Experience abundance – plant a veggie patch!

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Veggie Patch
13 Oct

So many of us are trapped in our poverty consciousness – strapped to the relentless wheel of working for the man, paying off our loans, credit cards and mortgage, and never seeming to make headway in our consumer culture. We have lost sight of where our food comes from, don’t know how to get our hands dirty, or experience the satisfaction that comes from a hard day’s labour done (or feel the pain of a back which has worked hard!) And yet, the hardest part of growing your own food is deciding where to designate as veggie patch, fencing it from predators (when it comes to the veggie patch, chooks, wallabies, rabbits and birds are all predators!) and building the raised beds or digging over the dirt initially.

Once all that is done, the rest is not so hard and really needs just a few hours of dedication once a week and daily forays to pick, squeeze, marvel and wonder at. Oh, and, deep watering once a week if the sky is not complying with sufficient heaven sent. Weeding steals the most time so careful thought and research as to the best way to discourage them from daring to venture into your patch is time well spent at the outset. The first principle of organic gardening is to cover the soil, so I think copious amounts of straw and newspaper really are the best bet. Finally, all those piles of used and unused paper, can be recycled in an intelligent way, without resorting to council waste services, or plastic weed mat.

Ged is very good at doing the deep digging to save my back but when he’s not around I enjoy it – it’s very satisfying watching the soil get richer and more chocolatey, flaking off the fork like a good, crumbly cake. Of course, we have no shortage of poo here but it has taken me 3 years to learn that it’s quality, not quantity, that counts. While all the horse and cow poo has undoubtedly enriched the soil, it has also imported grass seeds which means more weeding! Alpaca poo – now there is a wonderful, magical, pellet to enrich the soil and create black velvet . . . and no weeds (don’t ask me how they do it!)

I have bought plenty of plants from Bunnings and other nurseries over the years and many, if not most, have died. Certainly the fruiting plants have soon turned up their toes. But then I discovered Diggers and Heritage Fruit Trees and now I have wonderfully healthy plants. Last year was my first year buying from Heritage Fruit Trees and within weeks of putting in their blueberry and raspberry plants we had fruit and Ben spent all summer finding and eating their generous output. Want to get a small child interested in fruit and veggies? Plant a patch and watch them eat peas, broccoli, spinach, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and even garlic chives and nasturtium flowers, fresh from the garden! Ben has become so used to being able to eat plants that our problem is getting him to check first whether he can eat something either in the garden or the wild! His eagle eyes are the keen spotter of wild raspberry plants in every crevice of the farm and we have to go on wild raspberrying forays all through winter – yum!

I love the fact that Diggers are working with Seed Savers in the US to share and keep heirloom and heritage seed varieties. Now that the evil Monsanto (manufacturers of Round Up and Round Up resistant GM crops – did you know that GM crops are sprayed with Round Up to kill weeds but the crops grow regardless, absorbing all those lethal chemicals into their cellular structures?) have taken over Yates seeds and are on a mission to buy all seed producers and purveyors, we owe it to our children and the future of the planet to be very very careful where we get our seeds from. After all, there is no life without seeds and a world where one monolithic chemical company owns all the seeds is seriously scary.

When I first heard of planting by the moon I thought it was very woo woo but now it is second nature. Weeding with the waning moon, planting on the full. Plants and seeds needing to grow downwards (carrots and parsnips or plants needing to send down strong roots) go in on the waning moon and seeds and plants to reach up to the sky go in on the growing (waxing) moon. Planting by the moon was developed as part of Rudolf Steiner’s system of BioDynamic Farming, but has now become a widespread and commonly understood method of planting and harnessing nature’s forces. The more I know about Steiner the more I respect him – he was a man well before his time.

I have been known, midsummer, in the cooler midnight hours to be out in the veggie patch, stark bollock naked, preparing the ground and planting seeds under the bright silver light of the full moon in all her resplendent glory. But really you would need to be a gardener to understand that!

Put in the seeds, water them, and watch them grow. Now that the earth and sun are warm it is amazing how quickly little seeds (and some of them are very little!) turn into little plants reaching up to the light. With the current dry it looks like we are going to be spending a lot of time watering, but I find holding the hose in one hand, and weeding with the other is quite a satisfying way of tending my patch (multi-tasking as ever!) I have spent years neglecting the patch from one week to the next and then being overwhelmed by the weeds so I think little and often is a better way forward. I am still such a beginner veggie patcher, and learning all the time. At the moment my favourite relaxing bedtime reading is a bit of Peter Cundall – I find him very reassuring!

What I do know, is that those few packets of seeds (and it is worth buying good organic seed) yield an incredible abundance for the kitchen, our bellies and the freezer. At times that abundance can be overwhelming, and finding creative ways to deal with a glut stretches the imagination, the powers of good old google, and the forbearance of the family at mealtimes. But that’s Mother Nature – so generous, so richly abundant, nurturing and fulfilling. Never an empty plate, never any excuse not to create something healthy and nutritious and fresher than fresh to feed both our bellies and our spirits – true soul food – sewn, nurtured and reaped in bountiful harvest by our own two hands. It doesn’t get much better than that. And as we experience this rich bounty, and the over abundance we are given, we realise that there IS enough, there is always more, that we are enough and are good enough to experience the best life has to offer. We learn to nurture ourselves as well as others. To feed ourselves with love. That each has its time and its season (all the old truisms are true!), that we need time to grow, that death and decay are essential and feed the soil, that the circles, cycles and rhythms are endless (sometimes relentless . . . ) and the world and her mysteries will still be here turning, revolving, evolving long after we are gone.

