Stand Tall

Silent sentinel I stand in a world that holds endless species of light.
I am Surya driving through the heavens.
You look up and imagine that you see a golden orb.
This sun is merely your own reflection.
It is your own heart.
It is your own light.
The light you seek is within you.
The light you seek is within me.
The sky of the old order fell when a bird was knocked from his perch and the deluge destroyed the people of the wood.
The sky of the new world could only be raised by an act of sacrifice.
I was the cosmic sacrifice.
I am earth and air and water.
I am fire – I burn my own wood.
I am Yggdrasil and I am the axis between worlds.
A world clock ticking endlessly: sometimes my breath is tired and rusty.
My breath can cut you as your language can kill souls.
I watch as another world rests within my bones, unseen and untouched by your kind.
I am a gateway, a lighthouse to others, a communicator for the between.
Like you.
You are the spiritual internet.
Like me.
I am both directed and yet directionless.
There is a hidden door – come closer you will see as no other can.
Enter.
Open.
There is nowhere else to go but here – yet here is everywhere.
I am Thor’s Oak. Bonafcius did not fell me but my purpose was all in the telling of his tale.
I am a wet nurse for your race, watching and supervising and protecting – you have no concept yet of how I keep you safe.
The Olympic rings were originally cut from my body symbolising the rings of truth that protect you from danger.
I am Sekhmet and I protect the land, destroying enemies with arrows of fire.
Yes I have committed crimes in the eyes of many yet I am remorseless.
I have carved death on many faces.
Sometimes death has as much a purpose as life.
You too have killed as much as you have birthed.
This is life.
I am Yax Imix Cheand, I am abundance raised in the middle of the world.
I raised the sky and I birthed what you see is the sun.
Watch me; watch how my roots are sent deep into this earth.
The deeper you root yourself the easier you will bend, ebb and flow with the tides of your time.
Like your heart, this earth upon which you walk, is kept alive by me for I hold its terrestrial intention.
This intention is a submission to the point of resistance.
I am Sól and I count the years of man.
Every particle of mine is a book in a library far reaching beyond your wildest imagination.
I am every case study you will ever need.
I am every page every written.
I am every scientific experiment ever conducted.
There is a frequency that I hold upon which this earth was formed.
A frequency that beats your very own heart.
I am Helios driving my chariot across the sky.
My faith in the magnetic force and my trust in the safety of the flow hold me firm in a constant evolution of tension oscillation.
I am Ain Soph Aur, the tree of life – without end and with light.
When I bend, I am stretching and expanding – creating more space in this illusion while contracting and nesting.
I am Freyr, the Maypole, and the phalloi that Isis could not find.
My colours are crafted in the dramas of birth and death in this forest.
My leaves grow without any thought from me.
Your heart loves without any thought from you.
It is not possible for either of us to ever be alone.
I am a circle, a never-ending line, keeping and standing where you left me so long ago.
I am Lugh and I hold all contracts written of this world.
If I so choose I can fade like a ghost and vanish. No one will ever know I was ever here.
But this will not end my life as I will live on through another seed, another pod, another root system, branching out and merging with more light.
I can be whatever I choose just like you.
You and I – we share a molecular structure so refined and complex yet so basic and simple.
Your digital world and formless currency are frequencies crafted and released by my leaves.
I am Kuker and my coarse and speckled bark forms part of my horned mask.
My reptilian skin is just one coat – just one aspect.
Every leaf that I lose is my gift to the earth.
It joins me at the base – never lost – only re engineered.
Every person that you lose from your life is your gift to humanity.
They are never lost always reappearing in another face in another time.
I am Ra and I command the sky, earth and the underworld.
Standing tall under Mintaka, his pulse is felt in my roots.
You were born under this star forever in between, in the middle of the two.
You are destined to strip my bark, shatter my myths and stand in between.
With one foot in both worlds you stand under Mintaka’s power.
Beings of light are the only words you can understand and they are around you now – watching and prodding without you even being aware.
Their home is here – not some far away planet.
The planets you see in the night sky are not real; they are your reflections – your hearts, minds, souls and bodies.
The organs in your body are the planets.
What you are seeing is a grand illusion.
When they said that God created the world in seven days, they were talking about you.
The stars that you see in the night sky are not real; they are your reflections – thoughts, feelings, purpose and intentions.
Your star burns bright.
Stand tall.

These words were written after a long conversation with a very ancient gum tree in Barkers Vale NSW on 23 April 2007.

Waste Not Want Not

There is too much stuff in this house – 16 years of four children, various guests, pets, businesses and endless activity.

It just had to go – I needed to truly release SO much of this “stuff” - this was a clearing of Hollywood proportions. The skip was filled to the brim and so we hired a Ute loaded it up and drove to the DUMP.

The Dump – as a kid, going to the dump was THE exciting adventure of the weekend. There was no such thing as a skip – to us that was the nickname that the Greeks and Italians had for us Aussies who watched Skippy the Bush Kangaroo after school each day. This was the time in my childhood when firecracker nights were still legal and Dad could burn anything in the incinerator in the back yard without applying to the council in triplicate.

Whatever was too big and hard to burn, Dad would load up into the Volkswagen. My brother and I would pile in stuffing our bodies in amongst old bikes with knees up to our chins surrounded by various broken bits and pieces of our household’s life that my father could pry from my mother’s stubborn fingers. The closest dump was located in the next suburb with tiny dirt roads carved through mountains of settling landfill winding around various stages of rubbish processing.

