Womansong

She is stirring in us all, the Mother-Godde of the Earth who has been bound, silenced by subjugating warrior peoples for recent millennia.

She must cry out :  for the forces which have suppressed her great mind are finally threatening her very life.  Her waking movements are a resurgence :  or, fearfully,  a death-throe.

*

She never left us,  our Earth-Mother-Goddess.

Humans renounced and left her,  a mere five thousand years ago in our hundred-thousand-year human history,  and shut her away in a dark, deep mind-recess.  She has been defrocked and desecrated,  while her consort male god is levitated to absolute dominion.  They have killed our brother-and-sister-creatures,  and hammered and cracked her earthy foundations.

She has lived on in her subterranean prison,  the Mother Earth Spirit ;  singing her un-heeded song through her other quiet conscious species,  her child-creatures and tree-spirits and sea-things ;   and through the special senses of her highest offspring,  those few Elder respectful human peoples who still faithfully practise their finest gifts,  and repeat her lyric teaching messages in sacred chants.

These rare, near-extinct cultures remember the ordained, proper, evolving ways to live as human creatures,  during our long hundred thousand years of history ;  and are the few who today still relay her sacred law songs,  and sing in turn their own urgent hymns of love and strength and care for the hurt and buried Woman of this planet.

In australia, we have the rare privilege of living with the most ancient human culture on Earth, their sixty thousand years of dedication to truthful remembrance, spirit and ceremony, lawful and responsible living.

All their nations’ laws are made in the light of the beautiful First Law of the Earth, which arises from the voice of the Mother Earth herself:

–  that just as she gives love, life, provision, and long lineages to us, so then we in return give Her our loving care, our respect, and constant protection.

This profound ancestral knowledge is crushed and hushed as colonisers sprawl and excavate throughout the globe.

Earth sings her grief through the cries of her child-species,  the wind-call of dying birds and the howl of starving wolves.  And we can hear this mother-wailing through her animals, and plants,  and living-dying waters :  those of us who adore the Life of the Earth.

And we join with them to sing forth these her roaring lamentations,  for their suffering and mass–deaths.

It is the keening voice of the Dog I can hear,  who lives so brave and close to human beings.  Who is the animal who lives between two worlds,  who speaks to bird and rock and kangaroo and human,  who knows the mind of beast and the mind of man.  The Dog is high in our knowledge,  the hunter’s dog-helper without whom the family would not feed,  and would live in cold mental distance from the animal world.  The Dog is our intermediary to Earth-Life,  the one whose eyes and diverse-wild-calls tell us the feelings of fellow creature-being.

The Dog is comprehending witness to our deeds and misdeeds ;  and we cannot look into the truthful eyes of a Dog without clear conscience.

The Dingo Dog sings with the Mother,  whose own cry rises with her night-howl.  And the Dingo is calling now,  her Earth-message-voice for all her anguished creatures, and her plants,  her dying indigenous peoples,  and for all the mothers of the Earth :  the Dog who can bay out in our passionate language,  for our understanding.

The following book came unsolicited over two years,  like a river through my mind and hands,  as torrents of feelings, images, fable-stories, and meanings.  I found some words to describe these unfolding tales,  and wrote them down faithfully on paper, 1992-95, near-thirty years ago.  They lay unnoticed on a novice website soon after.  The personal wake-turbulence was great ;  then life took many other paths,  before I returned to these messages again.  From 2019, the book was edited again,  and I added some art works and photographic imagery.

And I see it as though written by another, which it surely was :  the grief and rising fury,  the declamatory address,  the fulsome language and imagery,  the edicts and the unrelenting judgements.

The intense ethical themes,  and sometimes esoteric and mystical inward visitations,  encompass ideas and focus that I would never have brought forth from my own practical and scientific mind.  It has been an honour to deliver as an informed scribe and also artist :  we whose hands and minds are guided by the sheer thrill and magnificence of the Cosmos.

Many people today are channels or conduits for the palpable grief and sickness of our sacred Mother Planet.  All over the world we are hearing Her messages now.  My care for Animals is the avenue for this particular expression of her suffering.

