Fancy boys and hovering Kite-angels

This week’s offering is more tiny wild-diary entries, glimpses into the wild week inside my head and heart, and the wild I have seen outside.

I talk about drawing as being a way to weave ourselves into relationship with the wild beings that come spilling out of our pencils - the wild life, this wild Earth, everything beautifully natural and wild.

But I have also come to realise that weaving relationships with wildlife through drawing their beautiful bodies is a sneaky way to reweave the relationship with our own bodies.

That honouring their supple and rigid forms, their fur and feathers, their muscles and skeletal structures and fat and loose skin and scars and lumps and bumps - every single part of them beautiful and necessary and alive and freaking sacred - can help us recognise that all of that present in our own body is sacred too. To see how they accept rest and play as necessary, part of being alive, and not something to beat oneself with.

Drawing for yourself in a sketchbook is such an accessible way to honour the feminine energies of creation. To use our hands to make, to see the intricacy and beauty in another’s body, to sculpt with pencils and eyes and big wild heart - this is a way to sing the abundant beauty of the world into the world, into the beating heart of Earth, into our own beating heart too. To mirror wonder and love so that it is reflected both inward and outward.

What if you gifted yourself a sketchbook and pencil and let yourself draw a soft animal body so that you could honour your own soft animal body too?

Oh, how lucky I am to live in a time where paper and pencil are easily acquired, and to watch the women in my community wield them with the magic only they can make!

Today is wiiiinnnndddyyy. I am not a fan of the wind. Never have been, but oh, as I age it feels like all the things that sort of pressed my buttons when I was younger are stomping like Riverdance all over the buttons and all the non-button-stuff around the button. I need to wear my Loop earplugs all day when it is like this, and while they are fantastic, because I wear them to sleep too, by the afternoon I feel like my head is full of pressure that needs release a-la Fred Flintstone style (was it him that had the steam coming out his ears? And oh my stars, aren’t those old cartoons we used to watch a misogynistic mire now. Oof).

But this morning, before the sky breathing got too raucous, Baby Magie sang to me as she does most mornings, a song for a peanut, a very reasonable trade I say. She is truly delightful, and beautifully wary, which as much as I would like to snuggle her, I appreciate. She has her boundaries, don’t come too close human, and I will give you a sky full of song.

There are little holes in the bare earth around the yard. Places the grass has decided not to grow, or has been too badly trampled by the little winged dinosaurs eating seed. The holes are from the Kookaburra who have decided this yard is the place to be, thank you very much. I don’t know how we have any earthworms left, but oh, their cackles, their chunky little hops all over the ground, their snapping of beak onto branch to break up their prey, they really are a marvel to behold. I share my home with them - they share their home with me.

How lucky I am to live where there are Magpie and Kookaburra!

I was going through some old Substack articles to pull quotes for Notes - the sort-of-social-media aspect of Substack - and I found this one:

I have been thinking, trying to define what my own creative practice is at the moment so that I can support other women easing into their own, and well, it is probably obvious, but what if there is no definition? And what if my definition doesn’t matter anyway?

What if rather than defining I simply create space for practice, for myself, for others, and let definitions float like so many leaves down a river into the horizon.

Defining is such a human thing, right?

A tree doesn’t feel the need to define who they are, what the purpose of their growth is, how they fit into the forest, whether forests in far away lands are “better” than them.

A wolf has not read Little Red Riding Hood or the myriad of other tales that define them as the bad guy, they are authentically themselves, present, attuned to the land around them, full of curiosity and resilience and play.

What if that is the definition of my creative practice, then?

Present, attuned to the land around me, full of curiosity and resilience and play.

Yeah, I can get behind that.

This has been a winter-of-no-winter. Not a single frost, not a night below 5 degrees C. There have been baby Lorikeets, absurd at this time of year. The mulberry is full of baby fruit and baby leaves. The pear didn’t even lose all her leaves. H5N1 has finally arrived in Australia - we knew it would happen, but it is scary and heartbreaking none-the-less.

But on my walk this morning there were a lot of fancy boys - Superb Fairywren males all decked in their shimmering blue finery. “Hello sweet sir” I said to each, while equally praising the females for their beautiful russet eye-shadow.

There was a Black-shouldered Kite hovering over the reeds - they at least look winterised, all brown and flat. The reeds that is, not the Kite. Her head completely still and focused as her body made subtle moves to keep her like a marionette on cloud-strings - a beautiful white angel with penetrating amber coloured eyes.

And there was so much other wild - the scurry of a decent sized skink under the leaves, the blue butterfly, the tiny spider dangling on the path, determined to hitch a ride with an un-suspecting human passer-by.

To this wonder, to this wild, I am present, I am full of curiosity. And more and more I am finding that when that happens, I can be more resilient, I can find space for play. What else can wolf and tree and moth and beetle teach us? So much more, of that I am sure.

I am so lucky to live up the street from the fancy boys and russet-make-up girls, from the hovering Kite-angels and skinks and the dangling little spiders!

That is it from me this week, but I want to go back to just one thought.

Presence, attunement to the land around me (and how I fit into it), curiosity, resilience, play.

All of these things are what I teach, empower, and encourage in my courses, and especially in Hedgerow. So if you are a woman who loves to or wants to make with her hands and heart, and who wants more of these things in your life, then Hedgerow might just be the place for you.

Until next week my loves, may your days be filled with wonder at the ordinary (but sacred) wild that lives where you are planted,