Today it is a very trendy upmarket suburb sporting parks and house proud residences. But back then, going to the dump, for me, a budding Archaeologist, this was akin to a religious experience. After all, these were piles of prehistoric treasures just waiting to be discovered and my imagination would run wild digging up jars containing sacred scrolls and all the answers to the universe.

We would drive into craters of dirt, park beside other dumpers and watch as some people sifted through the already dumped “stuff” seeking that “one person’s trash is another’s treasure” find. We would all pile out of the car and grab the various refuse items and literally just throw willy nilly out onto the ground. The smell was something that has etched itself onto my memory forever – a combination of old, dirt, sickness and death – simply ferrel. There were crows, magpies and seagulls everywhere – all capitalising on whatever opportunity they spotted and wasting nothing.

Looking back now, it was dangerous and quite a health and safety hazard. That is something we never thought of back then. However as a six year old, dodging the seagulls swooping while chucking crap from the VW - it was great fun!

Today, the Dump is called a Transfer Station. Transferring your trash OUT of your household and into a station where it can be recycled restored and resold as someone else’s treasure is a federal enterprise and managed by a strict accountability system. So today, driving into neat lawned grounds we were met by a weighing station and given a ticket with specific path and bay instructions. Impeccable landscaped gardens greet us around each corner and after seven curbs we turn into a large shed with an enormous deep hole in the middle where bulldozers and large shiny yellow squishing machines transform ordinary rubbish into flat neat little packages. The dump smell is diluted to 100th of my memory and the whole place was – well – clean and tidy. I felt significantly underdressed and respectively hopped out of the car, mindful of all the safety instructions as per the hundreds of signs around me and carefully placed the rubbish into the designated area.

It felt like we were at Ikea – the Ikea where items are returned and transferred after a decade or two. I watched the abundance of our city being transferred to this neat clean little facility and wondered about our relationship with “stuff” and where appreciation would factor into our waste management practices. What a great example of the universal balance – here at the Dump?

Sunday mornings may find many people at Harvey Norman or Far Pavilions buying new furniture. Sunday afternoons may find many people at the Transfer Station relieving themselves of the old furniture they no longer want. In one end and out the other – just like living organisms expelling toxins and waste.

Waste management is big business and is the human control of the collection, treatment and disposal of different wastes. Approximately 3000 tonnes of solid waste are generated each day in the south-east corner of Queensland alone. Most of this waste is sent to landfill. But what if we applied the law of the 5 ‘R’s before we made our next purchase?Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Restore – this is what REAL appreciation is all about!

How could we upgrade our relationship with “stuff” with appreciation and reduce our waste? Decluttering is a wonderful thing. Clearing out creates space on an energetic level. However what if we regularly conducted an inventory of every single thing that we owned and held in our house, office or life?
What if we valued our “stuff”?
What if we converted decluttering to our very own internal transfer station?

My grandmother’s favourite saying was “Waste Not Want Not” and she lived her life by that premise. I would definitely be in lots of trouble if she were still alive today.

Let’s look at the big picture here – look at the WHOLE picture. I created the Push the Earth policy for our business and industry and have been patting myself on the back about how much I value the environment yet look at my first paragraph – “There is too much stuff in this house – 16 years of four children, various guests, pets, businesses and endless activity. It just had to go – I needed to truly release SO much of this “stuff” - this was a clearing of Hollywood proportions.”

Here I am complaining about having abundance in – well abundance – and instead of appreciating it – I am DUMPING it. The word Waste comes from the Anglo Frankish “waster” meaning to spoil and ruin - squander, spend or consume uselessly.
How about we SAVE, VALUE and APPRECIATE what we have instead of WASTE?
How about we live a simpler life?
Live as part of the earth, part of the tides, the natural rhythms, the planets and the elements.

Align the values of the earth with family, community, work and our own.
Live with less.
Make better use of our resources.
Make better use of our time.

What would appreciate then?

Winter in Brisbane

Late afternoons watching wet weather adds texture to any day. Standing in the rain, you can see the dark clouds over you, hear the patter on the earth, feel the drops sliding over your body and soaking your skin. There is a definite smell to athunder storm, an orange dusty tinge that floats into your nostrils, teasing them and sending it into your mouth and onto the back of your tongue.

It’s delicious!

Curling up in bed, these days of dark weather are a reminder of just how sunny Brisbane usually is – even in the dead of winter. Compare our weather to Europe and the UK or even New York and we realise our winter is almost the same as their spring. How good is this that we don’t have enough dark weather to ever feel oppressed by a gloomy day every so often? Today, a grey dull dreary winters day, the rain fell in large heavy drops that held the promise of spring inside revealing a pale light green glow upon the grass, and a shimmering glistening on the leaves of the soggy trees, as if they were bouncing back some of the summer sunshine they had absorbed in the months previous.

"The best thing one can do when it is raining is to let it rain" — Longfellow

Today, I walked outside for the first time in weeks to check the garden and the wind whipped around me teasing my hair and clothes. Like an electric charge, it was somehow reminding me of impending adventure, the life I had put on hold and how it was all still waiting for me.

I actually stood in the rain and squealed loudly and for the first time in ages, breathed easy.