Earth Parenting

Across the span of time and all over the world, indigenous peoples raised their children with nearly identical ways which indicate that humans have an 'earth code' for our raising just as all animals have innate parenting codes.  Detailed studies of anthropology reveal many exceptions to this and therefore experts can easily dismiss my simple observation as idealistic and even romantic.  However what can not be overlooked is that despite the exceptions, peoples all across the world maintained culture for thousands of generations and their parenting was nearly identical with different colour feathers, so to speak.  Even modern day Steiner's work seems to have been tapping in on this innate 'earth code'.
A brief breakdown of the common threads of 'earth parenting'of the stage of babyhood are:
1. Singing as main ante natal preparation for maidens. There was no application of logic or analytical mind to what is essentially innate and part of the ancient limbic system of the mind.
2. Birthing was secret women's business, attended by sisters and elder women and generally safeguarded from maidens.
3. For one lunar month the mother and newborn were cared for by the sisterhood in a womb like environment. This was the dreamtime of the new child, important bonding was established.
4. Women regrouped their energy through synchronized menstruating where they would often withdraw to a special place, taking only breast feeding babies and newly menstruating maidens with them.
5. Once out of the dreamtime, mother resumed her place in the tribe; gathering and preparing food with her baby tied to her or carried with her.  Generally the first stage of babe in arms, the_ baby was carried by the mother or woman who breastfed him or her.
6. As baby got bigger it was carried freely by older children. The baby was immersed in its tribe very deeply.
7. Babies were never left alone. (The exception was the practise of leaving the infant out over night when first born in some tribes)
8. Babies breastfed for three years, generally. This matches the apparent 'psychic bond' of mother and baby.
9. Once toddling, the baby was free to explore the world around, safely observed by the sisterhood. The collective body of the tribe provided a natural safety net for them. They were immersed in the elements; eating dirt, sucking rocks, navigating fire, uneven ground and many other situations.
10. Babies were unrestrained and grew with a feeling of infinite freedom.  Safety and monitoring them was done collectively and it was obscure so that the will of the child was not prematurely activated.
11. Sounds and particularly baby sounds were used with babies.  They picked up their language from those around them, everyone happily spoke babies sounds to them.  Many cultures use repeat words with babies; for example Ma ma, Da da, Pa pa and so on.  We under estimate how important these sounds are to the developing mind in our quest to comunicate with our babies we over look the natural process of bonding that opens up doorways to intuition and allow us to instantly be able to understand our babies without words.

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A miracle is just a wish away

When our eleven year old daughter was told that the queen had gone and therefore the hive too was gone, she simply said, "maybe she left a princess". For the educated in this subject it was a fanciful idea at best; the musings of a child. However Earth Parenting is deeper than logic and understands that logic often stands in the way of the magic of nature.
So without attachment to my daughter's comment, I met her at the dreaming place and together we made it into a wish.  Perhaps I had already corrected the things that seemed to be lacking when we first discovered the bees had gone and we were loving our garden again; who knows, but the bees kept gathering pollen. Evita lovingly observed this day after day and the other children began watching for signs of an active hive with her. Then, yesterday, our youngest boy came running with news, "they are making honey, I saw the honeycomb and I could smell the honey and there are more bees!."
We have a princess who has become a queen!  Another one of nature's daily miracles, that our logic often rules out. The queen has gone, long live the princess.
Earth Parenting is about recalibrating ourselves with nature through our parenting of our children.  In this process we need to take heed, much of what we believe about nature was told to us by adults who themselves were already many degrees removed from it.  Our small children see energy and nature as it really is.  Our 'parental warnings' often camouflage this reality and eventually distort their own innate senses. The sensory reality of children is intangible to the adult operating from the limited space of logic and reason.  The bridge that can take us there is trust. When we trust nature and our children, our logic takes a back seat and something more powerful than our usually unreasonable fears takes over; love drives the vehicle and magic and miracles become daily events.

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The Queen has left

Our landlord is an absolute gem. He was raised in the house he rents us and he raised his kids in it too.  His shed stands like a living museum full of things from his past that may soon have place in the future.  Last week, within minutes of me showing him the swarm of bees I had found on my garden's fence, he had them in a box he had easily found in his shed.  Yesterday he arrived with the necessary partitions and discovered they had gone. It felt like the death of something.