We reconnect with our primal natures. With man at his most basic – feeding the land, sowing the seed, reaping the harvest, loading the table and giving thanks, grateful thanks for the bodies and minds and hearts to enjoy it. And even when the earth seems dead and dormant, there are seeds and bulbs underground lying, waiting to burst forth in the warmth of spring. And we realise that every age, every part of life is beautiful. We lose our dependence on and despairing hankering for the blossom of youth and we learn to relish our own process and ageing and acquired wisdom. And as we reconnect with the earth so we realise that we will return to it one day and that is ok. We can feed a tree, provide shade and shelter, look pretty eternally and leave a legacy, however insignificant, as one who loved and tended and learned from the land.

Self sufficiency can be hard work, but it is so satisfying and to know where your food comes from – literally from paddock to plate is such a good feeling. I hate how removed from our food and its sources we have become. How the sterile aisles of Coles and Woolworths with their glaring lights, dyes, sprays and additives entice us to part with our hard earned for things that we literally wouldn’t feed to the pigs here.

And yet we can all grow a little ourselves and learn to reconnect with nature, with food, with what fresh food REALLY tastes like (grow tomatoes and you will never buy another tomato again!) In a tub, in a pot, on the verge, in a little plot at the end of the garden, we can all start small and grow fresh, chemical free, real food. And something magical happens when we grow things – we reconnect with our source, with spirit, with light and rain and the seasons. With the moon, with the earth, with its creatures great and small. We dig our hands deep into the soil, get dirt under our fingernails and get real, real fast.

Ditch the plastic fantastic and the greed of the gimme, gimme, gimme, instant gratification of the relentless consumer society and cultivate a little patch of dirt. Chuck in some seed, enjoy a daily sprinkle session and wait . . . I promise you won’t be disappointed. But I warn you – it’s highly addictive, this gardening malarkey. My Mother sent me a postcard once which said there were 3 phases of the female life – horses, hormones and horticulture. My poor neglected horses are testimony to the fact that horticulture has bitten me hard.

A Cleansing Fire

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Ged watching his fire
30 Sep

Pyromaniac that I am, I love the burning off season. Lines of fire, snaking across country and into the bush, lighting up the late winter nights with their warming glow. I love to light them, putting a lit match to the bladey grass and hearing it snap, crackle and roar. As a general rule, we don’t burn Avalon, because we believe in repeatedly slashing the grass and mulching the land to retain moisture and build up the soil levels to create healthier soil and pasture. 5 years ago when we came here, the land was all bladey grass, bracken fern and fireweed, now we have beautiful native grasses, kikuyu, clover and oatey grass, and the bladey grass is almost gone. Burning bladey grass might give you green pick for the cattle, but all you get is more bladey grass, so it never made much sense to us. However, as a way of seeing what is there in areas that have not been slashed, it is invaluable, and as a way of quickly clearing the land without slashing, it can be useful. But not our preferred way of doing things.

Anyway, the Friday before Ostara, the spring equinox and the real Easter in the southern hemisphere, it was a dull day, with moisture in the air, no beating sun and the hint of rain to come, so Ben and I thought we would just quickly light some fires to burn down into the weeds along a section of the river bank and into the neighbour’s paddock, which she has always invited us to burn. We lit a few fires along the fence line which blazed up briefly and then fizzled so we figured they would be out momentarily and went home for lunch. About 4 hours later we drove over to feed the horses and I saw the wall of smoke . . . ‘I think we have a problem’ I said to Ben. He wasn’t concerned. He’s heard Mummy say that before when she’s inadvertently burnt a paddock!

We drove over the ridge and saw a line of flames licking voraciously at everything in its path. 500 metres from the site of our start up fires and travelling in the opposite direction to our intention! We weren’t going to even try to beat this one back, it was going to have to keep gorging until it was replete. All we could do, was damage limitation. We drove down to the horses and set them free. Then we splashed water all around the water tank above base camp and removed all the water pipes, stand pipe and hoses. Then back burnt around the tank just to make sure. Next we drove through Henry Hollow and up into the Dam Paddock and there we stopped in shock and horror. We were faced with a blackened wasteland and facing us were the bee hives standing sentry like and stark white against the ash. ‘The bees! Daddy is going to go mental’ One hive was already swarming. One was still smouldering. All our lovely workers, all the new frames and comb all ready to be filled with lovely, life giving honey. All my fault . . .

We rang Ged and told him the bad news. But it was to get worse. By the time he came home two hives were burnt to cinders and we will have to start again with nucleus hives. He found a hive of European bees in a fallen tree and bear like tried to extract the comb and honey and then persuade some to take up residence in some of our boxes but they didn’t want to relocate despite their hot home, so that didn’t work out the way we planned it either. The fire continued on its merry way all night and for two days thereafter, clearing, cleaning, exposing.

At least we are rid of the high load of dead grass before the predicted drought gains intensity – although the ground is already so dry, the river lower than it was at the end of the last drought, we are desperately begging for rain. And the fire has cleaned up and rid us of old stumps and piles we inherited from the previous owners. And the exciting news is that what we really wanted to burn, the oasis with the spring in the middle, is now accessible and we can see the tree graveyard in there. This is obviously where they used to go to extract millable timber, cut fence posts and strainers etc. I spent two days in there, black from head to foot, lugging logs and branches and chainsawing wood to make it manouvrable, feeding the existing fires to clear areas of all the fallen timber. There’s another 6 months work in there but it will be beautiful when it is done. A lush green forest, a shady oasis in the middle of the pasture where the stock can retreat to on hot days and Ben and I can wander in awe.

We have to take the long view in farming. And I am learning that stressing achieves nothing. There was no point in trying to fight that fire, she obviously wanted to be burnt. And now she is.

Working in the blackened aftermath over the weekend, I meditated on the cleansing fire, the phoenix arising, and the rebirth and renewal offered both by the fire and the first days of spring. How it was possible to rebuild and restart in the ashes – relationships, friendships, dreams, plans, futures. Here is the cycle of life in all its stark reality – death, decay, rebirth. Every aspect of our lives affected by these never ending circles and rhythms if we could only realise it, and stop demanding the excitement and blossoming of eternal spring. We have to learn to live with the circles and cycles, see them, accept them and even embrace them as essential for our evolving, revolving life on earth.

