vibrating with the eternal consciousness of love itself.

Surrender to Love

MOTHERING IS HOLDING AND LETTING GO. Just as breathing requires two opposing acts, inhaling and exhaling, we need to exercise letting go while simultaneously holding our children. The pure form of mothering in the collective memory, the Indigenous people of the world still exhibit this to varying degrees.   This type of mothering is as easy as breathing and requires no real thought. The act comes from the wider intelligence of the heart space and therefore has no encumbrance. However modern mothers have no immediate village to let our children go to.  We come ourselves with a mixed bag of repressed pains and fears. Like an archeological dig they pop up as our children reach the age the trigger was set, sometimes many generations ago. It is little wonder that the closest we come to letting our children go is to creche or school.  Letting them go is deeper than that just as love is deeper than physically taking care of our child. It is at the level of the heart space that we hold and let go. It could be that like birth, we don't get to hold our baby until we have truly surrendered. The act of birthing is ultimately, the act of surrendering. In modern mothers our analytical mind is over active and often at birth this presents a massive problem that prevents true surrender and blocks natural birthing, as statistics show. So if we accept that we are a culture of women who have largely forgotten how to surrender, we can turn our attention to finding ways to allow that to heal. Moment by moment it's the simple things like singing and gardening, walking in nature, that give us back to the space of surrender. We need to let go of so many layers of thought that quietly drive us to ever shifting fashions. Breath in the love for your child, breath out that same love. You will see that it is not your love you give to your child but God's love, the universal love that you can source though letting go is so much bigger.

Silence speaks loud and clear

      The other day I had the privilege of walking into a beautiful forest with ten children under the cover of silence.  Their challenge was to walk to the rocky outcrops where we would have lunch, without talking.  I had suggested to them that we wouldn't talk if we were watching a movie, so we could try going in with the same attention.  The veil of silence allowed us to experience the natural setting at a higher frequency; immersing us all deeply and quickly.  As we walked the sounds of the forest turned to music, as if our silence was communicating a willingness to hear.  Like a radio station tuned in with the slightest turn of the dial, birds song filled the air and we could even hear the trees cracking and rubbing together.  When we arrived at the rocks a bliss had descended over us and we were all smiling deeply.  We were experiencing a spiritual high.
       When we returned to the school we were introduced to an Aboriginal song that an Elder had given us saying she wanted it to be sung along with our national anthem.  It is a beautiful song that literally translated means, "Welcome friends, welcome good friends".  I stood looking at these cultures polarized by this difference in digesting information; our culture needs so much more explanation, measurement and analysis.  It is head-based and we are required to endlessly collate, relate and translate the world back to each other.  The indigenous culture sees this polarity more clearly than we do, they even laugh about it being the 'white-fella way'.  The indigenous cultures are much more deeply connected to their heart spaces; their song needed only to say "welcome friends", the rest is left to love which cannot be measured and needs no translation.
       For all our intellectualism, we are blocked by a simple bias that tells us deeply that we are the culture that is smart and they are the culture that remained primitive.  Our thoughts are necessary and our need to communicate is essential.  We now have technology overlaying the industrial revolution and we are further imprisoning ourselves by our collective obsession with it.  This age of technology comes with great opportunity to communicate but it also brings us the shadow of our culture which has been ravaged of its heart center and with every generation has further activated the mind; perhaps eroding and blocking the truly extraordinary experience of being alive.  We might take time to listen to the beat of out hearts and remember we are here to connect with the Earth and each other.  Technology needs to be actively put in the back seat.
       We spoke more deeply when we used less words.
      

Nature is our Spirit just as Spirit is our nature

          In nature our children experience the oneness that is their nature.  Given space and time, their ego selves shrink leaving anb expanded form; they have access to their divinity when they are immersed deeply in nature.  It is the same for us as adults, potentially though as we have layers of belief patterns to get through before that experience can be ours.  Exploration in nature with our children connects us with our deeper story.  It reveals our fears, our hopes and dreams for that is where they were formed. 
          Though the indigenous parents emulated and lived this love of nature  for their children on deeper levels than we can hope to achieve in our culture ravaged of it's nature, any small step towards their ways with their children will leave us with more wealth as parents than we could ever dream.  We would do well to remember that all accounts written about the children of the new world were how amazingly joyful, happy and energetic they were. 
          I often tell my children how to delightful and easy to play with the children of my childhood in Fiji, Arabia, Africa and Pakistan were.  The Fijian children were perhaps fifteen to twenty generations removed from those first people described by the early explorers but the easy childhoods had continued up until my childhood in the early seventies.   After we left Fiji, industries targeted the place for cheap labour and production created jobs and pulled communities and families apart.  When we returned after five years, we the found a modern Fiji without their huts and their traditions; the average mother working in factories; modern day slavery in my mind.  Never the less the children still possessed that joyful nature; seemingly as yet protected by generations of intact community spirit in their genetic banks.
          Now is the time to rekindle community and a lot of people are out there doing it.  It is also time to get our kids back into nature.  To do that deeply we have to look first for our nature within nature.   By facing our beliefs as just that, multi-generational fears of an alien race in an alien land. (Our ancestors were an alien race to the original inhabitants.)  Then by gently pushing ourselves just past our comfort zones, chipping away at the crusty and brittle ideas of those "alien" ancestors of ours, we can visit nature and trust our children in it.
          This is the greatest respect we can pay our ancestors because when we look through the lens of the genre they lived in first, we can more deeply understand their personal story in its true spirit.  So too when we see ourselves in this current times we would prefer to see ourselves outside of the collective consumer ego that has possessed the world. 
          When we decide to take this journey back to nature with our children we are rewarded by our trust with wonderful experiences, never to be forgotten memories. Nature rewards and expands our trust.  We have taken a leap back into our indigenous mind; the collective understanding that our essential nature is nature itself, one in the same.  Then a new journey awaits us with our children.           
            Go first to the place you have the most fear about...it might be the cold and the idea that inclement weather makes you sick.  Explore it and take a walk in the rain or swim in the chilly ocean.  If it is the dark then go for a moonlit walk, you will be amazed at how much your children will love you for doing it!   If it is fear about dirt and being dirty start with some clay or make mud cakes.
           Make sure that what you pick you are happy enough to do   because your children will magnify your fears or apprehensions.   Enjoy it for yourself, your children and your ancestors and for nature herself.  Go in as deep as you feel comfortable and then go in some more.  There, in the moments of trust, have we xpanded just a bit further into our true nature.
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