The Queen didn't like it anymore and moved on so they have all followed; it felt like an accusation from the universe. I hadn't primed the kids and paid enough attention to the beehive, the garden wasn't loved enough....I accepted the swarm as a positive omen, now I must accept the loss in a personal way. I had not fully experienced the bee hive as the gold it was.  My life had gone on business as usual and this 'omen' hadn't really changed anything and the now the queen was gone.
We don't like to hear each other 'beating ourselves up', "don't be so hard on yourself".  We are weighed down with guilt in our culture and don't like to hear each other getting bogged down in it but guilt aside, it's worth considering where we haven't connected, so we can deepen that connection.
Once I accepted the possible reasons the Queen had left, I felt more desire to shape my life around the garden, making it more of a priority, revaluing it and helping it to grow with love and gratitude.
Once I accepted my place in the scheme of things, I felt the dryness of the land around echoed in the intense flowering of the Karri trees that had brought so much activity from the bees in the first place.  I remembered other people's oservations about this bumper season of bees but now with the wider question,  is this a symptom of pre-drought conditions?
Can we as culture take on that nature gives us warning signs gently and even sweetly, at first? As an individual,  I can open myself up to communion with nature when I am prepared to see the failings of my own life in the wider context of how our culture operates with nature.
I can't elicit any change other than that within my own family group. The place where I am Queen is in my family.  That is the real gold, the honey of life.

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Words are making us ill.

At every turn there are more words that need to be said,  written, thought,read: words vying for our attention.
The other night I got a creative idea for helping my son to be more interested in reading and with chalk I wrote messages and equations all over the carpets throughout this house.
Now that I have been moving about in my house, these letters under my feet are crowding my head.  The visual pollution of words is everywhere, I just hadn't. thought about it like that before. It took awhile to realize that I had become scattered by the words under my feet; they were blocking my connection with the earth.
       I can' wait to get down with a bucket and scrub the floors.
       The prescribed pattern of today's mass consciousness would judge this as masochistic, having no need to hear more and  moving quickly on to the next lot of words.  I need some grounding, stretching and meditative time where I can rub all the words away until my mind is free floating on my heart. There are no health resorts in my life; it is easy to overlook just how therapeutic cleaning our homes is.  I don't use a vacuum cleaner because it invades my energy and leaves everyone and everything jangled. I prefer to get on with my hands and knees and scrub the carpets with hot soapy, eucalyptus scented water.
When we take time, we make time and often those 'boring' jobs are the gold that give women power by grounding us in our spiritual foundations, the floors our family walk on.

Medical doctors and husbands

       When we look to the medical fraternity for help with illness when we have access to knowledge about herbs, we give something away from deep within ourselves.
With our husbands too; when we operate from the place that seeks their approval,  the same thing happens, erosion of some deep connection with the wise woman in ourselves.
           I know these things because I have lived this perpetual seeking  of my husband's approval  as an extreme example and with Shanti's illness I can suddenly see the connection with the loss of power I experience  through my marriage in the way I suddenly rushed to the doctors when Shanti's condition declined.
Through chance encounters and amazing wise woman  tfriends,  my rush to the doctors got rerouted to Chinese medicine and her decline in health got easily sorted with herbs and acupressure.
         This discussion is not about there being something wrong with the medical system, merely it is a very physical approach to health and in this way is not subtle enough for many of the health problems we have to overcome,  especially with our sensitive children.
           This discourse is about women accessing the wisewoman  within, day to day, in the real moments, when it matters.  I intuited that the whooping cough illness with Shanti had life changing lessons with it, especially with regard to trust issues.  I have trusted spirit and surrendered on plenty of occasions to serendipity.  I had no idea spirit was going to pull me inside out over this, leaving me naked and empty in the storm, madly snatching at John for help and understanding; overlooking my own power.
          I have taken us to hell and back, again. My family ravaged with the insanity of it; woman needing man's approval, bi-passing ancient knowledge. Women are the custodians of wisdom as we collectively carry the genetic information of the past into the future. Our true power lies in the ether, in prayer. Man needs words and we need silence.  We are the generation of women who have immature male to deal with, very often, and we were given guilt as our inheritance.  Forbearance and accessing the wise woman within has the power to overcome our genre's challenges.
         The storm is over and John's devotion shines like a beacon. He is a rock and serves our family with stability.  I am something less tangible and magical if I go within for solace. When I look to the divine mother I no longer need approval, I am connected to source and therefore can be transformed as the feminine power of my womanly self. It is not something my  husband need know about, though through irony he would sense it as an extraordinary change in me that would release him from the lower male energy that by design, avoids the woman.
               Peace in my heart
               Peace in my family.
               Peace in the world.
               Peace on earth.
                                           Shanti OM

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RECAPITULATION: Mum the Shopper