Securing Australia’s food future

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http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13979

Last week Chris Hartcher, with a straight face, announced that coal seam gas extraction (fracking) and food production can co-exist. Julia and Tony wrangled over how much of Australia’s farmland to sell to overseas interests and a NSW dairy farmer’s wife sent Coles into spin fever with a comment on their facebook page which garnered 75,000 ‘likes’.  Forgive me for beating the same old drum, but where will Australian food come from when every farmer has left the land, we have mined and fracked the fertile food plains and sold the farm overseas?

It is becoming increasingly clear that both politicians and corporations are completely out of step not only with the farmers but with ordinary Australians who fully grasp the issue of food security and are glad to stand up and campaign about it.

No one who has watched the American amateur documentary ‘Gasland’ can believe that we are still having a discussion about fracking in this country.  Australia is one of the driest continents on earth, we have almost constant water issues and the Great Artesian Basin below us provides the only reliable source of freshwater through much of inland Australia.  In addition our network of rivers and creeks are our literal lifeblood.  To even contemplate activities which we know from the US and Queensland experience poison groundwater is incomprehensible.  Short term decisions will wreak havoc on our water, and therefore existence, for ever.  Poison the well and the outcome is obvious. Water is too precious a resource for politicians funded by mining magnates to dice with.  France has been the first country to ban coal seam gas extraction.  We need to say no, too. Intelligent Australians don’t want cancer causing chemicals in their groundwater, and therefore food, when are the pollies going to catch up?

Meanwhile Julia and Tony wrangle over who gets to sell the farm.  I am no xenophobe, overseas investment is to be welcomed as long as food produced in Australia feeds Australians as well as foreigners.  The next big challenge for the world is feeding its ever expanding population.  Futurists are predicting global food shortages as well as lack and scarcity on a par with WWII rationing.  Australia escaped rationing then because it could feed itself and its friends in war torn Europe.  But if Chinese and Indian interests are buying Australian farms and food production facilities, as their huge populations increase beyond their land’s ability to feed their own, surely Australia’s food potential will all be shipped offshore?   And then where will the food for Australians come from?

In my local dairy based town, the co-operative have just sold their cheese making facility to an Indian conglomerate intent on continuing the current lines and installing apparatus for making milk powder for the Indian market.  They say they are going to pay local farmers more per litre for their milk than the current market price for ready freeze dried milk from purpose built facilities in Victoria.  Really?  Or is that just spin the starving dairy farmers fell for because the alternative – slaughtering the stock and selling up the farm five generations have slaved over, is too awful to contemplate?

If the world commits to cutting CO2 emissions and pricing pollution, how can we afford to fly in all our food?  And as populations increase and explode won’t current food source nations such as The Philippines, Vietnam, China, South Africa, Argentina and Japan lock down their resources to feed their own inhabitants?  These may seem like scaremongering worst case scenarios but we don’t know what the future holds and therefore we must be cautious, careful, take the long term view, be protective of our resources and practice careful husbandry (just like a farmer!)

Out in the real world, a NSW Dairy Farmer’s wife took her frustrations out on Facebook as her family struggled to stay alive on the paltry price paid for milk by Coles.  Over 75,000 people agreed with her plea for Wesfarmers to honour Aussie farmers with a fair price for providing the most basic of foodstuffs, full of goodness, which remains the staple table fair for healthy Australians.  Coles complained of an ‘orchestrated campaign’, apparently deleting the post to the ire of an extraordinary number of ordinary Australians who care more about Australia’s farming future and food security than they do about another buck in their hip pocket.

If only the duopoly which dominates Australia’s food intake would listen to their customers and realise that there is a global revolution away from fast food in favour of slow food and a visible chain from farmer to plate.  Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Stephanie Alexander and Richard Cornish, among others, are as passionate about the origins of food as they are about the final plate on the table.  Discerning customers are fed up with factory style farming and the tasteless pap it produces.  They want real food that tastes good, is rich in nutrients and really fuels our bodies, as well as feeds us.

Sure, there will always be a percentage of the population for whom price really matters, who stretch a dollar further than most of us would  believe possible.  Those people also know how to make do and mend and would be the first to support farmers demanding a fair price for their produce.  There will also always be people for whom liquor and cigarettes take priority over food and the supermarkets meet their needs too.

The increasing success of Farmer’s Markets are testimony to the fact that Australians are choosing healthier food options and want to be involved in the food chain from paddock to plate.  They want to reconnect with the men, women and children working the land.  They want their children to know where food comes from, to take responsibility for freshness, goodness and the life and health giving necessity of food.  We all need it, we all eat it, we all need to get more involved in making sure that we have plenty of Australian grown, reared, raised and nurtured food for every generation to come.

How Life can change in a Heartbeat

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07 Aug

We have been happy and relaxed and really enjoying being a family again after Ged finally finished stage one of the solar inspections (30,000 kms in 3 months).  I have been revelling in unbroken night’s sleep as he gets up for Ben in the night and I have to do a lot less chop wood and carry water when he is around.  Plus I get to go for a run every day (yay!) so everything was looking rosy.

Then I woke up in th emiddle of the night when Ben woke up and called out as usual.  I felt the other side of the bed for Ged but he wasn’t there so I presumed he was already up for him.  I must have gone back to sleep for a minute or two and then Ben called again and I listened for Ged, thinking ‘where is he?’  And I heard a truly horrible noise.  It sounded like the Thermomix we had borrowed the weekend before kneading dough.  Sort of harsh, grating and groaning.  So I got up and went to investigate.

