transformation

"Transformation is not just a static process, it is dynamic...organic. It is personal, profound and life-altering. It is the right of each woman and it is not a solitary event. Transformation is the deep healing, where one goes beyond the revealing of aspects of an issue, of understanding and analysing it, to the 'surrender place', where it changes and thus you change."

(Sherwood, 2011)

transformation

BUT

"The hardest moments in life are often those of transformation. Journeying from one place into another, leaving familiarity and heading through cloudy lands of change, we stumble and fall on strange ground...Even if we are confidently walking proud and sure, we are likely to be dragging with us some baggage of the past, some now redundant belief or behaviour...complicating life with its defiant and coarse irrelevance."

(Resatll Orr, 2008, P108)

virgin magic

"There is something in the psyche of our post-industrial society that infuses the notion of virgin land with a magical haze. We dream of such places, places that have not been touched by the felling, tilling, paving, civilising hand of humanity. It holds an unmistakeable allure, a fascination that provokes a craving that is deeply instinctive. It is prized like a great treasure. It inspires a yearning desire to hunt it down, to explore it, to discover the nature of its depths, to conquer its challenges, to bathe in its potentials."

(Restall Orr, 2008 p103)

Middle Earth - New Zealand... http://www.ianbrodie.net/



creativity

"Creativity most often begins deep within, an as internal response to some event in the world around...

...some creativity is never meant to be expressed openly at all. Lingering on the edges of our consciousness, it remains within, as an internal occupation for the exploration and pleasure of our own soul. Swathed by veils, hidden beneath the canopy, we work on it alone in dreams of the imagination and journeys through otherworlds. Wild fantasies, sweet tales and complex sagas, magical relationships of the soul, symphonies never to be heard aloud, songs of the heart and of the wind...

...Locked away in moments of solitude, we labour on such secret adventures, their developments measured only by the glint in our eyes, or the satisfaction and serenity with which we live our lives."

(Restall Orr, 2008, pp64-5)



Cycladic

before us

Those who walked before us


Minoan Snake Goddess




venus of Laussel








Cycladic figurine

 


Sheila na gig



and now....

• She makes the commitment to nourish her various states of being and in particular acknowledges the need for creativity, freedom of expression and personal time and space
• She moves in deepening surrender to her connection and calling
• She honours the ancestors and the spirit of this land
• She acknowledges the roots of her own ancestral traditions
• she acknowledges and embodies her connections to the cycles of nature, and uses this knowledge to live more powerfully and beautifully
• She works for a life filled with unguarded momenets of immense beauty



Venus of Willendorf

the waters

Now we see a return to La Nina. With frenetic energy and power, she has crashed through the lives of many thousands of people and restamped her mark on the landscape. The old, clogged waterways have been flushed and with it, many of our long held beliefs and understandings about the water we thought we had controlled. We have been surprised and shocked at her unyeilding power. We have wondered where it has all come from and we have blamed others for not being able to hold back trhe tides.

But who can hold back the waters?

Water is symbolic of emotion. If we have to ask oursleves what is the earth is emotional about, then we really don't understand anything about the planet we stand on. But what if we ask oursleves what we have to be so emotional about?

The waters have come as they should during a wet season. This is the time of unforgiving thunderstorms, unbridled energy and chaotic lives. Emotions come cascading down the mountain demanding to be noticed, screaming to be addressed. Perhpas if we revert to being the child for a moment, we can allow our emotions the freedom to spill out and tumble over the waterfall..... then as the adult, we swim through the pool and look closely at each eddy and current to dtermine what message is there for us.

Happy swimming

Wivenhoe Dam spillway 2011