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The alive world is a place of intimate, luscious entanglement, a place as real and strong as bones. This world is hidden, precious and wild, inside everything. For me, I can’t get there unless I open the door inside myself – but when I do, I realise that the way in is also the way

For the last few years I’ve had the thrill and privilege of being involved in a secret project. Secret, because it first had to get officially signed off by over a dozen different partner organisations. On Monday it was announced, the Birrarung Valley Walk, an official 220 kilometre, 13 day journey from the sea to

I can’t tell you about the world of co-becoming. You have to come with me. We have to go there together. I mean, I try. I try to tell, but to write about it always feels wanting. Because ‘about it’ is the problem. In the experience of co-becoming, there is no writing about, there is only

Sometimes all you experience of something is a story, but that’s enough to light you up. That was me just seeing the signs for the project Carpe Exitus at Confest; a rolling workshop of fishing for, preparing, and eating the feral carp, then making a soft leather with the skin. I heard the story around

An excerpt from my PhD A Secret History of Listening There is no way to engage in this kind of perception as a way of life, especially if you go deep with it, if you do not do specific work with the various consciousness modules that make up the self. It is crucial to understand

The presence that I became aware of, around and within me, is apprehended through an act of rapt, silent attention, both passive and probing, like sonar. And what the presence seems to be is the web itself, the thrumming relationality of all things. – Joanna Macy, from the introduction to Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love

Writing with the Earth, with World, with Country, with Body, with Breath, (capitalised here because we experience them as animate forces, as ‘persons’ if you will) can be done in a number of ways. I introduce it in co-becoming courses through a meditative state, because this is a sure way to depth, but we can

I was drawn to revisit Mt Baw Baw, near the source of Birrarung, while preparing for this exhibition. I came across this large and magnificent snow gum, and discovered, cut into the bark, these symbols. The day before I had sketched that very pattern of a diagonal cross bisecting a circle. I was creating a

Country, how shall I tend you? I send out the shining strands and bring you in. I bring you to me. Listen. Don’t hoard your longing. I gave you this longing so you would see me. Don’t be afraid to love, and don’t be afraid to reveal what you love. In this way you will

It was perhaps twenty years ago that I took this photo.  Alone at Kur-ring-gai Chase National Park, sunning my body after a dip in a clear shallow pool, I suddenly had a profound experience of being seen by an animate world. The gaze was compelling, yet not localised – I was being seen all over,

Recently I visited Larrakia Country, Darwin, to fulfil a dream I’ve had for awhile – to meet some of the authors of Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines. I’ve mentioned this wonderful book before, because it is a key inspiration on the work I do now: creating opportunities for people to experience deep,

An intimate, soulful and nourishing Saturday of embodiment and writing at my home in Warburton, by Birrarung, the Yarra River. Using the practices of guided meditations and stream-of-consciousness writing, we will enter into presence with the more-than-human world and bring back other — and ancient — ways of knowing. We call this co-becoming: a transformative altered

(Bunjil painting in ochre, by Sylvan, 9 years old, on stone clapstick) I stood in a small circle in the centre with the Dreaming team. Hundreds of black ducks, water rats, rainbow lorikeets and pobblebonk frogs were perched around us on the grassy clearing by the creek. Hand-made costumes clad the child performers, who were

A chapter from my PhD… A Structure of Feeling ‘Metaphor is a type of thinking and expression towards wholes as things. The word comes from the Greek ‘to carry across,’ and in metaphor one set of patterns is, as it were, carried across to another set in the mind, and in a way that safeguards

My father moved into a run-down little Victorian terrace house in Brunswick in 1978. The brass plate out the front said Villapola, and thus it has been known to the many lovely people who have lived in this share house over the decades.  Dad moved overseas in 1999, so I took over the care of

Twenty-one years ago I walked from the sea to the source of Birrarung. Twenty-one years to the day of arriving at the source of my river, I spent the anniversary in Kabi Kabi Country, Sunshine Coast, in exquisite rainforest, following a gorgeous stream, and memories and understandings flowed all through my body. So now, having

Sometimes you really want to show everybody what you’ve seen. And Elan really wanted me to put a story about him on my website. Perfect match. My nephew really loves dogs. He can’t have a dog. He tells stories of the neighbourhood dogs and how they love him (love being the favourite topic of this

Jung Society Lecture May 2021 How to begin opening such a large, complex, mysterious subject, one that also, inevitably and necessarily, touches on the vast pain of Australia’s brutal occupation of Aboriginal lands. Well, we know how to begin. Thousands of events all over the country will be beginning tonight in a similar way to

Naomi Klein, who’s written well-known tracts on climate change and the insane and psychopathic system that is capitalism, has just published another important and surprisingly beautiful book. It’s called Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and it investigates the political and social strangeness that covid unleashed. I read it in a whirl over the