Ged was unconscious in a pool of blood, sprawled over the bathroom floor in a pool of urine, with his head resting on the side of the bath which had burst his cheek, just under his eye, as he made contact.  His eyes were wide and staring with pupils like pinpricks and I tried to lift him, to communicate with him, to shake him, wake him, to no avail.  Meanwhile I was trying to keep Ben out of the bathroom and calm him down.  Finally (it seemed like forever!) Ged came too and was able to lie down on a towel I put on the floor.  Of course the recovery position didn’t even cross my mind.  I realised immediately that his cheek would need stitching so told Ben we would have to go to the hospital for the doctor to sew up Daddy’s cheek, just like he had to go and get his chin glued up when he fell on the slippery slide.  I set him to packing a bag with toys and books while I tried to sort Ged out.  He was groaning and swearing by this time so I had to try and shut him up!  He managed to sit up and then threw up. I ran a lukewarm bath and he managed to sit in it.  Needless to say I was dosing everyone up with Emergency Essence and, as usual, at my best in a crisis!

Got us all dressed and organised and in the car by about 3.30 and to the hospital by 5.  No one there so he was straight into triage.  They had him on a bed and an ECG within 5 minutes and then discovered that while he hadn’t had a heart attack, his heart was in extreme distress with arrhythmia.  Watching the numbers on the ECG was like watching some sort of random numbers game, 138, 32, 114 etc.  Ben was terrified and refused to stay near the Daddy who was hooked up to all these machines and insisted on returning to the waiting room to read stories with me.  He came in again for a brief moment or two while the young and lovely Doctor (I am definitely getting old – they are all little more than teenagers!) told us that Ged’s heart was all over the place and he would be staying put for the time being.  Ben and I went home.  I was ever hopeful that Ben would sleep and so he did for almost 20 minutes until we pulled up outside the door and then he was awake and adamant that he was not going back to bed, despite being up since 2.30am.

And thus began a surreal day.  Ben got to watch the Gruffalo three times while I did the washing up and ‘thunk’ – that we don’t have insurance for Ged, that we can’t afford to lose him, that we lose everything if anything happens to him, that I want him to get fit and slim and spend a long and healthy life with him . . .

And every few hours I would ring the hospital where Ged was being wheeled from test to test and seeing specialists etc.  He passed out again when they stitched his face – lucky he was lying down.  Finally at the end of the day they moved him into a private room and out of the Emergency ward so he could sleep.  Ben and I somehow got through an extraordinary day.  The poor child was as much in shock that his mother let him watch TV all morning, than that his father, so recently returned to us, was in hospital.

Suffice it to say we all slept extremely well that night.  And thankfully Ged’s heart was beating better in the morning.  Ben and I decided to visit him after lunch (so hopefully Ben would sleep in the car – ha, ha, this eternal hope of mine is laughable!) By the time we were on our way the hospital had decided to release Ged and he was, according to the nurse, in the ‘transit’ room.  Air side or land side I was tempted to ask . . .

But Ged told me he was being sent home with no monitoring equipment or any guarantee that this wouldn’t happen again so of course I went ballistic.  The nurse knew nothing about his case.  So I called in reinforcements.  I rang Macca and she agreed that he couldn’t come home to the farm without some sort of halter monitor.  She knows only too well what the hospital is like (she used to work there) so she put on her battle armour and said she’d meet me there.  She got there before me and woke Ged up from snoozing in his armchair.  He wasn’t surprised, he knows me well, he just raised his eyes to heaven and said ‘Hi Macca, she called in the artillery, did she?’

Ben and I couldn’t find a car parking space in the same postcode as the Hospital so we took advantage of our 4WD and parked on the grass.  And then walked long, featureless, corridors to find the transit lounge.  Not much of a lounge and not much transiting taking place as its inhabitants looked to have been sitting there long enough to have melded with the furniture.  Apparently waiting for a doc to sign a piece of paper can be an all day affair.  When the very young trainee doc came to sign Ged out with her red stethoscope and matching high heels (I last saw style like that in a B&D Brothel where a friend used to work!) I stated my case for a halter monitor.  She looked shocked to be challenged in her role as benevolent authority and disappeared to find the specialist.  Another well heeled blonde appeared in a pencil skirt and sashayed in front of us to find a meeting room.  Any red blooded man would get better just looking at her!  She was about half my age . . .

I stated my case and she proceeded to bamboozle me with science and medicine which somehow soothed and calmed me even though I cannot recollect a word she said and I didn’t understand most of it.  I think they must learn some sort of hypnotherapy mind control at med school . . . ‘I’m a doctor, TRUST me . . . ‘

At least Macca had some fun reading and talking to Ben, even though she didn’t weigh in to my medical stoush, and we got to take our stitched up, banged up, much loved husband and father home.

We all had our safe and ordered world rocked.  Ben then came down with a five day fever and has been a pale and listless caricature of his former self and we are all trying to get a handle on how, why and will this ever happen again.

Ged and I went to the specialist yesterday who at least gave him permission to drive, hooked him up to the ECG again and ultra sounded his heart.  It all looks normal and sounds steady so now they have to work out if he is stress sensitive, so they treadmill him next week and then book him in for a night in the sleep clinic to monitor whether he has sleep apnoea.  He has to lose weight (hurrah, someone else singing from my song sheet!) but then so do I – at least we can help each other there . . .

And we need to make more time for each other, for holidays, for fun as well as the farm, for play as well as work.  I need to learn to relax and enjoy.  Both Ben and Ged can teach me that.  I have to let them.  And we have to savour every moment, treasure each other, stop taking life and each other for granted.  We none of us know how long we’ve got.

Standing up and protecting children from abuse – published on ABC’s The Drum

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View on The Drum website

I was sexually abused when I was three. Apparently I became a very difficult child – I was full of anger, rebellious, and determined to hurt or destroy myself, my family, and all that I loved.