Children cannot live without their Mother.  We Earth-species,  at this point of our evolution,  are Children ;  and will die if our Mother Earth dies.

We may dream,  as children do,  of science-fiction life away from Earth ;  but before this we must Grow Up, and accede to independent galactic adulthood,  in our high and proper time.  We have not yet decided to undertake this path of Initiation and Maturity :  which will open up to us the right to explore our stern and perilous cosmos, in peace and respectful enquiry.

We are the Children of the Earth :  this is a universal metaphor of truth.  And this Truth contains its own teaching:  on how to care for our Mother-planet.

We Care For Her as we care for our human Mother :  with love,  respect,  with duty,  thanks,  affection,  delight,  honour.  Sometimes we know exasperation with her rules ;  but we know too their purpose, to keep us in safety,  happiness,  values of equity,  and the fine duty of sustaining the Life around us.
She teaches also our Rights and Obligations,  which we too will love to teach to our own children when we are fully grown.

The manners for Good Family Living are our blueprints for Communal and National gracious living and future.

The way to Peace on Earth is not a secret :  we live it every day in decent family life,  in mutual care and sharing and loyalty,  in communication and wholesome correction, in equity and respect and invitation and unconditional love ;  and in protection of children and brothers and sisters and fellow living things,  our dedicated care for all future generations.

Our mistake is to invent baleful deviant rules for separate tribes and nations,  which abandon the blueprint of rightful mutual Family respects ;  and treat other human cultures as fearful or contemptible.  And view most other Life-species as expendable nuisances impeding our own insatiable, distended lifestyles.

To learn about the Way to live, I listen to the Aboriginal peoples of australia:  the Earth’s most profound and ancient human culture surviving (just) today.  Their monumental task of intellect and remembrance has always been to preserve, and to transmit to all succeeding generations, the primal comprehension and laws of how to be a human being on this planet, in this cosmos.  This panoramic learning of Elders is accumulated throughout their initiatic passages through life.  Their ancestral insights enabled flourishing for millennia in relative peace, equity and decency, in a stern and secretive landscape.

The Dog knows how to be a Dog.  The Moth knows how to be a Moth.  The Human Being,  at heart,  knows how to be a Human Being ;  but has turned down the proper ancestral stories of the human Heart while transfixed with hard mechanical head-noise.

*

*         *

*

The elements of this book were recorded originally as many short disparate essays,  and then I gathered them (only a few of them) into an approximate flow of chapters,  grouped around central issues,  and often griefs.   They can be read if preferred as separate essays ;  though all parts appear related.

(For easy reading as a ‘book’ – find ‘print’ by right-click on 3-bar icon, top-right on first page of each chapter).

The words and messages can be hard to read at times :  profuse,  sonorous,  heartbroken,  harsh even.   A reader may prefer a little at a time, a chapter or two.   I hope you can find (as I have) that it is worth some effort,  to meet with the truthful messages that have come (through me and many others) from our Earth Mother.   They rise at times in fierce anger,  criticism,  scorn,  despair ;  and yet resolve eventually upon a searching conciliation,  compassion,  understanding :   a way through to healing amongst us all.   Her righteous confrontations are surely a measure of the near-debased level to which we have collectively and culturally fallen :   wilfully cast aside our ancestral, sacred human duty of care for all Earth life.

Some of the illustrations are the writer’s artwork,  most are from her photographs of australian land and rock forms,  some from new zealand,  south africa,  iceland,  faroes,  antarctic flight ;  a few courtesy google earth and auslig aerial survey,  and some public net images.

The most communicative images are the most ancient   ~   the extraordinary planetary paintings etched and seared into the oldest exposed rockbeds on Earth:  the three-billion-year abyssal gorges of australia,  and ancient coastal terraces exposed by weathering and waves ;   and her gnarly centenarian trees.   The finest teaching messages are found in the most beautiful and arcane art forms of nature.

hn 2020

blessing hand above our heads