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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