My only peace came when I was with horses. I never told anyone; in fact, I blocked the memory completely and only uncovered it after over 15 years of soul searching and personal growth work as I endeavoured to recover from my addictions and self-destruction.

I have been addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, speed, cocaine and marijuana. I have played with ecstasy, cocaine and heroin.

I have attempted suicide many times. I have struggled with depression all my life. I have self-harmed. I have been anorexic for most of my life, bulimic for some, and I still have difficulty nurturing myself with nutritious food at healthy intervals.

I have core beliefs that I am bad, not worthy, not good enough, and unlovable. I am working hard to change these as my healing is still a work in progress over 40 years later.

The sexual abuse of children takes them, in a moment, from innocence and light into darkness. It is an instant descent into hell. Trust is shattered; all that is good and bright is destroyed. Their picture of the world is distorted in the most gruesome way, and whether they are threatened not to tell or not, their innate sense of shame at an act which they instinctively know is wrong locks the secret away deep in their souls. They believe themselves to be not only different from the rest of the world, but bad, wrong, untouchable, and unclean.

Rather than turn their justifiable rage at their abusers, they direct it at themselves and those they love. Families are torn asunder at the force of the rage and the darkness that descends on a previously peaceful home. Perpetrators seem to somehow inject their own feelings of self-loathing into the victim, so that afterwards the perpetrator feels lighter, ‘better’. This is why they seek always to reoffend, grooming the next candidate for their acts of depravity.

Childhood ends afterwards. Innocence is stolen and once gone, can never be retrieved. We now know that the psychological scars are the same regardless of the nature of the abuse, although clearly repeated acts or those of a more serious nature burn the scars deeper into the psyche.

Whether the memories are repressed or constantly alive for the victim, they change all the programming in the brain and the victim is forever changed. What sort of life would I have had if I hadn’t been abused? Who could I have been?

I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m a survivor. I survived the abuse and its wrecking ball aftermath. But it never goes away. I grieve for the lost child almost every day. I am finally learning to play with my young child and to experience what a normal childhood might have been like. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. But I made it through.

Many don’t. The self-disgust leads them down paths of destruction and darkness and into chasms and abysses of despair which take their lives, whether accidentally or on purpose.

Sexual abuse permeates every social strata, every race, country, creed. It knows no boundaries. Sexual predators prey on children and parents’ trust and willingness to make friends and to believe the very best in people. They groom both parents and children to ensure there are opportunities for abuse to occur. Don’t be afraid of strangers, be afraid of the very people you trust most. And what sort of a way is that to live your life?

We all have a responsibility to the children among us to out these paedophiles from the crevices and corners of society in which they lurk. Unfortunately, allegations of sexual abuse by children are hard to prove because they are never witnessed and the child may not tell until long after the fact, which means forensic evidence is unrecoverable.

Pitting a child’s account against an adult who may well ‘present as normal’ in a court of law is fraught with difficulty. The Australian legal system needs to be changed to the European model where children’s rights are more protected and honoured within the court structure and the victims of child abuse protected from the harrowing ordeal of facing their perpetrator in court and having their testimony ripped apart by lawyers. That’s just another level of abuse.

The Catholic Community need to vote with their feet en masse and refuse to participate in the activities of a church which protects paedophiles. People power works. We must stand up as a community united and say we will not tolerate paedophiles. Children will be believed. Action will be taken. These heinous crimes will be punished.

Children are suffering the pain of child abuse right now, near you. Learn about it, do something about it. Be prepared to stand up and stop it. It stops being a dirty, shameful secret when it is out in the open.

It takes enormous courage to stand up and say ‘this happened to me’ but I refuse to be ashamed of something that is not my fault. We must be the generation and society that breaks the code of silence around child abuse. If we talk honestly and openly about it, victims will feel able to come forward, that society will support and help to heal them.

No other child should have to suffer as I did –  the act itself, and the lifelong pain. Unfortunately, they will, and they are. One in five children will be sexually assaulted before they are 18 years old.

Let’s come together and stamp out child abuse from all sections of society. If paedophiles know that their dirty secrets will not be protected, they will think twice before acting. Please stand up and speak out.

For more information visit Bravehearts, Victorian CASA, and Child Wise.

If you are struggling with depression you can get help from Beyond Blue. Go to beyond.org.au or call 1300 22 4636.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Menopause as a grieving process

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wedgie
04 Jul

Many of us are familiar with The Five Stages of Grief as introduced by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and we recognise that when someone we love dies we will experience some or all of the emotions associated with the long grieving process – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  Not many of us realise that we can expect to react similarly in other times of crisis or loss (job, divorce, rape, illness, burglary etc).  In fact, if you like, these emotions are the major themes of our lives, playing either in the background or the foreground, sometimes softly and other times at deafening levels if we could only see ourselves as others see us.

If there is a taboo in our society about talking about or dealing with death and the dying (and there is), then it is doubly so for menopause.  Just as we do not publicise our periods , we are not expected or allowed to talk openly about Menopause.  But we should.  Because this is a life changer that destroys marriages, creates volatile home environments for children and young people and takes women to the outer edges of their sanity and their ability to cope.  Depression has come out of the closet in all its guises, now it’s time for Menopause to step forward into the spotlight.

Let’s talk about the fact that women universally think that menopause happens to women over 50.  They don’t know that peri-menopause starts around age 40, and earlier if you have used in vitro or fertility drugs which provoke early and often release of eggs.  Peri-menopause – it sounds so harmless, so sweet, so unassuming . . . but it’s not.

