The Brunswick Boys

Content Warning: police brutality against an Aboriginal person, violence, racism   We were living in a sunny, two-storey townhouse in Brunswick – three girls, with a sprawling kitchen and big ideals. My boyfriend (now husband) would spend each day there too, drinking our tea and stacking our dishwasher. This particular morning, Jonathan, Charlotte and I were sitting around the kitchen bench, tea in hand. Beth was still asleep. We’d been at a Christian conference that weekend, and were full of wild, surging hopes for the future. Suddenly Jonathan looked up abruptly. Some kids just ran behind the house.  We had […]

The Whole Story: On Remembering and Resolving Gently

This day – New Year’s Eve – is tempting in its promises.  Tomorrow I will begin the life I have been aching for, kind of tempting. Tomorrow I will become more like (insert person you admire), and less like the worst version of me. Tomorrow I will present myself differently, and they will take me seriously.  And we shame the New Year’s resolution as a social institution, then secretly harbour our own desperate wishes for blessings and health and attention and change as the clock ticks over – as if between Christmas and New Year we have assessed how little Santa/our loved ones […]

Clearing the Temple: Kingdom Creativity vs The Spirit of Saleability

  This post has been adapted from the talks I gave at the SPARC National Gathering 2018 and Femelle Creates 2018, after being asked to share the notes. It is rougher than usual, but you’ll get the idea.   When I was a teenager, my creativity was misdiagnosed as awkwardness. Uncoolness. Weirdness. In the environment I grew up in, wearing wacky clothes wasn’t ‘creativity’ it was ‘a lack of conformity’. Writing epic plays about your friends was symptomatic of someone who had ‘issues’. Someone who was unable to be normal.   But then, of course, I discovered that there was […]

Mercy

Today is my daughter’s due date. Today is the day she would have been considered complete. It has been forty weeks, since the beginning of my last menstrual cycle. She has cried the most I’ve ever heard her, today, and even then it isn’t much. Small whimpers of impatience, while I am in the shower, as I write, as I make tea – asking to be held, asking to drink more when I know she isn’t that hungry. She is currently sleeping deeply, wrapped to my chest, as if still longing to be in the womb. It makes me wonder […]

The Ache of Co-Existence

  So we’ve come to this.   A dualistic, contemptuous, hysterical grapple between two words: yes and no. And, for an opinion poll, no less. Not even a referendum. Give the people enough ammunition to kill one another, but deny anyone the ability to affect the outcome of the war. Because, it does seem to be war now, yes? I don’t know about you, but I feel played. I’m not here for war, and I don’t think you ever came here for war, I think you came here, originally, to breathe deep, to love true and tell your story. To […]

The House of Love

Community is delicate, deep and coloured. It moves in currents – wild and tidal. It grows, like so many living things, to the degree that it is tended.   When I first relocated to Melbourne four years ago, I had one friend. Blindly, I followed him into a beautiful, messy circle of people with whom I slowly began to show myself. I found a tiny two-bedroom apartment tucked at the back of a block of apartments, nestled above the trees. My writing desk looked over the mountains, and the bookshelf was half-full.   The home grew as my community did. At first, I […]

Feathers, Part Two: Hollywood

No matter your belief paradigm, Los Angeles is a furnace. This month it has had this eery sheen. Smudgy bronzer lines the gutters of Hollywood Boulevard. We have red carpet covering that corner where the homeless man was killed by police. Is that a woman putting a price on her body? Darling, no. That’s a nominee. The Oscars are the ultimate reflection of a hope deferred. They are the television show masquerading as an institution, the marketplace pretending to be a temple. The top of the ladder, the dream of every kid waiting tables in WeHo. Judgment day. We see the […]

Feathers

The Sad Days start the same way all seasons do. The wild plants on the side of the road on which you are travelling, start to change, ever so slightly. They might have been sporting little yellow flowers – bright indications of warmth, health, abundance… But almost without you noticing, they somewhat wilt, and then shed. The plants become bare. It’s subtle at first, only a few dead leaves here or there. But as you travel on, you notice them more. Suddenly, there are no flowers at all, and you know you’re in the thick of a new season.   […]

The Beautiful Men

  ‘Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power, and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and goes in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy is itself undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever-changing, […]

We Get It

Last night, I went and saw a play called ‘We Get It’. It was part of MTC Neon, and created by ‘The Elbow Room’ – written by Marcel Dorney and Rachel Perks, and co-directed by Marcel Dorney and Emily Tomlins. This isn’t a review. This is my response. I don’t want this play to open, and then close, and have the long-awaited conversation stop. In saying this, I am responding to the aspect of the show that I could directly understand from experience. There were profoundly moving elements I can’t address, and so I leave them out – but not […]