Co-becoming is a meditation where something arrives on the page, beautiful, like a silt deposit loosed from a swollen river, silt that is soft, fine and nutrient-rich, and lit with glints of mica. Delve into the silt, meet the layer of clay. From this clay shape a bowl, over time, and with care, with which

I’m not sure why, but it feels as if a great load has lifted from me today. Perhaps an accumulation of things; driving, pre-dawn, up Mount Donna Buang, out of the blanket of cloud and into the luminous world of mountain islands in an endless sea of white. And what happened in co-becoming zoom class

I’ve been collaborating with Melbourne University this last year on a project researching how contemplative nature engagement helps address ecological anxiety. This is personal for me – anxiety and grief regarding the future is something I’ve lived with ever since I can remember. And while I still feel sadness around the choices humans and cultures

River, Mountain, Breeze, Sun. The palpable presences, the beingness of the elements in place; water, earth, air and fire in forms we can turn towards, and open to.    Over the past year I’ve run many co-becoming day workshops at my home by Birrarung, below Donna Buang, and this is how it goes. We walk

I had the great pleasure this week of hearing back from the Gay’wu group of women — the authors of Songspirals, the book that has been so impactful on my teaching and students. I’d written to them because my Co-becoming Plunge has been a fundraiser for this Arnhem Land community, and it was wonderful to

Why did it catch my eye, that something on the surface of the river? It looked just like a stick, a fat one, floating, but could it be that it seemed to be floating with an uncanny and wilful stillness, there in the current? Then I gasped. The floating thing vanished. It vanished in a

The plans for our long-awaited co-becoming retreat go awry when I have a covid scare, but Julie says I don’t care, we two could go anyway. So we come together to Sorrento, the place where a thin and crooked finger of land separates the ocean from the bay. Water everywhere. And in the void where

The Co-becoming Plunge: writing with the world. This half-year course is for those wishing to deepen both their nature connection and creative practices within a nourishing and supportive community. Using the practice of stream-of-consciousness writing, we will enter into presence with the more-than-human world and bring back other – and ancient – ways of knowing.

Just over one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein and Carl Jung sat down together for tea. The physicist and the psychologist met a number of times over the next few years to talk of their work; Einstein’s discovery of quantum mechanics, Jung’s ideas of psyche, of soul. Both of them, young people in their respective

There is so much for settler people to learn to become responsive and responsible dwellers in this land, and precious few traditional knowledge keepers. Which is why non-traditional ways of sharing have become so important. One of the books that we look at as part of the Acknowledging Country course is the book Songspirals by

I didn’t grow up with a theology. But I made one out of the insights gleaned from my adopted grandparents. Who didn’t know me. Who I never met. Yet who exerted such enormous influence over my sense of place, history, belonging and spiritual possibility at a young age, and whose worth evoked from me so

The clouds are spilling over Tugwell. It’s an inelegant name for such a lovely mountain, smooth with forest green, patterned purple where the shadows of the cumulous ripple over and away. The clouds are collecting, the clouds now are releasing their water, the mountain is getting a pounding. That inelegant name, I’ve just found out,

Ages back I’d planned to write something about this year’s pilgrimage to Mt Bride in March, part of our annual Walking the Mountains of Home project. But that event was wedged between two paradigm-smashing events: the climate change bushfires and the pandemic. We’re in the midst of strange, unsettling, complex times. Topics that once were

We’d been talking all the long drive to the ocean. Working through ideas with each other, his sharp and complex mind a strong thing to meet. The car wove through the coastal gums, bringing us to the beach by the end of the afternoon. Overcast and humid, a warm steady breeze, the tide had drawn

Cat McKay has created a beautiful artwork here; fusing her film making with my words to convey something of the experience of dancing contact improvisation outside. This is dance with a human other, and a more-than-human world. It’s one of my favourite things to do, and a powerful way of learning and knowing. And here

After the dismay of the election, and a sense of wanting to crawl into my shell, perhaps it’s more helpful if I learn how to engage with alternative media, this other world we can reveal and create together, the different stories we can tell. So, a little something to say sorry, for sorry day, and

Edge of the Sacred Conference, Whitegums, Arrente Country, July 2016 Thank you, Keith and Stella, for inviting me to be part of this gathering. Thank you to Mallee and the Arrente for our gracious welcome. I feel very grateful to be here. I hope I have something to offer; more and more as I progress

It was a hot bright day with a warm desert wind when David Abram and I set out to visit Martin Prechtel. It took awhile to find his ranch, we had to ask a number of the locals of Ojo Caliente – there were no signs, no outward signs of what lay within. It reminded

  This April the fourth was the tenth anniversary of setting out from Williamstown on the Long Yarra Walk. I woke to a stunning day, perfectly autumnal; cold clear morning, with a rolling band of mist streaming along the side of the valley, not far above our place in Warburton. After washing my face in