Often the first symptom is an all consuming rage which is unidentified as a symptom of peri menopause and therefore directed at husband, children, employers and employees and colleagues.  Families and worklife can be wrecked if the emotion isn’t correctly attributed and some sort of management commenced.  Some women have hot flushes, some don’t.  Some have a couple a night and some have hundreds a day.  They are embarrassing, exhausting, debilitating.  We have to learn how to dress differently in order to manage them, and most women will try a plethora of remedies in order to stem or stop them.

After the rage has wreaked its havoc then comes the depression (which may simply be a reaction to the unforeseen and unexpected change of life).  For many women (especially those hounded by hot flushes) the depression is all consuming, a deep dark pit at the bottom of which is a desire to leave life and all we love.  Undiagnosed, this can end in the ultimate tragedy.

Woven among the above is the denial ‘this can’t be happening to me now’, ‘I’m not ready’, ‘’m too young’ etc as we realise that our biological clock is ticking away our childbearing years and heralding the dawn of the demise into old age and eventual death.  We are forced to contemplate our own mortality, our life purpose, our own needs and wants and desires after subjugating our souls and selves during our childrearing years.  Often women feel rudderless, pointless, empty, barren and embittered as the women’s heartbeat in our womb slows and stops.  Some women are beset with almost constant bleeding and are left begging for the cessation of the flow.  All the physical symptoms are exhausting and the broken nights of sleeplessness add to the out of control feelings and the inability to cope.

This is a time when we need to nurture ourselves, take time out from daily stresses and reflect on our lives thus far and question ourselves deeply about what we want to feel, see, hear, achieve in the second and final half of our lives.  This should be a time of deep going within, withdrawal and meditation for a woman.  This is the perfect opportunity for a life changing journey or pilgrimage to seek out her soul’s longing.  But instead she is often hurried and harried at work and by the frenetic pace of modern life.  All too often a peri-menopausal woman is at war with a teenager in the house, a clash of hormones which is a recipe for disaster and can destroy parent-child relationships.  In my case, menopause has coincided with toddlerdom for my first and apparently, only, child.  I can only hope we can both forget some of our darkest days.  I now fully understand the wisdom of having children in our youthful, fertile years and get them long gone from the nest so that menopause can at least be survived in the sanctity of one’s own space.

Bargaining is part of the process.  Being women we reach out to complementary health professionals, herbal remedies, natural oestrogen boosters and yoga, pilates, exercise, healthier food etc which might stave off or alleviate the symptoms.  We’re bargaining with Mother Nature for more time.

Finally we begin to accept that in all of life there are seasons and we begin to embrace what our autumn years can gift to us, rather than railing against the injustice of the loss of youth and elasticity.  We accept that while we might have saggier skin, boobs and bellies, our hearts are purer, bigger and more open to the wonder of life.  We have experienced life and now we have wisdom to share.  We can devote time and energy to long cherished dreams, creative endeavours and play pursuits.  Menopause is a time when women ask ‘what about me?’, ‘what makes ME happy?’ and finally have time to explore ourselves.  It’s a transition from youth to maturity and we must mourn our losses as well as celebrate what we gain.  Let no woman suffer in silence and may every woman better understand what will come to us all.

The real picture of our farming future – published on ABC’s The Drum

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view on the Drum website

Julia Gillard is absolutely right that Australia is on the brink of becoming the global economic superpower as the economies of Europe and the US falter, dip, double-dip and recede in the wake of the rampant consumerism of the eighties, nineties and noughties.

The shift has already happened, it is just the global consciousness that needs to catch up. Gillard is also correct in her prediction that Australia has the potential to be the food bowl of Australasia.

The potential is there, but the reality is that federal and state governments are going to have to markedly shift their attitudes, funding allocations and support for farmers if Australia is ever going to be anything other than a dust bowl importing all its food from Asia. That’s the way we’re headed.

Farmers are leaving the land in droves, frustrated with government treatment of rural communities and the right of farmers to earn a living wage for the crucial food production and custodianship of the land they battle the elements for every day. The age of the average Australian farmer is ever increasing (currently around 65 years of age) and the industry is not attracting newcomers (except Asian and other overseas purchasers). The children are leaving the land in preference for fringe dwelling – who can blame them when the rural schools are being closed, the Coles/Woolworths price wars and market domination demand ever-lower farmgate prices for produce, the satellite signal for broadband is slower than the city peak hour crawl and we can’t get a TV or radio signal, let alone a doctor, a post office, a store.

It’s a great sound bite, Julia, but come out into rural Australia and get the real picture. There is so much to love and nurture – the platypus, koalas, wallabies and pristine waterways and rainforest gullies as well as the cattle, the native grasses and trees. But there is also much to fear – the fracking which is nonsensical on the driest continent on earth. Poisoning our underground and inland waterways will destroy all our unique native wildlife, our land, our crops, our animals. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. The mining and exploration licences over great swathes of the most fertile and abundant food producing land in the country. The right of miners and government to grasp the land we nurture and savour every day in order to fulfil some short-term greed and perceived need that history will damn us for. The fact that though we raise our voices, we are a whisper not a roar, and who hears us anyway above the city sirens, circling traffic and power suited pontifications of Canberra?

We don’t need to keep raping and pillaging and poisoning this great land of ours. We have to stop industrialised farming which clears great tracts of land and then seeds it, poisons it and starts again. We don’t want or need GM anything, we need to stop and think about what sort of food we want in our bodies, what sort of custodians of the land we want to be, what sort of land we want to leave to our children and their children. We need to work with the land and the seasons and the natural rhythms of life. We need to become a global leader in renewable energy harvesting and consign the coal seam gas pioneers to the history books. We need to reward farmers, believe them, trust them, stand up for them, work with them, help them to produce ever more nutritious food for our brains and bodies and thank them for what they do 365 days a year (there’s no such thing as a day off or a holiday on a farm).

Gillard’s prediction can come true, but first we need to go cap in hand to the farmers and find out what it means to produce food in this country, how to do it better, how to harness the healing nature of the land to produce real food, not chemical cocktails which might fill the plate but who knows what they are really doing to our bodies.