         To recapitulate is to look back while still moving forward,  life's rear vision mirror. I am using it all the time, seemingly on a highway right now with information coming in at all angles.  The first and most obvious road sign is woman/ mother as shopper or as my daughter when three told me "it's not shopping, Mummy, it's swapping."
         Back to empty cupboards and an empty fridge with a new level of dietary understanding from our ten week vegetarian diet with minimal milk product means there was room for some new decisions.   Armed with my sour dough culture from the walk I made some bread. Then we harvested potatoes and boiled up home grown eggs we were given. Mayonnaise was easy to make and then, as if by magic, we had an organic potato salad. Abundance came also from the sea when we were given a fish on our first day back.  Shopping/swapping the pantry was filling up on its own. I have always been silently dedicated to reducing our family's eco-footprint and have been blessed with a wood fired stove so I fired that up with Karri sticks (by the way, wood sticks release the same amount of carbon being burnt as they do when left to break down) and cooked our sour dough bread and made a stock from Evie's garden.
             When lighting the stove two articles jumped out for reading; one was about the global economy and how women make up 70% of the spending market, with a global purse of 17.8 trillion dollars while we are represented at government level by only 10% female economists. You can further reduce that percentage when talking about women in politics who are actually producing home made goods for their house holds. No doubt most working women of that level would not have the time.
           So whilst we have this massive global purse we are barely represented at the global financial decision making processes and therefore we are shopping in the dark as a group; susceptible to advertisers who target us with essentially aesthetic product. This brings me to the second article titled 'The  Sisterhood of Shopping''which shows our love affair with shopping centres started with the beginning of the industrial revolution and the first shopping centres which were places of liberation for the women of the time.
Well times have changed and while our men are still largely the 'bread earners' they statistically are not the main spenders.  While we are also contributing to the 'bread earning' we continue to be the main spenders. Our collective decisions are leaving us all in chains and our Mother Earth stripped bare.
          We need to be accessing our power as the main spenders and making decisions based on real needs. Real needs are directly linked with sustainability both environmentally and individually with reference to our time managed lifestyles. As a side line but very much worth considering, we live in nuclear families that cannot provide all the essential needs that for eons were met in communities and the fallout is represented by our collective need for more stuff. Ironically,  this very need is what is fuelling the drive for nuclear power stations. The waste created by them has a half life of 1.3 billion years so obviously this path is unsustainable and immoral.
          So with these cards on the table it is a natural and commonsense conclusion to remind ourselves of the very powerful position we have at the sink and the kitchen counter where we decide for real what we can make verses what needs to be bought.
            The movement for saving our world, our families, our health and our women's business is through these small decisions we make at home. So fill yourselves up with this amazing power of womanhood; gather together as sisters and bake a cake for humanity, cook a stock for sustainability, walk to school for the power of making a difference to our planet. These small acts will connect us and nourish us . Remember we are the decision makers and our children are watching. Life is abundant and beautiful and so are we.
1. Buy local produce and eat seasonal produce.
2. Recycle and swap and buy from second hand stores.
3. Refuse to buy products that are over packaged or poisonous to our waterways.
3. Teach our children how to shop sustainably
4.  Worm farms and compost for kitchen waste.
5.  Find ways of opening up your home to your wider community; billet families or individuals in need (Japanese families need billeting to get small children away from the radioactive fall out. If interested contact me at kryystalmcmullan@yahoo.com.  I am finding out more about this at present for our family.)  Or go camping with other families, invite your mother in law to live with you.  Knock down fences....have regular meals with people in your street....there are many ways of deepening our community and lessening the sometimes stale air of our nuclear families.
6. Walk or ride instead of driving.
7. Challenge the princess in yourself and your daughters; we are physically capable of more and it benefits us to stretch ourselves in that direction.
8. Get wet and immerse in the elements. Nature will reward you...
9. Support small business, buy from market stalls etc. Keep out of shopping centres.
10. Stop throwing out things you haven' t used in a year. The Zen housewife is refuelling the consumer cycle because removing clutter is removing potential. Our children need chaos and order. Too much order means the energy of chaos goes underground leaving us attached to control and needing new things. Don't get me wrong; I do subscribe to the idea of keeping belongings moving and not hanging on to things that are no longer useful but I think it all needs tempering. We have Zen homes and full tips and over flowing second hand stores. This is a much broader conversation but essentially I am suggesting that we take a back seat while managing order in our homes.  Bless our collective abundance and pause to consider our children and our men may not always see it how we do.
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HIT THE GROUND RUNNING

           I have parachuted some twenty jumps as a eighteen year old and remember well that with a stiff wind blowing you need to start running when you hit the ground or you get dragged along like a fishing net.  So when we eventually arrived home at six pm on Sunday with school starting the next day I went to bed with my boots on.
I have found the whole transition, harder to cope with than I expected. On many levels I have felt fine but I have had 48hours of acute asthma. So the stress has measured on my nervous system without really impacting my patience or tolerance.
           Normal things like driving, shopping, operating a plastic card, are all out of frequency with what I have been accustomed to and definitely add an element of stress. Stopping and starting things too, has felt stressful. Our days were more fluid and naturally rhythmic, perhaps that loss in our modern culture is why we crave our 'routines'.Anyway there is more to say but for now real life has more pressing needs than cyber space so I will round this off here.
This blog will continue as part two; the unfolding after the pilgrimage. Twelve hundred kilometres takes some time to digest.
Looking forward to catching up again with people. Love Kristi

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