This is the Year of the Farmer, let’s listen to them, get down on our knees to them, hear them, help them and secure a food future for Australians and their Asian neighbours. Please, before every morsel on the supermarket shelves has done more globetrotting than even the most ambitious grey nomad, and Australian farms and farmers have bitten the dust.

Copycat Coles killing free enterprise one product at a time

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Copycat Coles Killing free enterprise
12 Jun

I’ve been shopping at my nearest Coles supermarket for about 5 years.  As an increasingly discerning shopper I have become aware of Coles trading tactics and have come to despise them for their gloating greed.

Coles is owned by Wesfarmers, a name which might make you think of green fields, caring custodians of land and livestock.  In 1914 when Wesfarmers began as a West Australian farmers co-operative, that may have been true.  Now Wesfarmers is one of Australia’s biggest listed companies who own and run Coles, Target, Kmart, Bunnings, Officeworks, coal mines, gas and chemical companies.  They’ve pretty much got the domestic dollar spend cornered and covered.

I’m not a consumer expert on any of the other businesses but over the years I have become very clear on how Coles operates.  I can only surmise the greed is good mentality and tactics are the general modus operandi for the group.  Manufacturers and farmers may spend years and many thousands endeavouring to gain mass market exposure on the shelves of Coles.  Finally they are successful and the new product graces the shelves.  The customer is excited, the product is successful, the stocks repeatedly sold and in a free market economy there the tale should end with a happy supplier, happy supermarket, happy customer success story . . . a win win for everyone.  But no, what happens now is that Coles’ sophisticated stock monitoring systems tag the success of the new brand/product’s success with the consumer and the Coles killing machine takes over.  Their in house product experts pull the new product apart until they have worked out how to copy it, the new product is soon no longer available as Coles claim supply difficulties which the manufacturers vigorously deny.  After a suitable pause of a month or so while the customer is left wondering what happened, the shelf space is suddenly filled with a Home Brand replica (or attempt at a replica) at a lower price and significantly lower quality.

Not only is the attitude to product developers and manufacturers abhorrent, so too is the disdain and disrespect shown to the customer.  The opposition is annihilated, the shelves full of Home Brand and all choice is removed for the consumer.  Most of us shop in a hurry and the sad fact is that we all make price based decisions, especially in these uncertain economic times.  Coles currently have 3,500 own brand products, and introduced a further 1,000 in 2011.  The trend is growing and the only people who can stop it are consumers voting with their hip pockets because if Coles control everything we buy and Australia has poor packaging and labelling laws, where does that leave us?  What are we eating, wearing, washing with – do you know?

Now let’s talk about what Coles are doing to farmers.  If Coles make a ‘lowest prices guarantee’ to their customers then obviously they are cutting costs to suppliers.  Imagine the scenario – you have spent years developing a relationship with Coles in order to get your product to the consumer.  You have invested in infrastructure, fertiliser, animals, staff etc based on a price agreement with Coles.  Then they turn around and lower the price they are prepared to pay.  What can the farmer do?  He is absolutely against the wall – the bills, mortgages and loans have to be paid off, he can’t risk saying no, he can’t invest money he doesn’t have in marketing or developing other avenues to the consumer and much of what he produces can’t sit around and wait while he finds a new path.  Make no mistake Wesfarmers are screwing the Australian farmer royally in order to break their backs, spirits and ensure there is no Australian farming future.  Don’t be fooled by their advertising to the contrary.  Take the milk war, first they squeeze the name brand milk suppliers from the shelves by introducing home brand milk, then they slash the prices so the named brands have no hope. And the dairy farmer with his automated processes, huge shedding, fertilizer, grain, staff and diesel bills is forced to work longer, harder to try to make ends meet, to diversify and finally to up sticks and sell up.  Who wins?  Only Coles, not the average Aussie consumer.  Because Coles don’t really care where the food comes from or who will prostitute themselves to their pay less philosophy.  The Consumer doesn’t win if the farmer is forced to cut costs and corners to meet Coles pay strictures.  This week mushrooms are $6.00 a kilo.  Let’s say that means that the farmer gets $3.00 a kilo (I bet he doesn’t!)  How could anyone produce a kilo of mushrooms for $3.00 when you factor in labour costs, manure, mushroom spore, straw, heating and diesel.  It’s not possible.  Bang and another farmer goes to the wall.  When all the Australian farmers have walked off the land where will our food come from?  Don’t you think the Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais or Indonesians will at some point want to keep their own home grown foodstuffs for their own population boom?  Food security, that’s a topic for another day . . .

On the Wesfarmers website it says ‘The primary objective of Wesfarmers is to provide a satisfactory return to its shareholders.’  Not to serve the customer, care for the consumer’s health or assist in marketing a vibrant diversity of products and produce to secure Australia’s sustainable farming future.  Remember that when you shop at any of their stores.  And are Woolworths any better?  Not much, but a little bit.  We all need to change our shopping habits and give the big boys the flick.

I have taken this on as my personal challenge and we buy flour and dry ingredients wholesale.  We make our own bread, soap, cheese.  We grow our own veg.  We are growing meat for the freezer.  We have our own supply of milk.  And in the interim we shop at the greengrocer, the butcher, and very occasionally at the arch enemy of consumerism for a few essentials which I still need to be weaned off (firelighters, chux, washing up liquid) but with every trip we purchase less, we make and grow more and we save money.  But more importantly we have the satisfaction of becoming ever more self sufficient and giving the finger to the Coles/Woolworths duopoly which does nothing for good food, good farming or Australia’s food future.

Female in full flood

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06 Jun

I have had a horrible week with my three year old.  On Monday I locked myself in the pantry to sit on a tub of dried beans and sob.  I am not proud of my behaviour, my lack of control or restraint and I do world class guilt about scarring him for life.  Today I took some much needed time out to go for a run on the beach.  Feeling the wind beat against me as I battled through it, watching and running barefoot in the waves as they sashayed on the shore I reflected on the difference in the high rollers and green foam of today’s sea and the crystal blue perfection and calm of last week’s beach.  I asked myself (with thanks and apology to Richard Bach’s Illusions) – ‘Is it a perfect sea today?’  and I answered ‘It’s always a perfect sea’.  And I realised that we women are like the sea.  Ruled by the pull of moon, who shapes our forces and flows.  Changeable, mercurial, captivating, luring.  sometimes peaceful and quiet and still, warm and inviting, other times cold and cruel and hard, lashing in fury, pounding on the sands, hurling spit and spray as we rant and rage.  And in between the two, a thousand different moods and emotions, a hundred different faces, all of them beautiful.

Just as we accept the sea in all her changing guises, so we women must accept ourselves as equally alluring whether in temper or tranquillity.  There’s no point railing at the weather, little point therefore in forcing ourselves to fit some mythical mould of machine like lack of emotion.  We are women, we are meant to emote.  We are free to feel the full spectrum of emotional weather and to vent it as it flows.  Just like a toddler but with a tad more decorum.

Men are like the rocks upon the shore – stubborn, steadfast, strong.  Immovable, unchangeable, immutable.  We women lap around them, hurl ourselves at them and rage against them. But they do not move.  Maybe in aeons we will wear away an iota.

Mutable mermaid that’s me and my kind.  Siren singing from the depths of our emotional worlds.  Changing, transforming, shifting shapes and sand dunes in our tempestuous, tumultuous tempers.  Intriguing, inviting, inciting.  Fully alive, fully present, grounded, both Madonna and whore, mistress and wife, healer and warrior, mother and child.  Every dichotomy, every nuance in between.

Wonderful, amazing, beautiful women.   As we are.  Captivating, challenging, charismatic.  Maybe I’m doing my son a great service in exposing him to the vagaries of the sex from an early age.  Maybe one day he will thank me.  In the interim, I am going to accept myself as a passionate, perfect specimen of the species and enjoy her, storm or calm.

The Colditz of Core Beliefs

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27 May

I have been seeing a psychologist.  Not before time.  And oh how I wish I had had the wisdom to heed my heart and see someone ten or twenty years ago.  Because my eyes have been opened, I have been listened to, I have been heard, and I have not been deemed or damned mad.  Instead my thoughts and rotational ramblings have been outed for the very normal products of a being whose programming was awry.

I have known for some time that we are all run (just like our computers) by an Operating System which is invisible to all but the most discerning but which dictates our every action, reaction and response.  I knew that our formative years and situations and surroundings dictated the programming.  I didn’t know that these are called Core Beliefs.  I didn’t know that many of mine are common in people with low self-esteem, even normal (yay!) and that seeking them out, shedding light on them and naming and shaming them for the ridiculously skewed scars they are, allows me to be free of them.  Or at least see them for what they are, get some perspective and refuse to buy into them or believe them any more.

I was in prison and I have been freed.  And like the nightingale I want to sing songs of joy that I am no longer locked in a cage of core beliefs like: I am a bad mother, I am a bad person, nobody likes me, I am unlovable, I am not good enough, I am a failure, life is not fair, I am ugly, I am unworthy, I am different, I am bound to be alone.

Phew!  That’s pretty scary.  Just imagine, for most of my 46 years I have been operating under that programming.  That is really sad.  Because it’s not true.  I can see that now.

‘Low self esteem is having a generally negative overall opinion of oneself, judging or evaluating oneself negatively, and placing a general negative value on oneself as a person.’

‘People with low self esteem usually have deep-seated, basic, negative beliefs about themselves and the kind of person they are.  These beliefs are often taken as facts or truths about their identity, rather than being recognised as opinions they hold about themselves’

The crazy thing about Core Beliefs is that once initiated (and even a chance remark or throwaway line at a vulnerable or traumatic time can spark a rewiring of the circuitry) ‘they are maintained by the tendency to focus on information that supports the belief and ignoring evidence that contradicts it’.  It’s like life through rose tinted glasses in reverse.  Like a house of mirrors, each image uglier than the last, and all distorted, warped and bent out of shape.

I was raised in a house where nothing we ever did (or is still!) good enough, where criticism was the currency of conversation and there I learned to criticise myself.  I guess I was a sensitive soul and I have taken words spoken in anger, jest and jealousy like spears into my heart where they have wounded, festered and finally exploded out in a shower of truth under the laser like beam of professional psychotherapy.

I have beaten myself up over the last 40 odd years – submitting myself to a program of torture, finding ever more creative and cruel ways to hurt and punish myself and make life in my own mind a misery.  Abuse of food, drugs, alcohol, punishing my body, my friends, my colleagues with alternately undisciplined or overly controlling behaviour, mood swings etc.  Living listening to the mean old voices in the mind rather than seeing any sense in day to day reality.

The doors of the prison are swung open with the light streaming in and I see that I am loved and loveable, I am a good person, I am trying to be a good mother, I am kind, I am attractive, I have a good heart . . .  I’m normal, with both strengths and weaknesses.

I have been trapped for so long in the torturous turnings of my warped wiring that to let go of the fear and negativity in my brain is like a longed for holiday.  I want to sing, dance, play, write and love.  I am so glad and grateful to be free at last.  I can’t wait to see what life without them looks like, feels like.  I’m like a baby taking those first toddling steps.  I’m sure I will stumble and fall and bang back into those old core walls but I’m on my way into a future free of them.  I can make and shape my own core beliefs from here on in.  Chuck out the old OS and download a new one.

I’ve challenged my core beliefs – what are yours?